Front Page

The 'Zine

Sunsphere City

Bonus Track

Market Square

Search
Contact us!
About the site

 

Comment
on this story

 

The Superstitious Welshman

Jon Manchip White has written novels and screenplays along with histories of Egypt and Namibia, worked for Her Majesty's Foreign Service, patrolled the North Atlantic for German U-boats and guarded the Bank of England. And for the past 24 years, he's lived in Knoxville.

by Jack Neely

Jon Manchip White is one of those names you run across when you least expect it. At the end of a back-cover blurb on a new history of Africa. On the spine of a leatherbound volume of poetry in a rare-books store. A line on a science-fiction movie credit or a secret-agent TV show. Announced repeatedly as the winner of one of WUOT's guess-the-composer quizzes.

No one would blame you if you began to doubt the existence of Jon Manchip White. No mortal human could have this many identities. But look him up. Jon Manchip White, novelist, Egyptologist, screenwriter, expert on American Indians, professor, poet, former British seaman and, perhaps, former British spy, is one man, and he lives in Knoxville. You've probably passed him on the sidewalk.

He moved to America partly because he preferred the weather, but some days White just brings his Welsh weather with him. Just a minute ago, it was a hot, sunny, Tennessee afternoon, but as he arrives at the Little Kalamata Kitchen in Western Plaza the skies are overcast. By the time we're seated, it's raining hard.

White has a reputation as a gourmand, but here he happily settles for a gyro and a glass of iced tea. He's now 77, a balding man with a white mustache. White's eyes are seawater gray and convey a melancholy humor that underlies his conversation. Though today he tries to fool us with a red-and-white floral open-necked shirt, he moves with English reserve and speaks with a careful accent hardly diluted by half a lifetime in the States.

He has spent most of that time—24 years now—in Knoxville. That's longer than he has lived anywhere. He came here to teach at UT, as many professors have over the years, but it's clear that, for various reasons, he has settled in Knoxville.

He's aware that he's not your typical bloke. "I may be the only Egyptologist who follows Formula One racing," he allows. He doesn't just follow it. His first book, the 1953 novel Mask of Dust, was about Formula One racing, and that novel was made into a British movie, with his help. He wrote the script and also did some of the driving. "They were nice to let me win," he says.

His lifelong adventure began in Cardiff, the Welsh seaport where he grew up. He describes his childhood in an old seafaring family in one of his more recent books, The Journeying Boy: Scenes From a Welsh Childhood.

He attended Cambridge briefly before joining the Royal Navy during World War II. He sailed the North Atlantic on a British destroyer, patrolling for Nazi U-boats. In the early '80s, he saw the popular German movie, Das Boot, here. "I had to be restrained," he says. "I raised a cheer every time they sank one of the damn things."

Like many veterans, he's not eager to talk about the war. "It's rather strange," he says. "I only write about the war in movies. I think it's because when I got back to Cambridge I just wanted to get it all behind me and get on with my life. That was a thing I resented about the English. They were so sentimental about the war. There was a cult of the war, a nostalgia. It held them back—culturally, I mean. I don't blame them. But they should have let it go."

He left destroyer service to train to be an officer in the Indian army, but it was the mid-'40s, and the timing wasn't right. "They stopped recruiting, now that the jig was up in India." He was, instead, shifted to a domestic assignment, the Welsh Guards, an elite corps assigned to guard royal institutions in London. During the reign of George VI, White served as a guard at Windsor Castle. To him, though, it wasn't the biggest job.

"I actually guarded the Bank of England," he says. "I'm very proud of that. Of course, I don't know what I would have done if someone had tried to rob it."

Just after the war, White married an army nurse (he met her on VE Day) and returned to college, "I knew I was going to be a writer, so I studied things useful to a writer," he says. Like ancient Egypt. He eventually earned degrees in English literature, prehistoric archaeology, oriental languages, and anthropology.

Still in his 20s, he was already showing some schizmatic tendencies. Honored with a post at the British Museum, he left it after a few weeks. "I realized I didn't want to spend my life among mummies," he says. The erstwhile Egyptologist turned to popular writing. He happened to be in the right place at the right time when BBC TV geared up; he became the famous network's first story editor. But at home, he also worked on his first book about ancient Egypt.

Then, he says, "I got a very strange offer to go into the foreign service, as a senior executive officer. To this day, I don't know why." Not yet 30, the young Egyptologist/TV writer would be working in international intelligence in the early days of the Cold War.

"MacLean, Burgess, and Philby had given the foreign service a black eye," he says, referring to the infamous Soviet double agents of that era. "All were recruited at Cambridge. I was recruited at Cambridge. But I was one of the good guys."

For the next four years, White made trips around the world on behalf of Her Majesty's Foreign Service—into Europe, Africa, and South America, he allows, but won't volunteer much more. He worked in information research, and it was a "closed department."

"On my wall, I have the covers of documents marked Top Secret: To Be Opened By Mr. White Only. I show them to people to prove that I, too, have been James Bond."

Meanwhile, living in Glasgow, he and his wife had two daughters, Bronwen and Rhiannon, named for figures in Welsh poetry. During that period, he actually wrote some Welsh poetry himself, as well as a couple of novels.

White left the Foreign Service in 1956 to concentrate on his writing, a lot of which was contract work for TV and movies, much of the time working for Russian-born producer Samuel Bronston in Paris and Madrid. Among their movies was the famously extravagant El Cid.

Type Jon Manchip White's name into some Internet search engines, and you're likely to come up with several web pages associated with the still-popular '60s spy show, The Avengers. In particular, you'll see his name as writer for a classic episode called "Propellant 23."

That bit of information surprises the Egyptologist-poet.

"Really?" he says, as if he'd forgotten. For a moment he puts down his iced tea. But then it comes to him. "Yes, I did. I did some work on Avengers scripts." He enjoyed the work, but he doesn't seem like the sort of guy who has posters of Emma Peel on his bedroom walls. "You write what you're asked to," he says.

When an American entertainment company attempted to establish a European presence, they called on Mr. White. The chief of that company was named Walt Disney.

"Disney didn't like Europeans," he says. "I was one of the few Europeans he really seemed to like. I have a theory that Disney was affected by his ambulance service in Flanders during World War I. So he created this New World paradise of youth and innocence."

It's clear, talking to him, that White doesn't consider his screenwriting the major part of his career. Even during the dozen or so years that he made a living in show biz, he published several novels that gave him a reputation as a lover of the arcane and bizarre, as well as some notable nonfiction. His 1962 biography, Marshal of France: The Life and Times of Maurice, Comte de Saxe, was so strongly recommended by the critics that Jackie Kennedy bought it for her husband.

He also wrote Everyday Life In Ancient Egypt, which is still cited as a reference by other authors on the subject.

One of White's last movies is another one of those projects he doesn't mention until you ask: the 1965 science-fiction movie Crack In the World. Never released on video but well-remembered by many sci-fi fans, it starred Dana Andrews and its screenwriter was Jon Manchip White.

It's another of those he seems nearly to have forgotten. "It became the fashion to make science movies," he says. "I knew nothing about science at all." He seems surprised anyone has heard of Crack In the World, and says his original script was changed by other writers, who made it a love story. In his three-page vita, he doesn't mention any of his movie and TV credits and seems vaguely embarrassed to remember that era.

"I was 40, and I'd really had enough of it. It's a young man's game. I've never had a book rejected," he claims. "But screenplays—that's a constant progress of real disappointment and humiliation." He thinks at least half of his movie scripts were never produced. "You're a has-been if you're 40," he says. "They really do use you. They squeeze you dry and throw you away."

He doesn't call it a "mid-life crisis," but in his early 40s, he chose to shake up his career in a big way. He gave up show biz and moved to America. "I took what I thought was a temporary job as Writer in Residence at the University of Texas in El Paso. At Cambridge, I wrote a thesis on pueblos. I never thought I'd actually see them."

Texas was quite a contrast to soggy Wales. Partly for that reason, White loved it, and reflected his enthusiasm for this big dry country in his book, A World Elsewhere: One Man's Fascination With the American Southwest. In El Paso he taught and further developed his career as a novelist, with exotic suspense thrillers—"extravagant tales," as he calls them—like Nightclimber, about an art scholar obsessed with climbing tall buildings, and The Game of Troy, about a sportsman-killer, which earned comparisons with Poe's stories. He also wrote biographies of painter Diego Velazquez, a book about Cortez, and The Land God Made In Anger, which established his reputation as an expert on Namibia.

He also wrote his last book of poetry, The Mountain Lion. White, who published his first book of poems at 16, has never completely given up that form. "I'm not particularly good," he says, "but occasionally I get fired up."

He liked Texas as residence, subject, and setting, but when UT offered him a job to develop a writing program here in 1977, he took it. From then until his retirement, he held the Lindsey Young Chair of English, teaching a wide variety of courses from scriptwriting to Egyptology. He retired from UT seven years ago, but stayed in Knoxville. "I've got a lot of friends here," he explains, "various support systems." White is still awed by the things he doesn't know, especially in what he considers his weak spots: mathematics, physics, and chemistry. His friends are the people who impress him, and many of them are Oak Ridge scientists.

"They're a very distinguished bunch, they truly are," he says. "They fascinate me. It's like studying some rare and gifted tribe." (He's just not that crazy about Oak Ridge itself. "It's a mournful little town, isn't it?")

"I always liked the South," he says. "I came from South Wales. I wrote a book about South Africa." After his arrival in the South of the United States, he says, he had plans to write a book called 'My Souths.' Then my wife was ill, and I never got around to writing it."

His wife died some years ago after a long illness. One of his two daughters lives near him in Knoxville.

He has continued to write, if not at the breakneck pace of several years ago. Since he has been in Knoxville, he has published his Everyday Life of the North American Indian, as well as several more novels. He seems proudest of what may be his most unusual book, a surreal thriller called Death by Dreaming (1981) in which much of the action takes place in the characters' subconscious. It earned critical acclaim, but was never a bestseller. He remarks, a little resentfully, that the popular 1984 movie Dreamscape has a remarkably similar plot.

Asked what he'd like to change about Knoxville, he thinks for a moment. "I rather like it as it is," he says. "It's very varied. The downtown may be going through its trials, but it's very pleasant as it is, after all." The Jockey Club is his favorite local restaurant. He mentions the KSO and Clarence Brown Theatre, both of which he patronizes.

"Knoxville is one of America's best-kept secrets," says the former secret agent. "I've found it a very amenable town." He admits that some of his English friends give him a hard time. "I answer, 'Where do you come from: Leicester? Nottingham? Have you got a symphony orchestra? An opera company? A ballet company? I mean, come on."

"My 30 years in America have been very good," he says. He finally got his U.S. citizenship three years ago. "The British think anyone who wants to become a foreign subject is balmy," he says. He still keeps his British passport, though.

"I love London, I like Cambridge, Cardiff," he says. "But there, you're never out of sight of a car or another person. Most people live in row houses. In Britain, your next-door neighbor is glued onto the side of your house. People live hugger-mugger, they really do. In America, people live in houses surrounded by gardens."

The Knoxville area specifically allows him to indulge two of his polymorphous enthusiasms, fly fishing and the American Civil War, a longtime interest. White lived for years in South Knoxville, on Cherokee Bluff, and enjoyed walks along what he called Rebel Ridge, from where Porter Alexander's Confederate artillery unsuccessfully bombarded the fortified town in 1863. "My terrier used to dig up minie bullets. Also, once, a rebel shell."

Now in the Bearden area, he does much of his walking along Cherokee Boulevard. If you notice an old man behaving peculiarly down there, it may well be Mr. White. "I sometimes find myself in a fairy ring," he says. "Of course, I have to turn widdershins-about three times, and ignore the rude stares of passers by."

One of his Knoxville-era products is his 1992 book, Whistling Past the Graveyard: Strange Tales of a Superstitious Welshman. "I'm very superstitious," he confesses almost proudly. Earlier this summer he found himself at West Town when he noticed it was a new moon. "Of course, I had to bow three times to the new moon. Everybody in the car park thought I'd gone mad."

He offers a Welsh prescription for good luck: "Don't step on a crack in the sidewalk. Drink lots of martinis. Avoid, as much as you can, doctors, lawyers, and undertakers."

He has bad feelings about computers that sound more on the order of suspicion than superstition. He doesn't keep one in his house. "I don't want my home to seem like an office," he says. "I write longhand, type my books out, and send them to my daughter in New Orleans." He says his experience with computer-composed literature, via reading UT students' papers, hasn't been encouraging.

In his 60s, White finally wrote a book about one of the few subjects he'd never broached: himself. The Journeying Boy: Scenes From a Welsh Childhood describes a trip home to Cardiff and a flood of memories. Part Welsh history, part travelogue, part confession, the book is a rambling discussion of everything that comes to his mind. It's very much like a transcript of our lunch.

White has found a strong sense of belonging in the local Welsh community. He's an active member of the Knoxville Welsh Society.

White confesses it was always his ambition to be an old-fashioned Man of Letters. He may well have arrived at that goal. He has also lived the far-flung life that many of us once, when we were 18, believed we were going to live.

"I sold my papers to the University of Boston," he says, and adds an understatement. "I'm one of that last breed of authors whose papers are really going to be interesting."
 

August 9, 2001 * Vol. 11, No. 32
© 2001 Metro Pulse