This is one of those marvelous books that is so small, yet written in a way so that each sentence carries the work of ten. Somehow, it tears your heart out with just a word. Just right out. Because, this book is as much about what lies beneath T.H. White's words as what his words say. His words are telling us about a period when he trained a goshawk. (See that video for an incredibly gorgeous view of the creatures.) The rest of the story is in the underbelly, in what he is confessing about his point of view, of his little patch of the world. This is a book about war and pacifism, but told in a didactic code about falconry.**(It is not falconry. A goshawk is not technically a falcon, due to wingspan, and the term for the hawk's keeper is "austringer." Do you see what I mean about didactic, anyway?)So this is 1937. White feels what the world is about to do, what it already is doing, and he can't really cope. The idea of violence hurts him deeply; he wants justice and peace, but admits more to cowardice: "I did not disapprove of war, but feared it much." He wants, most, to live in his cloistered cottage, to talk to hardly anyone, and — quite desperately, I believe — to belong to another time.He isn't living a life the way his contemporaries are living life. He'll sit this one out. He's learned life from books, so far, and therefore why not buy a goshawk, captured in the wild — in Germany! — and train him per the methods of three textbooks: a volume of The Sportsman's Library, one of The Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes, and the truly incredible Bert's Treatise of Hawks and Hawking, published 1619. That is his only help and perspective. He is, as he says, an amateur "four hundred years too late for guidance."That last draws us directly into what White is really saying: he reminds us, often, that the last time falconry (and its relatives) was truly relevant was in the time of Shakespeare. During his long watches, training his hawk, named Gos, he recites him Shakespeare's verse. Even as "I was stroking a murderer, a savage," the bigger world around him is full of mounting violence, and of politics that pursue the kill; he concludes, "we still lived in the Middle Ages." So why not be there together.A philosophical line is drawn directly between the training of the hawk and the practicing of pacifism. The training, primarily, consists of exerting an endless patience as you hold the hawk by its straps and wait until it no longer "bates" away, attempting to fly off your fist. This takes days. Sleepless days. And after it's happened, and the bird sits calmly upon you, you can expect to backslide again soon; a hawk is never tamed. The bird shows you hate, and you must show it kindness, or fail. "Nobody could be a master of hawks without benevolence." It's something between a Christian's cheek-turning and a Buddhist's enlightenment. Not every soul can do it, surely.Part of this book is almost like the first half of a romantic comedy, the half where the players foil one another with petty fights and sardonic insults, yet are constantly drawn back together. Once he and Gos find their stride, we get so many wonderfully involved descriptions of the bird's personality. White uses the most sublime and funny language to describe him: Gos is both the hilarious "tetchy princeling" and the subject of tragic odes: "Unfortunate, dark, and immoral goshawk: I had myself been subjected to his brutality. In the beak he was not formidable, but in the talons there was death. … Once, when he thought I was going to take his food away from him, he had struck my bare forefinger. … I should only have hurt myself horribly by trying to get away, and was already being hurt."There are many of these dark shades; it isn't a cruelty-free story. He is following his forebears and his 17th-century textbook, doing what's always been done. It may not always be right. How does that make him different from the rest of the world, about to descend into a massive war? Certainly not wiser. After all, the whole point of hawking is to hunt; it is a sport inherently disrespectful to life. And this is the twisted contradiction White offers us in his self: he is an En-glish-man, he rules his little land. This is a repugnant point of view, really, privileged and imperialist; he is the figure to whom all cultural arguments are aimed today. In his world there are still old ways to rest upon, and wild things to take at will.Still I love him. He writes this book out of his compassion and his search for peace. He is the classic misanthrope, who loves animals more than people. There's a moment, when Gos is loose, that he lures him with a pigeon, as bait. But he stops: "I had known this pigeon: it had sat on my finger." It had sat on his finger! His friend! He buys two more pigeons, instead, so he won't have to use his friend for the death for which it was bred. His life is full of these tiny encounters, a "sentimental slaughterer," Snow White and the hunter both. He doesn't flinch from these gruesome habits, or permit us to. He brings us deeper inside them. On a day when the gentry conducts a foxhunt outside his home, he watches a young sow badger emerge at the wrong time from the forest and encounter two well-made-up women who sit and stare at it. When she is killed, later, White allegorically contemplates her body: "Brock: the last of the English bears: I had been proud that her race lived in the same wood with me. She had done nobody any harm. … Hob would be a good name for a badger. She dripped blood gently over the gate, while I held up her muzzle in the falconer's glove and looked into her small, opaque, ursine eyes. She was dead. What could I use her for? Surely, being killed, some definite good would ensue."But there's no purpose to the death for anyone: "I did not want to remember a young, short-sighted, retiring, industrious, ultimately prolific female who had been turned back by two frightened ladies, cornered by lusty and unlettered puppies, knocked on the nose by a peer. … Never mind. I was a badger too, in my snug cottage that lay in the badger's wood: and when the war-world came to tear me apart with whoops and halloas, the young sow and myself would be quits."Reading a passage like that, I'm just about quits myself.Something to understand: this is actually a nonfiction book about falconry. Though I'd say it's written like a memoir, and contains allegory, it gets into detail about what to do with a goshawk. There are many diagrams. ("Hawk Furniture"!) It has dull stretches, and doesn't properly follow a story for a while. But its strong moments sung so brightly for me. The details carry such pain: a lesson ostensibly on repairing a broken feather explains the tragedy of the bird's "hunger-trace," a line of weakness in the feathers from growing when the baby had no food. This childhood suffering leaves a visible scar; his feathers will inevitably break there, one by one. His master must mend him. This makes me want to cry, everybody.White's project moved me in the way that Wild did, the obstinacy of having no right to try this thing that they find they simply must, must do. Another author undertook this same spiritual legacy just last year in H is for Hawk, in which she copes with the death of a parent with this same project, examining T.H. White for his thematic dealings with grief. This piece by Macdonald explores something White mentions in his Postscript, the "top-secret falcon squadron" in the British Air Ministry of WWII, entrusted with capturing "enemy pigeons" (and their messages). She describes the birds' character as "naturalising the ideology of honourable combat. Falcons were a moral predator." Cool soldiers in the very conflict White feared so much. "It happened like this in the world. Old things lost their grip and dropped away; not always because they were bad things, but sometimes because the new things were more bad, and stronger."Thanks to Shannon, as ever, for telling me so much about this.
T.H. White wrote this as a journal of his efforts to train a goshawk, using books (including one from the 1600's) as a guide. Poor wild goshawk had to suffer for his inexperience and his moody love/hate attitude. The writing is beautiful, although once Gos escapes, the book, understandably, fragments. "...terrified, but still nobly and madly defiant, the eyas goshawk had arrived at my small cottage in his accursed basket--a wild and adolescent creature whose father and mother in eagles' nests had fed him with bloody meat still quivering with life..." (p. 12). My new vocabulary word: bate.
What do You think about The Goshawk (2007)?
The oddest thing happened while reading this book. Having just finished White's Sword in the Stone, and having just learned what an acciptor is (raptors, including goshawks, who diet on other birds) I discovered that T.H. White had written this memoir. But while reading it, I kept thinking that White, who referred to himself as an austringer (a keeper of goshawks) lived in the 1600s. The language of this "sport" is so specialized and near-archaic the book read as such. Plus, one of the handful of books of training guides he used was written in the 1600s. Then he would mention the world war or automobiles and I was snapped back into the 20th century. There was also an abundance of wildlife (are there any badgers left in England?) and uninhabited land. The year was 1938. I veered between fascination and repulsion. Good thing the book is short! The preoccupation with acquiring food for the goshawk, both live game such as mice, rabbits and other birds and market beef, and what could be perceived as the cruelty of taming such a wild and independent bird was often difficult to accept. But it was also fascinating to learn about his naive methods which amounted to extreme patience and trial and error. Also, there was this bizarre psychology between man and bird unlike anything I've ever encountered before.When the book was published in 1951, White added a third section with an overview of his continued practice with another goshawk, changes in method, and mention of the disappearance of the practice in England, but which he was glad to see continuing in America.
—Mmars
The author, as well as being a professional writer, was an avid sportsman and this was a well written account of his efforts toward training his own Gos. But with no knowledge or experience, he embarked upon the rigorous task of an Austringer while not realizing that a Goshawk should only be attended by the most experienced handlers. Falconers train falcons; Austringers train accipiters and other hawks. Goshawks, the largest accipiter, are infused with extreme independence, wildness and intractability; hence their deserved reputation of being the most difficult to dominate and train. Anyway, White's task was so arduous that he often interjected literary schemes into his training to settle his own mind and to make the read more appealing to his audience.Years ago at a hawk watch site it was my good fortune to be able to adopt -- pay $50.00 -- an adult male Goshawk that had just been netted and banded. For my 50 dollars I had the immense thrill of holding within my grasp this creature of the supreme wilderness. Shortly thereafter and with unspeakable joy, I launched him back to his freedom and life in the wild!!! What an unforgettable experience!!! And Goshawks truly are the embodiment of the current slogan of the "Wolverine" brand......... "Relentless By Nature."
—John
Sometimes you stumble upon books without really knowing why, and sometimes those books end up being your favourites. This will go down as one of those.It's a brilliant read. To be read alongside Macdonald's 'H is for Hawk' is very enjoyable. Helen references this book, and White's up-and-down life in her own book. Both document the struggle an austringer faces when attempting to train a goshawk.Maybe it doesn't sound up your street? It didn't mine either. But White's writing is a delight and this book deserves its 5* rating. Thank you Mr White for being convinced to have this book published. It shall live a happy life upon my shelf. And be taken down again should I ever be fortunate enough to own a hawk.
—Mark McKenny
