Far Away and Long Ago by W. H. Hudson

First published: 1918

Type of work: Autobiography

Type of plot: Reminiscence and nature notes

Time of work: Mid-nineteenth century

Locale: Argentina

Principal Personages:

• W. H. Hudson, a sensitive, imaginative boy
• Mr. Hudson, his father
• Mrs. Hudson, his mother
• Dona Pascuala, a neighbor
• Don Evaristo Penalva, another neighbor

Critique:

William Henry Hudson wrote his autobiography while in bed during a six-weeks’ illness. On the second day of his illness, beginning to have a clear and vivid vision of his childhood, he decided to write out the picture. The vision stayed with him, and, between bouts of fever and sleep, he continued to record the impressions he had of his early life on the pampas of Argentina. The result was aptly named FAR AWAY AND LONG AGO, for he was an old man writing of his life between the years of three and sixteen. This book, revealing Hudson as a naturalist, a poet, and a mystic, is written in the beautiful and limpid prose of which he was a master.

The Story:

W. H. Hudson’s father was a colonist in South America, engaged in raising cattle, running a store, and being so amiable to everyone that he finally lost almost all his possessions. The mother was a stanchly religious New Englander, known in the whole section south of Buenos Aires as a good woman and kind friend. Hudson’s parents loved people so well that their house became a regular stopping place for all travelers.

Even in childhood Hudson was interested in people of all sorts and in every kind of bird, animal, and insect. Though there were many children in the family, he himself was almost a solitary wanderer. At one time his mother, who shared his intense love of nature, was worried because he often stood alone and transfixed. Finally she followed him, only to find he was watching a bird on its nest; she was satisfied that he was not eccentric but that he merely wanted to be by himself.

Hudson believed that in little children the sense of smell was as important to their pleasure as sight and sound. To him, as far back as he could remember, the smells of the pampas grasses and flowers, of the cattle and horses, of the garlic and cumin-seed seasoning, of the Saladero or slaughtering grounds were as vivid as the coloring of the parakeets and flamingos, the feel of bristly thistleweed, or the lovely sounds of flocks of pipits.

The house in which he was born was called “The Twenty-five Ombu Trees” because that many huge, century-old Ombu trees around the house made the place a landmark on the open pampas. There was also one other tree on the place—an unnamed variety—which blossomed so freely and deliciously each November that neighbors, smelling the blossoms on the wind, would come to beg a branch to perfume their own houses.

When the family moved, Hudson found around his second home many other kinds of trees, black acacia, Lombardy poplar, red willow, peach, pear. These he came to love by smell, sight, and touch when he was still too small to wander far from the house.

There were birds—hawks, cowbirds, doves, pigeons, eagles, pipits—and animals, domestic and wild, to entertain him. There were thousands of rats nearby that had to be smoked out periodically. One day, while the men were pouring deadly fumes down the rat holes, Hudson was watching. Suddenly he saw a small armadillo trying to escape by furiously digging a new hole. He caught hold of its scaly tail and tried to pull the animal backwards. The armadillo paid no attention to him but kept on digging, kicking the dirt back into his face. Before long Hudson found himself pulled to the ground as he clung stubbornly to the animal’s tail. The contest was small-boy pride against animal desperation, and it was not until his arm had been pulled down into the hole that Hudson let go.

He found snakes fascinating, particularly a colony that lived under the flooring of the house. As he lay in bed, he could hear them moving around, and he often wondered whether they would coil around his legs if he slid to the floor. Until he fell asleep, he could hear their conversations go on, conversations that were a series of sighing sounds, then twenty or thirty ticks, then the sighing sounds again.

When he was six years old, he was given a pony and allowed to roam at will over the pampas. His interests in nature increased, as did his acquaintance with new species.

He also learned to know people better because he learned that his neighbors were invariably kind to a little boy who wanted only to find out what new birds were around.

One place he visited often was Los Alamos, near a stream that was a delight to him because of the running water, the earthly odors, and the numbers of birds. Dona Pascuala lived at Los Alamos; she was old and wrinkled, her hair white, and her face as brown as the cigar she had constantly in her mouth. She was always interested in the Hudsons. One day she came to tell them that rain which had fallen for weeks would surely stop soon. Her saint was St. Anthony, and she had always treated him well with candles, flowers, and devotion. And this was how he treated her! She thought it was time he learned how so much water felt; she had tied a string to his legs and let him down the well with his head in the water, and there he would stay until the rain stopped.

The Hudsons’ nearest neighbors were the Royds, the husband a handsome Englishman who wanted to make his fortune from cheese made of sheep’s milk, and the wife a huge, indolent woman, a native of good birth. They had colored servants and two daughters. Their younger daughter was, Hudson thought, the most beautiful child he had ever seen. Her constant companion was a child of her own age, a mulatita, as dark as the white child was fair, with features so refined that no on supposed her father had been anything but a handsome Englishman. The family and servants lived happily together, but the native servants thought it below them to milk sheep and the cheese project fell through. Then Mr. Royd went to Buenos Aires and slit his throat. His wife considered her meeting with him in her girlhood the great calamity of her life.

As he grew older, Hudson came to know Don Evaristo Penalva, who was regarded as the grand old man of the plains. At first it was a little difficult for Hudson to reconcile his religious teachings with Don Evaristo’s home life, but he realized that all the countryside thought well of the old man who, when called upon, always responded in time of need. The thing that worried young Hudson was that Don Evaristo had six wives all living happily together.

About the time Hudson was fifteen, he caught typhus fever while on a visit to Buenos Aires, an unsanitary town on a plain with no water to be had other than the silted river water bought by the bucketful at the door. While he was ill, he began to realize that he might have to leave all the pleasures of childhood behind him. Before he could reason with himself that he could keep his reactions to nature and make them the basis of his life’s work, he was brought down with a case of rheumatic fever so acute that the doctors despaired of his life. The disease left him with a permanently weak heart. He went through a bad time trying to straighten out his religious beliefs until an older brother came back from England and brought him up-to-date on the course of religion vs. science, the battle being fought over Darwin’s ORIGIN OF SPECIES. Then he worked out a philosophy of life which convinced him that he was a mystic. That belief served to make life easier for a man who did not know whether he had one or fifty years left to him.

Further Critical Evaluation of the Work:

In his autobiography FAR AWAY AND LONG AGO, W. H. Hudson details, with the practiced eye of a naturalist, the pungent but lyrical memories of his childhood and adolescence up to the age of sixteen. Although Hudson wrote most of the book when he was in his middle seventies, he recalled with nearly photographic precision the impressions of places, scenes in nature—above all, the living creatures—that were the meaningful parts of his youthful days in Argentina. Previously he had published in Gentleman’s Magazine (1886) material from his first chapter, and much of the second and third chapters appeared earlier in English Review (1912); the rest of the book he composed during a six-week period while he was confined to a hospital bed. Yet his memories of “long ago” are not, as one might expect, the ruminations of an infirm old man; rather, they are presented with childlike freshness and wonder, the delight that comes from discovering the “root of things.”

In spite of Hudson’s remarkable powers of capturing the sharpest details of his past life, FAR AWAY AND LONG AGO is not entirely reliable as autobiography. Because the author was unduly sensitive about revealing his true age, the book is purposefully vague about dates, including birthdates; Hudson alters the chronology of some historical events (for example, material concerning the tyrant Rosas); and he distorts some time-sequences, so that the reader has only a general, imprecise notion of time itself. In places, Hudson’s evasive method works to his artistic advantage. Because the passage of time is made to seem unimportant, the action of the book is filtered through the author’s consciousness, as though in dream or reverie. Events in his life are treated without concern for exact chronology, and thus are made to appear more significant than they should be, or more trivial. For example, Hudson’s first memories are not those fixed on his parents or siblings, but on his dog Pechicho; reflecting upon another beloved dog from his early childhood, Caesar, he writes: “Nothing in the past I can remember so well.” Hudson has little to say about his father, except that he was reputed to be an amiable man, and he discusses his mother at some length only in the last chapter, commenting on the subject of her death. Also in this final chapter, “Loss and Gain,” he mentions for the first significant time his older brother, whose influence upon his scientific education must have been crucial. Other curious—and psychologically meaningful—attitudes become apparent from Hudson’s distortion of chronology and his reticence about describing his family life. He remembers with astonishing precision natural phenomena: birds, snakes, trees, flowers, small and large animals, storms and other convulsions of the weather. But his descriptions of people tend to be caricatures: Constair “Lovair,” indelibly recalled for his strangeness; the ferocious beggars of Buenos Aires; Mr. Trigg, who “didn’t own a box”; the dandy Don Anastacio Buenavida; or the patriarch Don Evaristo Penalva, who married six wives yet was “a virtuous man.” Or Hudson remembers scenes of human violence: a young officer murdered by his soldiers, his throat cut; Mr. Royd, who commits suicide by slashing his throat; the image is repeated in scenes describing the slaughter of cattle, also with their throats cut by the sadistic gauchos.

Although the author treats people with scientific coolness or reculsion, remembering mostly their cruelties or foibles, he remembers nature with unaffected warmth. To the boy, the city is frightening, but the open grassland is beautiful and protective. With poetic luminosity Hudson describes the pampas, “level as a billiard-table”; the Ombu trees, Lombardy poplars, mulberries, and the peach trees in vivid bloom; the small creatures of the plains—rats, columbine snakes, vipers, vizcachas (rodents); flowers, especially those in early spring; and, above all, his beloved birds—the scarlet fly catchers, plovers, purple cow-birds, many others. Hudson is at one with nature, even with the least appealing creatures, such as the black snakes. In the most significant chapter of the book, “A Boy’s Animism,” he declares his faith, with almost religious fervor, in nature as a spiritual force. Like Wordsworth, Hudson sees in nature not only beauty but also a presence of the divine. Through his art he recaptures his childlike sense of awe in worship of this “far away” but remembered presence.