immediately bought a Jaguar (the sports car, not the beast), his chances at continuing life as a starving artist were now effectively ruined.
The Sword in the Stone was subsequently made into a full-length Walt Disney cartoon and finally, in 1958, it was incorporated into The Once and Future King . Composed of all Whiteâs previously published Arthurian tales which were especially re-edited for this edition (to the original bookâs considerable disadvantage, in the case of The Sword in the Stone ), the compendium became a best seller and a few years later was bought by Lerner and Lowe as the basis of their hugely successful Broadway musical Camelot . Years after Whiteâs death the bookâs influence continued in a way that would have staggered its author. J. K. Rowling revealed to an interviewer that the boy named Wart, whose education as the future King Arthur is described in The Sword in the Stone , was Harry Potterâs âspiritual ancestor.â Indeed, the parallels between Whiteâs fantasy/adventure/school story and the Harry Potter opus are many.
In spite of T. H. Whiteâs once and future successes, his warning in an early chapter of The Goshawk proved prescient. There he had idly noted, perhaps to forestall its eventuality, âthe folly of thinking that anybody would want to buy a book about mere birds.â In the end it was far more than a bird story, including among its gifts to readers a history and description of medieval hawk management, an incisive dissertation on Shakespeareâs use of falconry (especially in The Taming of the Shrew ) and much natural history observation that goes beyond the ornithological (my favorite was about maggots). Nevertheless, in 1951 Whiteâs book may have appeared to be a mere bird book to prospective buyers. It enjoyed only modest sales and then went out of print.
Over the years, however, The Goshawk âs underground reputation grew. Like the great books of Joseph Mitchell that were unavailable for decades until a canny publisher obtained the authorâs permission (after years of resistance) and republished them in a single volume, T. H. Whiteâs hawk story accumulated a passionate coterie of devotees that continued to grow long after its authorâs death. When library copies were lost or stolen, and several brief paperback reprints did not go back to press, the book became available only to readers willing to pay high prices at antiquarian bookstores or, in recent years, used-book sites on the Internet. Now, to our good fortune, everyone can read it.
In all works of art, larger meanings attach to the particular stories they tell. So too in this book. For parents, for married couples, for partners of all sorts, even for nations, The Goshawk will provoke thoughts about the inevitable power struggles of human relations. For writers especially, this simple story about a man training a hawk provides a model for a less self-pitying approach to life. Instead of regretting the hours they must spend at their labors, obliged, as Milton wrote, âto scorn delights and live laborious days,â all who slave at their art might choose to take an alternate view, one White conceived during his arduous days and nights with Gos: Why not âlive laborious days for their delights?â he inquires. Though his story was one of unending labor and almost unendurable frustration, Whiteâs joy in the process allowed him to create an occasion of delight for his readers.
âMARIE WINN
[1] The word âpashâ appears in modern dictionaries only as a slang abbreviation for the noun passion, but it can be found in the appropriate sense in the Oxford English Dictionary : âTo hurl or throw [something] violently so as to either break it against something or smash something with it.â Pash as a verb fell into obsolescence before the end of the seventeenth century. White may have come across it in Piers Ploughman , a