Anachronistic Education

T. W. White's The Sword in the Stone (Putnam, $2.50) is a heady mixture of fantasy and fact, legend and history, with other assorted literary liquors--poorly blended and served lukewarm, disguised as cambric tea. This potion the Book-of-the-Month Club has chosen for its New Year's wassail. The brew is not potent enough to make a reader pass out, but it may make some heads giddy.

The time is the olden days; the place, an assiduously merrie England. Principal characters are two boys--Kay, a toad of a child, and the Wart, who turns out to be King Arthur. Kay's father, Sir Ector, is a ruddy country gentleman who wants the lads to have a proper "eddication," decides to hire a tutor. By accident the Wart finds just the man--one Merlyn.

White's Merlyn is ten times more fantastic than the Merlins of Malory, Tennyson, other Arthurian romancers. White's magician was born in the future, is living backwards in time, getting younger. This device is the excuse for numerous anachronisms: since Merlyn knows what will happen in the 20th Century, why not make some of it happen in the 13th? He does, to the delight of the Wart, to the confusion of Kay, Sir Ector and the reader.

Merlyn's method of education is to put the Wart through more metamorphoses than a moth ever dreamed of. Ffft! The Wart is a fish, learning self-preservation from a tench and a pike. Presto! He is a hawk, learning bravery. He becomes a snake, learning 20th-century theories of evolution, a badger, learning about adaptation, an owl, learning how trees and stones talk (so slowly that they could be heard only if time passed at the rate of 30 years per minute).

The Wart also encounters a witch, a giant who apparently represents 20th-century totalitarianism, and Robin Hood, whose real name, according to White, was Robin Wood. (The W slurred off, and recent highbrow scholars, thinking 'ood a Cockney abbreviation, added H.) After all his adventures the Wart still has strength enough to pull the legendary magic sword out of the anvil, win the right to be King Arthur.

Author White is a typical English country lover, in appearance much like his beloved cocker spaniel. He has the same alert, thoroughbred look, the same wavy hair. He lives in a gamekeeper's cottage near Stowe, where he is now writing his ninth book, on falconry. Best passages in The Sword in the Stone are the descriptions of sporting events: a boar hunt in which the master huntsman's dog is cruelly killed, the pursuit of an escaped falcon which is deep in the molt and not in yarak (proper condition for flying).

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