Far away and long ago

On the centenary of W. H. Hudson's death, John Lewis-Stempel wonders how the celebrated writer and founder member of the RSPB came to be forgotten

- John Lewis-Stempel

He loved birds and green places, and the wind on the heath, and saw the brightness of the skirts of God Gravestone epitaph of W. H. Hudson

DO you know the name W. H. Hudson? Perhaps not. His books are largely forgotten. But then, what exactly was the name of the man who was a founder of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), a literary influence on Hemingway and judged by The Times on his death, a century ago in August 1922, to be 'unsurpassed as an English writer on nature'? Go to Argentina, where he was born in 1841 to American parents, and he was Guillermo Enrique Hudson-a town in Buenos Aires province is named for him. On the frontispiece of the US editions of Far Away and Long Ago, his passionate memoir of a wildlife-loving youth on the pampas, he becomes William Henry Hudson. In England, where he lived out the long and fruitful autumn of his life, he appeared in public as 'W. H. Hudson'. Except, that is, when he was writing the rags-to-riches potboiler Fan as Henry Harford.

In every sense, Hudson was difficult to pin down: a man of shifting name, shifting nationality and shifting authorial subjects. Above all, he was a bird man and the author of more than 40 books on ornithology. To him, birds were 'the most valuable things we have'.

He was a child of Nature. No sooner was he out of the wooden cot on his parents' sheep-and-cattle estancia than he was exploring the grassland of the Argentine, alone among the fauna and flora. In a crucial sense, Hudson remained a child his entire life, filled with awe and wonder at the natural world. On reaching adulthood, he would spend a whole day in spring simply admiring grass, 'nourishing my mind on it... The sight of it was all I wanted'.