Literary Chifferary

Poststructural Pub
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Today’s gem concerns T H White, author of Arthurian masterpiece The Once and Future King, inspirer of Lerner & Lowe’s Camelot, scholar, Latin bestiary translator, falconer, medievalist, etc, etc.

When in The Sword and the Stone, the first and best of White five volume rip-off Sir Thom. Mallory’s Morte d’Arthur, White has the wizard Merlin tells the young Arthur that the best cure for sadness is to go and learn something new, the words are the author speaking directly. This was White’s exact strategy for coping with life. As White had a fair number of things to be sad about, he ended up acquiring a massive amount of both skill and knowledge in a wide range of fields.

His consuming but passing passions included falconry, flying a plane, deep-sea diving (the suit with the big brass helmet, not scuba), riding/foxhunting, huntin’ shootin’ and fishin’ (the proper pasttimes of the english gentleman, he felt), viciously mocking the proper pasttimes of the EG from the POV of the ungentle (cf Burke’s Steerage, but not recent book which stole the title), plowing with horses, drawing and painting, learning Irish, etc etc - a nauseating catalog of accomplishments.

This post is because I have just discovered from finally getting around to reading the whole of TOaFK for the first time, and then reading Sylvia Townsend Warner’s excellent bio and some of White’s letters that among his crazes was the playing of the tin whistle. Who knew?

None of the books so far have mentioned when, where or how he did this, but given that he spent the war years* (ie, 38-44) staying with a farm family** in Doolistown, Co. Meath, it seems very likely that this is where he took up whistling, and that ITM is what he was playing.

I think I’ll have to find a copy of The Elephant and the Kangaroo (see note below), the novel he later wrote about his time in Ireland, to see if it has any ITM or whistle content. Prolly not, because whenever any of his crazes shows up in the books, his biographer usually added the reference. However, she likely knew little about either ITM or whistling, so who knows what she might have missed. I shall report any further progress.

*He wasn’t - quite - a draft dodger or conscientious objecter because as an ex-tubercular homosexual intellectual with a badleg and a bad eye, he was likely safe from conscription anyway. He was rejected as a pilot by the RAFVR (he had learned to fly in the early thirties, but didn’t have enough hours in the air to impress the air force. Several attempts to get war work in the propaganda/Ministry of Info area (where his talents would have been best suited) proved fruitless.

**Whom he viciously (and un-gallantly) satirized in a later novel, which has earned him lasting emnity in Ireland. What he’d written would have been fine if it had been written by a genuine irishman like Flann O’Brien (which it appears to somewhat resemble) but then fact that it was coming from an englishman rendered the comedy inexcusable. The Irish were not assuaged by the fact that the character obviously based on him gets the worst of it. I wouldn’t have been, either. Mind you, the people he was living among were pretty convinced he was an english spy & he was kicked out of the irish volunteer home guard, which he’d joined. It eventually drove him out. Ireland became one more place where White couldn’t belong. The suspicion and mistrust went both ways.

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Alas, my hopes have been dashed. White’s whistle playing days occured on Alderney (one of the Channel islands), which is where White moved after leaving Ireland, and where he lived for the rest of his life.

June 8, 47

Dear Mary
[…]
I have bought a thing like a debased sort of recorder, called a Tipperary Flute. Its really a penny whistle made out of plastic. I can play four tunes perfectly. The first is called Camptown Races. You may have heard of it [he’s writing to Mary Potts, the wife of his best fried. She’s a (or maybe the) Cambridge Professor of Harpsichord ~s] After two others and one rather difficult one called There is a Tavern in the Town, I am at the end of my scores. Please > instantly > buy me in Cambridge a > students Song Book > for one shilling (there is no music shop in Alderney) and post it to me at once. But first you must mark the air of the first six tunes in the book thus:

Soh soh soh Me Soh Lah Soh
Me Ray
Me Ray
(Camptown Races, first line)
Otherwise I can’t find out how to use my fingers, as I never know which blast any tune begins on.

[…]

To revert to the Tipperary Flute, I > think> , but can’t quite be sure that Do is C - if that makes any difference to the tunes you’re going to verbalize for me, ie

Do Ray Me Fa So La Se Do Ray
C D E F G A B C x?

>
> I don't want to overblow at present.
>
> In despair, I enclose my > _only_ > score* to make you see what I mean. Could you try it on a recorder or something? FOR GOD'S SAKE RETURN IT. I can do the fiddley notes, like 1...6 x 4, without wincing.
> [...]
> *[I think he's talking about the one-page sheet of instructions that used to come wit either Clarkes or Generation whistles, which afaik had those two tunes as well as Men of Harlech, which he mentions later ~s]

The above is from Letters to a Friend, White's correspondence with LJ and Mary Potts. LJP had been White's tutor at Cambridge, and two remained lifelong friends.
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July 3, 47
Dearest Mary

Thank you so much for the song book. I play all the tunes you have marked solemnly three times a day, and am coming to have quite a repertoire. My > fingers > are beginning to live a life of their own, which is magnificent. But is there any reason why I should confine myself to this horrid plastic flute? when I blow the bottom note it says Hoo, like somebody with asthma, instead of Too. What do you advise? Would not an ordinary penny whistle be less asthmatic?

[…]

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What the hell, here’s one more:

July 16, 47

Dearest Mary

Only a very short note to thank you for buying the piccolo. Yes, I should like it > immensely > though I don’t think I shall ever be able to blow 2 1/2 octave on six stops. Please tell me how much I owe you for it.

I can blow the plastic thing without going Hoo. I go Too every time.

The curse of any musical instrument is practising without enraging other people. I have to do mine of rocks far out at sea, and even then there has been a rise in the number of C.I. [Channel Island ~c] wrecks. The plastic thing > has > go hoo unless you blow boldly. It was my ashamed efforts to blow softly which produced the Hoo.

I suppose I shall have to learn musical notation, to read it easily, but I enclose the fingering chart you asked for, as it is now useless to me. I play only your bits in the students song book. I was playing Men of Marlach [sic] this afternoon, sitting in a rock pool 1/2 mile out to sea, with no clothes on, like a debauched merman. Well, I suppose I was born to be eccentric.

Please send me some > simple, practical > instructions on how to blow the piccolo - as if you were explaining to a child of three.

I’m not sure I really needed that last vision. I’ll never read The Sword in the Stone[/i] again without seeing Merlin (the character is a mix of White and Potts) in this scene. And now I’ve infected your all (I mean all one of me, the vast audience reading this thread).

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“The curse of every musical instrument is practising without enraging other people.”

Yep.

The vision doesn’t bother me. Sorry to hear it bothers you.

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Yes, but what a brilliant rip off! I have loved it since high school, and still refer to fewmets often.

I also enjoy this advice for dealing with life. Very smart.

“Hoo” instead of “Too?” Did he not know about tonguing?

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Thanks for this! Both of the Whites (TH and EB) are favourites of mine.

You sent me looking for a reference I had seen that Arthur Ransome played the whistle, and I found even more - that both Ransome and Robert Louis Stevenson were whistle players. This passage is from an article on a book by Ransome about Stevenson which was unearthed in 1994.

‘It was about this time,’ it reads, ‘that Stevenson became ‘a great penny whistler before the Lord’ . . . The instrument is unjustly disfigured, even laughed at, but it is capable of great things. Stevenson and his stepson played duets: it led him to study the techniques of music; he even composed for it. And, somehow it is symbolical of his career. A grown man playing the instrument of youth, playing it with a skill not often dedicated to it, and, in larger matter, playing a penny whistle in the orchestra of English literature.’

That passage could just as well apply to Ransome, also a great whistle-tootler. Since the two men had so much in common, and now that we have the book in which one celebrated the achievement of the other, it is clear what a cathartic influence RLS had on Ransome’s own development as a writer.

I’m a little surprised that Ransome didn’t put a whistle in the hands of any of his characters in the Swallows and Amazons series–or maybe he did and I missed it? Maybe Captain Flint, who apparently was based on Ransome himself? I’d better go back and look.

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It’s Roger, in We didn’t Mean to Go to Sea. After going accidentally to sea sans adultes in someone else’s yacht, the Walkers decide that they need to engage a pilot to bring them safely into harbour, but are scared of revealing their adultless status. The stratagem they employ is to pretend that the fictional adults are all below in the cabin, drunk, while the eldest Walker pretends to be the cabin boy and deals with the pilot. A key part of the plan was Roger’s novice whistle-playing, on the theory that a drunk man sounds much like a sober boy if neither can play a whistle very well. Somewhere in the archhive of this board there’s likely a post of mine mentioning this much before, although I hadn’t heard that AR himself had learned to play.

*which happens at sea - at all times there would be a vessel keeping station at the harbour mouth, flying a universally recognised flag. Any vessel which wanted to engage one would signal, and a local pilot would come aboard by small boat. I imagine that GPS has reduced the need, but I believe this still occurs. AFAIK its still the case that ships coming up the St Lawrence must have, by law, a licensed St. L river pilot aboard.

~~

But the association is an apt one. In a later letter, THW successfully lures the Pottses and their three kids to come and visit for a month in Alderney. The island, he promises the kids, is just like something out of Arthur Ransome. He means because of the fine small-boat boating prospects; he’d bought a former ship’s lifeboat which had been re-rigged with a mast and sails. In another letter, he tells Mary (he’s probably talking through her to the kids) that a new AR novel (Great Northern) had only just been published.

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The Sword.. was a book my dad read to us when I was young, and I’ve loved it since then. It was a bit of an eye-opener reading the others, because unlike the first, which succeeds brilliantly as a book for both adults and children, the remaining novels are very much adult books, with a massive gay subtext. I kept making surprising conclusions about the author which I then had to read his bio to confirm. THW was gay, had emerged from his english public-school upbringing as a spanking enthusiast, and was attracted to boys (ie, rather than men) in a way he knew he could never indulge. There is no evidence he ever did, but it was the source of much sadness for him.

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a time or two…







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A few times! And I’ve read We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea more than once - I love the drama of that story. I wasn’t a whistle player yet, so I guess that tidbit didn’t remain in my memory. That would be something Roger would do.

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So I had to go back to check. The pun was my thread title, Chiff and Ships, which I’d long forgotten, and am now liking a good deal..

13

yes, I hopelessly mucked up the quotes & had to give up on the thread links…

14

I had a 2 am thought last night, which was a vague memory of Uncle Jim/Captain Flint playing either accordion or concertina during some shipboard celebration aboard his houseboat. There might even be an illustration of this, come to think of it. Do modern editions still come with the same illustrations? At a guess, they were Ransome’s work rather than a professional illustrator, so I doubt that there are any copyright or contractual reasons for leaving them out.

15

Ransome’s illustrations are in all my copies, 2 of which are 2001 editions I bought in England. I can’t imagine the books without them.

I’ve hunted a bit for the shipboard celebration you mention, and haven’t found it, but short of re-reading all 12 books of the series, it was necessarily a cursory search. I did find a Highland bagpiper in the latter part of Great Northern?, when the children and Captain Flint are captured by Gaels who think they’re purposely chasing their deer. Roger, who hasn’t been caught yet, goes racing off to try to get help, and runs straight into the piper:

Suddenly in the dim light of their prison, the captives looked at each other, wondering if all had noticed that sudden break in the piping. The piper had been skirling and droning on in a wild, elaborate, endless tune. The tune had been cut off short in an unhappy wail. A minute later it had gone on again from where it had left off. ‘At least,’ Titty said later, ‘you couldn’t be sure of that, but it went on making the same kind of noise as before.’

It’s a great story and I had to read till the end. The nastiness of egg collectors seems to be old-fashioned now, but it sure is good to see him vanquished by a smart child with some help from all the others.