The Goshawk (2 page)

But as the end of his adventure with Gos approached, something unexpected happened that made White change the plan for his book. (I will not spoil the story by telling you what it was.) And though White continued writing for a while—the book was almost finished—it was with half a heart. Finally he tucked the manuscript away somewhere and began writing another book, one in which his goshawk experiences would appear in a different form. That second book was
The Sword in the Stone
, T. H. White's tale for all ages about the childhood of King Arthur—a hunting expedition with a goshawk is in the first scene. The first of a trilogy of books based on Malory's
Morte d'Arthur
, it was published in 1938.
The Goshawk
didn't find its way into print until 1951. In a postscript written before its belated publication, White explained why he had decided to put the book aside thirteen years earlier. But he chose not to reveal the improbable behind-the-scenes story of how it finally came to be published.

It happened in 1949 on the island Alderney, the third largest of the Channel Islands. White had moved there three years earlier, not coincidentally because it was a tax haven and his career was prospering. As Sylvia Townsend Warner related:

Shortly thereafter Howard wrote from London that Cape wanted to publish the book. “[I]t's so good that it certainly must be printed,” he declared.

At first White refused to allow
The Goshawk
to be published. In a return letter to Howard he wrote:

But White had qualified his refusal by saying, “If Bunny says that the Hawk book is really good, I will consent to publishing it. I have not read it since I wrote it, long before the war.”

Bunny was White's friend David Garnett, a notable critic and novelist of the time, who responded by sending a written opinion of the book to its would-be publisher:

White's fear of being scorned by the falconry world was rooted in some reality. Many who practice the arcane sport today look down on
The Goshawk
as a period piece. I asked my only acquaintance in the falconry world what he thought of White's book. An Ohio biologist who hunts with a red-tailed hawk, John Blakeman wrote that he hadn't actually read it. But he added, “Since the book's publication a great deal has been learned about how to train and hunt this species (the goshawk). I seriously doubt the falconry community will be interested.”

White had anticipated such a response from “real” falconers. “What right had a cowardly recluse who fled from his fellow men ... to write about these fabulous creatures?” he imagined they'd say about his book. He had his defense ready: “[M]ine was not a falconer's book at all. It would be a learner's book only; in the last resort, a writer's book, by one who might have tried in vain to be a falconer.”

When Cape continued to press publication, White wrote: “I am heartbroken that you want to publish it.” Nevertheless, in the same letter he offered to help by providing pictures for the book if they were needed. After that, no one worried much about the broken heart.

When I first read
The Goshawk
I pronounced it “gosh hawk,” having never heard the word spoken out loud. Many years later I became a bird-watcher, and one winter a huge
Accipiter gentilis
paid a rare visit to Central Park. That bird was a female, and therefore it was considerably bigger than T. H. White's antagonist. Female hawks and falcons are almost always substantially bigger than males. Listening to my fellow bird-watchers that day I learned that the first syllable of the word rhymes with “Las” as in Las Vegas, not with “wash.” By calling his hawk Gos, White had given his readers a clue to pronunciation I hadn't caught.

My previous literary goshawk was the one in
The Sword in the Stone
, once a cult book for a subset of adolescents still clinging to childhood but finding Winnie-the-Pooh a bit precious. So, it appears, did T. H. White. He wrote to L. J. Potts just before
The Sword in the Stone
was published, “What I fear is that it has feeble traces of A. A. Milne.” The traces are feeble indeed, as White knew well—his writing has little of the sentimentality or nostalgia of Milne's Pooh books. “I think it's one of my better books,” he continued, adding bitterly: “so probably nobody else will.” White was right on the first count and wrong on the second. The book was taken on by the American Book-of-the-Month Club, ensuring a sale of 150,000 copies. Even though he immediately bought a Jaguar (the sports car, not the beast), his chances at continuing life as a starving artist were now effectively ruined.

The Sword in the Stone
was subsequently made into a full-length Walt Disney cartoon and finally, in 1958, it was incorporated into
The Once and Future King
. Composed of all White's previously published Arthurian tales which were especially re-edited for this edition (to the original book's considerable disadvantage, in the case of
The Sword in the Stone
), the compendium became a best seller and a few years later was bought by Lerner and Lowe as the basis of their hugely successful Broadway musical
Camelot
. Years after White's death the book's influence continued in a way that would have staggered its author. J. K. Rowling revealed to an interviewer that the boy named Wart, whose education as the future King Arthur is described in
The Sword in the Stone
, was Harry Potter's “spiritual ancestor.” Indeed, the parallels between White's fantasy/adventure/school story and the Harry Potter opus are many.

In spite of T. H. White's once and future successes, his warning in an early chapter of
The Goshawk
proved prescient. There he had idly noted, perhaps to forestall its eventuality, “the folly of thinking that anybody would want to buy a book about mere birds.” In the end it was far more than a bird story, including among its gifts to readers a history and description of medieval hawk management, an incisive dissertation on Shakespeare's use of falconry (especially in
The Taming of the Shrew
) and much natural history observation that goes beyond the ornithological (my favorite was about maggots). Nevertheless, in 1951 White's book may have appeared to be a mere bird book to prospective buyers. It enjoyed only modest sales and then went out of print.

Over the years, however,
The Goshawk
's underground reputation grew. Like the great books of Joseph Mitchell that were unavailable for decades until a canny publisher obtained the author's permission (after years of resistance) and republished them in a single volume, T. H. White's hawk story accumulated a passionate coterie of devotees that continued to grow long after its author's death. When library copies were lost or stolen, and several brief paperback reprints did not go back to press, the book became available only to readers willing to pay high prices at antiquarian bookstores or, in recent years, used-book sites on the Internet. Now, to our good fortune, everyone can read it.

In all works of art, larger meanings attach to the particular stories they tell. So too in this book. For parents, for married couples, for partners of all sorts, even for nations,
The Goshawk
will provoke thoughts about the inevitable power struggles of human relations. For writers especially, this simple story about a man training a hawk provides a model for a less self-pitying approach to life. Instead of regretting the hours they must spend at their labors, obliged, as Milton wrote, “to scorn delights and live laborious days,” all who slave at their art might choose to take an alternate view, one White conceived during his arduous days and nights with Gos: Why not “live laborious days for their delights?” he inquires. Though his story was one of unending labor and almost unendurable frustration, White's joy in the process allowed him to create an occasion of delight for his readers.

—MARIE WINN

[1]
The word “pash” appears in modern dictionaries only as a slang abbreviation for the noun passion, but it can be found in the appropriate sense in the
Oxford English Dictionary
: “To hurl or throw [something] violently so as to either break it against something or smash something with it.” Pash as a verb fell into obsolescence before the end of the seventeenth century. White may have come across it in
Piers Ploughman
, a fourteenth-century book he surely read which contains the line cited in the
OED
: “I'll pash him o'er the face.”

WHEN I first saw him he was a round thing like a clothes basket covered with sacking. But he was tumultuous and frightening, repulsive in the same way as snakes are frightening to people who do not know them, or dangerous as the sudden movement of a toad by the door step when one goes out at night with a lantern into the dew. The sacking had been sewn with string, and he was bumping against it from underneath: bump, bump, bump, incessantly, with more than a hint of lunacy. The basket pulsed like a big heart in fever. It gave out weird cries of protest, hysterical, terrified, but furious and authoritative. It would have eaten anybody alive.

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. The guttural voices, the unbirdlike den he was taken to, the scaly hands which bound him, the second basket, the smell and noise of the motor car, the unbearable, measured clamour of the aircraft which bounced those skidding talons on the untrustworthy woven floor all the way to England: heat, fear, noise, hunger, the reverse of nature: with these to stomach, terrified, but still nobly and madly defiant, the eyas goshawk had arrived at my small cottage in his accursed basket—a wild and adolescent creature whose father and mother in eagles' nests had fed him with bloody meat still quivering with life, a foreigner from far black pine slopes, where a bundle of precipitous sticks and some white droppings, with a few bones and feathers splashed over the tree foot, had been to him the ancestral heritage. He was born to fly, sloping sideways, free among the verdure of that Teutonic upland, to murder with his fierce feet and to consume with that curved Persian beak, who now hopped up and down in the clothes basket with a kind of imperious precocity, the impatience of a spoiled but noble heir apparent to the Holy Roman Empire.

I picked up the clothes basket in a gingerly way and carried it to the barn. The workman's cottage which I lived in had been built under Queen Victoria, with barn and pigsty and bakehouse, and it had once been inhabited by a gamekeeper. There in the wood, long ago when Englishmen lived their own sports, instead of competing at games with tedious abstract tennis bats and cricket sticks and golfing mallets as they do today, the keeper who lived in the cottage had reared his pheasants. There was no wire netting in his days, and the windows of the low barn were enclosed with wooden slats, nailed criss-cross, a diamond lattice work. I put Gos down in the barn, in his basket, and was splitting a rabbit's head to get at the brain, when two friends whose sad employment I had lately followed came to take me to a public house for the last time. The hawk came out of the basket already strong on the wing, beat up to the rafters, while his master, armed with two pairs of leather gloves on each hand, cowered near the floor—and then there was no more time. I had intended to put a pair of jesses on him at once, but he flew up before I had pulled myself together: and it was only when the great bundle of young feathers was perching on the rafters that one could see the jesses already on him. Jesses were what they called the thongs about his feet. Jessed but not belled, perched at the top of the old gamekeeper's loft, baleful and extraordinary, I left the goshawk to settle down: while we three went out to the public house for a kind of last supper, at which none was more impatient of translation than the departing guest.

They brought me back at about eleven o'clock, and by midnight I had given them drink and wished them fortune. They were good people, so far as their race went, for they were among the few in it who had warm hearts, but I was glad to see them go: glad to shake off with them the last of an old human life, and to turn to the cobwebby outhouse where Gos and a new destiny sat together in contrary arrogance.