The Goshawk Read online

  TERENCE HANBURY WHITE (1906–1964) was born in Bombay, India, and educated at Queen’s College, Cambridge. His childhood was unhappy—“my parents loathed each other,” he later wrote—and he grew up to become a solitary person with a deep fund of strange lore and a tremendous enthusiasm for fishing, hunting, and flying (which he took up to overcome his fear of heights). White taught for some years at the Stowe School until the success in 1936 of England Have My Bones, a book about outdoor adventure, allowed him to quit teaching and become a full-time writer. Along with The Goshawk, White was the author of twenty-six published works, including his famed sequence of Arthurian novels, The Once and Future King; the fantasy Mistress Masham’s Repose (published in The New York Review of Books Children’s Collection); a collection of essays on the ehighteenth century, The Age of Scandal; and a translation of a medieval Latin bestiary, A Book of Beasts. He died at sea on his way home from an American lecture tour and is buried in Piraeus, Greece.

  MARIE WINN’s recent book, Red-Tails in Love: Pale Male’s Story, featured a now-famous red-tailed hawk. Her column on nature and bird-watching appeared for twelve years in The Wall Street Journal, and she has written on diverse subjects for The New York Times Magazine and Smithsonian. Her forthcoming book, Central Park in the Dark, will be published in the spring of 2008.

  THE GOSHAWK

  T. H. WHITE

  Introduction by

  MARIE WINN

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  Contents

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Introduction

  The Goshawk

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  PART THREE

  POSTSCRIPT

  Copyright and More Information

  INTRODUCTION

  What an uncommon man was Terence Hanbury White, known to his few friends as Tim and to the rest of the world as T. H. A polymath and polyglot; a misanthrope who made exceptions for the very young, the very old, and the severely blighted; a nature lover inspired by his distinguished namesake of Selborne yet who blithely snagged salmon and shot geese, he was a superb writer though an indifferent speller, an unhappy man with a knack for making readers happy. He kept snakes, fox cubs, owls, frogs, and badgers in his sitting room at the Stowe School, an Eton-type boys’ school in Buckinghamshire where he taught English from 1932 to 1936. For his impressionable students, White’s Kiplingesque background provided an exotic aura: a miserable childhood in colonial Bombay, then four years at Cheltenham, a Dickensian boarding school where boys were regularly flogged by sadistic schoolmasters—White himself had a sadomasochistic streak, perhaps in consequence. His precocious literary accomplishments—two volumes of poetry came out while he was still an undergraduate at Cambridge and two novels shortly thereafter—gave him the undeniable glamour of a published author. “He had an open black Bentley and a red setter and among the boys enjoyed a reputation exciting, faintly discreditable and much envied,” a former student told Sylvia Townsend Warner, White’s biographer. A “daemonic and brilliant man,” according to his obituary in a Stowe publication.

  The red setter, Brownie, was the great love of White’s life, a romance reminiscent of the one described by his contemporary J. R. Ackerley in My Dog Tulip. T. H. White never wrote about his own beloved dog, apart from letters to friends and one touching document written for a seven-year-old godson. In the summer of 1936, however, he began to document another extra-human infatuation that possessed him briefly but entirely. This time the object of White’s passion was a bird, a fledgling goshawk. The young man intended to learn the ancient practice of falconry and a male goshawk, or tiercel, in falconer’s parlance, was the bird he chose to hunt with. The Goshawk is the book White wrote about his struggles “to train a person who was not human.” It is also a book about the bird’s efforts to train the man.

  The goshawk arrived at the Buckingham railroad station on July 31, huddled in a clothes basket covered with sacking, terrified, bedraggled, and mad as hell. “It would have eaten anybody alive,” White wrote. Three months earlier, when his well-received collection of writings about hunting, fishing, and country life, England Have My Bones, attracted several book club deals, White had the intoxicating idea of quitting his job at Stowe and making a go of it as a full-time writer. Teaching did not suit him, he had begun to discover, and the solitary, solipsistic life of a writer did. “I’m beginning to find there is something horrible about boys in the mass: like haddock,” he wrote to L. J. Potts, his former Cambridge tutor and a lifelong correspondent. White resigned his job at the end of the term and rented a primitive gamekeeper’s cottage—it only had a well and an outhouse—deep in the woods of the Stowe estate. It was half a mile from any road and seven miles from the nearest town, a perfect place for a would-be recluse, albeit a sybaritic one: using his book club money, White furnished it with pile carpets, curtains, and antique furniture. The Goshawk was the first of two masterpieces he wrote there.

  Later he described how the book came to be:

  I had two books on the training of the falconidae in one of which was a sentence that suddenly struck fire from my mind. The sentence was: “She suddenly reverted to a feral state.” A longing came to my mind that I should be able to do this myself. The word “feral” has a kind of magic potency which allied itself to two other words, “ferocious” and “free.” To revert to a feral state! I took a farm-labourer’s cottage and wrote to Germany for a goshawk.

  White is more candid in the first chapter of the book itself: “I had to write a book of some sort, for I only had a hundred pounds in the world and my keeper’s cottage cost me five shillings a week. It seemed best to write about what I was interested in.” A less romantic version than the first, but it supports Dr. Johnson’s pronouncement that the want of money “is the only motive to writing that I know of.”

  Falconry is a supremely difficult sport and White yearned for challenges. Among his other chosen pursuits in addition to a steady production of books were fly-fishing, duck hunting, fast driving, airplane piloting, calligraphy, translating medieval texts from Latin, bouts of marathon drinking, bouts of abstinence, and, briefly, psychoanalysis, the last undertaken in a misguided effort to reverse his homosexuality. It was the heartbreaking conviction of the time that the “talking cure” could transform a gay man into a happy heterosexual husband and father; White briefly craved both roles. Though the immediate goal was doomed to failure, he enjoyed the intellectual challenge of analysis; his thinking and writing were colored by insights gained during his sessions on the couch.

  Falconry, the struggle of man against wild bird, seemed a natural outlet for White’s strong aggressive instincts, the ones he utilized in his pursuit of blood sports. And for someone afflicted with deep self-loathing—a likely consequence of a childhood spent at the mercy of a weak-willed, alcoholic father and a willful, self-centered, alternately seductive and rejecting mother—here was an opportunity to ally himself with a creature even more unpleasant, uncontrolled, and aggressive than he was. By taming it he may have hoped to subdue his own wild, antisocial impulses. And yet White’s longing for ferocity and freedom had brought him to falconry in the first place. He recognized the contradictions inherent in his desire to be “free as a hawk” while keeping a wild hawk tethered to a perch, obliged to perform on demand. His ambivalence about these warring impulses is manifest throughout The Goshawk.

  He called the bird Gos, though he resorted to other names as well: Caligula, insane assassin, accursed overlord, filthy bugger, and choleric beast among them. The bird drove him to distraction. For unlike most falconry beginners who start with a bird that is relatively easy to train, a red-tailed hawk, for example, White had taken on the hardest, m
ost intransigent, most ornery of all birds of prey. Goshawks have always been highly regarded in falconry because of their superlative hunting skills. But every falconer knows they are devilishly hard to train. From the start of his adventure with Gos, White understood that he had taken on the most difficult task of his difficulty-craving life—one, indeed, that might prove too difficult.

  White compounded his difficulties by using an outdated textbook as his vade mecum, Bert’s Treatise of Hawks and Hunting. Printed in 1619, Bert’s required that the training process start with a lengthy period of “watching”—that is, holding the newly acquired hawk on outstretched hand day and night, without a moment’s relief for either man or hawk, until the bird finally falls asleep on its human perch. Only then, when trust is established, can real training begin. White’s watching stint with Gos required three uninterrupted days and nights, an ordeal he describes with breath-taking immediacy in The Goshawk. At the time he didn’t know that modern falconers had developed a streamlined training method that would have made the task much easier. But of course the story would have been less compelling. Almost certainly White’s book would have had a different ending.

  The power of The Goshawk lies in the struggle for control and self-control that is ever present in the text, with the struggle for self-mastery the more poignant one. White knew that he had to be gentle and reassuring during his training sessions with Gos, for a hawk cannot be forced to submit to his master’s will. The captive bird, through an odd form of transference, must come to believe that the falconer is his savior. “In a way it is the psychiatrist’s art,” White wrote, making the comparison between falconry and psychotherapy explicit. Yet time and again the inevitable battle of wills between man and bird made the man lose his cool. The bird, of course, was almost never cool. He was likely to express his fury by going into a “bate,” an old falconry term describing, as White puts it, “the headlong dive of rage and terror by which a leashed hawk leaps from the fist in a wild bid for freedom, and hangs upside down by his jesses in a flurry of pinions like a chicken being decapitated.” After the thousandth bate, White writes, it was agonizing to be calm and patient, to speak to the hawk kindly:

  [T]o reassure with tranquility when one yearned to beat him down—with a mad surge of blood to the temples to pound, pash,[1] dismember, wring, wrench, pluck, cast about in all directions, batter, bash, tug and stamp on, utterly to punish, and obliterate, have done with, and finally finish this dolt, cow, maniac, unutterable, unsupportable Gos.

  Bear in mind that White is having this verbal temper tantrum as he’s balancing a notebook on his right knee and jotting down what’s going on, while holding the hawk upright on his left fist with the arm bent into an L-shape, aching under the weight of the bird. The mounting fury and yet the affection that emanates from his stream of invective rings a bell to anyone who has experienced the pleasure and pain of raising a difficult but beloved two-year-old. It is an uncanny part of the writer’s skill that the diatribe he is uttering sounds like an unmistakable love song.

  But as the end of his adventure with Gos approached, something unexpected happened that made White change the plan for his book. (I will not spoil the story by telling you what it was.) And though White continued writing for a while—the book was almost finished—it was with half a heart. Finally he tucked the manuscript away somewhere and began writing another book, one in which his goshawk experiences would appear in a different form. That second book was The Sword in the Stone, T. H. White’s tale for all ages about the childhood of King Arthur—a hunting expedition with a goshawk is in the first scene. The first of a trilogy of books based on Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, it was published in 1938. The Goshawk didn’t find its way into print until 1951. In a postscript written before its belated publication, White explained why he had decided to put the book aside thirteen years earlier. But he chose not to reveal the improbable behind-the-scenes story of how it finally came to be published.

  It happened in 1949 on the island Alderney, the third largest of the Channel Islands. White had moved there three years earlier, not coincidentally because it was a tax haven and his career was prospering. As Sylvia Townsend Warner related:

  [W]hen Wren Howard of Jonathan Cape visited him in March, 1949, they immediately liked each other. During this visit Howard, finding himself incommoded by a bulky object beneath a settee cushion, abstracted it. It was the typescript of The Goshawk. He read it in bed and insisted on taking it back with him next day in spite of White’s vehement resistance.

  Shortly thereafter Howard wrote from London that Cape wanted to publish the book. “[I]t’s so good that it certainly must be printed,” he declared.

  At first White refused to allow The Goshawk to be published. In a return letter to Howard he wrote:

  My shyness about it is personal. You see, apart from not wanting to spread one’s personality naked before the public, I have become a much better falconer since then—even an authority on the matter. I know just how bad the falconry in that book is, if I recollect it. It is like asking a grown-up to sanction the publication of his adolescent diaries ...

  But White had qualified his refusal by saying, “If Bunny says that the Hawk book is really good, I will consent to publishing it. I have not read it since I wrote it, long before the war.”

  Bunny was White’s friend David Garnett, a notable critic and novelist of the time, who responded by sending a written opinion of the book to its would-be publisher:

  I think this is really Tim’s best book—an opinion which is perhaps not very flattering when analyzed. For Tim is not a lover of humanity or human beings and when he writes he usually writes partly for them, and the wish to please is a pretence. Here he lapses occasionally into awareness of other people and is writing privately. He is therefore more exact, more honest, more interesting. The battle between Tim and Gos is a masterpiece.

  White’s fear of being scorned by the falconry world was rooted in some reality. Many who practice the arcane sport today look down on The Goshawk as a period piece. I asked my only acquaintance in the falconry world what he thought of White’s book. An Ohio biologist who hunts with a red-tailed hawk, John Blakeman wrote that he hadn’t actually read it. But he added, “Since the book’s publication a great deal has been learned about how to train and hunt this species (the goshawk). I seriously doubt the falconry community will be interested.”

  White had anticipated such a response from “real” falconers. “What right had a cowardly recluse who fled from his fellow men ... to write about these fabulous creatures?” he imagined they’d say about his book. He had his defense ready: “[M]ine was not a falconer’s book at all. It would be a learner’s book only; in the last resort, a writer’s book, by one who might have tried in vain to be a falconer.”

  When Cape continued to press publication, White wrote: “I am heartbroken that you want to publish it.” Nevertheless, in the same letter he offered to help by providing pictures for the book if they were needed. After that, no one worried much about the broken heart.

  When I first read The Goshawk I pronounced it “gosh hawk,” having never heard the word spoken out loud. Many years later I became a bird-watcher, and one winter a huge Accipiter gentilis paid a rare visit to Central Park. That bird was a female, and therefore it was considerably bigger than T. H. White’s antagonist. Female hawks and falcons are almost always substantially bigger than males. Listening to my fellow bird-watchers that day I learned that the first syllable of the word rhymes with “Las” as in Las Vegas, not with “wash.” By calling his hawk Gos, White had given his readers a clue to pronunciation I hadn’t caught.

  My previous literary goshawk was the one in The Sword in the Stone, once a cult book for a subset of adolescents still clinging to childhood but finding Winnie-the-Pooh a bit precious. So, it appears, did T. H. White. He wrote to L. J. Potts just before The Sword in the Stone was published, “What I fear is that it has feeble traces of A. A. Milne.” The traces are feeble indeed, as
White knew well—his writing has little of the sentimentality or nostalgia of Milne’s Pooh books. “I think it’s one of my better books,” he continued, adding bitterly: “so probably nobody else will.” White was right on the first count and wrong on the second. The book was taken on by the American Book-of-the-Month Club, ensuring a sale of 150,000 copies. Even though he immediately bought a Jaguar (the sports car, not the beast), his chances at continuing life as a starving artist were now effectively ruined.

  The Sword in the Stone was subsequently made into a full-length Walt Disney cartoon and finally, in 1958, it was incorporated into The Once and Future King. Composed of all White’s previously published Arthurian tales which were especially re-edited for this edition (to the original book’s considerable disadvantage, in the case of The Sword in the Stone), the compendium became a best seller and a few years later was bought by Lerner and Lowe as the basis of their hugely successful Broadway musical Camelot. Years after White’s death the book’s influence continued in a way that would have staggered its author. J. K. Rowling revealed to an interviewer that the boy named Wart, whose education as the future King Arthur is described in The Sword in the Stone, was Harry Potter’s “spiritual ancestor.” Indeed, the parallels between White’s fantasy/adventure/school story and the Harry Potter opus are many.

  In spite of T. H. White’s once and future successes, his warning in an early chapter of The Goshawk proved prescient. There he had idly noted, perhaps to forestall its eventuality, “the folly of thinking that anybody would want to buy a book about mere birds.” In the end it was far more than a bird story, including among its gifts to readers a history and description of medieval hawk management, an incisive dissertation on Shakespeare’s use of falconry (especially in The Taming of the Shrew) and much natural history observation that goes beyond the ornithological (my favorite was about maggots). Nevertheless, in 1951 White’s book may have appeared to be a mere bird book to prospective buyers. It enjoyed only modest sales and then went out of print.