Customer Reviews

Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life (L.Y.T.)

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"When I hear people say they have not found the world and life so agreeable or interesting as to be in love with it...I am apt to think they have never been properly alive nor seen with clear vision the world they think so meanly of...".

The author says it all. I picked up this book in a little Gloucester bookshop a few years ago, but I've finally just had a chance to read it in its entirety. What a Joy! It reminded me that the stresses and travails we encounter in our daily lives are so trivial at best, compared to the world we pass by everyday. The author's recollection of his boyhood on the Argentinian pampas and his adventures with snakes and birds and vizcachas made his words come alive, and I felt I was there with him. A treasure and one I would read to kids who have the gift of spirit in them, and to remind them that all of what he wrote is disappearing.

We badly need to have this book once more available. Full of insights into the meaning of human life in nature, it also chronicles the passing of a virgin landscape in S.America with the coming of a predatory civilization. Hudson came of age with little schooling but endless hours of observing life (especially birds) and reading. His friends in England, where he went in his 30s, often wondered why he was habitually sad. This profound reminiscence explains why.

Hudson is a wonderful writer, and this is a first hand account of his childhood in gaucho land, with invaluable glimpses of Buenos Aires at the setting of Rosas dictatorship and after.

Written in 1918 by this Englishman who tells about his life as a boy in the Argentine Pampas. Filled with intense melancholy -but at the same time joy- that those recollections produce in his memory. Whoever reads this biographical account cannot but adore this man.

He achieves the difficult task of making us readers see nature, wildlife, and human beings with the same eyes as his young and avid ones. He talks a lot about plants and birds, and this to me is the only minus I can find, since I sympathize with his love for nature but cannot go along with his terminology. He describes the people he met and that left in him a greater impact. His family, the daily chores at home and in the fields; but above all we get to feel like a child, to see that far away wilderness with the innocence and vulnerability of a little kid.

However, the book wouldn't have been more than a picturesque story of an English child in the Pampas if it wasn't for the last 3 or 4 chapters. The death of his mother, his illness and the sentence inflicted by the doctors of a short life, the angst of knowing that his beloved nature, trees, birds and all to be lost soon, produces a struggle of faith against the pullings of new-come Darwinism and its partisans. A struggle that millions must have gone through -as the author admits- but I can't think that anybody could describe it so beautifully.

How different those two men must have been: Darwin and Hudson. "Darwin, writing in praise of the gaucho in his Voyage of a Naturalist, says that if a gaucho cuts your throat he does it like a gentleman: even as a small boy I knew better- that he did his business rather like a hellish creature reveling in his cruelty."

Hudson's parents were Protestant Christians, true believers. Not all his brothers inherited the parents' faith: the desire for immortality is not universal, as he mentions. But W.H.Hudson's desire was enough to grant him the faith he so much struggled to retain in the passage from childhood to manhood.

An inspiring story, humbling and beautifully told.

I read Green Mansions on Jan 6, 1946, and was blown away and all these many years later I treasure the enjoyment and appreciation which I had for that book. When I became aware that Hudson had written a history of his early life, I was glad to locate and read a copy of this work, first published in 1918 (though the copy I read was published in 1925). Hudson is primarily a naturalist, and I have no particular interest in nature; yet this account of the first fifteen years of Hudson's life growing up in Argentina I found, after a time, increasingly interesting. The final chapters especially caught me up. His sensitivity to birds, and all the fauna he found in his area of Argentina, as well as his astute observations of the people among whom he and his family lived, are of great interest. This book fittingly memorializes the boyhood years (1841 to 1856) of a master of English prose.