He clearly saw in Malory's cycle the British version of the Oresteia - an epic creation myth in which the violation, even the unintentional violation, of a cluster of taboos eventually leads to the disintegration of the nation created, even though, in White's work, almost everyone involved is reasonable, compassionate, and well intentioned. White, born in India in 1906, was a brilliant student at Cambridge in the 1920s, when he was already reading Malory's Morte d'Arthur. The fourth, briefest book, The Candle in the Wind, concerns the end of the Round Table and Arthur's death. The third, The Ill-Made Knight, takes up the story of Sir Lancelot and his uneasy relation- ship with Queen Guenever and with Arthur. The second, The Queen of Air and Darkness, tells the story of adolescent sons of Orkney (Gawaine, Agravaine, Gaheris and Gareth) and their mother, Morgause, who, unbeknownst to him, is Arthur's half-sister. The first, The Sword in the Stone, concerns the lost childhood of Arthur, future king of England, and his education by Merlyn. The volume published as The Once and Future King is actually four works separately composed over about 20 years. Nevertheless, it is a serious work, delightful and witty in many ways and yet very sombre overall. Maybe it has been contaminated in the minds of critics by popularity and Walt Disney animation.

T H White's The Once and Future King is steeped in learning and literature, and yet it is not quite respectable in the way that the works of, say, Kingsley Amis or Virginia Woolf are.

The once and the future king