W. H. Hudson, Argentina, and the New England Tradition

Abstract

W illiam Henry Hudson (1841-1922) is probably best known in North America as the author of Green Mansions (1904), set in the Venezuelan/Guyana jungle, a novel whose mixture of fantasy and adventure has tended to overshadow Hudson's main concern with the fate of nature, as symbolized by the memorable protagonist, Rima, the spirit of the forest. Hudson, however, who has generally been categorized as one of los viajeros ingleses of the River Plate region,' has made a valuable contribution to both Argentine and English literature. Best known in Argentina, where he was born in 1841, for his contribution to gauchesque costumbrismo in novels like The Purple Land (1885) and the short stories of El Ombz (1902), Hudson has also established a reputation as a nature essayist in Englandhe arrived in 1874 and died there in 1922where he earned a reputation for his collections of out-of-door pieces like Hampshire Days (1903), Afoot in England (1909), A Shepherd's Life (1910), etc. Although Hudson was born in Buenos Aires province, both his parents were New Englanders. Daniel Hudson (from Massachusetts) and Caroline Kimble (from Maine), despite the opposition of strict parents, fled to Boston to be married in 1823. Subject to the continuing influence of disapproving, austere, inflexible and dogmatic families, the young couple finally escaped the oppressive New England atmosphere by emigrating to Argentina in 1833. Their reasons for departing were probably a mixture of the aforementioned family opposition and economics. They chose Argentina because of the rosy picture of the Southern continent painted by a friend George Hartz on one of his visits back to New England. There is much meat here for the literary and biographical detective,2 but the end product was a move to Quilmes in 1833 where they bought a little ranch, Los 25 Ombties. It must have been quite a culture shock for the simple, strong-minded Daniel and his family to be thrust into the life of lawless post-Independence Argentina. (Daniel, by the way, was later to be a staunch supporter and admirer of the law and order dictator, Rosas.) The Puritan character of Caroline was tempered by a gentleness and affection that was to have a lasting influence on the young Argentine-born William (1841), the victim of an early heart ailment. The religious influence, compounded by his illness and forced solitude, was mitigated by a love and appreciation of nature. This proximity to death left in Hudson an almost Unamunian attitude to the mystery of life and immortality, which was heightened by the premature loss of his mother in 1859. With her death the religious force in him dissipated gradually into some kind of natureworship or pantheism, through which he ought to escape his tragic sentiment of life, trying to sublimate the pain by work and study and observation of his beloved birds and animalsall preparation for his future role as a nature writer. In his autobiography, FarAway and Long Ago (1918), written at the end of his life from the vantage point of old age, he underscores the importance of his early years on the pampas and the influence of his New England mother and the old religion of his upbringing. It is very significant that in his autobiography, which deals with what might be called his metaphysical or philosophical evolution, he describes not his whole life but only his childhood and its formative force-important factors also from the literary point of view, not only for Hudson but for his New