Falcon (22 page)

A peregrine falcon high over London in an illustration by Charles Tunnicliffe for Henry Williamson’s
The Peregrine’s Saga
(1923).

indistinguishable from a modern gyrfalcon as is the peregrine photographed at its eyrie in the 1920s from the peregrine photographed there today. Civilizations rise and fall, fashions change, but feathers remain the same. And so all falcons, past, present and future, are routinely represented as if they are a sin- gle bird. A symbolic type specimen. This is the ‘immortality’ that gives animals an extraordinary facility for the signification of history. Like an antique vase, the falcon gains value and meaning from the hands it has passed through. Today’s gyrfal- con is lauded because, in one sense, it’s the same bird that Henry
VIII
or Genghis Khan flew, the same bird that’s nested for millennia on ice-capped Arctic cliffs. And this is how Peterson’s falcon partakes of what Nietzsche described as the superhistor- ical spirit of the modern age.

Tunnicliffe’s peregrine has a name: but it is a family name; it too is immortal. For this is Chakcheck, Henry Williamson’s supreme icon of aristocratic romanticism, and the hero of his 1923 nature fable
The Peregrine’s Saga
, a tale far more disturbing than
Tarka the Otter
. The Chakcheck lineage is ancient, ‘older than the gods of man’ explains Williamson, establishing the falcon in a
longue durée
framework of essential Britishness. ‘A Chakcheck surveyed the Battle of Trafalgar’, he continues. ‘Another slew the Frenchman’s message-pigeons before Sedan. One was in Ypres before the first bombardment.’ And on he goes:

A Chakcheck was hunting the airways of the Two Rivers’s estuary as the ships went over the bar to join Drake’s fleet; centuries before, when Phoenicians first came to trade; long, long before, when moose roamed in the forest which stood where the Pebble Ridge of Westward Ho! now lies – the trees are long since gone under the sand, drowned by the sea.
⁴

And this falcon is
not
at home in the city over which it flies. Williamson was convinced that urban life led to social, mental and moral decay, and the gulf between his falcon and the modern city is vast. The bird is invisible to London’s inconse- quential denizens who move in ‘agitated streams’ below. It exists in the same symbolic register as those city landmarks upon which it chooses to rest: on the cross of St Paul’s Cathedral, or on another one-eyed British hero atop a column in Trafalgar Square, ‘landing on the admiral’s cocked hat with scratch of claws’.
⁵

Williamson’s peregrine is not Nietzschean solely in its his- torical transcendence. It is an analogue of the
Übermensch
, the ‘superior man’ who redeems Western civilization from its moral decadence and loss of vision. Any doubts about Williamson’s political affiliations are dispelled in the virulently anti-Semitic episode in which Chakcheck is trapped by a bird-netter, an ‘unshaven and insignificant individual, who worked for a mac- ulate Yiddish “birdfancier” in Whitechapel’.
⁶
The netter is frightened of this warlike
Übervogel
, of course; Chakcheck attacks him, escapes, and flies back into the pure skies.
The Peregrine’s Saga
clearly foreshadows Williamson’s later propa- ganda for the British Union of Fascists.

Williamson’s recruitment of the falcon as a fascist icon is a particularly distressing episode in that long-standing Romantic tradition of viewing the falcon as the spirit of a lost age – either of vital, primeval nature, or of glorious myth and heraldry, both of which have often been held up as contrastive and ultimately normative mirrors to society and the social mores of contem- porary America and Europe. Typically the falcon was viewed as the opposite of modern civilization, the scion of ageless mountains, not a citizen of modern streets. In 1942 American ornithologist Joseph Hickey wrote a scientific paper emphasizing

how important ‘wilderness’ was to peregrines. He thought that high cliffs isolated and protected them, raising the falcons away from ‘the progress of what passes for civilization below their cliffs’.
⁷
Like many other falcon-enthusiasts, Hickey was worried that urbanization might drive east-coast peregrines from their historic cliffs. Strange, then, that an ebullient Hickey had seen peregrines ‘all over’ New York City two years earlier. ‘I nearly got

‘Man has emerged from the shadows of antiquity with a peregrine on his wrist.’ The falcon as a signifier of history: David Jones’s 1948 water- colour drawing
The Lord of Venedotia
.

run over by Broadway traffic 2 weeks ago watching one for
ten
minutes working an area around 72 St’, he wrote, thrilled, to a friend.
⁸

skyscraper falcons

Yet Hickey’s apparently inconsistent views on falcons and cities were not so strange. For falcons do live in towns. Lugger falcons haunt village streets in Pakistan. Black shaheens raise their young on temples in southern India. Hickey himself reported that peregrines had nested on Salisbury Cathedral in the nine- teenth century. And he noted that American falcons sometimes nested on those modern cathedrals of commerce, skyscrapers.
⁹
Skyscrapers dominated the city skylines over which Hickey watched his falcons. Some were overtly futuristic – New York’s Chrysler and Empire State buildings glittered in concrete and steel. Other high-rises reworked classical styles to extraordinary dimensions. The steel skeleton of the Kodak Eastman building in Rochester, New York, for example, was faced with terracotta and topped with a hundred-foot aluminium tower. Bettmann’s photograph of Iroquois workmen on the Chrysler Building atop a eagle- or falcon-headed gargoyle projecting over the city far below is both a reminder of modernism’s fascination with prim- itivism and a literally concretized trope of the raptor’s vision and power. Atop the skyscraper, the falcon shares the carto- graphic view of the town planner, looking down on grids of streets and edifices of angled sheer stone and glass. As the writer David Nye explains:

the new vista glimpsed from the upper floors of these buildings was intentional, and it quickly became an important prerequisite for executives. By the 1920s the

Olympian perspective from their offices was immediately recognised as a visualisation of their power.
¹⁰

From this height the view was sublime. It evoked the same feel- ings of awe and transcendence in the viewer as did views from the edge of the Grand Canyon or from Rocky Mountain peaks over vistas of wild America. But there was a crucial difference between the sublime view from a skyscraper and the view from a clifftop or mountain: from the former, the totality of civiliza- tion, not nature, was laid out below. This was a second nature, the cityscape doubling for wilderness. Mankind had proved he was indeed lord of his own creation.

But something else was sharing those views. Real falcons. They naturalized these parallels between cliff and skyscraper, nature and city. Wintering American peregrines roosted on city high-rise ledges as if they were cliffs, tail-chased pigeons hell for leather through the skyscraper canyons of Manhattan’s finan- cial district. They shared their mountain views with top-floor executives; both were high above the hustle and mess of the urban jungle below. And because these giant buildings were concrete symbols of corporate and personal power, falcons

Construction workers on New York’s Chrysler Building in the 1940s take a cigarette break on a sublime steel perch.

choosing to roost or nest on them had enormous symbolic import. For one of nature’s most spectacular icons of vision and power had chosen
your
headquarters over those of your com- petitors to call home. If falcons forsook cliffs to nest on your building, you had clearly succeeded in creating an edifice as immortal as a mountain: your own Olympus. Capitalism seemed to have been granted its final approval from the falcons that chose to inhabit its most obvious symbols and whose predatory practices naturalized the aggressive competitiveness of capitalism.

The most famous city peregrines of the 1940s lived on a quite literally mountain-sized building: the headquarters of the Sun Life Assurance Company, a mind-numbingly massive edifice of pale granite rising over Montreal’s Dominion Square. In 1936 a pair of peregrines ‘laid claim’ to the Sun Life Building, where local falcon-enthusiast George Harper Hall watched them daily. For two years, he saw the falcons nesting attempts end in disaster; the female laid eggs in drainage channels where they were soon waterlogged. And so, in 1940, Hall sought per- mission from the Sun Life Assurance Company to assure the future of its peregrines. He arranged for two shallow wooden boxes filled with gravel to be placed over a drainage scupper on the twentieth floor. The falcons accepted the boxes, laid eggs in one and raised two young. Hall was delighted – even more so when the falcons bred again the following spring. But the com- pany had scheduled repairs on the building’s façade for May, and the falcons, busy raising their young on a diet of city pigeons, took umbrage and attacked the contractors. The work- men retreated and refused to work unless the birds were destroyed. Hall immediately took on the role of public relations representative for the falcons, and the furore over their fate was fanned not only by the local press but by the national media;