this acute and witty monograph the shape of a man whom many have loved and followed, a figure not without grotesque heroism, and a soul that followed its star all dismayed.24
While some comments are disputable, the acuity of these observations leads one to suspect that the writer John Still had an insight into White based on more than the book itself. The next period of this ‘soul that followed its star all dismayed’ began in a wandering both geographical and psychological, that, for all his subsequent adventures, was primarily spiritual.
White’s enthrallment with Maria de las Mercedes Ana Luisa Carmen Dolores (Dollie) Mosley coincided with the first occurrence of the ‘liqueur sensation’ that he placed so much emphasis on for the rest of his life, or at least until the time of his autobiography in 1930. There are few references to it in his late letters, but it is not unreasonable to accept that as a seminal experience it served to give a coherence to his inner beliefs, which remained more or less consistent to the end. Although caution must be adopted by recalling that the only records of substance of his inner life were not written until he had reached the age of 50 or thereabouts, questioning their reliability too much would be to cavil unnecessarily.
White described this phenomenon for the first time as a ‘most pleasurable sensation in the middle of my chest, as if I had just drunk a strong liqueur’.25 It seems to have lasted at least an hour or more and reached some kind of intensity as he was reading a telegram about the Russo-Japanese War, which, oddly, was the topic that initially sparked the experience. Whatever it was, it served White as a satisfactory explanation for later behaviour that contributed to his reputation for incorrigibility; he believed it was the driving force that lead him ‘out of the army, to Canada, in to various prisons and awkward predicaments beyond number’.26 When he left India, barely avoiding a charge of desertion by getting the personal permission of Kitchener to return temporarily to Europe in order to pursue Dollie, White gave this sensation as the justification for what appeared to be a ‘mental aberration’. He developed it into a kind of personal spiritual guidance which, although not as dramatic as the ‘absolute faith […] that is reported of Joan of Arc’, still was ‘wonderful evidence of intelligent guidance’ beyond the ordinary. He did not lay claim to ‘actual clairaudience or clairvoyance. The impulse to action was always this sensation in my chest accompanied by a mental sensation of co-operation with a scientific law beyond my formulation or comprehension’.27
It is not within the ambit of this work to theorise on the nature of this experience of his, or the fact that he placed such credence in it, but undoubtedly it is a more common occurrence than is generally acknowledged. From the time of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) there has been a regular academic reporting of similar phenomena. White himself maintained that American transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman experienced this, as had others like the English poet, socialist, and mystic Edward Carpenter. He recorded his attempts to find references to it among the philosophers. Henri Bergson’s perspective on the higher intellect provided him with some insight into his ‘sensation’. He dismissed Richard Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness as too elitist, ‘confined to a handful of notorieties!’28 However, more recently, Alan Watts, Protestant clergyman turned Zen Buddhist, comments on Bucke in a manner that suggests similarities to White’s experience:
The most impressive fact in man’s spiritual, intellectual, and poetic experience has always been, for me, the universal prevalence of those astonishing moments of insight which Richard Bucke called ‘cosmic consciousness’. There is really no satisfactory name for this type of experience. To call it mystical is to confuse it with visions of another world, or of gods and angels. To call it spiritual or metaphysical is to suggest it is not also extremely concrete and physical, while the term ‘cosmic consciousness’ itself had the unpoetic flavour of occultist jargon. But from all historical times and cultures we have reports of this same unmistakable sensation emerging, as a rule, quite suddenly and unexpectedly and from no clearly understood cause.29
White’s penchant for religious conviction and experience lasted all his life, and towards the end, aware that he was dying, there is a continual stream of references to resources beyond the temporal. Characteristically, there are none of the more conventional pleas for relief for his terminal illness or expressions of confidence in being taken care of. He did not appear to believe that the spiritual had anything to do with his personal concerns, which must have been pressing, considering the pain he was enduring. He describes particularly unpleasant experiences to his niece, but without recourse to religion:
returning from […] Ballymena, having weathered the strain, as I thought, pretty well, I was suddenly seized with a violent fit of nose bleeding in Ballymena station. Luckily I had just rang up a cab which I bled over all the way to Broughshane, and the bleeding has gone on at intervals since, making me frightened and weak.30
This was in August 1945, six months before he died of prostate cancer; his own diagnosis of what was happening gives an indication of where his interests lay at that time:
I interpret this as part result, part safety valve for the abnormal strain of the messianic consciousness on the brain, and this rise to the brain of the later stages of it is closely connected with the virgin birth, as I grope for its true meaning.31
There is little evidence of his attending religious services, although he would have described himself as Presbyterian and professed a faith in God, but he seems to have perceived his own spiritual beliefs on a kind of political basis, heavily supported with biblical references and mythology. The concept of messiah had an enduring fascination and, it must be stated, in particular as it applied to himself. This raises doubts about his mental stability towards the end of his life, although the more likely explanation is regular overindulgence in solitary drinking. (His daughter-in-law Jennifer, Derrick’s first wife, informed me that the landlady of the local public house had related that, not only did White do a considerable amount of late night drinking in Broughshane in the 1940s, but that the village was accustomed to the clip clop of his horse in the early hours of the morning going on journeys to
no-one-knew-where.)32
Dollie
Allied to White’s spiritual leanings was a conviction that whatever course of action he had decided upon was going to be taken without any consideration for the discomfort – or worse – that he would cause others. According to himself, he wooed Dollie Mosley against the explicit wishes of both families,33 although in the surviving correspondence on the matter there is not the slightest recrimination from either of his parents. This is probably an indication of the indulgence they continually granted their wayward son. White had been posted to India after his father had retired as Governor General of Gibraltar in 1905. When Dollie called off their engagement, he decided, filled with conviction inspired by his ‘liqueur sensation’, to leave India and return to Europe to repair his fractured relationship, a harbinger of the match to come and decades of marital turmoil. (This had been the second such occasion; previously he wrote in detail about getting leave from Kitchener to hurry back and persuade Dollie to change her mind soon after he had arrived at his posting.) This time there was a flurry of letters between Dollie and Sir George and Lady Amy, all written with the spectre of White returning by steamer from the East, undeterred by either the blandishments of his mother or Dollie’s letters. Dollie had been living with the Whites in London when she had changed her mind and agreed to marry White after his first return from India. However, she had once more decided to cancel the engagement sometime in late 1906 or early 1907 and had returned home to Gibraltar. She wrote to Lady Amy on 15 January 1907:
I don’t want my day of arrival to pass away without writing you a few lines. Well here I am! It has been a very sad home coming. […] I could never forget you all and all the kindness bestowed on me when I have been the principal cause of all your anxiety and worry.34
By the beginning of March White was on his way back and Dollie had notified the Whites of her concern because at some stage he had given the impression that he
