The Sea Inside

‘and everybody lives from one speech of Hitler’s to the next’, White wrote in his diary for 26 April 1939. ‘My nature is not monastic; it may be noncooperative, but it is free. It is a raptorial nature. Hawks neither band themselves together in war, nor yet retire from the world of air.’
    War for White came as a suffocation, symbolised by the day a farmer friend came to help fit him with a gas mask. Warner sees her subject trembling like an animal as the rubber seal is put over his face – before tearing it off and running into the woods. White declared he would neither fight nor run. ‘Anybody can throw bombs,’ he said; he had novels to write; it was his destiny. He even claimed that the overarching theme of
Le
Morte d’Arthur
was to find an antidote to war. In Ireland – having left England before the issuing of identity cards or ration books and being beyond conscription age anyway – he gave up his identity just as Thomas Merton did; only he used the royalties from his writing to rent a large house and live in a medieval manner. Not for nothing did he tell Cockerell – who was the well-connected director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and who had begun his own career by sending seashells to John Ruskin – that he had to try on a suit of armour in order to enter Arthur’s world: ‘I want to know how the stuff
works
.’
    It may have been easier to re-imagine that world in the Celtic twilight of Ireland. White retreated into his island fastness. From there he corresponded with figures as disparate as Noël Coward, as to the suitability for the stage of his Arthurian play
The Candle in the Wind
, and Julian Huxley, on whether animals had a ‘mind’. Reviewing Huxley’s
Kingdom of Beasts
, in which the renowned zoologist claimed that man was the mammal ‘most successful at living’, White countered that ‘Man … has only his own word to go on, and to be most successful at what you happen to be best at doing does not constitute an absolute superiority over the rest of the animal kingdom.’ He would rather have lived with animals. ‘How restful it would be if there were no humans in the world at all,’ he observed. ‘If only there was a religious order which not only took a vow of perpetual silence but also decided
to go to bed
for ever, how gladly I would join it.’
    White’s world was closed down by war. He was as captive on his island as any internee on the Isle of Man. He could not leave Ireland, nor enter England. Communication with friends such as David Garnett (who himself had been a conscientious objector during the first war, when he was lover to Duncan Grant) and Sydney Cockerell was reduced to fitful correspondence. In an age already reliant on telephones and telegrams, radio and radar, White’s words were restricted to letters and diaries, in the past of the old England he imagined. He thought seriously about becoming a Catholic, went to Mass every Sunday, observed abstinence and even considered becoming a priest as an alternative to being a combatant.
    But as he wrote his epic story of battles and ancient heroes, White realised that by charting Arthur’s story he had sealed his own fate; that he had no choice but to enter the war himself. To remain outside it would be to betray his creation, let alone the country which he determined should have his bones. He saw direct parallels with the animals he loved. In nature, he claimed, only ants and bees fought wars. Animals did not own property, nor conduct industry. They avoided rather than courted aggression. ‘Now what can we learn about abolition of war from animals?’ He hunted, but he only killed the things he loved very much, which is why he was not keen on killing human beings.
    Deep grief brought drastic thoughts, and what he learned from the death of his beloved Brownie ‘maimed his heart’. His red setter had become as eccentric as her owner-lover. She would adopt chicks and baby rabbits and bring them to bed with her; and since she and her master shared the bed, he would end up being bitten by rabbits. Brownie also kept a collection of stones under the kitchen table, to which she added regularly. And when she died, on the one day that White was away on business in Dublin, her master was so distraught that he stayed up for two nights with her body beside him, only then burying her in the garden, having clipped a lock of her golden-red tresses to tape into his journal.
    For a week afterwards he visited