Helen Macdonald’s ‘Vesper Flights’ Sees Wonder — and Refuge — in the Natural
World
By Parul Sehgal Updated Aug. 19, 2020
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“What’s that coming over the hill? A white, middle-class Englishman! A Lone
Enraptured Male! From Cambridge!”
That’s the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie, in 2008, memorably assailing the
stereotypical English nature writer. I wonder if he has ever recovered. Does he
hobble over the hill now, a bit sheepishly? That tourist, she depicts him, who
struts into the country, pen drawn, ready to “discover” the wilderness, to tame
it with his “civilized lyrical words.”
He’s a soft and obvious target, almost too easy to clown, but Jamie’s criticism
is subtler than it might first appear. It’s not his maleness that incriminates
him; it’s those two adjectives, so delicately damning — “lone, enraptured.”
We see “solitary contemplation as simply the correct way to engage with
nature,” Helen Macdonald writes in her new book, “Vesper Flights.” “But it is
always a political act, bringing freedom from the pressures of other minds,
other interpretations, other consciousnesses competing with your own.”
What’s that coming over the hill? The polymathic Macdonald — historian of
science, naturalist, poet, illustrator and one-time falcon breeder for the
royal family of the United Arab Emirates. Macdonald is the author of the
internationally best-selling memoir “H Is for Hawk” (2015), winner of the
Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction. She could be the twin sister of the Lone
Enraptured Male (“From Cambridge!” applies), but instead her work is an
antidote to so much romantic, reductive writing about the natural world as
pristine, secret, uninhabited — as a convenient blank canvas for the hero’s
journey of self-discovery.
Macdonald’s writing teems with other voices and perspectives, with her own
challenges to herself. It muddies any facile ideas about nature and the human,
and prods at how we pleat our prejudices, politics and desires into our notions
of the animal world. There’s nothing of the tourist or bystander in her
approach. She has been an amateur naturalist from girlhood — so bird-besotted
that she slept with her arms folded like wings. She grew up wandering forests,
collecting feathers, seeds and the skulls of small animals. Her bedroom
menagerie included an orphaned crow, a badger cub, a wounded jackdaw and a
whole nest of baby bullfinches.
Hers is a gritty, companionable intimacy with the wild. At one point, she
mentions a fox allergy discovered while “skinning a road-killed fox to turn
into a rug.”
Helen Macdonald, whose new collection of essays is “Vesper Flights.”Bill
Johnston Jr.
Macdonald describes her new book as a Wunderkammer, a cabinet of wonders that
is itself “concerned with the quality of wonder.” The book required moral
courage: “Some of the ways in which I try to talk about class, about privilege,
about climate change — I think I would have been too scared to have done that a
few years ago,” she has said. If such an admission feels surprising, given how
common are her critiques of Brexit and the mounting xenophobia in her country,
it’s wise to remember that she’s a writer with a preternatural drive for
self-concealment.
[ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of August. See the full
list. ]
As a lonely, often bullied child, she took to heart the instruction of T.H.
White’s Merlyn: “The best thing for being sad is to learn something.” She cared
for animals but she used them, too, she writes, to make herself disappear: “If
I looked hard enough at insects, or held my binoculars up to my eyes to bring
wild birds close, I found that by concentrating on the creature, I could make
myself go away.”
In “H Is for Hawk,” she took this talent to an extreme. Mourning her father,
she went into seclusion to train a goshawk — a singularly intimidating,
murderous bird that embodied everything Macdonald wanted to be: “solitary,
self-possessed, free from grief and numb to the hurts of human life.” They
hunted together, Macdonald snapping the necks of rabbits the hawk would
otherwise eat alive. She drifted deeper into the hawk’s world. She became a
feral thing.
The essays in “Vesper Flights,” several of which were first published in The
New York Times Magazine, are short, varied and highly edible, some only a page
or two long. Macdonald experiments with tempo and style, as if testing out
different altitudes and finding she can fly at just about any speed, in any
direction, with any aim she likes, so supple is her style. She writes about
migration patterns and storms, nests as a metaphor for the domestic and the
danger of using nature as metaphor at all. I was reminded of the goshawk, so
thickly plumed, so powerful that it can bring down a deer, and yet it weighs
only a few pounds. These are the very paradoxes of Macdonald’s prose — its
lightness and force.
The pieces carve similar paths. Macdonald examines how an animal or natural
phenomenon illuminates something in her own life, or on the national stage. An
essay on her childhood habit of collecting nests twines with her youthful
skepticism of domesticity, how nests render birds — exhilarating in their
freedom — suddenly so painfully vulnerable. A riff on hares winds into a
meditation on global warming. And then, in almost every essay, an unusual move:
She takes a step back to confront what it means to use the natural world as a
mirror, and how we might learn to appreciate the nonhuman in its own right.
That step back, that act of revision, of re-seeing, provides the book with its
chief animating drama: Macdonald getting things wrong. She cheerfully charts
her errors in judgment, her bungles, her myopia. “Vesper Flights” is a document
of learning to see, of growing past useful defenses of diversion and escape.
For its wry self-deprecation, “Vesper Flights” is a book thick with sorrow, an
elegy in the midst of the sixth great extinction underway. Macdonald weeps when
holding a falcon egg and discovering that if she makes a clucking noise, the
chick coiled within, ready to hatch, will respond. She weeps when she sees the
beloved meadow of her childhood mowed down to stubble. She weeps when a swan
walks out of a river and sits down beside her, haunch to haunch, like a large,
companionable dog. She weeps when she sees “Jurassic Park” on a movie screen
for the first time — “It was miraculous: a thing I’d seen representations of
since I was a child had come alive.”
It’s not mere grief, as if grief is ever simple. These are tears full of
surprise and recognition. At the sight of an eclipse, she weeps again: “I’m
tiny and huge all at once, as lonely and singular as I’ve ever felt, and as
merged and part of a crowd as it is possible to be. It is a shared, intensely
private experience.” What is this emotion but relief — to feel the intellect
bypassed, the odd, unsung pleasure of experiencing human life as small and
contingent — “continuous with everything on earth,” as Eula Biss has written.
It is awe, but no need to wait for an eclipse — Macdonald presents it
everywhere for the taking, in the underground networks of fungi, in fog, in
deer that “drift in and out of the trees like breathing.” It exists in birdsong
and the “cobra-strike” of a heron stabbing at a fish. It’s in the pages of this
book, in the consciousness of a writer admiring the world, so grateful for its
otherness.
Follow Parul Sehgal on Twitter: @parul_sehgal.
Vesper Flights: New and Collected Essays
By Helen Macdonald
261 pages. Grove Press. $27.
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