White - The goshawk

TERENCE HANBURY WHITE (19061964) was born in Bombay, India, and educated at Queens College, Cambridge. His childhood was unhappymy parents loathed each other, he later wroteand 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 Mashams Repose (published in The New York Review of Books Childrens 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 WINNs recent book, Red-Tails in Love: Pale Males 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

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, Whites 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 schoolmastersWhite himself had a sadomasochistic streak, perhaps in consequence. His precocious literary accomplishmentstwo volumes of poetry came out while he was still an undergraduate at Cambridge and two novels shortly thereaftergave 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, Whites biographer. A daemonic and brilliant man, according to his obituary in a Stowe publication.

The red setter, Brownie, was the great love of Whites 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 Whites 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 falconers 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 birds 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. Im 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 gamekeepers cottageit only had a well and an outhousedeep 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-labourers 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 keepers 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. Johnsons 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 Whites strong aggressive instincts, the ones he utilized in his pursuit of blood sports. And for someone afflicted with deep self-loathinga likely consequence of a childhood spent at the mercy of a weak-willed, alcoholic father and a willful, self-centered, alternately seductive and rejecting motherhere 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 Whites 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