KLASSEN ON BOOKS - April 2015 - By John Klassen (Reviews)

John Klassen

Helen Macdonald

Macdonald is an English writer, naturalist, and an affiliated research scholar at the University of Cambridge Department of History and Political Science. Her book H is for Hawk (2014) won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction and the Costa Book of the Year Award.  Earlier books include Shaler’s Fish (2001) and Falcon (2006).

H is for Hawk

This is an intriguing and fascinating book. It defies genre classification because it entails memoir, autobiography, history, the science of training hawks, environmentalism, sociology, psychology. The starting point is an exploration of grief and what deep loss means to a sense of self and identity.  Macdonald discovers that a search for seclusion, which seems a required defense, can militate against healing. She also learns how the experience of living is diminished through the loss of harmony and communication, with animals, nature and even landscapes.  Macdonald is among other things, a poet and she has a lyrical writing style; she describes people, events, landscapes, emotions with sharp, deft strokes; she has an eye and an ear for crisp, effective, new metaphors that don’t strain but ring true.

Macdonald’s father taught her patience: for him, as a boy, this involved plane-spotting and as an adult, a career in photojournalism; for Macdonald, as a child, it became reading and bird-watching and later a special fervor for training and running falcons.  Plunged into grief with the sudden death of her father, Macdonald decided to acquire and train a goshawk (that she names Mabel) to channel her energy into a solitary activity, and so to withdraw from society and convention. She also re-reads a book by T.H.White on training a goshawk, which he does poorly by all accounts, but it was a time in his life when White also shunned society and connections because of his own identity crisis stemming from a terrible childhood and repressed homosexuality.  Macdonald closely considers the social and personal circumstances of White’s often tortured life, the connections with a goshawk, and the parallels between their lives.

A fascinating element of the story is the connection that develops between Macdonald and Mabel. For Macdonald it is an intensely emotional one; she lives very closely with Mabel and comes to see and appreciate Mabel’s quirks and personality.  But Mabel is a wild animal and there is always an edge of not knowing whether this might be the day, because of diet or weather or weight or who-knows-what, that Mabel, despite all the love and attention and training, simply flies-off on a hunt and does not return. Everything could be over in a heartbeat, as it was for White when his hawk disappeared, and as it can be with a loved-one who dies suddenly and leaves only memories.  On the other side of the ledger, Macdonald’s experience with Mabel, an efficient, relentless, predator brings “a sharp, wordless comprehension of my own mortality. Yes, I will die.”

Macdonald’s sensitivity extends to landscapes; the physical ones and the cultural ones and how easily they can become petrified or manipulated: “I think of all the complicating histories that landscapes have, and how easy it is to wipe them away, put easier, safer histories in their place….I wish that we would not fight for landscapes that remind us of who we think we are. I wish we would fight, instead, for landscapes buzzing and glowing with life in all its variousness.”

The title does not convey what this book attempts as a complex, engaging exploration of life and the vicissitudes that can bedevil it, but also the harmonies that enhance it and make it worth living.  To my mind, it does so wonderfully

William Maxwell: So Long, See You Tomorrow

William Maxwell (1908-2000) was an American editor, novelist, short story writer, essayist, children’s author, and memoirist. He was fiction editor for The New Yorker from 1936 to 1975.  Perhaps his best known novel is So Long, See You Tomorrow.  Michael Ondaatje included this in his list of 12 classics from the 20th century. Ondaatje’s blurb on the cover of the book says, "This is one of the great books of our age. It is the subtlest of miniatures that contains our deepest sorrows and truths and love--all caught in a clear, simple style in perfect brushstrokes." 

There is a very brief, passing reference to William Maxwell in Macdonald’s book, H is for Hawk.
This was enough to include an earlier review of So Long, See You Tomorrow.

So Long, See You Tomorrow
The novel is set in small-town illinois in the early 1920s. A farmer (Lloyd Wilson) is murdered one morning in his barn and it appears that the culprit was another farmer (Clarence Smith) who had been  Wilson's best friend until it came out that after 12 years of friendship Wilson and Smith's wife (Fern) began an affair. This is the precipitate event from which flows the unravelling of these families, these lives. 

Smith's body and shotgun were found in a quarry shortly after the murder. The coroner's verdict was death by gunshot wound. The belief was suicide in the remorse of losing his family and killing his erstwhile friend. By the time of the murder both families had been torn apart: the Smiths through divorce and bankruptcy and Clarence's increasing depression, the Wilson's through separation of husband and wife and sons and daughters, and Marie Wilson would not grant a divorce so Lloyd and Fern could never be together.

The novel recounts these lives within the framework of the life and family of the narrator, now an old man, through the death of his mother in the 1918 epidemic, his father remarrying, the family's move to Chicago for a new job and new life for his family. As a child, our narrator had no connection with either the Smiths or the Wilsons but he did have a brief friendship with Cletus, son of Clarence Smith, after the divorce and before the murder of Lloyd Wilson and the death of Clarence Smith.  Fifty years later, the narrator reconstructs events in his own search for the truth of the past and to assuage a guilt from that earlier time.

Ah....but what is the truth? As our narrator muses, "What we, or at any rate I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw."

Ondaatje is right about the "clear simple style in perfect brushstrokes" as Maxwell gently and  unobtrusively presents the myriad and conflicting emotions that swirl around faded love and desire, lust and love, abuse, denial, the confusion and hurt of children as collateral damage in the malestrom of adult relations and turmoil, the meaning of young friendships, the inability to ever really know another person in their thoughts and desires, the social strictures of the time, and the meaning of 'truth' in a specific incident and time and how that reverberates through life.

The ambiguity of memory permeates the novel, even to its conclusion. The narrator and Cletus do not stay friends but the narrator is long tormented by the thought that, "When enough time has passed he will know that I haven't told anybody...". Told what? That Cletus in fact was the murderer of a man he once liked very much but whom he blamed for ruining his family? And Clarence, in his depression, then took his own life to cover-up his son's deed? Or was it the lesser crime of Cletus simply being happy that his abusive father was dead? But why would this be a secret that Fern would have worried about a 15-year old boy telling?

Our narrator ends wondering what happened to Cletus in his life and, "...whether the series of events that started with the murder of Lloyd Wilson--whether all that finally began to seem less real, more like something he dreamed, so that instead of being stuck there he could go on and by the grace of God lead his own life, undestroyed by what was not his doing.". What was not his doing? The murder or the inexorable events that precipitated it in the mind of a teenage boy?

Ambiguities, uncertainties, unknowabilities, memory as a construct, the 'truth' of an event unfixed....such is life...such is the play Maxwell presented so well here.  

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