H Is For Hawk

MacDonald recalls the short, emotional phone call with her mother in which she learned about her father’s heart attack and death. After the shock of the phone call, MacDonald meets an academic friend for dinner. During dinner, she doesn’t eat, and upon learning of her loss, the concerned waiter brings her a complimentary dessert. The gesture strikes the grieving MacDonald as absurd, and she feels a sudden need to drive to her family home in Hampshire.

She finds it difficult to describe the isolating feeling of grief, even after years have passed. She finds little life in the things he left behind, but instead in memories she has of going with him on photographic expeditions, as when he decided to photograph every bridge on the Thames or explored the outlying wilderness. Dealing with the funeral and with her father’s final effects, MacDonald feels more alienated than ever by others, to the degree that “a kind of madness drifted in” (16). During this period, signals from the world read differently, and her perspective of time changes. She reads many books on grieving, but none of them make sense to her. After weeks, her grief continues, and her mind begins to fixate on hawks. She remembers a time when she worked at a bird-of-prey rehabilitation center in western England and looked right into the eye of a goshawk. The impression was of confidence and power. She replays the moment in her mind during her time of prolonged grief.

MacDonald’s interest in birds of prey began at a young age. When she was twelve, she was excited by witnessing her first demonstration of goshawk training but was vaguely aware that the gender and class of the men who practiced the training differed from her own. Seeing the goshawk kill brought her into her first close proximity to death, and seeing the men struggle to bring their hawks to hand echoed the impressions she had gotten from books that goshawk training was a patient business, full of small frustrations.

MacDonald has read prodigiously about hawks, from girlhood into adulthood. Such reading informs her that there is a long-standing penchant among the aristocracy for falcons over hawks. Falcons are graceful animals requiring a great deal of land in which to hunt. By contrast, hawks are heavy and brutal, killing from close range. They are also famously difficult to train. Yet during her prolonged grieving period, her mind attached itself to a small goshawk she found via the internet, a fledgling cared for by a trainer in Ireland. She decides that she must become its trainer and arranges to meet the trainer in Scotland. Before she goes, she visits one of her oldest friends, Stuart, an expert advisor on the subject of goshawks. On a hot July day, Stuart advises her to train a falcon instead, but she insists that she wants to train a goshawk.

Among the most influential and frustrating books in MacDonald’s collection is The Goshawk. It is a memoir by T.H. White, an author best known for popular Arthurian fantasy. The book famously depicts White’s training of a goshawk as an existential war of wills between trainer and hawk and an exhausting and torturous exercise in willpower. It is also a book known among experts in the field as entirely wrong on the subject of hawk training. MacDonald first read it when she was eight and found its inexpert knowledge and literary mode off-putting. She was much more accustomed to books that corresponded to established fields of study, rather than works that relied on flawed anecdotal evidence. Among her scholarly books, The Goshawk stands out as an oddity.

T.H. White’s literary legacy is unusual. As a student of literature, MacDonald found that White’s name rarely came up in discussion. Nevertheless, he is the author of the definitive modern retelling of Arthurian legend, one that incorporates subtext about modernism, nationalism, and war; it was to White’s Camelot that modern writers were referring, for instance, when defining John F. Kennedy’s brief and hopeful tenure in the White House. Beyond its technical limitations, many think of The Goshawk as a literary masterpiece. As a falconer and as a literary writer, MacDonald struggles to reconcile her feelings about the book. She concedes that it is a strong depiction of metaphysical struggle while also understanding that White’s training methods caused intense and unnecessary trauma for the hawk. She thinks of his book often as she undertakes her own efforts.

MacDonald recreates T.H. White’s imaginative and professional life during the spring of 1936, the year in which he took the notes for The Goshawk. His notebook from that period not only describes his training regimen, but also his dreams and disappointments. Many of these personal entries underscore the fact that he was a gay man struggling with his identity. He works as a well-respected schoolmaster at the Stowe school, though it is an open secret that he authors racy novels under a pseudonym. White’s mother and father fought over him, with his mother lavishing attention on him and his father prone to fits of rage. White lived in fear of failure, and so challenged himself with gentlemanly sports. He writes in his journal that keeping a hawk to hand was akin to keeping it “powerless to harm me” (37).

In later journals, the never-married White wrote more openly about his same-sex attraction and so his friends chose a sensitive biographer to go through the material and edit out that element of his personality. Still, MacDonald finds evidence of his same-sex attraction encoded in his published writings. She finds him displacing his unwanted desires onto a platonic love for the English countryside and distracting his peers from any notion that he might not fit in by taking “as great a part as possible in what is going on” (39). He worried about the formal elements of gentlemanly sport, such as proper attire. MacDonald cites an extensive literature of other gay writers in England who wrote about hunting and nature, and a corresponding love of independence, as a way of displacing their sexual longing. White also seems to find human cruelty best expressed by personified depictions of animals, such as the hunting hawk, and so compared that cruelty with the taming influence of the hunter or trainer of animals. MacDonald notes that White’s concern that his own hawk, named Gos, would return to a feral state mirrors his own fear of returning to what he considered the “feral” state of same-sex attraction.

MacDonald travels to Scotland with a friend, where she meets the breeder who will sell her a goshawk. Enervated by the drive and in the strange landscape of the Scottish quays, MacDonald silently interrogates her surroundings. It is a land, like the Brecklands, of natural beauty and of human encroachment. Though she is an experienced falconer, MacDonald wonders whether her desire to own a hawk derives from processing her grief. She recalls falconry vocabulary and equipment knowledge from her training, attributing it to a long practice of establishing social standing among falconers, though when she was young, terms such as creance and haggards took on a magical quality. She remembers crafting falcon hoods and leashes as a child, and the fact that her father would tease her by misnaming them as hats and “bits of string” (50). She also recalls a paper by the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott about a young boy who fixated on tethering things out of anxiety that they would abandon him. Finally, she remembers that she had a twin brother who died soon after birth.

In meeting the breeder, MacDonald recalls that hawk breeding is difficult work, defined by the fact that the female hawk is as likely to kill her mate as breed with him. At one time, there was no need for hawk breeding, as they ran rampant across the countryside. Since they nearly went extinct, however, breeding in captivity is now a necessity, and it is common to be able to watch hatchling nests via internet live-cam. As with all things hawk-related, it is hard to personify the activities of the hawk in this context; the hawk is an animal with a mercurial aspect.

The breeder arrives with two cardboard boxes. The other hawk is smaller and meant for another trainer, who will be meeting him later. Meadows is amazed and intimidated by the larger hawk meant for her. In a meek voice, she asks whether or not she could have the smaller hawk instead. After some thought, the breeder allows it.

Goshawks are notoriously difficult to train, and more than once MacDonald questions herself. The key to training goshawks, she believes, is “kindness and love” (57). It is natural that goshawks are confused and frightened by the trappings of the human world; showing them the rewards of their training and gaining the goshawk’s trust is the best way forward. Driving home and thinking about the time she’d spent with her father and the time she’d soon spend with the hawk, her mind naturally makes the transference. She frets about the hawk in her cardboard box during the seven-hour drive and thinks of a suitcase at an art exhibit with a mirrored interior which gave the impression of being a box of stars.

She contrasts her approach to training with White’s. His goshawk traveled much further in a wicker basket to reach him. This echoes the confinements of White’s own life. He was born in India and traveled with his quarreling parents back to England when he was five. To him, like the hawk, his emergence into a new country was baffling. His schooling was punishing and featured regular beatings. He left behind a world of play and imagination and entered a world of rigid conformity. When, as a young adult, he gets a house in the country, his first thought is to train a hawk in his barn.

That night, MacDonald returns home, exhausted, and dreams that her father is a little boy.

The next morning, MacDonald wakes to the sound of chaffinches outside her window. She muses that the chaffinches near her home sound different from the finches in Surrey, where she grew up, and cites the work of a man named Thorpe who studied chaffinch dialects. She is excited to begin her hawk’s training.

MacDonald approaches the new, hooded hawk and predictably, the hawk bates, a term for the way in which a leashed hawk will panic in an attempt to be free. Carefully, she weighs the hawk on a scale, carefully acting in sympathy with its unfamiliarity and fear. It is a little overweight; hawks which are either over-or underweight are more difficult to train. She removes the hood, and the hawk continually bates for several minutes in an attempt to get away from her unfamiliar surroundings. Finally still, the hawk stares at MacDonald with the intensity of mortal terror. MacDonald’s duty during this period and throughout the training is to become functionally invisible to the hawk, except as a source of food and positive reinforcement. Hawks are not affectionate pets, but solitary creatures, in need of silence and the illusion that they’re alone. This requires a very patient and unusual state of mind on the part of the trainer, who must remain very still and hold out a reward of food. As a reader and introvert, Helen MacDonald feels as if she has had practice in disappearing all her life.

She has a depth of experience training birds of prey in this manner. In watching her new hawk, she had already stocked her freezer with hawk food and instructed her friends that she would be unavailable. Her singular goal is to get the hawk to eat from her glove by keeping her inside, in darkened conditions, and by remaining a silent presence with her. During this critical training, Meadows feels she has a purpose for the first time since her father died. She recalls her photojournalist father dealing with highly stressful jobs by focusing his entire attention through the lens. This separation allowed him to have another, braver self that he expressed entirely in his work while also allowing him to process the traumatic things he’d seen.

At some point in the first day of training, MacDonald sees the hawk relax and then jump in surprise at the sight of her. She thrills at this evidence that it has forgotten about her presence, if only briefly, and considers it progress.

MacDonald notes that White had more rapid success at first in his training regimen than she, but only because he had received a partially tame hawk in the first place. White undid the hawk's training by overfeeding the hawk. The more White’s hawk was overfed, the less likely it was to behave, and so White would attempt to feed it again. In this way, White made the training of his hawk a punishing battle of wills. MacDonald submits that White was reenacting his own childhood, with the hawk standing in for himself as a child.

His reading on the subject was enthusiastic but limited. He shared with MacDonald a love for a 1619 book on the subject written by Edmund Bert. Bert’s voice is cantankerous but inviting, his opinions particular. He compares training a hawk to the wooing of a mistress. His methods were outdated by 300 years, yet White modeled his training after Bert rather than a more contemporary author, treating his training as a rite of passage rather than a practical and thoughtful relationship between man and animal. Through the hawk, White was hoping to “tame” his same-sex attraction. As chronicled in his book, he drove himself to madness in the process, putting himself and the hawk through many sleepless nights.

MacDonald marvels at the beauty and alien quality of her hawk. Her hunting instinct is innate and perfectly suited to her form and mentality. Even the suggestion of a squeaking rabbit causes her to dig her talons into MacDonald’s glove. After two days, the hawk stays on MacDonald’s hand, and the challenge now is to keep her hand elevated (which is sore and tiring work) and to do nothing to disturb the animal. They are bonding as days and nights pass by. She has time to think and observe the enclosure of her home, as well as the hawk’s shifting attitudes.

Over time, she feels more hawk-like, “free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life” (85). She responds to minute clues given by the hawk, and then begins to predict them. When her friend Christina stops by to bring her coffee, she finds it difficult to communicate. Still, part of training the hawk is introducing it to a new stimulus, and so the two friends sit quietly near the hawk, getting it accustomed to other people. Soon, the hawk eats from her hand, a small triumph. Their feeding regimen becomes an important and predictable part of their relationship.

It is a superstition among falconers that if one names a hawk something innocuous, it will take on a ferocious personality, whereas if one names a hawk something ferocious, it will be docile. MacDonald decides to name her hawk Mabel, “from amabilis, meaning loveable” (89).