The boys have gone out hawking. The year is 500 A.D., give or take, when young men of a certain social class fly hawks for sport. One of these boys belongs to that class: his father is a knight, and he will grow up to be one, too. His name is Kay. The other boy will grow up to be a king, but he doesn’t know that yet. For now, he is Kay’s inferior: younger, adopted, of unknown lineage, saddled by the older child with the unfortunate nickname the Wart. At present, in an arrangement that is typical, the Wart is trudging along carrying a dead creature to serve as a lure, while Kay, walking in front of him, carries the hawk.
It is a goshawk, a huge bird with golden eyes, like something out of a legend. And this one is: we are six pages into T. H. White’s six-hundred-and-forty-page medieval epic, “The Once and Future King.” We have already learned, on page 1, that the boys practice hawking every week, but now it becomes clear that Kay is bad at it. He throws the bird from his glove before it is ready, and for a moment it hangs there, a confusion of feathers and air and instinct. An instant later, it is lost. “Up went the hawk,” White writes, “swooping like a child flung high in a swing, until the wings folded and he was sitting in a tree.”
Kay soon goes off in a fit of pique, leaving the mild, anxious, loyal Wart to try to catch the bird. It flies deeper and deeper into the woods. Night falls. The Wart worries. He knows the forest is full of outlaws, maniacs, and wild beasts, but he can’t bring himself to abandon the hawk. He keeps watch beneath the tree where it roosts, gets shot at, flees, loses the bird, encounters a knight, loses him, too, then stumbles upon a clearing with a stone cottage and a strange old man outside. The old man is Merlyn, the magician, and he foresaw long ago that this would happen: that here, in front of his cottage, he would meet the boy known in later years and ever after as King Arthur. So much has yet to come, but all of it—the sword, the stone, the wars, the Round Table, the quests, the love affairs, the murders, the betrayals, the tragedy, the whole huge arc of it like a longbow pulled fast with the arrow already nocked—all of it begins because a person, of uncertain identity and gravely lost, binds his fate to a goshawk.
Helen Macdonald was in her third and final year as a research fellow at Cambridge, a prestigious postgraduate position, when her father died and, for eight hundred pounds sterling, she acquired a ten-week-old goshawk. The death was unexpected. Her father, a professional photographer based in London, had gone out after a violent storm to take pictures of the damage down at Battersea, when he suffered a heart attack. Later, Macdonald saw the final image in his camera: “Blurred, taken from a low angle, far too low; an empty London street.”
The goshawk was unexpected, too. By the time of her father’s death, Macdonald, an experienced falconer, had trained kestrels and merlins and peregrines, but she had never cared to train a goshawk. Among those who know their birds of prey, the reputation of the goshawk is half Hamlet, half Lady Macbeth: mad, murderous, unpredictable, the kind of creature whose partners and intimates should brace themselves for trouble. “Spooky, pale-eyed psychopaths,” Macdonald calls them. “Not for me, I’d thought, many times.” But then came death, that other unpredictable mad murderer, and Macdonald got a hawk, named her Mabel, and set about trying to tame her.
Macdonald’s book about that experience, “H Is for Hawk” (Grove), was first published last summer in Great Britain, where it won the Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction and the Costa Book of the Year prize, awarded to the best new book in any genre. Had there been an award for the best new book that defies every genre, I imagine it would have won that, too. Like the griffin that the Wart might have met in his forest, “H Is for Hawk” is an improbable and hybrid creature. It is one part grief memoir, one part guide to raptors, and one part biography of T. H. White, who chronicled his maiden effort at falconry in “The Goshawk,” written just before he began work on “The Once and Future King.” I am describing Macdonald’s book by its parts for the same reason we describe a griffin by its parts—because how else would we do so? But it is coherent, complete, and riveting, perhaps the finest nonfiction I read in the past year.
To this wondrously atypical book, Macdonald brings an equally atypical background. She is a former falcon-breeder for royalty of the United Arab Emirates, a current historian of science at Cambridge, a naturalist, an illustrator, and the author of three collections of poetry and one previous work of nonfiction, “Falcon,” a natural and cultural history. She is also what you might call a former raptor prodigy. Her father, in addition to being a photographer, was an amateur plane-spotter, and he taught his young daughter sky-watching, bird-watching, and patience. By the age of six, she had begun teaching herself about birds of prey. Her prepubescent leisure reading included, along with “The Goshawk,” Gilbert Blaine’s “Falconry,” Frank Illingworth’s “Falcons and Falconry,” and James Harting’s “Hints on Hawks.” By nine or ten, Macdonald had become, in her words, “the most appalling falconry bore.”
Listen to her now, two pages in:
So much for the falconry bore. Intellectually, Macdonald is unhurried—she pauses to point out whatever is interesting—but, stylistically, she is like this passage, all pounce. Over and over, her writing takes you by surprise: no sooner have you registered the kitchen than, whoa, there’s the snow leopard, its huge Himalayan paws leaving prints on the tile and half a domestic shorthair hanging from its mouth. I will never again not have pictured that, and, with apologies to my cat, I am glad. Like “The Goshawk,” only with considerably more self-awareness, “H Is for Hawk” is about what happens when you blur the line between wild and domestic: about what it is like to share your home with a bloody great murdering creature, why anyone would choose to do so, and what rewards and hazards attend that decision.
Books about nature, like the category “animal,” sometimes suffer from a sin of omission: in both cases, people belong inside them but are often left out. Books about grief run the opposite risk; too much of the person can be left in, too much of the world omitted. Macdonald, who is writing both kinds of book at once, makes neither mistake. She is intimate and moving on the anguish that carried her into the company of hawks, but the world of her book is like the world we really live in, crowded with humans and human ideas, and she turns on it all the triple perspicacity of a poet, a naturalist, and a historian. She dissects the cultural symbolism attached to hawks from Victorian England to the Third Reich; she catalogues the classic animal stories by gay authors, who could not write openly of their human relationships; she observes that when a species is endangered it suffers not only numeric but also semantic decline. “The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have,” she observes. “Eventually rarity is all they are made of.”
Goshawks are rare in England now—certainly, they are a rare companion for a young urban woman—but, Macdonald notes, there was a time when you could walk down the street in Cambridge and see as many birds on the fist as today you see dogs on a leash. That world had an entire culture and language, and Macdonald provides an introduction to it. A person who trains falcons is called a falconer, but a person who trains hawks is called an austringer. Young hawks are eyasses, as crossword-puzzle devotees know; adolescents are passagers; those caught as adults are haggards. A happy hawk signals its contentment by “rousing,” and Macdonald and White each provide a wonderful description. Mabel “lifts herself into a vast, frothy mop of feathers”; White’s hawk, when it roused, “looked exactly like a fir-cone.” By contrast, a malcontented hawk will “bate,” dive-bombing off its owner’s fist in terror or rage. A hawk cannot escape by bating, because its owner holds its jesses—slim leather straps attached to bands the bird wears on its ankles. But it can escape when released to hunt, as Kay’s hawk did—and then, like the Wart, the owner must follow underneath the bird and try to coax it down. Austringers spend so much time craning their necks at fugitive hawks that, Macdonald informs us, one seventeenth-century writer declared falconry to be a moral activity on the ground that it kept you looking toward Heaven.
Macdonald delights in the argot of falconry, so ancient and exclusive that it feels like the words Merlyn might have used in his spells. But she relishes, too, the matter-of-fact magic of avian biology. Certain birds can perceive ultraviolet colors, the separate wing beats of a bee, and the earth’s magnetic field, and goshawks, Macdonald tells us, can “watch thermals of warm air rise, roil, and spill into clouds.” She also notes that the bird’s volatile reputation is partly due to neurology: the pathways between the goshawk’s sensory neurons and its motor neurons all but bypass the brain. “They react to stimuli literally without thinking,” Macdonald writes, and a whole lot of those stimuli can provoke their hunting instinct: squeaky doors, passing bicycles, real pheasants, but also black-and-white drawings of them, Joan Sutherland on the radio. (“I laughed out loud at that,” Macdonald writes. “Stimulus: opera. Response: kill.”) The other part of the goshawk’s bad reputation, Macdonald points out, comes down to class bias. Goshawks hunt well in woods and require very little room to kill, whereas falcons need the kind of open space that, historically, was available only to those who owned manors. People who could afford to keep falcons looked down on those who couldn’t—and, by extension, on the birds they kept instead.
That helps explain why Mabel fails to live up to her fearsome reputation. A character in the book in her own right, she does not come across as a psychopath; she comes across as a mixture of a Labrador retriever, an F-16, and Houdini. Chasing a rabbit that turns and runs into the woods, she “slewed round sling-shot style, heel-bow, soaking up g-force like a sponge,” then “closed her wings and was gone.” But at home she is companionable, curious, easy to train, and, to Macdonald’s astonishment, playful. The two of them play catch with crumpled pieces of paper and peekaboo through a rolled-up magazine. “No one had ever told me goshawks played,” Macdonald writes. “I wondered if it was because no one had ever played with them. The thought made me terribly sad.”
But Macdonald was already terribly sad; she was, in fact, far more troubled and difficult than her bird. Macdonald had always been close to her father, who emerges in the book as a kind, steady, understated man with a sly streak. “My dad had been my dad,” she writes, “but also my friend, and a partner in crime”: her companion in the kind of legal but impish adventures to which a professional photographer and a poet-falconer might incline. It seems a lovely relationship, and Macdonald writes with clarity and heart about its loss. She understands grief’s paradoxical essence, which is the constant presence of absence; there is an awful moment in the book when, unable to remember a detail of a story about her father that she plans to tell at his memorial service, she picks up the phone to call him. Months after his death, she looks around at the woods, at her hawk, at her life, and feels nothing, or nothing good: “My heart is salt.”
Such simplicity, such totality. But what Macdonald handles so well on the page nearly undid her in real life. At the time of her father’s death, she had “no partner, no children, no home. No nine-to-five job either.” Like a tent poorly staked, she is filled by the storm that is grief and blown away. Soon that disconnection comes to seem desirable. Hurt by the human world, she wants nothing more to do with it. Instead, she longs to be like her bird: “solitary, self-possessed, free from grief.”
Thus does hawking, as Macdonald practices it in her bereavement, become a zero-sum game: as the bird grows tamer, she grows wilder. She spends her days stalking with Mabel through field and forest, her pockets full of dead day-old chicks, snapping the necks of rabbits the bird would otherwise eat alive. She stops seeing friends, “jumped in panic when the postman knocked on the door; recoiled from the ringing phone.” She lives alone in a house empty of coffee and filled with lumps of raw meat. Before long, she is walking that fine Lear line between grief and insanity. Wounded by death, she devotes herself to a pastime for which she must kill daily. Drowning in loss, she commits herself to a creature whose defining trait is the capacity to fly away.
The term “hoodwinked” is closely associated with falconry. For millennia, falconers have slipped hoods over the heads of their birds, calming their hair-trigger nervous systems by protecting them from excess exposure to the world. It is a morally muddy practice, simultaneously necessary, compassionate, and deceptive. Macdonald, in her grief, accomplishes the unlikely act of hoodwinking herself with a hawk. With Mabel on her fist, she is focussed and calm; without her, she is angry, reactive, and scared. Rather than assuaging her heartache, she is simply evading it, soothing herself by hiding from the world. Eventually, she recognizes the limitations of that strategy—because she is emotionally astute, but also because, back in her hawk-obsessed childhood, she had read about someone else who tried it.
Terence Hanbury White also got a goshawk to fill the void left by a beloved parent, but in a different sense: he never had one. His mother and father hated each other and, on the evidence, despised their son as well. White was beaten often, coddled rarely—when it was tactically convenient for one parent or the other—and otherwise neglected or humiliated. He finally went away to boarding school, but an upbringing like his did not permit complete escape, then or ever. Macdonald shares a telling detail: upon receiving a photograph of the young White, his mother wrote back to say that his lips were “growing sensual” and that he should hold them in—with his teeth, if need be. “It is so fatally easy,” White wrote of Lancelot in “The Once and Future King,” “to make young children believe that they are horrible.”
White did believe he was horrible. “I had a friend who was a sadistic homosexual, now happily married with children,” he once wrote to L. J. Potts, his former Cambridge tutor, in a minor classic of the genre of Asking for a Friend. White was himself a sadistic homosexual, and, in those pre-Stonewall, pre-“Fifty Shades” days, his desires were a misery to him. They were also, as far as anyone can tell, unfulfilled. White had no known male lovers, and he was, if anything, gentler than the standards of his time. In his twenties, he taught English at private boys’ schools, and, unlike most of his colleagues, refused to hit his pupils—partly out of conviction (he deplored the notion that “the complex psychology of a human being can be taught with a stick”), but possibly also because of how much he longed to do so. “He felt in his heart cruelty and cowardice,” White wrote, again of Lancelot, “the things which made him brave and kind.”
White was thirty when he quit teaching, rented a cabin far from town, and got a goshawk. He wanted to spend his time writing, but he also had a deeper motive. “The business of life,” he wrote, was “to divest oneself of unnecessary possessions, and mainly of other people.” Like Macdonald, although more deliberately, he used the bird to engineer a retreat from the world. The day it arrived, White dined with friends, and then was “glad to shake off with them the last of an old human life.” His new life would be with and for the goshawk alone.
The poor bird; the poor man. The only worthy thing to come out of their relationship was “The Goshawk”—and that very nearly didn’t come out at all. White completed the book in 1937, but declined to publish it until 1949, when an editor paid him a visit, sat on his sofa, found it uncomfortable, and fished from under the cushion the abandoned manuscript. He prevailed on White to let him publish it, and the book came out in 1951. In the United States, it eventually went out of print, and, for decades, it was difficult to find. In 2007, New York Review Books remedied that situation by bringing out an edition that preserves White’s many drawings of hawk paraphernalia (part of the attraction of hawking, one suspects, was all the time spent with leather and knots) and adds an introduction by Marie Winn, best known for chronicling the life of the red-tailed hawk Pale Male and its mate.
Unlike Macdonald, White had no idea what he was doing when he acquired his goshawk. “I had never trained a serious hawk before, nor met a living falconer, nor seen a hawk that had been trained,” he wrote. “I had three books.” The one he relied on most was written in 1619. It was a bad guide, White was a bad student, and, as for the hawk, before its training was done it broke its tether and flew away. I won’t reveal what became of it, but White’s book goes slack at that point, its own line broken as well.
Until that moment, however, “The Goshawk” is tremendous. White has both a keen eye and a supple, surprising mind, and his observations of the natural world often lend a comic pleasure to an otherwise dark book. A hawk that has killed a mouse “rose leisurely over the hedge, carrying the body as a city worker carried his attaché case.” Watching his hawk hunt, a falconer grows so involved that “it was like being an onlooker at an athletic meeting who kicks to help the high-jumper.” After a passage about a hawk chasing a rabbit, White, wonderfully at ease on the page, appends these instructions: “You must read it at the top of your voice, in three seconds, and you will see what it was.”
For a slim book, “The Goshawk” has, like its subject, a formidable wingspan. It is not quite right to call it a draft of “The Once and Future King,” but it is something close to a précis of the later book’s themes: it is about educational systems, political systems, medieval history, desire, violence, control of others, and control of self. These last two, in particular, dominate the work, and Macdonald’s take is the right one. “White made falconry a metaphysical battle,” she writes. “Like Moby-Dick or The Old Man and the Sea, The Goshawk was a literary encounter between animal and man that reached back to Puritan traditions of spiritual contest.” In keeping with that tradition, what was at stake for White in austringing was not his hawk but his soul. It is the prerogative of hawks to draw blood without sin. If White could master the bird, he seemed to believe, he could at once master and vicariously enjoy his own violent urges.
This struggle gives “The Goshawk” its stakes, but it also makes the book almost unbearably disturbing. In attempting to identify with the hawk, White only makes it subject to his self-loathing. He names the bird Gos but calls it terrible things: frightening, repulsive, dangerous, hysterical, baleful, a monster, a savage, a snake, murderous as Caligula—as Attila, as Odin, as Death. “It was like being handcuffed to a moron, I would think bitterly, in a chain gang”; or it was like sharing his home with “a homicidal maniac.” That line might more reasonably have been written by the bird. White describes his yearning to wring its neck, bash its head into a gatepost, and subject it to “the extreme torture it deserved.”
All this is made more painful by the fact that White also genuinely loves the hawk, and hates himself. He writes, with delight, of Gos taking his first bath, getting his first case of hiccups, first coming from afar to the fist. The book would not be half so hard to read if it were not half-time tender. But tenderness is not an attitude that a man so deprived of affection can sustain. Once, when the bird won’t stop bating, White flies into a rage and, in violation of the first commandment of hawking, deliberately thwarts its effort to climb back up on his fist, forcing it to remain dangling upside down in helpless terror. Afterward, Gos seems stunned into quiescence, and White “stood dumbstruck also, mobbed by most of the deadly sins.” The war poet Siegfried Sassoon, who had reason to recognize the rage, shame, denial, and self-justification attendant upon acts of violence, could not finish “The Goshawk.” “I now flinch from anything frightful,” he wrote, “and what I read was agonizing.”
Of all the falconry words we learn from Macdonald, the most potent one to appear in “The Goshawk” is “manning.” It means to get a bird accustomed to being around people, but there’s no escaping its connotations. Macdonald is unmanned, in her way—without a father, without a partner, cut off from what we used to call mankind—but, when White uses it, the word takes on darker tones. To man something is to control it, as one mans a ship. It is also, implicitly, to assert physical and sexual power. White knew that by contemporary standards he was unmanned; he also knew the extent of his desire to exercise control over others. He despised both aspects of himself, and spent his life fighting them. But a captive hawk that escapes will eventually become entangled in its jesses, and White, attempting to free himself, found instead that he was caught up in everything that he hated. To escape the human world, he made a wild animal captive to it; to exorcise his violence, he turned it against an innocent creature. Despite himself, White winds up treating Gos quite as his parents had treated him: with cruelty, caprice, and fatal neglect.
Like “The Once and Future King,” “The Goshawk” is many kinds of tale—a comedy, a romance, a farce—but, in the end, unmistakably, it is a tragedy. Tragedies, in the literary sense of the word, do not happen to terrible people; they happen to decent people, terribly flawed. White, on the page, is sensitive, funny, highly learned, with a demanding moral compass and a spectacular mind. Neither homicidal nor maniacal, he is more like the friend so troubled that no one can save him. “For the first time in my life, I was absolutely free,” he writes, upon moving to the cabin and acquiring Gos. And then, with the terrified bird newly tethered and locked in his barn: “I was as free as a hawk.”
Toward the end of “H Is for Hawk,” Macdonald recounts a story first recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the mid-twelfth century. Once upon a time, the story goes, there was a Welsh king who fought a terrible battle and, in the course of it, lost many close friends. Grief-stricken, he fled to the forest, where he lived “like a wild animal . . . forgetful of himself and of his kindred.” That Welsh king was Merlyn. Eventually, he emerged, but the impulse of the anguished to flee into nature would persist across the centuries. “Earth hath no sorrows,” John Muir once wrote, “that earth cannot heal.” If that is a cure, it is homeopathic; for the desolate and lonely, only wilderness and solitude.
Figuratively speaking, White never found his way out of the woods. He moved from place to place, evaded his taxes, evaded a lot of things. He wrote some twenty-odd books but is remembered today mostly for “The Once and Future King,” in which he hid himself occasionally as Arthur, more often as Merlyn, but above all as Lancelot, the ill-made knight who was for a time the best in the world at his craft yet carried within him a shame so old and deep that he could not even name it. In the end, the legend holds, Lancelot goes to live in penitence in a hermitage, while the king, mortally wounded, is set adrift on a ship—to one day rise again. White died at the age of fifty-seven, on a boat in the Aegean Sea. “I expect to make rather a good death,” he’d written two years earlier. “The essence of death is loneliness, and I have had plenty of practice at this.”
Macdonald’s story has a different ending. One day, crouching over a rabbit she has just killed, feeling like “an executioner after a thousand deaths,” she comes to see that she has been travelling with her hawk not further from grief but further from life. Scared by her own numbness and darkness, she begins to seek help: from loving relatives, attentive friends, modern psychopharmacology—all the advantages she had that White did not. Slowly, her grief starts to lift. As it does, she finds that she disagrees with Merlyn and Muir. “The wild is not a panacea for the human soul,” she writes. “Too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.” All along, she had wanted to be her hawk: fierce, solitary, inhuman. Instead, she now realizes, “I was the figure standing underneath the tree at nightfall, collar upturned against the damp, waiting patiently for the hawk to return.” Her father, she knows, will never rejoin the human world. But she can. Like a figure in a myth who followed a hawk to the land of the dead, Macdonald turns around and comes home.
There is a precedent for this. After Merlyn finds the Wart in the woods, he catches the wayward goshawk, then accompanies the boy back home and becomes his tutor. His is an odd sort of schooling, consisting mostly of indirect ethics lessons accomplished by turning the boy into various animals: a perch, an ant, a badger. The Wart regards this as a huge improvement over logic and Latin, and one evening, when he is desperately bored, he goes to Merlyn and begs for another lesson. Perhaps, he suggests, he could be turned into a hawk.
To want to be a hawk: “That is pretty ambitious,” Merlyn observes. Eventually, he will grant the request, and the goshawk that the Wart followed into the woods will try to kill him. But, for now, the magician puts his student off. “You shall be everything in the world, animal, vegetable, mineral, protista or virus, for all I care—before I have done with you,” he tells the boy. But, he continues, the time has not yet come to try to be a hawk. And so, he says, “you may as well sit down for the moment and learn to be a human being.” ♦
