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Mistress Masham's Repose,
by T. H. White, 1946
When people get really caught up in a book, they often find themselves reluctant to reach the end. They wonder what the characters would be doing if the author had only let them have a few more chapters. If writers themselves, they may go beyond wondering. They may take over the characters, and give them space in their own books. They may even take over the plot, and write an actual sequel.
T. H. White, the distinguished author of The Once and Future King, was devoted to both practices. As a very young man, he tried continuing Jane Austen in a special Whiteish way. Like most of us, he loved Pride and Prejudice. So he wrote ... not a novel about the married life of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy as it would have occurred between 1797 and about 1840, but a 20th century murder mystery, set partly on Darcy's estate. Many of the characters are descendents of Elizabeth and Darcy. That book is called Darkness at Pemberley.
A few years later, he introduced two characters from a Robert Surtees novel into a hunting novel of his own. Since Surtees wrote between 1838 and 1864, his characters would now be quite elderly. No problem. White has them holed up in a sort of large wine cellar. It's the wine that keeps them going.
White also did a bit of rescue work on Robert Louis Stevenson, and at one time he considered bringing Don Quixote into the 20th century. (Graham Greene later had the same thought, and wrote Father Quixote.)
But the best continuation White ever did was in a children's book. He continued Gulliver's Travels. He does not pick up where Swift left off, he merely picks up one of Swift's hints.
Readers of Gulliver may remember that when the intrepid mariner leaves Lilliput, he takes with him a pocketful of Lilliputian farm animals. He's got a little flock of three-inch-long sheep and half a dozen cows the size of chipmunks. These he shows to the captain of the ship that rescues him—in fact, he gives Captain Biddel one of each.
At this point White takes over. In Swift, Captain Biddel now fades from view. In White he steps forward, a look of greed on his face. A shrewd businessman, Captain Biddel realizes there's big money to be made out of tiny farm animals, and even bigger money to be made out of tiny human beings. The first chance he gets, he sails back to the latitude where he picked up Gulliver. He cruises around until he finds Blefescu and Lilliput. He then kidnaps 13 people, plus as many sheep, cows, and thumb-sized sheepdogs as he can grab, and sails home to England. Here, he exhibits his captives in a sort of miniature traveling zoo.
After much suffering, the Lilliputians escape with their animals. They manage to get to a small island in a lake on a country estate, where they hide. Two hundred years later, their descendents are still living on that island, nearly a thousand of them by now: the nation of Lilliput in Exile. How have they escaped detection, right up to the year 1946? Partly by taking extraordinary care, partly through good fortune. It is their good luck that the estate, a ducal one, is both vast and neglected. The lake is choked with water weeds, the island overgrown with briars. No full-sized human being has set foot there in many years.
All that is background. The story White tells begins when a full-sized person does come. She is the heroine of the book and the heiress to the estate, a 10-year-old girl named Maria. Do not imagine some privileged little future duchess. Yes, Maria will be a great lady some day. Right now she is an orphan, left in the guardianship of the local vicar, an odious man. This cleric, the Rev. Mr. Hater, has appointed a remote cousin of Maria's, a Miss Brown, to be her governess. Miss Brown is worse than odious, she is cruel. She and the vicar keep Maria rigidly suppressed; they also siphon off most of what little money still comes in so that the great house of Malplaquet gradually continues to crumble. Maria's only friends are the one servant left from her parents' time, who is the cook, and a remarkably eccentric professor who occupies a gamekeeper's cottage elsewhere on the estate.
Maria, having no parents to love or be loved by, not allowed even to keep a pet, is naturally thrilled when she discovers Lilliput in Exile—and her first act is to steal a baby that she finds asleep in a two-inch cradle. She intends to take it home and keep it (well hidden from Miss Brown) as something to play with and to lavish affection on. When the mother attempts to prevent this, Maria takes her, too. Then she is both puzzled and angry that mother and baby are not grateful at being carried back to the palace of Malplaquet and offered bits of a strawberry. She would have been so nice to them!
Part of the action of the book turns on Maria's discovery that ownership and love do not go well together. Suppose, the Professor says to Maria, you become the patroness of Lilliput in Exile, their Superwoman, their strong protector: "You would be a Big Bug then, however kind you were, and they would be little bugs, without the capitals. They would come to depend on you; you would come to boss them. They would get servile, and you would get lordly." We who live in a Big Bug nation should recognize that description. And maybe wince a little when we think of all the Lilliputs we currently boss—and expect to be loved by.
Maria does learn her lesson, and does become friends with the Lilliputians on an equal basis. They then open their hidden city to her, and share their lives. The best chapters of the book result, as Maria gets to see how these tiny people operate in a world where a robin on the grass can look them in the eye, a domestic cat looms larger than ever a saber-toothed tiger did to the cave people, a swooping owl means instant death. My very favorite describes the fishing expedition she gets to watch. The People keep a square-rigged sailing ship in a secret harbor on the far side of the island, and at night they sail out to hunt pike rather the way Nantucketers used to sail out to hunt whales.
But eventually Miss Brown catches Maria sneaking out to go visit the island—and worse, she then finds several tiny presents the People have given her. Maria refuses to explain where she got these things. When Miss Brown locks Maria in her room, planning to starve her into submission, the People eventually come in force, about 500 of them, to bring her food. (Three whole roasted bullocks, 48 loaves of grass-seed bread.)
The worst possible thing then happens. Miss Brown catches a Lilliputian. She and the Vicar realize, far more clearly and ruthlessly than Captain Biddel did in the 18th century, that the owner of a lot of miniature human beings can get very rich indeed. A thrilling struggle ensues, with Maria, the People, the Cook, and the Professor on one side, and the Vicar and Miss Brown on the other. The People eventually win.
T. H. White was a good and possibly a great writer. Like most such, he was prepared to take almost infinite pains. Mistress Masham's Repose went through four radically different versions between the time White began to write it in 1942 and its publication in 1946. In the first version, for example, the Vicar and Miss Brown speak in Elizabethan blank verse.
But even the fourth version, the one that finally got printed, is not quite as good as it might have been. White was in deep grief at the time he finished it, almost incapacitated. "I lost the only living creature I loved on the 25th of last November," he wrote sadly in 1945, "and I know that I shall call out her name when I die." Polishing the manuscript with a cool head seemed out of the question. So he sent it to his best friend, the novelist David Garnett, with instructions to edit it freely: "You may leave out whole chapters, if you like, for I trust your taste implicitly and my own not at all."
Garnett cut no chapters, but he did write T H. White a memorable letter. It is part gasp of pleasure and part solemn warning.
"You have stumbled upon a most beautiful subject which you will never get again & you have the opportunity to write a masterpiece," Garnett said. Some of that masterpiece is already present, he went on, but much of the book is spoiled by facetious and tiresome jokes, by "a lot of twaddle about Miss Pribble [as Miss Brown then was] and the Vicar," and so on. Plus an overindulgence in capital letters when the Lilliputians are talking, I'd add.
"It is a real tragedy," Garnett concluded, "for you are on the edge of a book which will make you immortal." He begged White to delay publication and to revise still more.
White listened to what his friend said, and he did make extensive new changes. They are not extensive enough. It was The Once and Future King that would make White immortal, not Mistress Masham's Repose.
And yet, as finally issued, it is a masterpiece, though a flawed one. I can think of few greater pleasures in reading aloud to a bookish child than to read that child first Gulliver's Travels and then Mistress Masham right after. If the child happens to be especially observant, he or she may notice that Swift uses the Lilliputians (and the Brobdignagians and the Yahoos) to belittle human nature, but White uses them to magnify it. It is a stunning book for a child to know.
