The Goshawk, T. H. White (365 Books, Day 240)

[rushthatspeaks]

In 1937 or so, when Terence Hanbury White had published a book about hunting and fishing and general outdoorsiness that had gotten him some acclaim and some income, he quit his job as a schoolmaster at Stowe, rented a gamekeeper's cottage seven miles from the nearest main road, and ordered a goshawk from Germany.

He was in his early thirties and he hated everybody. Perhaps hatred is too strong a word. He despaired of everybody, especially in aggregate, except that that is also how he loved human beings the most, in groups making things, building things, working. He definitely despaired of himself, except when he was engaged in some great enterprise, doing something he considered both difficult and worthwhile. To some extent the more difficult the more worthwhile; he was exactly the sort of person who does things merely because they are nearly impossible, and who knows on some level that he is making things infinitely more difficult for himself, and can't and won't stop.

Falconry was out of fashion. He had never met a falconer. He had corresponded with one or two, who were mostly in far and inaccessible regions such as Bavaria or the Isle of Wight, and whose letters would come to him six months late, mis-spelt, covered in birdshit and usually in a language he didn't speak. He had one and a half books on falconry, and the one was Bert's Treatise on Hawks and Hawking, printed in 1619. And the goshawk is renowned as the most difficult of hawks, the moody one, the crazy one, the one you can never, ever actually be sure of. (I told you that he liked to make his enterprises nearly impossible.)

He only knew one method of training a goshawk, the one from that 1619 manual. You cannot use most methods on a hawk. They will die rather than give in to a human. So an austringer (this is the correct word for a person flying a goshawk, which is not after all a falcon) must pit human will against the bird's in a way such that the bird does not know it is happening. The way to do this, in 1619, is by 'watching' it, which is to say preventing it from sleeping for three days and nights together, so that it becomes so exhausted it is willing to sleep on a human fist, and then after that will consider that fist a place of safety. Of course the human cannot sleep at all either, and must have the bird on an arm all that time, the arm at a right angle, the leather glove on the hand...

... and the notebook on the other knee, for White had decided to get his living by hawking: not only by keeping himself and the bird, eventually, on what he caught, but by writing a book about the entire process, and selling it, and thereby paying for things like rent and eventually other hawks. He conceived it as a way of removing himself from the entirety of human existence, because he would be with his birds as much as one has to, which is to say, ninety percent of the time, outdoors in all weathers; the book is his concession to the practicalities, which will tell you something.

It is such a terrible idea all around that I cannot help but love him for it.

And he did write the book with the hawk on his other hand, and it is a good one. There is White, with his desperate self-hatred and his aggravation at us (whoever we are), and his prejudices that come from being an English gentleman born in 1906, and his total inability to deal with, well, anything, and his indomitable and unbreakable will and determination: and there is the mad free silence of the goshawk. This is one of the few books I have seen that talk about patience as a practice, as something to be voluntarily learned, because the goshawk can interpret even an upset expression on your face. In the nights without sleep and the fourteen-hour days of the bird flying directly at him and the endless whistling to try to get it to learn its call, you can see him wrestle even his anger and brokenness into his love and his love into that infinite unyielding patience. It is a thing to watch. He spends himself and spends himself and spends himself, and the hawk comes to his hand one day, and he smashes a glass of champagne in the fire. I have never seen anyone happier, in some of this book, or less, in other parts.

Because falconry will not in the end leave you heart-whole. He did learn the art (and that there have been advances, since 1619, and one no longer has to go without that much sleep), but this was not the book with which he made his fortune (again). The next year he would write The Sword in the Stone, with its scenes in the mews-- those are all birds he knew, birds he owned and loved and worked with-- and make himself immortal. He would publish The Goshawk reluctantly, in the 1950s, reluctantly because it said too much about him. It has drifted in and out of print. The New York Review of Books has brought it out most recently, which is how I have it.

And it is bitter, and sometimes surprisingly funny, and very beautiful, and well worth reading.

Comments

[potted_music]

This review is beautiful <3

[rushthatspeaks]

Thank you!

[coughingbear]

This is a gorgeous review of a book that I love, and that I've never seen discussed before. Thank you.

[rushthatspeaks]

Thank you! Also, your icon is made entirely of awesome.

[thistleingrey]

I hadn't quite realized before that White was the age of my father's parents (born neatly between the years they were born). This does not explain anything, but it interests me re: vantage and types of assumptions.

Also, re: his experience as you describe his description: wow.

[rushthatspeaks]

It was a very wow sort of book. I have never encountered anything else quite like it.

[t-windling.livejournal.com]

This is one of the loveliest articles about T.H. White that I have yet read. Thank you.

-- Terri Windling

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I am glad to have been able to write about him, because I've loved his work for many years.

[skygiants]

The Once and Future King is one of the books that formed me, so I can already tell this is going to be hard to read in the way the books are that say too much about the authors that formed you, but I think I'm going to have to read it regardless. Thank you!

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

White was not an easy person. The Once and Future King was formative for me, too. If you can find it, you can kind of ease into his nonfictional personality by reading Sylvia Townsend Warner's biography of him, which has a lot of quotes from his letters-- that's how I did it, so this book wasn't as hard. But the Warner is very hard to find.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

T. H. White's bit in one of the Once and Future King novels about learning being the only cure for sadness always suggested to me that he was very unhappy a lot of the time.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

“’The best thing for being sad,’ replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, ‘is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then–to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting."

I wanted the litany of things to learn, for the sheer joy of rehearsing it, but here at least is the exordium.

Nine

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

He was. He was born out of his time and he knew it, though he'd have done better sixty years later then being born in the sixteenth century and he couldn't know that. I think he made good with what he had, but he was miserable most of his life.

[marith.livejournal.com]

No wonder the scenes in the mews felt so real. Wow.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Even all the names of birds in that are birds he had-- Cully was his first sparrowhawk.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Thank you, Rush, This is beautiful.

Nine

[sovay]

And it is bitter, and sometimes surprisingly funny, and very beautiful, and well worth reading.

That's a lovely review.

[genarti]

This sounds beautifully human, and fascinating.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Ah, this is lovely. Also, the Lit & Phil has the book. *zooms*

[negothick.livejournal.com]

It's far better than, oh at a guess maybe 99% of the academic criticism ever published on T.H. White (not counting Warner's great biography as academic). And that's still not saying much.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

So, I am not the only person in the world who read this book!

I bought it in London, having come across it in a used bookshop. I'd never heard of it before, but the scene with the hawks was one of my favorites from The Once and Future King. I can still remember how thrilled I was when, years later, I read The Duchess of Malfi and realized that the mad Colonel Cully's dialogue was mostly quotes from the mad brother Ferdinand in the play.

I remember (perhaps my edition had an epilogue?) that White later leaned that his method was needlessly stressful for bird and man, and there was a much easier way that everyone but him knew about. I suspected that White would not have tried the entire venture had he known of the easy method, though.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I first heard this existed when I read Sylvia Townsend Warner's biography of White, but I put it down as mythical because it was totally unfindable in any way I could think of. You have awesome used bookstore luck!

Cully was White's first sparrowhawk, in real life, I loved that.

The epilogue is in all the editions because of the twenty years he left the typescript sitting around his house-- the preface of this edition says his publisher, on a visit, sat on it by mistake and carried it off against White's protests-- so he wrote the epilogue to say 'I actually know something about falconry now'. I agree, if he'd known there was an easier way he'd never have started.

[aliseadae]

Hi! I came across your LJ and you seemed neat and I have friended you. I wanted to leave a note to say hello.

[withneedle.livejournal.com]

Delurking to say that I was reminded of this review by one of Helen Macdonald's _H is for Hawk_, which I have not read but have put on my list, and which sounds like it might interest you as well:

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1476820.ece

(White was not formative for me, but I came to him through Sylvia Townsend Warner, who was.)