The Goshawk

By T.H. White and Marie Winn

This account of one man’s tempestuous relationship with the hawk he trained is at once a comedy of errors, a classic of nature writing, and one of the best glimpses into the world of falconry.

The predecessor to Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, T. H. White’s nature writing classic, The Goshawk, asks the age-old question: what is it that binds human beings to other animals? 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 he immediately wrote to Germany to acquire a young goshawk. Gos, as White named the bird, was ferocious and free, and White had no idea how to break him in beyond the ancient of depriving him of sleep. 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9781590175460

Reviews for The Goshawk

[emmakendon_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Well worth a read, but it's an uncomfortable one. Like a cross between The Old Man and the Sea and The Go-between! I found myself sympathising with White's stubbornness, admiring his perseverance and loving his account of fox-hunting. I was fascinated by the hawk himself, and his first bath is absolutely charming, beautifully - and I hope faithfully - described by White. The observations seem pretty sincere, even where they're in ignorance, so you learn with White. Gos' detestation of meat after all the early over-feeding is captivating, and his own human observations - including his reflections on 'The Taming of the Shrew' are illuminating too. I the end though, I wanted him to feel punished, humiliated, broken, wretched, not drinking champagne. Did "God" who made the lamb also make these clumsy, callous, victorious men? Well yes, he did. [I read "H s for Hawk" immediately after reading this.]

[dbsovereign · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Power over. But who really holds the power?

[bruce_deming_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very fun book. Autobiographical bit about the author training a Goshawk, probably for his own experience to aid in writing The Once and Future King with it's falconry and such.

[markm2315 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A very well written account of a half-assed attempt to man a Goshawk by the author of The Once and Future King. The author seems preoccupied, peculiar and cruel. I didn't really understand this book until I read Helen MacDonald's H is for Hawk (q.v.).

[breic-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fascinating. Brief, but perfectly written. An excellent companion to "H is for Hawk" or "The Rites of Autumn." > I had never trained a serious hawk before, nor met a living falconer, nor seen a hawk that had been trained. I had three books. One of them was by Gilbert Blaine, the second was a half-volume in the Badminton Library and the third was Bert’s Treatise of Hawks and Hawking, which had been printed in 1619.> There were two kinds of these raptors, the long- and the short-winged hawks. Long-winged hawks, whose first primary feather was on the whole the longest, were the "falcons", who were attended by falconers. Short-winged hawks, whose fourth primary was the longest, were the true "hawks", who were attended by austringers. Falcons flew high and stooped upon their quarry: hawks flew low, and slew by stealth. Gos was a chieftain among the latter.> Gos was suffering from a hunger trace. If a growing eyas was stinted in his food, say for a day or two, the lengthening feathers would add a weak section during those days. The stamina might be picked up again, and the feathers might continue to increase in length, healthy and strong; but always, until the next year's moult, the tell-tale weak section would lie like a semicircular slash across the full grown plume. … For this reason broken feathers had to be mended by a process called "imping". Most people who have been compelled to read Shakespeare for examinations will be familiar with the word. "Imp out our imperfections with your thought" or "imp out our drooping country's broken wing".> He was a Hittite, a worshipper of Moloch. He immolated victims, sacked cities, put virgins and children to the sword. He was never a shabby tiger. He was a Prussian officer in a pickelhaube, flashing a monocle, who sabred civilians when they crossed his path. He would have got on excellently with Attila, the most truculent of men. He was an Egyptian hieroglyph, a winged bull of Assyria. He was one of the lunatic dukes or cardinals in the Elizabethan plays of Webster.

[baswood · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

T H White - The GoshawkA misanthropic man meets a misanthropic bird so let battle commence. This is an autobiographical account of White's struggle to train a goshawk to be a companion and hunting bird. White was a man in touch with the natural world, who valued the friendship of animals rather than fellow human beings. He welcomed the challenge of training a goshawk, without any detailed knowledge of falconry, relying on his own observations and knowledge of the natural world. It is a rugged and curiously unemotional story, told straight from the falconer's glove. The book was published in 1951, however it feels much older than that. It was completed some fifteen years earlier and so represents the epoch just before the second world war. The style of writing feels even older as there are few references to the modernist styles of Joyce, Lawrence or Woolf. White muses on his fledgling career as a writer at the start of his story after two earlier attempts at science fiction:"But what an earth was the book to be about? It would be about the efforts of 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 a bird."The goshawk arrives trying to force its way out of a cloth covered box and the author's task has begun. After managing to settle the bird down he prepares to spend three days awake in order for the bird to tire itself into sleep. This seems to be a task that White has invented for himself and although he is right to say that there are no easy options, this course of action seems to be masochistic. Every time that White approached the bird it would 'bate': that is flap his wing enough to tumble off the perch and hang upside down fastened by his tress, finally he has success as the bird feels comfortable enough to sleep. The next six weeks are spent with the bird as almost a constant fixture on his gloved hand. White got used to doing most things with one hand using his free hand to write daily notes of his progress. The book is therefore a summary of these daily notes as Whites ambition is to achieve the five great milestones of falcon training: the moment when the bird first ate, the moment when it gave in to its master after the watch, the moment when it flew to his fist, the moment when it flew to him from a distance of 100 yards and the moment when it made its kill.The bird proves difficult to master and White finds himself taking one step forward and then almost immediately two steps back. It increases his natural pessimism and the situation in 1936 with the fascists in power in Germany and Italy increases his bitter mood:'In the end one did not need European civilisation, did not need power, did not need most of ones fellow men, who were saturated by both these: finally would not need oneself.'It becomes a fierce struggle between man and bird as to who would be master and this reader felt that they probably deserved each other. The strengths of the book are the details of this struggle and White's observations of the countryside around him. It is the height of summer, but there are many days of bad weather and this book is a gloomy struggle: relentless and unrelieving. I had enough of White and his goshawk long before the end of the book 3 stars.