I have said some rude things about
memoirs. In a creative nonfiction workshop at Truman State, I said that while I
had respect for memoirists and had no doubt of their works’ literary quality, I
simply had no appetite for the genre myself. I couldn’t understand, I questioned my
professor and classmates (many of them ardent memoir fans and autobiographers
themselves) one why it was that people described the value of a good memoir in
terms of the volume of Kleenex used (usually something around a box-worth.) At
that time, I had little tolerance for other students’ belief that confession
was the supreme form of communication, instead putting my faith in a kind of
literary stoicism. There was place for feeling in writing, but it was better put
to use in understanding other people’s experiences or in researching a
challenging but beloved subject.
And I was led to my first
book-length memoir, Helen MacDonald’s H
is for Hawk, on somewhat false pretenses, or at least ignorance. A science
writing professor recommended the title to me, and even once I understood it was not
merely a dispassionate book about falconry but the story of how a woman copes
with her father’s loss, I thought that I would at least meet this story through
the comfortable distance of fiction, not of memoir.
However, once I realized in the
first chapter what I was reading, I had been entranced by MacDonald’s narrative
voice so completely that genre seemed beside the point. She begins
with a trip to the Brecklands (meaning ‘the broken lands’) as an escape from
her scholarly work in Cambridge. She comes upon a pond:
“The pond was a bomb crater, one of a line
dropped by a German bomber over Lakenheath in the war. It was a watery anomaly,
a pond in dunes, surrounded by thick tussocks of sand sedge many, many miles
from the sea. It was odd. But then, it’s very odd here, and walking the forest
you come across all sorts of things you don’t expect. Great tracts of reindeer
moss, for example: tiny stars and florets and inklings of an ancient flora
growing on exhausted land. Crisp underfoot in summer, the stuff is like a patch
of the arctic fallen into the world in the wrong place.”
MacDonald is adept at seeing how
human actions and feral forces interact to create wild landscapes. Her hawk is
at once domesticated and wild, the most difficult of raptors to train. She also excels in picking apart our romantic
and ultimately false-hearted attempts to preserve or recreate ‘pure nature,’
showing how our beliefs about what is authentic and what is not are changeable
and often misguided, unhelpful to human or creature. Instead, she favors
whatever actions allow natural beauty to persist, whether it be found on the
moors or in suburban Britain.
In
addition to exploring her natural landscape, the landscape of grief for her
father, and the landscape within the mind of her goshawk, Mabel, MacDonald also
takes a compassionate but unsparing look at the English writer T.H. White,
perhaps the only other author to write a memoir centered around goshawk
training, The Goshawk. White’s
struggles with his own demons guide MacDonald away from self-loathing, and
tutor her in how to be a more humane hawk-keeper.
The language of falconry is enticingly
archaic, with inputs from medieval English, French, and Turkish. A goshawk-keeper is an austringer. A hawk struggling against its jesses, hungry for
rabbits, is said to be in yarak. While she walks about the south of
Britain, wild-eyed goshawk on leather-gloved arm, as if a figure out of its
medieval or at least its Georgian past, MacDonald casts a shrewd eye on lazy
neo-nationalism that would label her more essentially English than a recently
arrived family from Algeria making their way in London or Manchester. After
talking companionably with an older couple about some nearby deer, one of the
few successful conversations with strangers she has managed in months,
MacDonald is horrified to hear the man say, “Isn’t it a relief that there’re
things still like that, a real bit of Old England still left, despite all these
immigrants coming in?”
As a University of Cambridge historian with a Scottish name—a
culture which at different times has carried the respect of landed gentry and
the indignity of backwoods rebels in the eyes of their English neighbors—MacDonald
recognizes the fluidity of identity and the dangers of labelling a skin tone,
animal-training hobby or an ancestry as more pure than the rest. Indeed,
goshawks were extirpated from England in the 19th century and now exist there only as immigrants from the mainland, where they hunt hares that were similarly
introduced. So were the deer.
* * *
My problem with memoirs, I realized
as I read H is for Hawk, had to do
not with the genre but with my expectations for what a book should do for me.
Should it only educate, titillate, and make me chuckle? Or was I willing, as I
once was when much younger before I knew I had the choice in the matter, to
invite a book into the more private circle of close confidants who share their
most difficult experiences, as well as their greatest joys? And not through the
angled mirror of fiction, the transparent guise of “I have this friend who did
this and that,” but in a simple and direct storytelling tone of catching up
with a friend after a long absence, eliminating as many illusions and artifices
as possible?
Even when I did not like memoirs,
the notion that autobiography is self-serving cut no ice with me. How much more
would we all strive for moral clarity and good service to others, if we knew
that we would at some point call ourselves to account in a novel-sized analysis
of our greatest choices? How much have we gained, in a mere documentary sense,
from the countless diarists of past ages? And in this case, how much damned
good nature writing would we lose if we refused to listen to the personal
narrative within which it exists, which created it?
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