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Far Away and Long Ago - Autobiography of His Youth

by William Henry Hudson

3.88 of 5 stars 3.88 · rating details · 112 ratings · 19 reviews

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Pomona Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Hardcover , 314 pages

Published November 4th 2008 by Pomona Press (first published 1918)

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Mar 11, 2012 none rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: memoir

Montaigne asked, "Why is it not lawful for every one to draw himself with a pen, as he did with a crayon?' Virginia Woolf said, "..when we attempt the task, the pen falls from our finger; it is a matter of profound, mysterious, and overwhelming difficulty."

Succeeding where few have, William Henry Hudson (1841-1922) has captured the passions of his early boyhood--his intense love of his mother, of nature, of all wildness, and of sport. In his eightieth year, he remained a boy at heart, able to re Montaigne asked, "Why is it not lawful for every one to draw himself with a pen, as he did with a crayon?' Virginia Woolf said, "..when we attempt the task, the pen falls from our finger; it is a matter of profound, mysterious, and overwhelming difficulty."

Succeeding where few have, William Henry Hudson (1841-1922) has captured the passions of his early boyhood--his intense love of his mother, of nature, of all wildness, and of sport. In his eightieth year, he remained a boy at heart, able to revive the past mentally, and picture it in its true, fresh, and original sensations.

Hudson was born in Argentina on the outskirts of Buenos Ayres, the son of American settlers. It is this changing time from casting off the Spanish "yoke" to revolutionary outbreaks and anarchy and finally the absolute power of Dictator Rosas that becomes his narrative.

His appreciation of the natural world is communicated with fullness and depth of feeling. From the ombu tree, poplar and black acacia trees growing on the sides of the moat, to the detail of each bird, serpent, and bat that populated the district, his recall and passion of the experience is contagious. Just two or three miles from his home, he observed bats tolerant of the day content to hitch themselves to the twig of a tree under a cluster of leaves until night came.

He ventured out everyday, walking or riding horseback to find species new to him. On one such excursion he spotted a black snake, the only one of its kind in the land, a "melaninized individual" of the species. It crawled lazily over his shoe into its lair. The sight of a magnificent sunset was sometimes "more than I could endure and made me wish to hide away."

Hudson confesses to an animistic faculty, "lost to civilized man", a sense of the supernatural in natural things. He distinguishes between the time when the joy in all natural things was purely physical, but then the sensations experienced on a moonlite night among the trees became animated...as if, albeit silent and unseen, a being was "divining every thought" in his mind.

When the author was fourteen, he traveled across country the twenty miles to Buenos Ayres. He observed the Saladero, the killing grounds of fat cattle, horses and sheep. The ground was red with blood, the putrified flesh stank beyond endurance, and the men observed the same ritual of throat cutting from centuries past. He contracted the dreaded typhus from the pestilential city, and for three weeks his life was in grave danger.

Upon his recovery, he celebrated his fifteenth birthday, and said, "I had only just become conscious." The author, naturalist, and ornithologist appears to this reader to have been fully aware and appreciative of every moment of his long and productive life. Highly Recommended!

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Apr 12, 2012 Ann Klefstad rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The strangeness of the world is never-ending, particularly in the memoirs of those who have long ago left us. Hudson evokes a bird-world in South America that even he laments as lost, from his burrow in the smokey London of his exile. He knew what was happening in his homeland, the spread of efficient agriculture that doomed wetlands and their denizens. And this was over a century ago. The beauty and oddity of this memoir just absolves it of the terrible pain it causes. That seemed to have been ...more

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Dec 14, 2007 Sally rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommends it for: nature lovers

The author grew up in Argentina in the late 1800's and he describes a fantastical natural world, at least to those of us who grew up in the tame North American forests. The ostriches, the vaqueros, the cattle, the birds. As a boy he falls in love with birds and, although he studies and appreciates all of nature, the birds are his first love. Despite having no formal education, a few tutors helping him and his brothers with the basics, he has the most lyrical and moving way of writing. Very excel ...more

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Apr 13, 2015 Wanda rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Wonderful book.
I didn't rate it four stars because of a curious reticence on the author's part about his own family--in a memoir of his childhood. Although he tells us the names of neighbors, their personalities and biographies, he never tells us the names of his brothers and sisters, and doesn't even bother to mention that he has any or how many until well into the narrative, and we learn very little or nothing at all about them. The same for his parents. He scarcely mentions his father and on Wonderful book.
I didn't rate it four stars because of a curious reticence on the author's part about his own family--in a memoir of his childhood. Although he tells us the names of neighbors, their personalities and biographies, he never tells us the names of his brothers and sisters, and doesn't even bother to mention that he has any or how many until well into the narrative, and we learn very little or nothing at all about them. The same for his parents. He scarcely mentions his father and only discusses his mother in any detail in the last chapter. Weird.
That aside, it was an exceptional book that acquainted me with a curious and wonderful world that I had no idea had ever existed, and when the last page was turned and the story done, I hated to close the book and let it go.
To fully appreciate the memoir, I had to do a little outside reading. Thus I discovered that, Hudson, born in 1841 to American parents who had emigrated to Argentina, was writing about that country as it was in the late 1840s and early 1850s. The land that was to become Argentina had become independent of Spain a quarter of a century before, but wars among the provinces had been ongoing, as well as a conflict with Chile, which intended to seize Patagonia, and promoted rebellions by and against the native populations to attempt to achieve that end. It's all very complicated to one unfamiliar with the history.
Nonetheless, it bears on Hudson's story, especially in explaining why all the estancias, or landed estates...ranches...haciendas...seemed to be in a state of decline, relics of a better and more peaceful and prosperous time, why the books in his household, some hundreds of them, were mostly a century old. That's because the Argentine, as well as the rest of South America, under Spanish rule, had been more peaceful and prosperous, and once the colonial rulers were expelled, anarchy and warfare became the norm.
To Hudson as a little boy awakening to a beautiful natural world, all this was an only rarely troubling aspect of his existence. But the economic retrogression that the political turmoil engendered actually helped preserve a little while longer the beautiful natural world that he so enjoyed and has told us about in his charming remembrance of things past.
But do not think that Hudson sugar coats his memories. He is utterly honest about the life and the casual cruelty of the world he grew up in, whether he's describing the way of killing cattle or the way of killing men. It was a brutal, violent world without mercy or tenderness, except within the family, and within his own boyish heart as he grew to appreciate and understand nature and the lives of the wild creatures that instilled in him a profound joy in living and happiness in the sheer awareness of being alive. ...more

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Aug 29, 2014 Frederic Hunter rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

At the age of 15, suffering from a difficult and painful malady at his parents’ estancia on the Argentine pampas, W. H. Hudson did not think he would see 20. Instead he saw 80. LONG AGO AND FAR AWAY is a memoir he wrote of his boyhood. Hudson was a superlative naturalist whose interest in plants and animals, especially birds, started early. According to what he tells us, laid up late in life for a period of weeks, he kept having memories of his childhood. What extraordinary recall! He wrote the At the age of 15, suffering from a difficult and painful malady at his parents’ estancia on the Argentine pampas, W. H. Hudson did not think he would see 20. Instead he saw 80. LONG AGO AND FAR AWAY is a memoir he wrote of his boyhood. Hudson was a superlative naturalist whose interest in plants and animals, especially birds, started early. According to what he tells us, laid up late in life for a period of weeks, he kept having memories of his childhood. What extraordinary recall! He wrote the memories down and organized them and so his memoir was born.
It is a very fine memoir, well written, of a boyhood lived at a special time: the middle years of the 19th century. The pampas, still largely undeveloped, teemed with the cattle, horses and sheep raised on the estancias and was regularly visited by flocks of birds too numerous to count. We learn about very young Hudson’s investigating birds, mastering the ways of a junior gaucho, becoming a marksman, interacting with itinerant teachers and eventually overstretching himself while alone at 15, moving cattle all day long in the midst of a pelting rainstorm. That exertion broke his health and caused the end of his childhood.
I read LONG AGO AND FAR AWAY because I’m contemplating a trip to Argentina and wanted to read something about it. I’m glad I read it.
However, aspects of the book almost drive the reader crazy. Hudson never bothers to tell us the names of his parents nor of his siblings, apparently three brothers and maybe two sisters. He makes little effort to orient the reader in time. The reader doesn’t learn much of what’s going on in Argentina; that’s pardonable since Hudson at eight or nine probably didn’t know much either. But there’s a chapter when the family is threatened by a band of defeated soldiers and the reader knows nothing of what the fighting was all about. Moreover, Hudson’s father – of whom we never get a satisfactory picture – eventually loses the family estancia, apparently through negligence. There’s never any detail about how that came to be or what happened to the family members about whom the book has made us care.

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Feb 09, 2014 JoséMaría BlancoWhite rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: memoirs , hispanoamerica

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 symp 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. ...more

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Aug 13, 2013 Robbie Manson rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Charming. Quite similar to Durrell's My Family and Other Animals.

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May 06, 2012 Christopher rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It's a little difficult to expand on my title for this review.

The author suffered an acute illness in later life and, during this time, his childhood memories came back to him with a clarity that is a cause of envy for those of us with the usual hotch potch of muddied memories of our best times.

He then took the opportunity to record these memories.

Mr Hudson gives an insight into a world distant both in geography and time.

Describing many different aspects of his childhood - from the vast pampas t ...more

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Jan 14, 2015 Julia rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The author's love for and understanding of nature beutifully undergirds this biography of his boyhood.

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May 07, 2015 Marcelo Ezagui added it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Everybody

Recommended to Marcelo by: A naturlist teacher

Excellent

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Jul 15, 2015 Daniel rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Aug 28, 2014 Michael de Percy rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-reviewed

It took me a while to get into this book but once I started I managed to keep up the momentum. The story about the story was interesting but it is difficult to comprehend Hudson's lot until he deals with Darwinism and his own inclinations as a naturalist. Delivered as the story of one's boyhood, it is not until after finishing the book and reading the preface, one reflects and Hudson's genius comes to light.

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Jun 29, 2013 Tara Bush rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I'm not sure I can actually mark this book as read... it's more like I gave up. This may be the most boring book I've ever attempted to read. I made it about half way through, waiting for something of importance to actually happen, but nothing did. The author is a pompous bigot who tells little snippets of his childhood that mostly focus on naming the tress and birds that he observed. Snooze-o-rama.

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Apr 22, 2015 Eileen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: travel , non-fiction

Engaging book about growing up on the pampas of Argentina in the 1800s. A shy, introverted youngster, the author spent long hours observing and communing with nature even as a quite young child. He expresses a love of the earth and its ways at a time in history when it was left almost entirely to itself. Fascinating view into a lost way of life.

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Mar 18, 2014 Flora rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The author writes of a childhood (up to teenage)in the pampas of Argentina. It is a bit musty in tone but the book was published in the 50s. I enjoyed reading about plants, birds and animals that have long since been pushed out by farms and ranching. It made me realize how much was lost.

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Mar 25, 2011 W. Addison rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Hudson is not one of my favorites but this was part of research for my own writing and was referenced by Hemmingway as logic example and dialogue. Story had no direction for the first few chapters.

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Aug 29, 2015 Bo rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2015

This is what good writing is.

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Aug 10, 2015 Lori Michaelson rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Interesting naturalist memoirs

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Apr 26, 2012 Bob Young rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Wonderful writing about growing up in Argentina in the 19th century...early years of a nature lover...

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About William Henry Hudson

William Henry Hudson was an author, naturalist and ornithologist. He was born in the Quilmes Partido in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, where he is considered to belong to the national literature as Guillermo Enrique Hudson, the Spanish version of his name. He spent his youth studying the local flora and fauna and observing both natural and human dramas on what was then a lawless frontier, publi ...more

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