![]() ![]() Constance was cold and unloving except to her small dogs, whom her husband, by then a severe alcoholic, periodically shot. After the birth of their first and only child, she refused sexual intercourse to Garrick, who beat her. His mother, Constance White, was a great beauty who had made a show of rejecting every suitor who came her way one day, in defiance of her mother’s teasing, she declared flatly that she would marry the next one regardless of who he was, and it was Garrick. ![]() White was born in Bombay in 1906, where his father, Garrick, was a superintendent in the colonial police force. As his biographer Sylvia Townsend Warner once put it, “Notably free from fearing God, he was basically afraid of the human race.” Loneliness and melancholy, and the fear that inspires them, were the great themes of White’s fiction, and of his life. The essence of death is loneliness, and I have made good practice of it.” ![]() Years earlier, the author of The Once and Future King had written in his diary, “I expect to make rather a good death. His secretary found him alone in his cabin, and the English novelist was buried far from his countrymen at the Protestant cemetery in Athens, in view of the Temple of Zeus. Terence Hanbury White died aboard ship in the port of Piraeus in 1964 on his way back from the United States, where he had been hoping to shore up his income with a lecture tour. ![]()
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