Gripped with grief
‘H Is for Hawk’ tells story of how author’s falcon training helped after her father’s death
Don’t ask me to boil Helen Macdonald’s absorbing memoir “H Is for Hawk” down to a single quotation — but if I had to, it might be this one:
“The hawk had caught me. It was never the other way around.”
“H Is for Hawk,” the story of how Macdonald trained and bonded with a goshawk while grieving her father’s death, won both the Costa and Samuel Johnson awards and made many year’s-best lists. The paperback tour for “Hawk” brings the English writer to Milwaukee’s Schlitz Audubon Nature Center for an April 12 event.
In both the quality of its sentences and the distinctiveness of its contents, “Hawk” deserves the accolades.
The unexpected death of her father, photographer Alisdair Macdonald, and his public memorial service months later bracket the book. The elder Macdonald had also been Helen’s mentor and companion on many outdoor adventures.
Her preoccupation with falcons began as a child; she jokes, alluding to “Hamlet,” that she “could tell a hawk from a handsaw always.” At age 12, she saw her first trained goshawk and begged her parents unsuccessfully for one. She read everything she could and, later,
H Is for Hawk. worked in a raptor center and trained and flew falcons.
But after her father’s death she dreamed repeatedly of goshawks, larger raptors than the pretty peregrines she had flown.
Macdonald is a writer and scholar who has taught English and the history of science. Her account of training the goshawk Mabel, gripping in itself, is also a close reading of three sources: Mabel, Macdonald herself (particularly her grieving process) and the book “The Goshawk” (1951) by T.H. White, better known as author of the Arthurian fantasy “The Once and Future King.” Like Macdonald, White retreated from the world to spend months training a goshawk; throughout “Hawk,” Macdonald analyzes and reacts to White’s book, while also reflecting on the sorrows that plagued White.
After Mabel becomes accustomed to returning to Macdonald’s gloved fist, the writer thinks of the daemons bonded to people in Philip Pullman’s “The Golden Compass”: “I felt incomplete unless the hawk was sitting on my hand; we were parts of each other.” She also discovers things not written in the aristocratic, male-dominated falconry literature: Mabel will play with her, batting a crumpled ball of paper around.
Yet she regularly reminds readers that Mabel is a bird of prey: “Thirty ounces of death in a feathered jacket,” Macdonald writes. She recalls what a veteran falconer once told her: “If you want a wellbehaved goshawk, you
IF YOU GO
Helen Macdonald will speak at 7 p.m. April 12 at the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center, 1111 E. Brown Deer Road, Bayside. Also, Nicco and Sky Walker, resident SANC hawks, will show their stuff. Tickets are $21 or $27; they include either a paperback copy of “H Is for Hawk” or a hardcover copy of Macdonald’s poetry collection “Shaler’s Fish.” $5 from each ticket will go to SANC. The event is nearly sold out. For tickets, visit brownpaper tickets.com/event/2477246.
just have to do one thing: Give ’em the opportunity to kill things. Kill as much as possible.”
The woman who went into the wild world halfcrazed with grief does return, despite her scars, to the human one, with a new sense of equilibrium. She remembers something she learned from a great Wisconsin naturalist: “Aldo Leopold once wrote that falconry was a balancing act between wild and tame — not just in the hawk, but inside the heart and mind of the falconer.”