And though abjuring cruelty was White’s Word, animals played a curious role in keeping it. Riding out with the Old Surrey and Burstow Hunt, White recorded the first time he saw a kill with distanced fascination. The fox was dug out of a drain where it had taken refuge and thrown to the hounds. They tore it to pieces while a circle of human onlookers ‘screeched them on’. The humans, White thought, were disgusting, their cries ‘tense, self-conscious, and hysterically animal’. But the hounds were not. ‘The savagery of the hounds,’ he wrote, ‘was deep-rooted and terrible, but rang true, so that it was not horrible like that of the human.’22
In this bloody scene, only one man escaped White’s revulsion: the huntsman, a red-faced, grave and gentlemanly figure who stood by the hounds and blew the mort on his hunting horn, the formal act of parting to commemorate the death of the fox. By some strange alchemy – his closeness to the pack, his expert command of them – the huntsman was not horrible. For White it was a moral magic trick, a way out of his conundrum. By skilfully training a hunting animal, by closely associating with it, by identifying with it, you might be allowed to experience all your vital, sincere desires, even your most bloodthirsty ones, in total innocence. You could be true to yourself.
When White dreamed of the hawk his false self was cracking under strain. He felt himself ‘boiling with a strange unrest’23; was increasingly out to shock and appal. Colleagues remember him turning up to parties, drunkenly announcing, ‘This party has no racial future. Parties should be like bird sanctuaries, people should come to them to mate.’24 He’d decided he hated people. He preferred animals. He was still drinking too much. He’d already turned on his former loves of foxhunting and flying. They were adulterated with death, and snobbery, and the desire to excel, and they were founded on poor motives: the fear of falling and the fear of failing. Gentility was a game he had played, but the reasons for playing it had been wrong. He was putting it aside. ‘I was like that unfortunate man in Thurber who wanted a packing case in which he could conceal himself,’25 he wrote, ‘and the solution seemed to lie in splendid isolation.’ He went fishing alone in Belmullet on the west coast of Ireland during the spring vacation. It made him more than ever certain of his course. From Belmullet he resigned his post at Stowe. ‘It needed courage,’ he told Potts, ‘because my analyst has only got me about one quarter of the way. I don’t know what my future is going to be, if I have a future.’ And then, ‘The barmaid is a complete write-off.’26
And there was a new terror. It was war. Everyone felt it drawing closer; an almost tangible thing, acrid as sweat after nerves. ‘We all stand in the shadow of a great fear,’27 the Oxford historian Denis Brogan had written two months earlier. ‘And if the angel of death is not yet abroad in the land, we can hear the beating of his wings – and see them too, filling our old familiar sky.’ White saw it too, and wrote that the war was the fault of the ‘masters of men, everywhere, who subconsciously thrust others into suffering in order to advance their own powers’.28
His fear of war meshed darkly with all his other fears. He’d long had nightmares of bombs and poison gas, of tunnels and flight and escape routes under the sea. The previous year he’d published Gone to Ground, a kind of mid-century Decameron in which foxhunters hiding in an underground bunker told each other stories as gas-bombs and incendiaries fell from the sky to obliterate the whole nervous, broken thing that was Civilisation. Civilisation was over. It was pointless. Modernity was bunk, and danger, and politics, and posturing, and it was going to lead to the end of everything. He needed to run. Perhaps he could escape to the past. It would be safe there. He started reading a book on falconry by Captain Gilbert Blaine.
It was there that White came across a story of a lost goshawk. ‘From being on the day on which she was lost as domesticated as a household parrot,’29 Blaine recorded, ‘she had reverted in a week to a feral state, and became thereafter a myth and legend in the neighbourhood.’ For White the sentence was an epiphany. The hawk was a myth. A legend. ‘There was a sentence which suddenly struck fire from the mind,’ he wrote.