Currently Reading: “The Once and Future King”

I’d let too much time pass before I got to “The Once and Future King” by T.H. White and buying Joseph Campbell’s book about the Holy Grail nudged me to finally grab the book and commit. Also, I have Lev Grossman’s “The Bright Sword” waiting on me and that helps too, I think.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from a book I originally thought had been written in the ‘60s, only to find out it was actually written in the ‘30s. But it isn’t disappointing me. Even better, it’s freakin’ delighting me.

A huge chunk of storytelling from pages 30 and 31, when Wart sees Merlyn's home in the woods, practically sent me traveling through time to third or fourth grade, when I yearned for adventure and found it in my Scholastic Shock Shots or The Monster Squad.

Wart climbs the ladder to Merlyn’s room and White tells us:

"It was the most marvelous room that he had ever been in."

And then unloads an AMAZING description:

“There was a real corkindrill hanging from the rafters, very life-like and horrible with glass eyes and scaly tail stretched out behind it. When its master came into the room it winked one eye in salutation, although it was stuffed. There were thousands of brown books in leather bindings, some chained to the book-shelves and others propped against each other as if they had had too much to drink and did not really trust themselves. These gave out a smell of must and solid brownness which was most secure.”

Already, this room was my dream of magical spaces brought back to me. It reminded me so much of an early encounter with a room of this kind in Jeremy Thatcher Dragon Hatcher by Bruce Coville, but also Mario’s Magic Shop from PeeWee’s Big Adventure.

Those places had one of everything, it seemed, just like this…

“Then there were stuffed birds, popinjays, and maggotpies and kingfishers, and peacocks with all their feathers but two, and tiny birds like beetles, and a reputed phoenix which smelt of incense and cinnamon. It could not have been a real phoenix, because there is only one of these at a time.”

It wouldn’t shock me to learn Merlyn’s room influenced both of those previous rooms I encountered 50-some years later.

“There were several boars' tusks and the claws of tigers and libbards mounted in symmetrical patterns, and a big head of Ovis Poli, six live grass snakes in a kind of aquarium, some nests of the solitary wasp nicely set up in a glass cylinder, an ordinary beehive whose inhabitants went in and out of the window unmolested, two young hedgehogs in cotton wool, a pair of badgers which immediately began to cry Yik-Yik-Yik-Yik in loud voices as soon as the magician appeared, twenty boxes contained stick caterpillars and sixths of the puss-moth, and even an oleander that was worth sixpence--all feeding on the appropriate leaves--a guncase with all sorts of weapons which would not be invented for half a thousand years…”

And on and on until we arrive at even more that would've intoxicated Mort, plus me as a 10-year old (me as a 41-year old, too, honestly) as well as my entire friend group and probably every kid that went to Northside Elementary School with me.

There was:

- turkey feathers and goose quills for pens
- an astrolabe
- ink bottles of every color
- four or five recorders (love that the number is ambiguous; impossible to tell how many recorders exactly)
- two skulls
- the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica
- bunsen burners
- and "a complete set of cigarette cards depicting wild fowl by Peter Scott”

In case you don't know, like I didn't know, Peter Scott was a real person who really painted wild fowl for cigarette cards - in 1937.

T.H. White playing with meta commentary through Merlyn’s knowledge of time is something I’d normally bristle against, since I usually despise all meta commentary or anything that reminds me I’m reading a book. It works here though because of who Merlyn is, what he is. He’s living backwards through time!

The Once and Future King exists as a kind of YA adventure, way before that publishing (marketing) distinction even existed, but it also manages to surprise you with poignant character moments that hit you hard. Or hit me hard, anyway.

Merlyn returns Wart and the hawk that’d escaped to Sir Ector’s castle, which is a jolly time for everyone but Kay, who’s obviously jealous of the attention Wart’s getting. He won’t stop doubting Merlyn’s magic until finally he says Wart wasn’t on any “quest” at all, and the old man probably did all the work for him anyway.

Merlyn doesn’t hesitate, he launches in on Kay, tells him he’s being a jackass and that his own mouth will be his downfall — but in a much more eloquent way, obviously — and then…

“…everybody felt uncomfortable…”

And instead of Kay losing his cool, like the version of the character that lives in most contemporary minds thanks to Disney, he is hurt, and silent. Merlyn apologizes with a gift, one Kay loves, and White describes who Kay actually is, rather than the caricature he’d been saddled with.

“[Kay] was not at all an unpleasant person really, but clever, quick, proud, passionate and ambitious. He was one of those people who would be neither a follower nor a leader, but only an aspiring heart, impatient in the failing body which imprisoned it.”

Within something like 60 or 70 words White tells you a lot more about who Merlyn is, and then a HUGE amount about who Kay is.

I haven’t been able to get that description out of my head, “an aspiring heart, impatient in the failing body which imprisoned it.”

-Austin
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