Disillusioned by the surrender of the nation’s symbolic heartland to suburban sprawl or the depredations of touring parties, dismayed by the nation’s increasingly democratic tenor, convinced that Britain was an ever more foreign land, an infl uential minority of writers, like Morton, hunted out forgotten corners of the kingdom where its traditions might still be found, or else, like the Pleydells, looked abroad. Latin America was not only a popular setting in which responses to these crises of cultural identity might be attempted, it was also a key locus through which the underlying notion that the countryside was a repository of authentic national values, of LIFE itself, might be interrogated. In their search for England, in their efforts to examine the changing nature of the nation’s principal values and the essential identity they enshrined, British writers persistently present Latin America as a place of death – a place where the particular qualities of life in Britain might be examined.
In the late nineteenth century, the writer and naturalist W.H.
Hudson was an infl uential interpreter of Anglo-Latin American cultural relations. Born in Argentina in 1841 and raised there on his parents’ estancia, he came to Britain in 1877 where he lived until his death in 1922. His upbringing not only gave him a privileged perspective on Britons’ misapprehensions about Latin America, it also afforded him a critical distance from their
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instinctual valorisation of their own country: ‘He writes so well about English rural life’, Jonathan Bate claims, ‘because it seems strange to him, because he sees it with the unsentimental eyes of an outsider’ (Bate, 2000: 57). The most conspicuous consequence of Hudson’s cultural distance from his adopted country was his resistance to the mythopoeic inscription of rural England so prevalent among cultural critics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He retained an unsentimental vision of the land and its people. Where Morton and his disciples saw in the forgotten hamlets and ancient croplands of deep England a unique repository of the nation’s history, Hudson found there not a measure of what the nation possessed but an inventory of the qualities it had already lost. The tidy hedgerows of rural England suggested to Hudson that the civilisation the British so prized was slowly but certainly throttling them. Cut off from their fellows by the ‘hateful subdivisions’ of class, denied the rough tutelage of nature by the constraints of culture and education, spared the struggle for survival, the people were losing their elemental vigour and the whole country was stiffening into rigor mortis (Hudson, 1927: 335).
He illustrated this point in his fi rst novel The Purple Land (1927/1885) where, ostensibly in search of work, his English-born narrator travels through the wild countryside of the Banda Oriental, modern-day Uruguay. This journey is the pretext for a crash course in the country and its culture, experienced through a range of picaresque adventures in which the narrator duels with gauchos, takes part in an abortive revolutionary uprising, rescues a damsel in distress and in the process meets a cross section of Uruguayan society. These adventures are bookended by set-piece speeches from the summit of Montevideo in which the narrator surveys the country. In the fi rst of these, before he sets out on his journey, he reviews the state of the land, lamenting the failure of its people to exploit it:
‘Whichever way I turn,’ I said, ‘I see before me one of the fairest habitations God has made for man: great plains smiling with everlasting spring; ancient woods; swift beautiful rivers; ranges of blue hills stretching away to the
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dim horizon. And beyond those fair slopes, how many leagues of pleasant wilderness are sleeping in the sunshine, where the wildfl owers waste their sweetness and no plough turns the fruitful soil, where deer and ostrich roam fearless of the hunter…?’ (Hudson, 1927: 11)
Preoccupied with politics, the locals’ failure to develop the land has all but ruined it. Short of a general extirpation of the people – which at this point the narrator favours – the country’s only hope lies in its incorporation into the British Empire:
Oh, for a thousand young men of Devon and Somerset here with me, every one of them with a brain on fi re with thoughts like mine! What a glorious deed would be done for humanity! What a mighty cheer we would raise for the glory of the old England that is passing away! (Hudson, 1927: 12–13) The narrator’s succeeding adventures and his overwhelmingly positive experience of the people he encounters lead him to revise these views. When, near the close of the novel, he again ascends the hill to pass judgement, it is not to commend British rule but to concede how its imposition would stifl e the native qualities that so enrich the country:
I cannot believe that if this country had been conquered and recolonised by England, and all that is crooked in it made straight according to our notions, my intercourse with the people would have had the wild, delightful fl avour I have found in it. And if that distinctive fl avour cannot be had along with the material prosperity resulting from Anglo-Saxon energy, I must breathe the wish that this land may never know such prosperity.
(Hudson, 1927: 333)
The key condition of health and happiness, he concludes, is fi delity to the promptings of nature. Disorder and the uncertainty it breeds are not to be feared but embraced. It is the tenuousness of life that gives it value and meaning. One does not invite misfortune; but a life in which ‘folly, crime’ and ‘sorrow’ have been legislated out of existence is no life at all, merely a rehearsal for ‘the dreamless sleep of the grave’ (Hudson, 1927: 338). He concedes:
I do not wish to be murdered, no man does; yet rather than see the ostrich and deer chased beyond the horizon, the fl amingo and black-necked swan
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slain on the blue lakes, and the herdsman sent to twang his romantic guitar in Hades as a preliminary to security of person, I would prefer to go about at any moment to defend my life against the sudden assaults of the assassin.
(Hudson, 1927: 333–4)16
Hudson’s conviction that death is a positive presence, the foil that gives life its form and light, was a theme that he audaciously returned to 30 years later, during the darkest days of the First World War. Bewildered by the scale of the slaughter in France, British writers had, by early 1916, rejected death’s once automatic association with nobility and sacrifi ce, regarding it instead as the principal emblem of modern purposelessness.17 Hudson took a different, quite heretical view of death. Thinking back over ‘the past two or three dreadful years’, while recovering from a serious illness over the winter of 1915–16, Hudson found his only point of reference for the carnage in France in his memories of his childhood in South America (Hudson, 1918: 330). Approaching Buenos Aires from the south, he recalled, one passed through the ‘Saladero, or killing grounds, where the fat cattle, horses and sheep brought in from all over the country were slaughtered every day’. When the volume of livestock exceeded the capacity of the buildings:
you could see hundreds of cattle being killed in the open all over the grounds in the old barbarous way the gauchos use, every animal being fi rst lassoed, then hamstrung, then its throat cut – a hideous and horrible spectacle, with a suitable accompaniment of sounds in the wild shouts of the slaughterers and the awful bellowings of the tortured beasts. (Hudson, 1918: 286–7)
In the face of events on the western front it was hardly surprising that Hudson’s refl ections should turn to the suffering and death of the terrifi ed herds at the Saladero. Paul Fussell notes that 1915,
‘had been one of the most depressing years in British history’
(Fussell, 1975: 11). At Ypres, Festubert, Neuve Chappelle and Loos, tens of thousands of men had been butchered in battles which brought negligible territorial gain that even the Offi cial History of the First World War dismissed as a ‘useless slaughter
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of infantry’ (quoted in Liddell Hart, 1970: 267). French soldiers being marched to the front protested at their inevitable fate by baaing loudly, ‘in imitation of lambs led to the slaughter’ (Watt, 1964: 194). The British High Command harboured a correspond-ingly contemptuous view of its own largely conscript army. The staff offi cers responsible for planning the attack on the Somme
‘assumed that these troops – burdened for the assault with 66 pounds of equipment – were too simple and animal to cross the space between the opposing trenches in any way except in full daylight and aligned in rows or “waves”’ (Fussell, 1975: 13).
Treated like dumb animals, the men could do little to avoid dying like them. At dawn on 1 July 1916, as the barrage which opened the British assault lifted, the German infantrymen climbed from their dug outs, set up their machine guns and began
hosing the attackers walking toward them in orderly rows…Out of 110,000 who attacked, 60,000 were killed or wounded on this one day, the record so far. Over 20,000 lay dead between the lines, and it was days before the wounded in No Man’s Land stopped crying out. (Fussell, 1975: 13) In Wilfred Owen’s view, the manner and scale of these deaths spoke not of the battlefi eld but the abattoir: ‘What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?’ (Owen, 1963: 44). By the time Owen’s poems were published, in 1920, the war was over and criticism of its aims was widespread, even fashionable. Hudson, however, composed his narrative when the nation’s ideological investment in the war was as absolute as was its political and military commitment and when to oppose the fi ghting was to invite abuse or prosecution.18 As a consequence, he articulated his outrage by camoufl aging it as a fond reminiscence of his childhood in Argentina. While his memoir might have looked like an escape from the disasters unfolding across the channel, it actually constituted a trenchant critique of their bloody consequences. The particular consequence that he sought to redress was the cheapening of life that the slaughter had engendered. He sought to do this, paradoxically, by dignifying death, restoring it to its rightful place in the natural order and so re-consecrating the value of life.
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Though recovering from a ‘very serious illness’ while he composed Far Away and Long Ago (1918), Hudson remembered his convalescence as ‘a happy time!’ (Hudson, 1918: 3). This was because his recovery brought on a ‘rare state of mind’ in which long-forgotten memories resurfaced and he was granted
‘a wonderfully clear and continuous vision of the past’ (Hudson, 1918: 2). Through this vision, Hudson was able to revisit his childhood and recover the intense communion he had felt with the Argentine pampas, where he grew up. It is hardly surprising that so many critics have responded to Far Away and Long Ago as an unaffected celebration of a life regained. Yet as in The Purple Land, its affi rmation of life is articulated through a focus on death.
From the demise of Caesar, the family dog, through the loss of his mother, to his own near fatal illness as an adolescent and his necessary habituation to the prospect of his sudden extinction, it is death and not life around which the narrative orbits. His memories of his fi rst visit to Buenos Aires are haunted by death and the menace of its unexpected irruption. On his fi rst trip out of the house, transfi xed by the press of the crowds and the cacophony of the streets, he loses his way and is rescued by a policeman ‘with brass buttons on his blue coat and a sword at his side’ (Hudson, 1918: 94). The weapon was no affectation as the city was plagued by lawlessness, ‘infested’ by a ‘multitude of beggars’ who, as Hudson remembers them, were ‘the most brutal, even fi endish, looking men I had ever seen’. A rag tag band of convicts, criminals and old soldiers, the beggars lived ‘like carrion-hawks on what they could pick up’. Scornful of a polite refusal to give alms, the beggar’s response to rudeness was deeply threatening: ‘he would glare at you with a concentrated rage which seemed to say, “Oh, to have you down at my mercy, bound hand and foot, a sharp knife in my hand!”’ (Hudson, 1918: 100).
Though the threat of death is all-pervasive, when it fi nally reveals itself it turns out to be oddly alluring. Walking along the sea wall, Hudson takes note of a young man of ‘wonderfully fi ne appearance’ who
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holding a pebble in his right hand…watched the birds, the small parties of crested song sparrows, yellow house sparrows, siskins, fi eld fi nches, and other kinds, and from time to time…would hurl a pebble at the bird he had singled out forty yards down below us on the rocks. (Hudson, 1918: 102–3)
Teased by Hudson over his inaccuracy, the stranger, ‘with a slight smile on his face…putting his fi nger and thumb in his waistcoat pocket…pulled out a dead male siskin and put it in my hands’.
Hudson’s response to the bird is rapturous, almost reverential, as death brings out the otherwise hidden facets of its beauty:
its wonderful unimagined loveliness, its graceful form, and the exquisitely pure fl ower-like yellow hue affected me with a delight so keen that I could hardly keep from tears...After gloating a few moments over it, touching it with my fi nger-tips and opening the little black and gold wings, I looked up pleadingly and begged him to let me keep it. He smiled and shook his head…and taking it from my hand put it back in his waistcoat pocket.
(Hudson, 1918: 103–4)
Death has many faces in Hudson’s narrative. Whether it is a source of ‘terror’, an act of God, a whim of man, a gesture of kindness or a mark of evil, it is never less than ‘a strange, exciting spectacle’
(Hudson, 1918: 40). It is also a constant presence in the child’s life on the pampas, so much so that he recalls ‘there was seldom a day on which I did not see something killed’ (Hudson, 1918: 40).
Death is seen as a natural feature and its place in the cycle of the seasons is accepted. When a wild hailstorm sweeps over the family estancia laying waste to the vegetation, he recalls that it also killed
‘Forty or fi fty sheep’, three cows and ‘an old loved riding-horse’
(Hudson, 1918: 74). Similarly, when after the downfall of the dictator Rosas, gangs of desperate men roamed the pampas bent on plunder, Hudson saw the evidence, not the act itself, of only a single killing – though an awful one at that. Death on this scale and in this context, though no less feared or lamented, is more comprehensible than that of the nameless millions swallowed up in the mechanised slaughter of the First World War. At the very moment that Europe was descending into mass butchery,
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Hudson turned to South America, where, through his memories of daily life on the pampas, he found safe ground from which he might return death to its human scale, reaffi rm its place in the environment and so condemn the criminal disregard for life that the war exposed. Though the Argentina of his childhood was, by his own admission, a still wild land of ‘battle, murder, and sudden death’, it was, as a consequence, a place where the proper value of life might be gauged – an exercise clearly beyond the capacities of civilised Europeans at the time (Hudson, 1918: 35).