Non solo l’animale capiva i miei sentimenti guardandomi in faccia, ma ero io in grado di individuare nella sua almeno due distinti stati d’animo… L’intera fisionomia mutava, come quella di un essere umano.

Cockerell was a connoisseur, a bibliophile, and the Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, of which he famously said, "I found it a pigsty; I turned it into a palace. Una battaglia che non può che terminare con la reciproca accettazione di uomo e animale, abbisognanti l'uno dell'altro per sopravvivere. Macdonald's brilliance is to look into White's entire life, his homosexuality, his traumatic upbringing, and the sadistic tendencies he kept rigorously in check, to produce a psychosexual analysis that would have delighted Freud. I also loved the passages where White describes how his hawk regards his love or kindness with suspicion, because the hawk knows instinctively that humans show kindness to it because they want to conquer its will and enslave it.In larger doses this would perhaps grow wearisome – but we are soon back to crisp delineations of feather and flight, and patient logbook chronicles of comings and goings at the nest. He had held the glove with one talon, the bare forefinger with the other, so tightly that only one method of escape had been open to me, and that had been to tear him in half. Even as "I was stroking a murderer, a savage," the bigger world around him is full of mounting violence, and of politics that pursue the kill; he concludes, "we still lived in the Middle Ages. A particular sentence 'the bird reverted to a feral state' seized his imagination, and, White later wrote 'A longing came to my mind that I should be able to do this myself.

H. White's memoir of trying to train a goshawk were it not for Helen Macdonald's wonderful analysis in H is for Hawk, her recent account of training her own hawk.Si mette in giuoco la propria mente con un’altra mente con il massimo dell’impegno e della tensione intellettuale. After all, it had been quite right of him to resist to the last: to recognize, long after a falcon would have given in (you could train two or three falcons in the time of one goshawk), that I was an unnatural force. Tra un uomo e un pennuto, ok, ma sempre sentimento è - per quanto l'autore si affanni a ribadire che nella falconeria il sentimento non conta, per lui è solo psicologia, ma dal suo stesso racconto emerge tutt'altro. Of course, the two parts are not clearly split, but are interwoven together like the warp and weft which make a fabric.

The other thing that's clear from the beginning is that White himself is very sad in years 1936 and 1937, the period that he's writing about. Of course The Goshawk, first published in 1951, is timely because Macdonald wrote so perceptively about it in H is for Hawk. I was a badger too, in my snug cottage that lay in the badger's wood: and when the war-world came to tear me apart with whoops and halloas, the young sow and myself would be quits. Owing to its intimate revelations of his personality, White was reluctant to publish the work, but acquiesced after his publisher happened upon the manuscript during a house visit in 1949.The journey takes him from an encounter with a stuffed Goshawk in a glass case, through travels into supposed Goshawk territories in Britain, to Berlin – where he finds the bird at ease in the city. 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. All focus is on the lived experience, finger poised on the camera button, waiting, watching, listening. He did not know he was doing so, and perhaps it may have been due to her, but it seems, in tragedy, that innocence is not enough. FIRST EDITION, INSCRIBED BY WHITE: PERHAPS THE BEST POSSIBLE ASSOCIATION COPY, WITH A WARM AND LENGTHY INSCRIPTION TO HIS GOOD FRIEND SYDNEY COCKERELL — CONNOISEUR, BIBLIOPHILE, AND DIRECTOR OF THE FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM.