Helen Macdonald’s memoir H Is for Hawk received outstanding reviews and several prestigious awards last year. It is the beautifully written story of her grief after her father’s sudden death, the depression that followed, and her attempt to lose herself in falconry. Macdonald is a member of the research faculty at Cambridge University’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science, and her skills as both researcher and historian are on display throughout the book. She weaves her personal story into the larger world of falconry and its history and, unexpectedly, into the story of T.H. White, author of The Once and Future King and a primer on falconry called The Goshawk. White and Macdonald share more than an interest in goshawks and their training. Each suffered personal pain and alienation, and falconry became a means to navigate that pain, although not always successfully.
Macdonald confesses to a lifelong interest in hawks and falcons. She was obsessed with them in her childhood, reading every book on falconry that she could find and spending time hiding in hedges in an attempt to observe them in the wild. At the age of 12, she and her father went along with a group of falconers on a hunt where Macdonald, for the first time, observed a goshawk kill a pheasant. But her observations about the falconers themselves are more interesting. Falconers traditionally are an elite male club, and within the club falcons have historically been considered nobler than hawks. Falconers, like falcons, are aristocratic, while austringers, i.e., trainers of hawks, are graceless loners. Among hawks, goshawks have the worst reputation. They are “things of death and difficulty: spooky, pale-eyed psychopaths that lived and killed in woodland thickets.” Macdonald, who has trained falcons and other types of hawks, recalls a time when a goshawk trainer offered her this advice:
If you want a well-behaved goshawk, you just have to do one thing. Give ’em the opportunity to kill things. Kill as much as possible. Murder sorts them out.
Macdonald found this to be rather off-putting at the time and was uninterested in taking on a goshawk until her father’s death. At that point, struggling to cope and trying to convince herself that all was normal, she started dreaming of hawks. In one of the many interesting lessons in this book, Macdonald gives us the roots of the words bereavement and raptor. “Bereavement” is an Old English word meaning to deprive, seize, rob. “Raptor” comes from the Latin rapere, also meaning seize, rob. Macdonald contacted a breeder to get a goshawk. In her words, “The hawk had caught me.”
As already noted, Macdonald had experience as a falconer and had read everything written on the topic. Yet, as she awaited her goshawk’s arrival, she found herself drawn toward a book that she and other falconers had always loathed: T.H. White’s The Goshawk. She recalls reading it when she was 8 years old and being horrified. The man clearly knew nothing about hawks and treated Gos, his goshawk, terribly. What the adult Macdonald finds in the story though is something quite different, something influenced by what she knows about T.H. White’s personal life. He was an outsider and carried great pain. His childhood had been abusive and he harbored a cruel streak that he was well aware of and managed; he was gay at a time when it was considered sick and criminal to be so. For White, the hawk represented his repressed dark desires, a kindred spirit. This was a chance to “civilize his perversity” in the form of a hawk. Too late, he realized his own cruelty toward Gos. Macdonald feels that this changed him as a man and influenced the creation of Merlin in The Once and Future King.
Macdonald, like White, retreated from the world with her hawk. While this is a necessity when training begins, for Macdonald it was also a sign of her deepening depression.
The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.
Training a hawk involves a process of becoming invisible so that the hawk becomes accustomed to the trainer’s presence. The trainer spends days in a quiet isolated room, shut off from the world, with the hawk on her arm, waiting for it to take food from the glove, then hop to her arm, then fly to her. This invisibility was welcome to Macdonald. The next steps of training, taking the hawk out into the community to get it accustomed to the larger world, were terrifying for Macdonald because she herself felt skittish, high-strung and paranoid. She was, in a strange way, becoming like a hawk. She was also falling behind on bills and about to lose her house and job.
Macdonald eventually finds a way to become human again. She goes to a doctor and begins to take anti-depressants. She prepares for a memorial service for her father and goes through some of his things; she ponders their relationship and their shared ability to watch and wait. She learns an important lesson from Mabel about the relationship between wildness and humanity:
I’ve learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not. And I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates it.
Too often, humans project some image onto an object or animal so as to serve their own ends. Victorian falconers felt they were empowered by their falcons and that their falcons were ennobled by contact with them. Nazis were keen falconers and cultivated the image of being ferocious warrior preying on the weak. While out with Mabel one day, Macdonald encounters an older couple taking a walk. When they discuss their mutual interest in a herd of deer seen nearby, the gentlemen laments the influx of immigrants that threaten the “Old England” that the deer represent to him. Macdonald is deeply disturbed by the man’s comments and thinks, “I wish we would not fight for landscapes that remind us of who we think we are…” Instead, fight “for landscapes buzzing and glowing with life in all its variousness.”
Macdonald’s openness about her grief and depression and the impact it had on her life for those many month is both brave and moving. Her ability to place her personal story within the context of falconry, which is probably mysterious to most readers (and is absolutely fascinating as Macdonald describes it), and simultaneously compare it to T.H. White’s life, is nothing short of artistry. I didn’t pick this book up out of any special interest in any of those topics. I just wanted to see what it was that had so many reviewers raving, and now I get it.
