Helen Macdonald: “We suffer in silence for the most part”

Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk is the kind of book that tears you asunder and then stitches you back together. It exquisitely weaves together three genres; a grief memoir about Macdonald losing her beloved father to a heart attack, the training of a goshawk called Mabel and the ‘shadow biography’ of TH White, author of The Goshawk. Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book Award, H is for Hawk was anointed a ‘soaring triumph’ and a ‘breathtaking’ book on its release in 2015. Here, Macdonald talks about ‘the archaeology of grief’, the influence of Shakespeare and why parrots are vindictive. Excerpts from an interview with Nandini Nair.

You write about ‘seeking safety in not being seen’. How do you cope with festivals like this?
I was quite nervous around people. I am an introvert. But I realise people are actually quite lovely. I have become an extrovert. It has come as a bit of a shock! Who would have thought it? This is the busiest festival I have been to. The crowds are absolutely enormous. But everybody is listening so hard. It is astonishing. I love it.

What brought about this change?
This book is about loss. Loss makes you feel very alone. Everybody goes through it. I have been meeting people on my tour. I have talked to hundreds of people of their own dark times and bereavements and you realise we are all in it together. We all go through it. We suffer in silence for the most part. It made me feel we are a bunch of messy humans, it just made me love people a lot more. It has been very humbling.

Tell me about the letters you have received from readers.
It is terrible, I haven’t replied to so many of them. There is this huge box of letters in my room. People enclose works of art of birds of prey. I have had very elderly men write to me, which I find very moving. They were interested; some even knew TH White when they were young.

I believe you also receive letters from new mothers.
Yes, this is extraordinary. I have never had children. I have had letters from young mothers, and it has just knocked me over. They say, ‘Your book reminded me what it is like to be locked in a house with a newborn baby. There is this thing that is incredibly precious. It can’t tell me what it wants. Everything you are doing for it, you think you are doing wrong. And the whole world shrinks down to this strange being. It is just like you and the hawk in the book.’ I didn’t expect that, it is amazing.

‘Patience is my only weapon,’ you write. Patience derived from patio, meaning to suffer. How did Mabel teach you patience?
In falconry when you have this wild, fresh hawk on your gloved hand, you have to go into this meditative state. You have to kind of disappear. Time is suspended. Time does strange things. And that kind of patience is very easy to do. It is a willed loss of self. Training a hawk is all about that. I didn’t want to feel like me anymore. I didn’t want to feel my grief. That is a great allure but also a danger. There was a time with the bird when I felt more like a bird than a person, and that numbed me to emotional pain. But it also made me very depressed. I had to crawl back into the place of humans.

What that year taught me about patience is that if you wait long enough, you can incorporate all sorts of pains, hurts and bad things into who you are and it becomes bearable. You just have to wait. It is very hard to do. But everyone has to do it.

Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but you are very different from who I imagined.
No, no, people have told me this. People think I will be this intense nightmare woman crying all the time. That was then. But my parents gave me the tools to be happy. And now I am happy as anything. Sorry to disappoint everyone.

Is owning a parrot a sign of your happy self?
My friends tell me that my parrot is more emotionally healthy than a goshawk. It is small, green and very cuddly. But I always have to say to people, no. If you upset a goshawk, it just gets upset with you. But if you upset a parrot it remembers, and gets vindictive. I have had more scars and bites from my parrot than my hawk.

Give me an example of your parrot being vindictive. What is his name?
Birdoole. It is ridiculous, I know.

So my mum and parrot got along pretty well. My mum had this lentil salad with vinaigrette on it. My mum offered him a lentil. My parrot loves lentils. So he came up and grabbed it. He was disgusted by the vinaigrette and spat it out. She made this terrible mistake of picking it up and offering it to him again. And he took it and couldn’t believe it was still disgusting. And bit her really hard. And ever since then, he just hates my mother. They do take offence, whereas goshawks are very simple birds.

But I do love my parrot. Not because it bit my mother. I do get along very well with her. One of the things people say to me is, ‘Why don’t you talk more about your mother and brother in the book?’ I feel very strongly that they had their own stories to tell. And I didn’t want to intrude on them.

I hope the book doesn’t make me sound like this incredibly self-centred person. But when you are grieving, you are self-obsessed. Because you don’t know who you are any more. It is a struggle to become someone who can deal with this new reality.

Many books have been written on grief. What were you reading at the time?
When I was writing this, I didn’t read any literary books at all. They were too influential. They messed with my voice. And I discovered that the only books I wanted to listen to or read were detective novels and Shakespeare, particularly radio plays of Shakespeare. Sometimes I laugh about it that the drive of the book might have been stolen from Agatha Christie. And there are definitely parts where I get very flowery and I am pretty sure that I was listening to Richard II when I was writing it. They were kind of weird influences.

Hawks catch their prey and eat them alive. You write about putting rabbits out of their misery. It is all rather extreme…
I was in an extreme place at that time. I’d probably find it much harder to do that now. Then, the world was made of bones, dust, dark and light and it was very clear to me that what I was doing was the only thing to do. It made me realise that our lives are very, very short. It can be taken away at any time.

You trained a goshawk, known to be the toughest bird to train. How hard is it to train words? To control them and then give them flight?
That is a really good one. I’ve never been asked that before.

There were two registers that I was using. There was the kind of writing that I used very simply, for what was happening with my father when I saw him in the hospital, at the funeral. Just very simple, strong moments. And they were very hard to write. Sometimes it would take a week to get a paragraph right. I wanted to be true to my emotions. And that can be hard, especially when you are writing about hard things.

The stuff with the hawk was very easy to write. It was like automatically writing poetry. It just poured onto the page. When I read it, I realised that those two forms were much more similar than I had imagined.

Writing a book is a fascinating thing. You lose control and struggle to get it back. It is all-consuming. Quite a lot of the time you don’t know what you are doing.

booksH is for HawkHelen MacdonaldRichard IIThe Goshawk