Grove Koger
As I expand and update When the Going Was Good, I’m posting revised entries from the first edition. Today’s deals with a late masterpiece by W.H. Hudson, who died August 18, 1922.
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Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life (London: Dent, 1918)
William Henry Hudson had the extraordinarily good fortune to spend his childhood years in a part of the world little despoiled by “progress.” His father was English and his mother American, but the family had settled in the Argentine countryside a few miles from Buenos Aires by the time William was born in 1841.
Hudson left Argentina for England in 1874, and he would never return—in a literal sense. Yet many years later, in 1916, as he lay seriously ill, he found that he “had that far, that forgotten past with [him] again.” The resulting written account appeared two years later, and along with the 1904 novel Green Mansions, has remained Hudson’s most popular work.
Hudson provides vivid descriptions of the two family farms, “The Twenty-five Ombú Trees” and “The Acacias,” both appropriately named, as trees had excited a natural strain of animism in him from early childhood. Far Away and Long Ago is rich in observations of other plants (especially striking are his descriptions of the ten-foot thistles that covered the plains in “thistle years”) but richer still in portraits of his parents, of gauchos, and particularly of the Hudsons’ eccentric neighbors. A moving chapter is devoted to the old dog Caesar, whose death Hudson styled the “most important event of my childhood.” If, as novelist L.P. Hartley once observed, the past is a foreign country, Far Away and Long Ago is the best evocation in English of that bright but distant land.
Most editions of Hudson’s memoir come with useful introductions, including my 1972 Dent / Everyman Paperback, which includes one by John Galsworthy that originally appeared in the first edition. The cover drawing, by the way, is by Mark Peppé.
Similar books by Hudson include Idle Days in Patagonia (1893), Nature in Downland (1900), Hampshire Days (1903), The Land’s End (1908), Afoot in England (1909), and A Shepherd’s Life (1910). And for further information on Hudson, I suggest you read John T. Frederick, William Henry Hudson (Twayne, 1972); Richard E. Haymaker, From Pampas to Hedgerows and Downs: A Study of W.H. Hudson (Bookman Associates, 1954); and Ruth Tomalin, W.H. Hudson (Witherby, 1954).
The portrait of Hudson, by an unknown photographer, dates from 1915 and is in the public domain in the United States, while the map dates from approximately the same time. Both are reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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