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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

Digging Deep

Digging Deep

Reading this book is like hearing an all-but-interminable pub conversation between two cronies. There is bombast; there is scandal; there are a thousand private references by their first names to friends and relatives whom we have probably never heard of; and there is the basis of friendship revealed, the matter of certain shared obsessions. The conversation is chiefly interesting to the extent that one shares these obsessions. What T.H. White and David Garnett shared was the obsession of writing, the obsession of being (in different degrees) Englishmen, and the obsession of fishing – I could say also an obsession with hawks and dogs, but this last belonged only to T.H. White.

It happened that at the same time that I read these letters, I was also reading François Mauriac’s Subjective Memoirs, and the difference between the old Frenchman and the younger Englishmen struck me forcibly. Where page 656 they are concerned with personalities, he is concerned with ideas – not dead ideas, but ideas that exist as roads exist in a spiritual landscape. It is perhaps a national difference; but it does imply that to be determinedly English may hold one back from emotional maturity.

The publication of the letters is no doubt intended to reveal the personality of T.H. White. This object is in part achieved. The sad outcry of T.H. White from Eire, in 1944, after his dog Brownie had died, is revelatory –

You must try to understand that I am and will remain entirely without wife or sister or brother or child and that Brownie supplied more than the place of these to me. We loved each other more and more every year. . . . It was because we were both childless that we loved each other so much . . . I loved Brownie more than any man I have ever met has loved his natural wife . . . I always tried to hide how much I loved her, for fear of this silly reproach about old maids . . .

I don’t have the faintest difficulty in understanding T.H. White’s statement: for I can remember walking hour after hour up and down a road where a tomcat had vanished, never to be seen again, and how grief gripped the fibres of my heart, both then and for months to come, because the one whom I loved had gone from me and might die in fear or hunger. Yet I do not congratulate myself on this love. It sprang from the depths of a heart too narrow, too certain it can never be well loved by another human being, too absolutely afraid to expose itself to the glare of human ridicule. People like myself and T.H. White love cats or spaniels more than we love God or our fellow humans, who ask us continually to be other than we are. Perhaps it is our particular destiny.

But David Garnett may not have done his friend a service by trying to show him as he was. The half-made man has the right to the privacy of his own innocent deformity. In relation to others he has the right to wear the mask that T.H. White wisely and continually wore; the mask of the universal clown. Perhaps David Garnett was less wise in digging too deep into his friend’s grave, to exhume the solitary child who died along with the man.

1968 (546)