The Goshawk (New York Review Books Classics)

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A firm, square copy, a little rubbed to extremities with very small white blemishes to spine and edges, but very good in the jacket with the slightest of toning to spine, ends a little creased, but bright. And then when the war came, as it surely would, and everything around him crumbled into ruin and anarchy, White would fly his goshawk. Unhappy, lonely, gay but unable to come out, he has left a teaching post to live a solitary life and seek personal redemption through mastering the bird.

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. The book is his non-fiction log of the training of the bird named Gos, using two dated manuals, one written in 1619, as his only guides.The final breaking of the bird’s will and its acceptance of its human master required, according to the ancient lore, 72 hours of sleeplessness, enforced by the also sleepless trainer, nudging the bird awake, until the bird finally relaxes it feathers, droops it wings, drops its head, and succumbs to sleep, even in the presence of its new human master. His friends have urged him to take up arms to fight the fascists, but he "would rather shoot rabbits than people".

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 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). 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.Of course, this leads to the natural question on why train a wild bird like a hawk, when it can do better on its own, why reduce this magnificent wild being to a human pet. 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. 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. I also liked the discussions of the weather, the descriptions of the English countryside and wildlife (very Colin Dann!

In a remarkable passage, Aldred watches a parent bird brings its chicks the decapitated head of a week-old robin: ‘The goshawk – suddenly enormous, cold and strangely mechanical – grips it by the end of its lifeless beak… It’s a pitiful sight made all the more poignant from knowing that the chick would have instinctively reached up to beg for food as the hawk’s shadow fell across it… The rest of the robin’s soft blue body lies to one side, attracting flies. 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).

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. 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. 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. 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.

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.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. 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. White would walk the countryside for miles with Gos on his arm, and even taught the bird to perch on the handle bars of the bicycle for longer trips. He is an extremely skilled and keen-eyed ornithologist, and the details of plumage, nestmaking, hunting and chick-rearing are compelling on their own terms, but this wouldn’t be a goshawk book without a little dark rapture, and Aldred obliges, marvelling at the ‘brooding power’ of the female and going head-over-heels for the ‘restless wild beauty’ of her mate: ‘There’s something shadowy, even blurred, that suggests transience, as if he dwells on the wavering edge of visible light. 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.