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| Enraptured by a raptor... |
And found it to be a wonderful little book.
In the summer of 1936 White holed himself up in an old workman’s cottage in the woods, miles from civilization, with only a pet dog, a wireless radio, and some booze for company. And set to work training a goshawk (a male hawk) based on the methods of three archaic books on the subject, including one volume originally printed in 1619. These books explained that a hawk could not be forced to submit to training and the will of the falconer, you had to win its love through patience and persistence and closeness. Part of this process of acclimation included staying up for three straight days/nights (!) with the bird, so that it would perch on its master out of sheer exhaustion. Man and bird becoming one. Something akin to love.
White actually did this, and it’s all described wonderfully in The Goshawk, as only White can. His descriptions of the bird and its unpredictable moods and odd quirks are lovely. It's a snapshot into a world that feels almost alien, so far removed from 21st century life.
I knew essentially nothing of falconry and left with an understanding of how it might have been practiced by medieval falconers. Which is about as practical as learning how to master hoop rolling or leaded window installation.
What’s the point, and why read something like this? Fair question.
To which I would answer: Because there are difficult crafts worth pursuing for their own sake. That we might pour two months or more of training to tame a wild raptor to see if it can be done, and to have had that experience and sense of accomplishment. And might learn something about nature, human and animal, if we carefully observe the process.
The Goshawk is mainly focused on the training of the bird but does have a few wonderful asides and commentary. Little observations like this, of the end of the old ways of falconry:
It happened like this in the world. 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.
Or this, on writing and more broadly on any craft practiced well, which touched something in me. It’s something I love about writing, that if done well can achieve a sort of small and unassuming immortality:
To write something which was of enduring beauty, this was the ambition of every writer: as it was the ambition of the joiner and architect and the constructor of any kind. It was not the beauty but the endurance, for endurance was beautiful. It was also all that we could do. It was a consolation, even a high and positive joy, to make something true: some table, which, sat on, would not splinter or shatter. It was not for the constructor that the beauty was made, but for the thing itself. He would triumph to know that some contribution had been made: some sort of consoling contribution quite timeless and without relation to his own profit. Sometimes we knew, half tipsy or listening to music, that at the heart of some world there lay a chord to which vibrating gave reality. With its reality there was music and truth and the permanence of good workmanship. To give birth to this, with whatever male travail, was not only all that man could do: it was also all that eclipsed humanity of either sex could do: it was the human contribution to the universe. Absolutely bludgeoned by jazz and mechanical achievement, the artist yearned to discover permanence, some life of happy permanence which he by fixing could create to the satisfaction of after-people who also looked. This was it, as the poets realized, to be a mother of immortal song: To say Yes when it was, and No when it was: to make enduringly true that perhaps quite small occasional table off which subsequent generations could eat, without breaking it down: to help the timeless benevolence which should be that of this lonely and little race: to join the affection which had lasted between William the Conqueror and George VI. Wheelwrights, smiths, farmers, carpenters, and mothers of large families knew this.
Observations like these are what make White worth reading.
Is this book The Once and Future King? No, it’s not. The Goshawk is far less awesome in breath and scope, and not as artful. But I can’t really describe it as lesser. Just less ambitious. It’s a little slice of White’s life, utterly charming, a bit of sanity disconnected from the modern world, in between two savage world wars.
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| S&S protagonists: Occasionally lovable scumbags. |
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| This one escaped the pyre... |
Longtime REH fan/observer/contributor Brian Leno generously sent me a free copy of The Cimmerian journal, vol. 4, no. 4 (August 2007), along with a pair of REH postcards from the foundation. I would be hard-pressed to even begin to provide the level of Cross Plains coverage here on the blog that Brian offered in this issue. Brian took a trip to Cross Plains in 1967 at age 11 with his parents and two brothers, and his TC article “Down the Rabbit Hole” details his second trip, 40 years later, this time to Robert E. Howard Days 2007.
This article has stoked a greater fire in me, if that’s possible. Brian writes eloquently of an evening trip to Howard’s gravesite in Brownwood, which he experienced in the moonlight. Of a wild evening in the company of whiskey-drinking Howard scholars. Of a long car ride to Fort McKavett, location of a famous REH photo; of a day trip to Enchanted Rock, near Fredericksburg, where Howard first envisioned Cimmeria. And a culminating tour of the Howard house with Don Herron as a tour guide. The same Don Herron who edited The Dark Barbarian and The Barbaric Triumph. Pretty amazing. And much more besides, including a bus tour of Cross Plains, a visit to the famous icehouse where REH once boxed, panel sessions in the Cross Plains library, and the Foundation Awards, of which he was a nominee for the Venarium (emerging scholar) that year. Plus some other interesting asides. This was a great primer for the trip.
Thank you Brian, for the generous gift!
I finished my paper for the Glenn Lord Symposium, tentatively titled “Far countries of the mind: The frontier fantasy of Robert E. Howard.” I hope it’s worthy of the occasion. A little longer than the 1500-1800 word cap Jason Ray Carney imposed, but not much.
I’m planning to bring a few copies of Flame and Crimson and have heard from a couple folks who are attending with copies they want me to sign. I’ll gladly leave my mark. Maybe in blood.
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| A dream fulfilled... 40 years in the making. |
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| A "striking" cover (<=see what I did there?) |
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| Fuck you asshole... I'm here to write your sword-and-sorcery |
I am probably making a bigger deal out of this than the technology currently warrants, but GPT is only going to get better, and no one has answered the question of what we're to do when the machines can do everything better than we can.
One thing we could do is keep art off-limits.
