The Goshawk

by T.H. White, Marie Winn (Introduction)

What is it that binds human beings to other animals? T.H. White, the author of The Once and Future King and Mistress Masham's Repose, was a young writer who found himself rifling through old handbooks of falconry. A particular sentence — "the bird reverted to a feral state" — seized his imagination, and, White later wrote, "A longing came to my mind that I should be able to do this myself. The word 'feral' has a kind of magical potency which allied itself to two other words, 'ferocious' and 'free.'" Immediately, White wrote to Germany to acquire a young goshawk. Gos, as White named the bird, was ferocious and Gos was free, and White had no idea how to break him in beyond the ancient (and, though he did not know it, long superseded) practice of depriving him of sleep, which meant that he, White, also went without rest. Slowly man and bird entered a state of delirium and intoxication, of attraction and repulsion that looks very much like love. White kept a daybook describing his volatile relationship with Gos — at once a tale of obsession, a comedy of errors, and a hymn to the hawk. It was this that became The Goshawk, one of modern literature's most memorable and surprising encounters with the wilderness — as it exists both within us and without.

Genres: Nonfiction, Nature, Memoir, Animals, Birds, Classics, Biography

215 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1951

About the author

Born in Bombay to English parents, Terence Hanbury White was educated at Cambridge and taught for some time at Stowe before deciding to write full-time. White moved to Ireland in 1939 as a conscientious objector to WWII, and lived out his years there. White is best known for his sequence of Arthurian novels, The Once and Future King, first published together in 1958.

Reviews

[Karen Witzler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Went there after reading H is for Hawk, stayed for the pure pleasure of T. H. White's writing, which totally outweighed Helen Macdonald's retelling of the entire story within her recent book.

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

In my reading life, I can go from being a shad fisherman one week ( The Founding Fish) to being a falconer the next. Without being drowned or clawed. To say nothing of my fiction choices, with all the myriad chambers of the human heart exposed. Once again without being drowned or clawed.

One obstacle to learning about a new topic, though not insurmountable, is the beautiful strangeness of language. I speak here not of a country's or people's verbs, nouns and adjectives, but rather of the peculiar argot of a sport, hobby, or occupation. After reading about shad, for example, I wonder at my reaction the next time I meet someone named 'Milt'. Here, in this foray into falconry, I learned of the austringer, of imping, of jesses and creances; I stepped carefully around mutes and flinched at every bate. At times, my relative ignorance caused me to laugh:

In the afternoons there was shooting to be done, and on the Friday I had despaired of a pigeon and shot him a Frenchman -- out of season.

As if shooting a Frenchman is ever out of season.

This is T.H. White's story of his attempt to train a goshawk, to 'man' him. It is not a 'How To' instructional so much as a 'How Not To'. Learn as you go, once and future austringer. Falconry for Dummies. White even says, "It was like being handcuffed to a moron in a chain gang." The moron was not the bird.

This is White's journal of his very amateurish beginning in falconry. Rather transparently, he says that he is writing this because, well, he's a writer and he could use the cash. So, at times this has a forced quality, a 'this is what I did on Tuesday' feel.

Still, the writer exposes the savagery of the hawk, not just the soaring beauty. The exceptional nyrb cover shows a portion of this painting, which does the same:



And too, he exposes the man at the other end of the creance:

Blood-lust is a word which has got shop-soiled. They have rubbed the nap off it. But split it into its parts, and think of Lust. Real blood-lust is like that.

Perhaps. As I said at the beginning, I'm just a vicarious reader, with quieter hobbies.

But there is a red-tailed hawk which spends half the year soaring in the sky where I live. Some time this summer, as I'm staking gladioli or dead-heading coleus, I might see him again, black against the red-stained evening. I know he will have seen me before I see him. I'll stand, whatever cold thing in a glass in my right hand. And very slowly, remembering this, I'll lift my left arm, L-shaped, ninety-degrees. I'll whistle a tune, maybe a hymn. Maybe Cassandra Wilson singing 'You Don't Know What Love Is."

[amapola · Rating 5 out of 5]

Diario di un fallimento

“Uomo demoniaco e brillantissimo” diceva il necrologio di Terence Hanbury White. Erudito e letterato finissimo, calligrafo, artigiano squisito e naturalista affascinato dal ferino; personaggio scontroso, ritiratosi in solitudine in uno sperduto cottage nella campagna inglese, nel 1937 restò avvinto da un trattato secentesco di falconeria e ordinò dalla Germania un astore, il più coriaceo fra i rapaci, per dedicarsi, ignaro, al suo addestramento.

Quando lo vidi per la prima volta, era una cosa rotonda che assomigliava a un cestino per i panni sporchi coperto da una tela da sacco ... Il cestino pulsava come un grosso cuore che battesse all’impazzata. Ne uscivano agghiaccianti grida di protesta, isteriche, terrorizzate, ma furibonde e perentorie. Avrebbe mangiato vivo chiunque.

Il libro è la cronaca di quell’impresa temeraria: non un manuale, ma il racconto di un’esperienza profonda e lacerante, il tentativo di sottomettere all'uomo un assassino dai folli occhi di un forsennato arciduca bavarese.

Oh, lo strazio della pazienza, il continuo rimuginare, gli sforzi compiuti nel senso di una sovrumana benevolenza! Al millesimo salto della giornata, col braccio piegato a L, irrigidito e dolorante fino all'osso sotto il peso dell'uccello, limitarsi a dargli dei colpetti col guanto per farlo tornare al pugno, parlargli cortesemente ricorrendo al miagolio che nei miei tentativi di conversazione era la cosa che sembrava gradire di più, sorridere allo spazio ignorando la sua presenza, rassicurarlo col calma... quando bruciavo dalla voglia di schiacciarlo, e, mentre il sangue mi saliva furiosamente alla testa, di pestarlo, fracassarlo, smembrarlo, torcerlo, slogarlo, spennarlo, disperderlo ai quattro venti, picchiarlo, sbatterlo, trascinarlo e schiacciarlo sotto i piedi, punirlo senza pietà, e cancellarlo, farla finita con quell'odioso, imbecille, demente, indomabile, inqualificabile, insopportabile Gos.

Tra White (lo schiavo) e Gos (il suo tiranno) intercorre un vero “rapporto d’amore”. Perché il primo falco tocca sempre il falconiere nel profondo, e la sua perdita gli causa “uno smottamento del cuore” che lascia senza respiro.
Un diario di sei settimane di addestramento, in cui lo scrittore-addestratore lotta, sbaglia, fallisce, si tormenta, e alla fine rimane chiuso fuori dal mondo del rapace.

Legarsi a un falco significa non potersi permettere sciatterie e smancerie. Nessun falco può essere un animale da compagnia; il sentimentalismo è escluso. In un certo senso, è l’arte dello psichiatra. Si mette in giuoco la propria mente con un’altra mente con il massimo dell’impegno e della tensione intellettuale. Non c’è nessun desiderio di transfert affettivi, nessuna richiesta di disonorevoli atti d’omaggio o di riconoscenza. E’ un tonico per la meno schietta ferinità del cuore umano.
Colui che ha creato l’Agnello ha creato anche te? Ebbene, la risposta è sì.

Struggente, emozionante, coinvolgente. Forse cinque stelle sono troppe, ma Gos mi è entrato nel cuore. E il professor White pure.
Lo so, sarei un pessimo falconiere.

http://youtu.be/ldcp0LhaDAo

[Malacorda · Rating 4 out of 5]

La falconeria mi ha sempre affascinato. Qualche anno fa mi sono incantata ad osservare da vicino le manovre di un gruppo di falconieri con i loro volatili, alla festa di Campora, e mi è balenata in mente l'idea di iscrivermi anche io ad una scuola di falconeria. Avendo per marito un cacciatore impenitente che in parte si duole per il mio completo disinteresse verso l'attività venatoria, quando mi sono illuminata alla vista dei rapaci, poco c'è mancato che me ne procurasse uno - non certo per farmi un regalo ma piuttosto sperando in un futuro supporto e diversivo nella caccia alla lepre.

Questo è dunque il diario dell'esperienza di addestramento di un astore, e chissà se io con un poianone o un gallinaccio qualsiasi avrei saputo fare altrettanto. Non lo credo, né per quanto riguarda il diario, né a riguardo dell'addestramento.

Diario che è stato dichiaratamente scritto per poter essere pubblicato e consentire così all'autore di raggranellare qualche soldo, quel tanto che gli potesse consentire di mantenersi nella sua libertà e nella sua selvaticità nella campagna inglese, senza un vincolo o un padrone, libero di dedicare tutto il suo tempo e il suo impegno alla caccia e alla falconeria: dunque un libro dove, un po' come ne "La Storia infinita" di Ende, contenuto e contenitore si incrociano e si inseguono in un loop senza inizio e senza fine. A volergli attribuire un qualche significato aggiuntivo, lo si potrebbe affiancare a Thoreau, oppure anche a tanti altri libri pubblicati in questi ultimi anni in cui si raccontano le esperienze di chi si vuole distaccare, in tutto in parte, dalla civiltà moderna e caotica, per riscoprire un diverso spirito nel contatto con la natura e con i ritmi quotidiani. In questo, si può dire che White sia stato uno dei precursori, avendo egli raccontato la sua esperienza nel primo dopoguerra.

E' un diario, ma di quando in quando si porta sul racconto in terza persona, per meglio sottolineare l'intento ironico o polemico, a seconda del momento. White è ironico in maniera pungente (nei confronti di se stesso, degli altri uomini, del falco, della natura, della storia, della guerra), e impeccabile come etologo. C'è tutto il sentimento del rapporto uomo-animale domestico: ognuno leggendo ritroverà qualcosa del rapporto con il proprio cane o gatto. Spassosissima la sfilza di appellativi ed epiteti con cui l'autore si rivolge al suo astore, pensavo di essere l'unica ad appioppare al proprio animale nomi e soprannomi a tale ritmo, e invece. Poi c'è anche tutta l'emozione e il mistero del rapporto con l'animale selvatico, l'intraducibile "call of the wild", che mi ha fatto ripensare al libro di Rong, Il totem del lupo, dove il protagonista si cimenta nell'addestramento di un lupetto per giungere alla conoscenza dell'animo profondo della prateria mongola. E in effetti anche l'astore si presta bene come simbolo di un mondo "sommerso" o scomparso, come totem delle teutoniche foreste e montagne, sia per l'immagine che per il suo carattere.

Sono in parte d'accordo con tutti coloro che hanno scritto che si tratta di una storia d'amore. Tra un uomo e un pennuto, ok, ma sempre sentimento è - per quanto l'autore si affanni a ribadire che nella falconeria il sentimento non conta, per lui è solo psicologia, ma dal suo stesso racconto emerge tutt'altro. Come in tutte le storie d'amore ci sono i momenti entusiasmanti e i momenti burrascosi. E in questo libro i sentimenti emergono bene, bisogna riconoscerlo: a volte contrastanti, magari non per tutti comprensibili e/o condivisibili, ma sentimenti veri e sinceri. E' un racconto tutto fatto di eventi minimi per non dire insignificanti, eppure riesce ad essere coinvolgente. I passaggi bucolicamente poetici si alternano a riflessioni filosofiche un po' spicciole e volte anche un po' noiosette. All'inizio ero letteralmente entusiasta, poi, procedendo con la lettura, l'euforia è andata un po' scemando. Non che le considerazioni sulla guerra e sull'umanità intera non siano interessanti, arrivo benissimo a comprendere e in parte anche a condividerne i punti di vista fortemente misantropici; ma con tutta la faccenda dell'astore, volendo essere un po' distaccati e obiettivi, c'entrano come i cavoli a merenda, e se collocate in altra sede tutte queste riflessioni potevano avere ben altro rilievo e approfondimento. D'altro canto, ora mi chiedo, senza qualche considerazione e condimento un po' fuori dal seminato, non sarebbe diventato allora un resoconto anche più noioso? Gli sbalzi di umore così come le divagazioni di ogni tipo sono perfettamente riconducibili alla categoria cui appartiene l'opera: un diario in tutto e per tutto, appunto.

Dunque, chi cerca la corposità e l'intreccio di un romanzo, dovrebbe rivolgersi altrove. Chi invece vuole gustarsi una lettura lieve, piacevole e rinfrescante, si deve accomodare perché è arrivato nel posto giusto. Farebbero meglio ad astenersi gli animalisti ipersensibili, gli iscritti a LAV, Enpa and so on: ne ricaverebbero solo una ulteriore irritazione rispetto a tutte quelle cose già grandemente irritanti che possono vedere ogni giorno.

Finale un po' forzato, l'autore sembra non sapere esattamente come chiudere il discorso. Sarà che di storie di cacciagione ne ho già sentite talmente tante da averne sopra la cima dei capelli… finisco per togliergli una mezza stellina.

[Lizzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those marvelous books that is so small, yet written in a way so that each sentence carries the work of ten. Somehow, it tears your heart out with just a word. Just right out.

Because, this book is as much about what lies beneath T.H. White's words as what his words say. His words are telling us about a period when he trained a goshawk. (See that video for an incredibly gorgeous view of the creatures.) The rest of the story is in the underbelly, in what he is confessing about his point of view, of his little patch of the world. This is a book about war and pacifism, but told in a didactic code about falconry.*

*(It is not falconry. A goshawk is not technically a falcon, due to wingspan, and the term for the hawk's keeper is "austringer." Do you see what I mean about didactic, anyway?)

So this is 1937. White feels what the world is about to do, what it already is doing, and he can't really cope. The idea of violence hurts him deeply; he wants justice and peace, but admits more to cowardice: "I did not disapprove of war, but feared it much." He wants, most, to live in his cloistered cottage, to talk to hardly anyone, and — quite desperately, I believe — to belong to another time.

He isn't living a life the way his contemporaries are living life. He'll sit this one out. He's learned life from books, so far, and therefore why not buy a goshawk, captured in the wild — in Germany! — and train him per the methods of three textbooks: a volume of The Sportsman's Library, one of The Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes, and the truly incredible Bert's Treatise of Hawks and Hawking, published 1619. That is his only help and perspective. He is, as he says, an amateur "four hundred years too late for guidance."

That last draws us directly into what White is really saying: he reminds us, often, that the last time falconry (and its relatives) was truly relevant was in the time of Shakespeare. During his long watches, training his hawk, named Gos, he recites him Shakespeare's verse. Even as "I was stroking a murderer, a savage," the bigger world around him is full of mounting violence, and of politics that pursue the kill; he concludes, "we still lived in the Middle Ages." So why not be there together.

A philosophical line is drawn directly between the training of the hawk and the practicing of pacifism. The training, primarily, consists of exerting an endless patience as you hold the hawk by its straps and wait until it no longer "bates" away, attempting to fly off your fist. This takes days. Sleepless days. And after it's happened, and the bird sits calmly upon you, you can expect to backslide again soon; a hawk is never tamed. The bird shows you hate, and you must show it kindness, or fail. "Nobody could be a master of hawks without benevolence." It's something between a Christian's cheek-turning and a Buddhist's enlightenment. Not every soul can do it, surely.

Part of this book is almost like the first half of a romantic comedy, the half where the players foil one another with petty fights and sardonic insults, yet are constantly drawn back together. Once he and Gos find their stride, we get so many wonderfully involved descriptions of the bird's personality. White uses the most sublime and funny language to describe him: Gos is both the hilarious "tetchy princeling" and the subject of tragic odes:

"Unfortunate, dark, and immoral goshawk: I had myself been subjected to his brutality. In the beak he was not formidable, but in the talons there was death. … Once, when he thought I was going to take his food away from him, he had struck my bare forefinger. … I should only have hurt myself horribly by trying to get away, and was already being hurt."

There are many of these dark shades; it isn't a cruelty-free story. He is following his forebears and his 17th-century textbook, doing what's always been done. It may not always be right. How does that make him different from the rest of the world, about to descend into a massive war? Certainly not wiser. After all, the whole point of hawking is to hunt; it is a sport inherently disrespectful to life. And this is the twisted contradiction White offers us in his self: he is an En-glish-man, he rules his little land. This is a repugnant point of view, really, privileged and imperialist; he is the figure to whom all cultural arguments are aimed today. In his world there are still old ways to rest upon, and wild things to take at will.

Still I love him. He writes this book out of his compassion and his search for peace. He is the classic misanthrope, who loves animals more than people. There's a moment, when Gos is loose, that he lures him with a pigeon, as bait. But he stops: "I had known this pigeon: it had sat on my finger." It had sat on his finger! His friend! He buys two more pigeons, instead, so he won't have to use his friend for the death for which it was bred. His life is full of these tiny encounters, a "sentimental slaughterer," Snow White and the hunter both.

He doesn't flinch from these gruesome habits, or permit us to. He brings us deeper inside them. On a day when the gentry conducts a foxhunt outside his home, he watches a young sow badger emerge at the wrong time from the forest and encounter two well-made-up women who sit and stare at it. When she is killed, later, White allegorically contemplates her body:

"Brock: the last of the English bears: I had been proud that her race lived in the same wood with me. She had done nobody any harm. … Hob would be a good name for a badger. She dripped blood gently over the gate, while I held up her muzzle in the falconer's glove and looked into her small, opaque, ursine eyes. She was dead. What could I use her for? Surely, being killed, some definite good would ensue."

But there's no purpose to the death for anyone:

"I did not want to remember a young, short-sighted, retiring, industrious, ultimately prolific female who had been turned back by two frightened ladies, cornered by lusty and unlettered puppies, knocked on the nose by a peer. … Never mind. I was a badger too, in my snug cottage that lay in the badger's wood: and when the war-world came to tear me apart with whoops and halloas, the young sow and myself would be quits."

Reading a passage like that, I'm just about quits myself.

Something to understand: this is actually a nonfiction book about falconry. Though I'd say it's written like a memoir, and contains allegory, it gets into detail about what to do with a goshawk. There are many diagrams. ("Hawk Furniture"!) It has dull stretches, and doesn't properly follow a story for a while. But its strong moments sung so brightly for me. The details carry such pain: a lesson ostensibly on repairing a broken feather explains the tragedy of the bird's "hunger-trace," a line of weakness in the feathers from growing when the baby had no food. This childhood suffering leaves a visible scar; his feathers will inevitably break there, one by one. His master must mend him. This makes me want to cry, everybody.

White's project moved me in the way that Wild did, the obstinacy of having no right to try this thing that they find they simply must, must do. Another author undertook this same spiritual legacy just last year in H is for Hawk, in which she copes with the death of a parent with this same project, examining T.H. White for his thematic dealings with grief. This piece by Macdonald explores something White mentions in his Postscript, the "top-secret falcon squadron" in the British Air Ministry of WWII, entrusted with capturing "enemy pigeons" (and their messages). She describes the birds' character as "naturalising the ideology of honourable combat. Falcons were a moral predator." Cool soldiers in the very conflict White feared so much.

"It happened like this in the world. Old things lost their grip and dropped away; not always because they were bad things, but sometimes because the new things were more bad, and stronger."

Thanks to Shannon, as ever, for telling me so much about this.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read The Sword in the Stone and The Once and Future King when I was much younger. This illuminates the things that T H White writes in those books about raptors, and reveals the deep fascination he has for these magnificent birds. As he writes about his efforts to train a goshawk, it's not so much a matter, for him, of subjugating the bird as understanding the way it thinks and feels. The other thing I appreciated here was the bits of erudition scattered here and there in his allusions to history and literature.

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

"For everything that rises must converge."
- Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

"For everything else kids, we either dispose of the corpse in Central Park or we cut off its head and strap it to the roof of our minivan for the five-hour drive home."
- RFK, Jr, perhaps?



Who knew 2024 would be my year of falcons and falconry. From the great J.A. Baker book The Peregrine, to Roberto Bolaño's novella By Night in Chile, to County Highway's piece on RFK, Jr's love of falconry (later we learned about his love for lost bear cubs and whale heads). Anyway, T.H. White is one of my favorite YA writers. I loved T.H. White's collection of 4 novels on King Arthur, later collected as The Once and Future King, and I guess so too did RFK.


From the Samuel's interview with RFK Jr:

"...when I was nine years old, I read The Once and Future King, which was T.H. White's book about King Arthur as a young kid. T.H. White himself was a falconer and he had a chapter with a very graphic description of falconry. And at that moment I knew that that's what I wanted to do in my life."

It does leave me wondering what book inspired him to later hide a bear cub in Central Park? Catcher in the Rye? No. That would involve ducks. What about decapitating a whale head with a chainsaw and strapping it into the family's minivan? Moby-Dick? Perhaps.

God, our literary and political timeline is kinda fucked-up if I'm honest. God save us. God save the Goshawks and the falcons.

[Lance Greenfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of the books that I had to read for O-Level English literature, and it was the only really interesting one out of the set. (These were the UK school exams for 16 year-olds back in the early '70s).

This is a role model for those who would practice the craft of writing great literature. The language is so descriptive and captivating and really pulls the reader in to experience the emotions of the author.

We were told that this is NOT the way to train a falcon, but it is a brilliant account of patience and the relationship between a man and a bird.

[Bfisher · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had read Helen Macdonald’s “H is for Hawk”, and was fascinated by her discussion of T.H.White and of his book “The Goshawk”. I think that my response to The Goshawk was greatly influenced by Macdonald’s book.

As one reads The Goshawk, one becomes aware of the struggles within White, even as he struggled for mastery of the hawk Gos.

I suspect that White fled from the life of a schoolmaster because of the terrible temptations it offered, as when he speaks of the use of punishment in the management of schools “...because of the pleasures of flagellation.” Perhaps he hoped for a new start, if he felt that ""

In any setback, he reverted to the language of domination and punishment: “...the authority established, the perserverance not now flouted lest it should be thought of as weak thereafter”, “Yet it was sometimes difficult to believe that he was not merely being naughty. Speak harshly to your little boy And beat him when he sneezes ...”, and when he tortures Gos for bating: “Now came the sin against the Holy Ghost. After half a dozen more bates - the flurry was almost continuous - I inclined my hand against his efforts to climb up the jess.”

He wished to love Gos, but did not know how to express that love; sadly for White and Gos, he could only express that love through domination: “I had loved Gos … He had hated and distrusted me … He had had guts to stand up against love for so long…”. He quoted a poem of William Blake’s:
"Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite."

That is the ending of the poem and the tragedy of White’s relationship with Gos, which must have started in hope of a better relationship:
"Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair."

[Ettore1207 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fra i tantissimi libri che ho in lista, mai avrei deciso di aggiungere L'astore se non mi fossi imbattuto nelle splendide recensioni di Malacorda e Roberto. Grazie, cari amici!

Legarsi a un falco significa non potersi permettere sciatterie e smancerie. Nessun falco può essere un animale da compagnia; il sentimentalismo è escluso. In un certo senso, è l’arte dello psichiatra. Si mette in giuoco la propria mente contro un’altra mente con il massimo dell’impegno e della tensione intellettuale. Non c’è nessun desiderio di transfert affettivi, nessuna richiesta di disonorevoli atti d’omaggio o di riconoscenza. È un tonico per la meno schietta ferinità del cuore umano.
Colui che ha creato l’Agnello ha creato anche te? Ebbene, la risposta è sì.

[lethe · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had mixed feelings reading White's account of his clumsy efforts to train a young hawk for hunting. I can't help thinking it's a kind of animal cruelty, especially in the way White tried it (not to mention that I don't understand the appeal of hunting for sport).

[Professor Weasel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book because I found Macdonald's discussion of it in "H is For Hawk" so interesting. I would definitely have never bothered reading it if that wasn't the case. Her discussion of this book provided a LOT of useful context that I would have NEVER gotten from reading it blind - his homosexuality, his alcoholism, the rise of WWII. It also helped put into context how cruel White was to the poor hawk.

What was interesting to me about this book is how OBSESSED it is with the goshawk. It proves Charles Baxter's point that a lot of books are driven by obsession (like Moby Dick). It is a very focused narrative in that sense. White's repetitive descriptions of the hawk as a killer, a savage, a princeling, a friend of Attila, a "horrible aerial toad, the hump-backed aviating Richard III" ... it's all very interesting language that shows a craving for proximity to power, death, and violence, and an escape from one's self (again, Macdonald does a good analysis of this). I also liked the discussions of the weather, the descriptions of the English countryside and wildlife (very Colin Dann!), and White's snarky humour.

A short read. I started it AGES ago but only finished it recently coz I had like 10 pages left and I was like okay, let's just finish this.

To write something which was of enduring beauty, this was the ambition of every writer: as it was the ambition of the joiner and architect and the constructor of any kind. It was not the beauty but the endurance, for endurance was beautiful. It was also all that we could do. It was a consolation, even a high and positive joy, to make something true: some table, which, sat on, when it was meant only to be eaten off, would not splinter or shatter. It was not for the constructor that the beauty was made, but for the thing itself. (72)

[Matthew Ted · Rating 3 out of 5]

A beautifully written, meditative and slightly exhausting book about T. H. White attempting to train a goshawk named Gos. As a big fan of his The Once and Future King and of nature/animals, it was a sure fit for me. And it was, mostly. White was a young writer, idly reading a book on falconry when the line, 'the bird reverted to a feral state' caused him to pause. He decided, on that quote alone, to try to train a goshawk. The book is a strange mix between the very technical training of Gos (using relatively brutal, medieval techniques as found in his outdated books in the 1930s (to untangle Gos's tail feathers, for example, White dips them in boiling water)) and the gentle, philosophical musings White conjures during this time/or reflections of this time. Naturally, with its technical detail, it sometimes feels a little laborious to read, though White's beautiful nature descriptions are never far away. This of course later inspired Helen MacDonald's very popular 2014 memoir, H is for Hawk.

To write something which was of enduring beauty, this was the ambition of every writer: as it was the ambition of the joiner and architect and the constructor of any kind. It was not the beauty but the endurance, for endurance was beautiful. It was also all that we could do. It was a consolation, even a high and positive joy, to make something true: some table, which, sat on, when it was meant only to be eaten off, would not splinter or shatter. It was not for the constructor that the beauty was made, but for the thing itself. He would triumph to know that some contribution had been made: some sort of consoling contribution quite timeless and without relation to his own profit. Sometimes we knew, half tipsy or listening to music, that at the heart of some world there lay a chord to which vibrating gave reality. With its reality there was music and truth and the permanence of good workmanship. To give birth to this, with whatever male travail, was not only all that man could do: it was also all that eclipsed humanity of either sex could do: it was the human contribution to the universe.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those incredible books that you pick up for no real, logical reason--more than a blind-buy, even--and become completely enamored with it. I can count these sorts of encounters with non-fiction on two hands.
The premise is simple: T.H. White, the guy who wrote "The Once and Future King", bought a goshawk and tried to train it to hunt himself, using books from the 17th century. He then wrote a book about it.
I'd be hard-pressed to elucidate what it exactly is about this book that endeared me to it so much. The answer might perhaps lie in White's own justification which has to do with wild things and men and feral states and the bliss of nature and ferocity and reversion. Certainly, White is a wonderful writer and he tells the story well, paralleling his training and frustrations with 'Gos' with his own musings on the absurdity of society and the up-ending of all kinds of assumptions that we take for granted about the efficacy and value of our 'modern world'.
I think it's best to say that its joy lies in both themes: showing us how clumsy we are in the world yet how joyful the labor to attempt to do so and bad-ass descriptions of training a bird of prey.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone is familiar with Mr. Whites' superb Arthurian fantasy epics and here we have the great wordsmith applying his talents to his experiences of falconry, with no other than a book of the subject from the sixteen hundreds.
This was an absorbing read that left me eager to learn more. If it was not for the deft skill of Mr. White and his mighty pen this would be an absolute faillier.

A collection of well rounded stories of a factual nature from an excellent writer who has beyond doubt mastered both fact and fiction and knows how to seperate them.
Other writers take note.

RECOMMENDED

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant, but a little boring

I would not have known about T. H. White's memoir of trying to train a goshawk were it not for Helen Macdonald's wonderful analysis in H is for Hawk, her recent account of training her own hawk. White, as he himself admits, does a lot of things wrong: feeding the bird far too much, for example. This horrifies Macdonald, and I expected it to horrify me too. But, because he is unaware of his mistakes at the time, what comes over has no cruelty in it whatsoever; frustration and occasional despair, yes, but otherwise just the very honest account of a lonely man's struggle to bond with this wild creature of the air.

And beautifully written! Which surprised me a little, but I should have realized that the author of The Once and Future King (the source for Camelot and an inspiration for Harry Potter) would have pretty strong chops. But again, the amazing quality of Helen Macdonald's writing—easily the best I had read all year—had made me assume that no one could equal her. Wrong again! In fact, I realized that by embracing the comparison with White, Macdonald was writing for her life. "Goshawks were Hamlet, were Ludwig of Bavaria," writes White. "Frantic heritors of frenetic sires, they were in full health more than half insane. When the red rhenish wine of their blood pulsed at full spate through their arteries, when the airy bird bones were gas-filled with little bubbles of unbiddable warm virility, no merely human being could bend them to his will." For both writers, the elemental wildness of their captor-captive stirs them to flights of verbal magnificence on virtually every page. White, a former schoolmaster, calls upon a huge vocabulary—words like banting, nasconded, silurian, circumbendibus, and perdue—in addition to the technical language of falconry used by both writers: austringer, jesses, creance, bate, stoop, yarak, and the like. A further subliminal interest in White's writing is that this is the late 1930s, dictators every bit as imperious as White's hawk are flexing their talons over in Europe, and the idea of aerial combat to the death is no longer confined to the world of birds.

The book is brilliant. But I have to say it is also a little boring. Good though White's writing is on the individual page, he is not nearly as good as Macdonald at giving the reader a sense of his progress overall. Perhaps because his mistakes are always sending him back towards the starting point, perhaps because of the journal format with day following day with little obvious pattern, I could never measure how far White had come towards his goal. And the last third or more of the book, which are mainly about White's efforts to trap birds of different sizes, lose momentum almost entirely. White is quite frank about his efforts as "a second-rate philosopher who lived alone in a wood, being tired of most humans in any case, to train a person who was not human," but of course the book is about the bird, not him. Macdonald's brilliance is to look into White's entire life, his homosexuality, his traumatic upbringing, and the sadistic tendencies he kept rigorously in check, to produce a psychosexual analysis that would have delighted Freud. Come to think of it, Marie Winn does something rather similar in her ten-page introduction to this edition, perhaps the best preface in any NYRB book that I have read. Either way, it needs this wider perspective. Without it, we get merely an elusive man in an ultimately frustrating struggle with an even more elusive bird. But a great writer.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came to T.H. White and "The Goshawk" as many others did - after reading a partial biography of the man along with passages from his slim book in Helen MacDonald's "H is for Hawk." Those passages pulsed brightly, like little electrical charges, in MacDonald's book, which I thought was otherwise quite flat. I quickly put The Goshawk on my to-read list. T.H. White is without question the stronger writer.

White's hawk-training methods were antiquated, and he acknowledges as much in the postscript, written in 1951, the year of the book's publication and some 15 years after White wrote the bulk of the book. He tells readers early on, however, that his is not a book about how to train a goshawk - certainly not successfully. He endeavors to train a notoriously difficult-to-train hawk with no falconry experience and with very limited teaching books to aid him.

An event ultimately alters the course of the hawk's training (White named him "Gos") and therefore the book's trajectory, but the book should be read less as a journal of daily trials and errors and of progress and relapses in the hawk's training and more for White's detailing of the micro-changes in his relationship with the hawk and within himself. Here is where he really engaged me.

He loved the hawk, he hated it (and himself). He sometimes blamed the hawk and other times blamed himself for this failing. But he was also invested, determined. "I had gone half bird myself, transferring my love and interest and livelihood into its future, giving hostages to fortune as madly as in marriage and family care."

His attribution of human characteristics (angry, suspicious, ill-mannered, "ungovernable barbarian") to the hawk irked me, yet White's observations of the seasons and the natural world, his reflections on the nature of "wild" versus domestic and his awareness of his own shortcomings were too frequent and stirring for me to dismiss him.

White was also just an interesting man with a preference for solitude and an unyielding curiosity and quest for learning. He is funny, thoughtful and tedious within these pages, and where he couldn't train his hawk, he could surely write about him:

"Sitting on the night perch of his mews he looked up at the ceiling, wriggled his head and neck like an eel or snake dancer from Ind, attempted to thrust down those three enormous bones into his interior with a kind of shimmy, regarded me, hiccuping, with glassy eye."

"To fly: the horrible aerial toad, the silent-feathered owl, the hump-back aviating Richard III, he made toward me close the ground."

"Once, when he thought I was going to take his food away from him, he had struck my bare finger. It had been a Bank of England apprehension, a painful impotence, a Come-you-here arrest by all-powerful police. ... He had held the glove with one talon, the bare forefinger with the other, so tightly that only one method of escape had been open to me, and that had been to tear him in half. In the process I should have pulled all the flesh off the finger, like stripping the rubber off an insulated wire. Not from courage, but from necessity, I had stood quiet and unprotesting, speaking to him calmly until he let go. A homicidal maniac: but now he was enjoying to be stroked. We were again in love."

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Last spring I reread The Once and Future King, and ever since then I've been wishing there was more of it. Recently I went looking for other T. H. White books, which I had never done before, and came across this one. It chronicles White's efforts to apply the falconry methods of the Middle Ages and train a bird named Gos.

In some ways The Goshawk is a difficult book to read. A certain amount of failure seems inevitable, and there's cruelty in the sport of falconry that contrasts with White's deep love and respect for his hawk. There was a section near the middle of the book that was almost too sad for me to handle, and I had to quit reading it for a couple of weeks. The catastrophe took me by surprise, although White gives warning in a passage from the opening pages about Gos's capture and journey to England:

Imagine what his life had been till then. When he was an infant, still unable to fly and untidy with bits of fluff, still that kind of mottled, motive and gaping toad which confronts us when we look into birds' nests in May: when, moreover, he was a citizen of Germany, so far away: a glaring man had come to his mother's nest with a basket like this one, and had stuffed him in. He had never seen a human being, never been confined in such a box, which smelled of darkness and manufacture and the stink of man. It must have been like death-- the thing which we can never know beforehand--as, with clumsy talons groping for an unnatural foothold, his fledgeling consciousness was hunched and bundled in the oblong, alien surroundingness.

T. H. White understands original sin. His early description of Gos reminds me of the section in The Once and Future King when Merlyn and the newly-crowned Arthur discuss the problem of England's history with Scotland. You can't expect a project to go well when it begins with a great wrong committed against one of the participants.

The other thing that's clear from the beginning is that White himself is very sad in years 1936 and 1937, the period that he's writing about. On its surface The Goshawk is about falconry, but really it's about a 30-year-old man with pacifist instincts trying to figure out what to do with himself in the time between the two world wars. His friends have urged him to take up arms to fight the fascists, but he "would rather shoot rabbits than people". He's living alone in a cottage in rural England with his dog Brownie and a hawk. And then he loses the hawk. It feels like the end of the world.

In other ways, though, the book made me very happy. It's a joy to hear a beloved author speaking as himself, in his own voice. White is working on the same problems in this book as the ones he gives Arthur, and he's doing his best to learn by thinking like his animals. It's with Gos that he encounters a border between two counties ("one saw in the mind's eye the imaginary lines all over England") and knows that borders aren't real--a hawk doesn't see them. And he recognizes through Gos the appeal of the rule of might--Gos the assassin "knew that might had always been right". (Pigeons, on the other hand, are peace-loving birds, good parents and citizens, and "the most susceptible to the principles of the League of Nations".) White loves Gos for his wildness and killer instinct, while also recognizing that humanity can never survive on those terms.

In a postscript written in 1951, White apologizes for attempting to give his readers "some sort of happy ending" by adding hopeful details that didn't exist in reality, but I think that impulse is what makes him so admirable as a thinker and a writer. He doesn't want to tell a story that's untrue to reality, but ultimately he refuses to tell a hopeless story. There's always a chance that Gos is happy and free, that humanity can learn the lessons of wildness but still act and think as itself, and the world isn't ending after all.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Repressed queer energy emanating off this like something radioactive - and I was delighted to find afterwards that Sylvia Townsend Warner, queen dyke, wrote that he's a sadomasochistic homosexual!

Helen MacDonald, modern queen falconer (possibly?) dyke, writes that gay people have over history chosen the countryside to love, document, create poetry about instead of other people from which they have been pushed away.

White becomes - all in his own words! - a mother, a lover (very romantic imagery, comparisons to Taming of the Shrew, etc. etc. without quite being furry-esque), a nursemaid, to this very male hawk, Gos. He fails so spectacularly because he loves poisonously, smotheringly, desperately. He literally can do nothing else.

[Mmars · Rating 4 out of 5]

The oddest thing happened while reading this book. Having just finished White's Sword in the Stone, and having just learned what an acciptor is (raptors, including goshawks, who diet on other birds) I discovered that T.H. White had written this memoir. But while reading it, I kept thinking that White, who referred to himself as an austringer (a keeper of goshawks) lived in the 1600s. The language of this "sport" is so specialized and near-archaic the book read as such. Plus, one of the handful of books of training guides he used was written in the 1600s. Then he would mention the world war or automobiles and I was snapped back into the 20th century. There was also an abundance of wildlife (are there any badgers left in England?) and uninhabited land. The year was 1938.

I veered between fascination and repulsion. Good thing the book is short! The preoccupation with acquiring food for the goshawk, both live game such as mice, rabbits and other birds and market beef, and what could be perceived as the cruelty of taming such a wild and independent bird was often difficult to accept. But it was also fascinating to learn about his naive methods which amounted to extreme patience and trial and error. Also, there was this bizarre psychology between man and bird unlike anything I've ever encountered before.

When the book was published in 1951, White added a third section with an overview of his continued practice with another goshawk, changes in method, and mention of the disappearance of the practice in England, but which he was glad to see continuing in America.

[hare · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a bursting heart of gratitude and triumph as the ravening monster slowly paced down the arm with gripping steps and pounced upon his breakfast! The rest of the day was a glow of pleasure, a kind of still life in which the sun shone on the flowers with more than natural brilliance, giving them the high lights of porcelain.

It's always hard to rate a classic, and The Goshawk, to me, proves even more difficult to review. Originally published in 1951, T.H. White's book is a compelling account of one man's struggle to train a goshawk. But it is so much more than a mere falconry manual - which it shouldn't be, as T.H. White was not at the time aware of how to properly train a bird of prey. Both he and Gos were learning: how to be an austringer, how to be a hawk.

He deserved to be free, but I wanted him still.

It's a tale of love, hatred, obsession, and loss, told by the master of the written word. I should also note that T.H. White's insights on falconry in Shakespeare's works were a lovely if unexpected touch.

Of course, Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk brought The Goshawk to my attention some years ago. Ever since then I wondered if it's worth the read, and now I can say: yes it is, even though, at times, I felt a tad too stupid to fully grasp what T.H. White tried to convey.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love discovering new books that live outside the world of literary prizes and literary fashion, and a good way to do this is by following the opinion of writers one admires. One of the writers I appreciate strongly is Robert MacFarlane who in the mini-pocket The Gifts of Reading describes the joy of giving away books one admires to enable others to get to know them. And so, since a while, I try to read what he admires and discovered some great authors and books. One of these, H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald, talks about another book, The Goshawk. So i was thrilled in finding and buying it (with an introduction by MacDonald of course).
The Goshawk was written by a popular writer of Arthurian Legend, T.H. White, in the mid-30ies, when he was trying to train a goshawk in the traditional way. He failed miserably in this, put the book aside, and it was only published in 1951 when his editor discovered it. It is as much a story of the struggle between the bird and the author as it is about the author itself. The book is cut up as a diary, and I feel it should be read like this too, day by day, and not too many days on one day… It has a wonderful 30ies atmosphere about it though it mainly plays in the countryside. It is a book about failure, but I have a hard time now to explain what it is exactly that makes this such a good book, through and through English, and I like it more than H is for Hawk itself.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love T. H. White, and the reason why I love his writing shines through in punctuated brilliance in this brief book. Be aware that the descriptions on the back cover are misleading: This is NOT a book about good falconry. This is a book about terrible falconry performed with zeal fired by the best intentions and armed with very antiquated source material.

Still, White's enthusiasm for the sport and for the intense relationship between falconer and hawk is moving and incisive. His joys and pains illuminate many of the pages. There are a few sections in which a more clearly definite goal might have proven helpful, but these were probably left in place to give the impression of desperate aimlessness felt by the bewildered and bereaved White. If so, the sentiment is perfectly evoked. Most of the frustration I felt during these phases of ennui were mollified, at least in part, by the author’s postscript, written decades after the main bulk of the book.

[Daniel Simmons · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine if Henry David Thoreau had gone off to write "Walden" with a ferocious bird of prey to keep him company, and you'll get an inkling of... -- No, scratch that, this book defies fanciful mash-up thinking. "The Goshawk" is a wonderful and weird little book that is unlike anything I've read before. For one thing, it manages to make sheep-corpse-eating maggots ("clean, vital, symbolical of an essential life-force perfectly persisting") and breaking wind ("the horns of elfland faintly blowing") poetic and even philosophical. As for the central pairing between man and the titular beast, well, I couldn't help but get completely caught up in that love/hate mess. Early on in his narrative White frets that there is a "folly in thinking that anybody would want to buy a book about mere birds." This book is about birds, yes, but it is also about so, so much more. Folly or not -- read it.

[Bryn Hammond · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little psychodrama between person and bird, fascism and war in the background (he thinks the human world is going to end -- a casual, sombre certainty). The tale of a failure, told with sadness and humour. I recognise White's self-investment and self-inspection in a story from The Once and Future King.

So much more humane and humble than H is for Hawk, which chides him for errors which he was first to confess.

[Henri Jacobs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Persoonlijk ben ik niet een voorstander van valkerij of het in gevangenschap houden van (roof)vogels en het africhten van, in dit geval, een havik voor de jacht, maar de poging van de schrijver T.H. White om een jonge vogel af te richten en de strijd tussen hen beide levert een boeiend verhaal op.

Ik las dit (gekregen) boek in de vertaling van Jolanda van der Klis en parallel de vertaling van Max Schuchart, die in 1980 verscheen als Prisma pocket, onder de titel ‘De vlucht van de havik’. Deze versie heb ik al een paar jaar in de boekenkast staan maar nog nooit gelezen. Een hoofdstuk in het ene boek en een volgende in het andere boek of soms passages in beide vertalingen. Interessant om te zien hoe taal zich ontwikkeld heeft tussen globaal eind jaren ’70 en 2016, het jaar waarin de vertaling van Jolanda van der Klis verscheen, maar ook hoe verschillend de interpretatie van de vertalers is. T.H. White schreef dit verhaal midden jaren ’30 van de vorige eeuw, De vertaling van Jolanda van der Klis is gepolijst en leest soepel. In de vertaling van Max Schuchart komt nadrukkelijker naar voren hoe somber T.H. White was over de toekomst – feitelijk de reden waarom hij zijn baan als leraar had opgezegd en zich terugtrok op een kleine boerderij op het Engelse platteland – en de oplopende spanning in de Wereld, vlak voor de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Bij het lezen van de vertaling van Max Schuchart voel je de sfeer en de beklemming die T.H. White wilde vastleggen.

Opmerkelijk is dat little owl consequent door Max Schuchart wordt vertaald met kleine uil, terwijl Jolanda van der Klis dit ook gebruikt maar in het tweede en derde deel hiervan afstapt en steenuil gebruikt, wat feitelijk beter is. Het zelfde voor jer-falcon wat vertaald wordt door beide met geervalk. Ook hier volgt een wisseling in de vertaling van Jolanda van der Klis en in het laatste deel wordt het giervalk.

Het lezen van dit verhaal van T.H. White is een opmaat voor ‘De H is van Havik’, geschreven door Helen Macdonald. Een boek dat ik later dit jaar wil lezen.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

Apparently most readers come to this book via a more modern treatise on the realm of hawking that was published within my lifetime. Me being the out of touch curmudgeon that I am, I somehow managed to commit myself to the ancestral work a couple of years before the modern work came out, and true to form, didn't actually get around to reading it until just over a decade later. As for what drew my interest in the first place, it would have to be what faint memories I have of The Once and Future King, which shows up often enough on the fringes of my attention span to this day that I'll be rereading it at one point or another. Few authors have made a successful transition from that long ago child reading a (supposedly) children's book to an adult reading an adult book, and while I have no idea how TOaFK will go over in a future read, I ended up deeply enjoying this work for what it is. Sure, it's a rhapsody on a great deal of White Male Stuff, but White has a keenly sensual sense of prose and a mastery of bringing one over the last couple thousand years of history while keeping one intimately grounded with an immediate sense of action and/or thought. Fortunately, he spends more time talking about what he knows (hawking, "Western" history, Shakespeare) than what he doesn't (women), and if you're willing to let your mind wander back to your (likely long ago) English courses and ground yourself in a millennia long interplay between two species, one of which happens to be commonly known as Homo sapien, this is a singularly pleasurable read indeed.

There's a term 'special interest' that has been going around as increasing numbers of folks and mass media find it comfortable to discuss being on the spectrum and/or neurodivergent and what it entails for their ability to zero in on one particular subject and make it their entire life for a time. I'm not about to go disinter White and slap a diagnosis on him (a diagnosis is only so good as it allows the impacted individual to better figure themselves out, and the constant interference from the state makes it extremely difficult to have any sort of proper discussion about that), but if you asked me what the tone of this entire piece is, 'special interest' goes a fair way in covering it. For there is little that is simple, or peaceful, or humane (and I say that due to how poorly White treats himself, for as he notices early on, mistreating a hawk is the easiest way to give up any idea of training it) about the hawking process that White undertakes, and if you're expecting a tale that rewards its readers with straightforward narration and rewarding closure, you won't get it. What you will get is a meditation that, for me, transformed a practice from a barely known subset of human/non-human interaction to a magnificent art fully worthy of the awe it has inspired for thousands of years, with the expounding on Shakespeare's use of hawkish metaphors sending chills up my scholarly spine. It didn't quite make it to a five star for me, but it was worlds better than I expected, and when it comes to these old dead white dudes, that's oftentimes the best one can hope for.

There's a special purview of human experience where thought becomes play, effort becomes wisdom, and sustained activity transcends its mortal bonds and bounds straight into the realms of art, icon, and wonder. White boys have done their best to hog it all ever since they bought enough of the world to convince themselves that what they had was all that was worth having, and while I don't begrudge (leastwise not as much) those such as White who actually make use of it, it does make the reading effort predictably insufficient at times, with the human one one side and the means violently kept from them on the other. So, I'll certainly take this worthwhile reading experience for what it was, but I continue to seek out that material which takes all that this has to offer and then some: seeking, discovering, and sustaining a note that makes the whole idea of the human species worth it, but as consequence of being integrated into the wider whole, not due to being so artificially lifted up as to have nothing better to do at the top. All in all, I tip my hat to White for being foolish magnificent he was for some years (honorable self-censorship and all), and I look forward to when I finally reconnoiter with his much more well known tetralogy (perhaps even pentalogy if the opportunity presents itself). He is yet another member of the pantheon whose vague, undefined outsider status (I touched upon neurodivergency, but queerhood is apparently the big topic amongst the literati) makes me marvel at the conspiracy that first drew me to them in my unformed youth and again now that I am grown, and for better or worse, I am glad he had this small, singular happiness in his life, worn close to the vest while living and shared with those who seek it out now that he is gone.

I felt lonely without him, and caught myself at moments wondering what I ought to be doing now. After all, it had been quite right of him to resist to the last: to recognize, long after a falcon would have given in (you could train two or three falcons in the time of one goshawk), that I was an unnatural force. Why should he, a wild princeling of Teutonic origin, submit to an enforced captivity? He had hated and distrusted me, the intransigent small robber baron. He had had guts, to stand up against love so long. I hoped he would snap his jesses safely, the ungovernable barbarian, and live a very long happy life in the wild world: unless I could catch him again, as a partner whom I should never dare to treat as captive. He deserved to be free, but I wanted him still. Love asketh but himself to please, To bind another to his delight, Joys in another's loss of ease, and And builds a hell in heaven's despite.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you've ever been to a Renaissance Faire you might have witnessed the fascinating hobby of Falconry, if you found it as interesting as I did and maybe even dreamed of owning a raptor of your own this book shows how one famous writer set about learning how to do it all on his own with just three books one written in the 1600's as his guide.

[Gill Quinn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Or how not to train a Goshawk!
I read this on the back of H is for Hawk (a truly wonderful book), in which Helen quotes a lot of passages from this book.
It's not really an enjoyable book to read, at least I didn't find it so, and you do feel sorry for Gos. I don't think he should have had a Goshawk to train for his first bird with no experience or instructions even - bar a 17th Century falconry book- though to his credit, the book does include a postscript detailing what he should have done. Really quite sad.

[Roberto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frangar, non flectar

Difficile capire cosa possa portare uno scrittore e professore universitario, Terence Harboury White, a isolarsi in una casa di campagna e a iniziare una delle attività più difficili in assoluto, l'addestramento di un astore. Che è un bellissimo rapace, più o meno un chilogrammo di peso (la femmina è molto più grande del maschio...) con un metro e venti circa di apertura alare (non nego di non avere avuto la più pallida idea di cosa fosse un astore prima di leggere il libro).

La caratteristica di questo animale, uno spietato assassino dagli occhi di ghiaccio che "sarebbe andato perfettamente d’accordo con Attila", è di non essere facilmente addestrabile.

"I rapaci non hanno una tradizione di masochismo, e quanto più li si minaccia o li si tormenta, tanto più s’inferociscono. Selvaggi e irremovibili, prima di poterli addomesticare è necessario «spezzarli», in un modo o nell’altro. Qualunque crudeltà ha l’effetto immediato d’incattivirli, ed è quindi peggio che inutile, perché l’uccello non si piegherà né arrenderà mai. Esso ha un estremo, inviolabile rifugio: la morte. Il rapace angariato sceglie di morire."

Difficile capire, dicevo, cosa potesse portare White ad affrontare una attività del genere, senza preparazione (solo un vecchio manuale di falconeria), senza aiuto, senza consigli da parte di nessuno.

White era una persona solitaria, aveva avuto una infanzia difficile e cercò per tutta la vita l'amore, non trovandolo. Chissà che l'unico fortissimo rapporto di odio e amore, travagliatissimo, non sia stato proprio quello con Gos, il temibile astore con cui condivise ogni minuto per molte settimane della sua vita.

Qual è il significato di addomesticare? Citando Il piccolo Principe di de Saint-Exupéry "Che cosa vuol dire addomesticare ? E' una cosa da molto dimenticata. Vuol dire creare dei legami..."

Il sentimento che legava l'uomo e l'animale (perdonatemi se non lo chiamo uccello, introdurrei dell'ironia di bassa lega...) era intenso e ben diverso da quello che si ha con un cane o un gatto:

"Non solo l’animale capiva i miei sentimenti guardandomi in faccia, ma ero io in grado di individuare nella sua almeno due distinti stati d’animo… L’intera fisionomia mutava, come quella di un essere umano. Un momento sembrava un matto, gli occhi infossati e luccicanti; l’istante successivo non appariva in nulla più temibile di un cucciolo, ridicolo e petulante"

Di cosa parla quindi questo bellissimo libro? Di una battaglia. Della appassionata battaglia per il potere tra un uomo solitario e problematico e un rapace inizialmente terrorizzato e vociante e poi sensibile e indipendente. La battaglia tra due esseri non malleabili, non corrompibili, non piegabili, non dominabili. Una battaglia paziente, anche se spesso la pazienza veniva meno. Una battaglia psicologica, dolorosa, con il morale continuamente altalenante. Dinanzi all'uomo un avversario coriaceo, che incuteva rispetto, ma anche tenerezza, come durante il primo bagno in una pozzanghera. Una battaglia di tensione, di resistenza fisica, iniziata subito camminando giorni e notti intere senza dormire con l'animale sul pugno, stravolto e incapace di resistere al sonno, per fare accettare la mano come posatoio. Una battaglia che non può che terminare con la reciproca accettazione di uomo e animale, abbisognanti l'uno dell'altro per sopravvivere.

"Ho sempre amato gli esseri che non si fanno ammaestrare, gli inavvicinabili, coloro che sono destinati a soccombere"

Alla fine, il dilemma per White: essere felice perché l'amato animale sia libero, lontano e felice o crucciarsi per non poterlo più avere vicino, probabilmente infelice? Interessante notare che questo dilemma valga spesso, uguale, per gli esseri umani.

"Parlargli cortesemente ricorrendo al miagolio che nei miei tentativi di conversazione era la cosa che sembrava gradire di più, sorridere allo spazio ignorando la sua presenza, rassicurarlo con calma... quando bruciavo dalla voglia di schiacciarlo, e, mentre il sangue mi saliva furiosamente alla testa, di pestarlo, fracassarlo, smembrarlo, torcerlo, slogarlo, spennarlo, disperderlo ai quattro venti, picchiarlo, sbatterlo, trascinarlo e schiacciarlo sotto i piedi, punirlo senza pietà, e cancellarlo, farla finita con quell’odioso, imbecille, demente, indomabile, inqualificabile, insopportabile Gos".

(Non potrebbe essere una conversazione di una coppia litigiosa?)

Un libro sull’amore e sulla libertà che è riuscito a interessarmi, colpirmi e stupirmi oltre le mie aspettative.

PS: mi si consenta di dire che quando è comparsa la Prunella modularis detta "passera scopaiola" non ho potuto evitare di ridere...