A few years ago I met a retired U2 pilot. He was tall, flinty and handsome and had just the right kind of deadly stillness you’d expect from a man who’d spent years flying at the edge of space in a dusty-black American spy plane. The geopolitical aspects of his role were truly disconcerting. But as a day job it was absurdly cool. At eighty thousand feet the world curves deep below you and the sky above is wet black ink. You’re wearing a spacesuit, confined to a cockpit the size of a bathtub, piloting a machine that first flew the year James Dean died. You cannot touch the world, just record it. You have no weapons; your only defence is height. But as I talked with this man what impressed me the most weren’t his deadpan tales of high adventure, the ‘incidents’ with Russian MiGs and so on, but his battle against boredom. The nine-hour solo missions. The twelve-hour solo missions. ‘Wasn’t that horrendous?’ I asked. ‘It could get a little lonely up there,’ he replied. But there was something about how he said it that made it sound a state still longed-for. And then he said something else. ‘I used to read,’ he said, unexpectedly, and with that his face changed, and his voice too: his deadpan Yeager drawl slipped, was replaced with a shy, childlike enthusiasm. ‘The Once and Future King. By T. H. White,’ he said. ‘Have you heard of him? He’s an English writer. It’s a great book. I used to take that up, read it on the way out and the way back.’
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Yes.’ Because this story struck me as extraordinary, and it still does. Once upon a time there was a man in a spacesuit in a secret reconnaissance plane reading The Once and Future King, that great historical epic, that comic, tragic, romantic retelling of the Arthurian legend that tussles with questions of war and aggression, and might, and right, and the matter of what a nation is or might be.
White is not a fashionable writer. When I read English at university his name wasn’t mentioned at all. But once upon a time White was very famous indeed. In 1938 he published a children’s book about the boyhood of King Arthur called The Sword in the Stone and it made his name and his fortune. Disney snapped up the rights and turned it into an animated cartoon. White went on to write The Once and Future King, which covered the rest of the Arthurian story, and that in turn inspired the stage-musical and film Camelot. White’s reworking of Arthurian legend was hugely influential: when you hear Kennedy’s White House described as Camelot, that is White – Jackie Kennedy quoted lines from the musical after her husband’s assassination. When you think of the wizard Merlin wearing a tall, peaked hat embroidered with stars, that is White too. And when I think of the U2 pilot up there reading a book about King Arthur, a book that had been wrenched strangely into a fairytale about American political life, I can’t help but think of a line written by the poet Marianne Moore: The cure for loneliness is solitude. And the solitude of the pilot in the spy-plane, seeing everything, touching nothing, reading The Once and Future King fifty thousand feet above the clouds – that makes my heart break, just a little, because of how lonely that is, and because of some things that have happened to me, and because T. H. White was one of the loneliest men alive.
The Goshawk is the book of a young man. It was written before White’s better-known works, and before he was famous. It ‘would be about the efforts of a second-rate philosopher’,10 he explained sadly, ‘who lived alone in a wood, being tired of most humans in any case, to train a person who was not human, but a bird’. When I read it again, years after that first childhood encounter, I saw more in it than bad falconry. I understood why people considered it a masterpiece. For White made falconry a metaphysical battle. Like Moby-Dick or The Old Man and the Sea, The Goshawk was a literary encounter between animal and man that reached back to Puritan traditions of spiritual contest: salvation as a stake to be won in a contest against God. That older, wiser me decided that White’s admissions of ignorance were brave rather than stupid. But I was still angry with him. First, because his hawk had suffered terribly as he tried to train it. And second, because his portrayal of falconry as a pitched battle between man and bird had hugely influenced our notions of what goshawks are and falconry is. Frankly, I hated what he had made of them. I didn’t think falconry was a war, and I knew hawks weren’t monsters. That small girl lying crossly on her bed was still cross.
That is what I thought as I sat there staring at the open book on my desk, four months after my father died. I read on, and as I did, there was a tiny jolt that was a realisation of why my eyes had spurned the book for weeks. I knew that part of why I was cross was that I felt, for the first time, that my urge to train a hawk was for reasons that weren’t entirely my own. Partly they were his.
4
Mr White
IT IS 16 March 1936. On the east side of the great Palladian palace that is Stowe School, jackdaws fuss in the sweet chestnut trees, water drips from the roof of the block of rooms that used to be the stables, and inside them, Mr White, Head of English, blankets bunched up against his shins, is balancing a notebook on his knees and writing fast in a small, clear hand. He wonders if this is the most important book he’s ever written. Not because it will make his fortune. But because it will save him.