it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.
Here is Buffa's take on the Novels of W.H. Hudson:
Ford Madox Ford, who knew every great writer of his time, and helped more than one of them with his writing, thought W.H. Hudson, not Henry James, or D.H. Lawrence, or Thomas Hardy, or even his close friend Joseph Conrad, “the greatest prose writer of his day.” Ford was not alone in this judgment. In London, before the Great War, the First World War, the war that changed everything, including, Ford would have argued, the way the world, especially the English speaking world, looked upon literature and those who spent their lives trying to make a serious contribution to what was worth reading, there was a “French restaurant called the Mont Blanc where, on Tuesdays, the elect of the city’s intelligentsia lunched and discussed with grave sobriety the social problems of the day.” Ford was there, of course; and so also were Joseph Conrad, John Galsworthy, Hilaire Belloc and W.B. Yeats.Visit D.W. Buffa's website.
The conversation followed a predictable pattern: talk about “Flaubert and Maupassant and Huysman and Mendes and Monet and Maeterlinck and Turgenev. And if Belloc came bustling in and Conrad was there, the noise would grow to exceed the noise of Irish fairs when shillelaghs were in use.” And that because “Belloc with his rich brogue and burr would loudly assert that his ambition was to make by writing four thousand pounds a year and to order a monthly ten dozen of Clos Vougeot or Chateau Brane Cantenac…and this to Conrad who would go rigid with fury if you suggested that anyone, not merely himself, but any writer of position, could possibly write for money.”
And then, suddenly, Hudson would walk in and the room would go silent, the immediate tribute of those who understood the nature, and the extent, of his achievement,“the greatest prose writer of his day.” Hudson would try to deny it, insisting that, “I’m not one of you damned writers: I’m a naturalist from LaPlata.” And then he would laugh, because he did not really mind at all that they held him in such high regard. It had taken him long enough to earn it.
Hudson was born in Argentina of American parents in 1841, and until he moved to London when he was forty had never, other than a few visits to Buenos Aires, been off the pampas. He never spent a day in a forest, or an hour in a jungle, and had never so much as stepped on the soil of Venezuela, but Green Mansions, one of the two great novels he wrote, is set in the jungle, and the other one, The Purple Land, is set in and around Venezuela. If Hudson was the “greatest living writer of English,” it was, at least in part, because the world he described was the world he invented, the world he watched form and reform inside his mind. It must have been this, or something like it, that drew the attention, and earned the respect, of the other great writers of his time.
“He was, at any rate in England, a writer’s writer,” Ford insisted. “I never heard a lay person speak of Hudson in London, at least with any enthusiasm. I never heard a writer speak of him with anything but a reverence that was given to no other human being. For as a writer he was a magician.” Green Mansions and The Purple Land are not just two great novels. All the writers Ford Madox Ford writes about in his Portraits From Life, including especially Conrad, believed that The Purple Land “is the supreme - is the only - rendering of Romance in the English language,” while Green Mansions “is Anglo-Saxondom’s only rendering of hopeless, of aching passion.”
Whatever else it is, The Purple Land is a marvelous tale of consecutive impossibilities, the chronicled adventures of Richard Lamb who marries a girl against her father’s wishes and then, as they try to escape his wrath, he is separated from her as gets caught up in one of the country’s frequent civil conflicts. The leader of the rebellion, the hero Santa Coloma, known for “his dauntless courage and patience in defeat,” is saved from death when Lamb, quite by accident, helps him escape from prison. Then, later, when Lamb is taken prisoner by the revolutionaries and brought before their general to decide his punishment, which means in fact the method of his execution, the general turns out to be Coloma, who recognizes him as the man who had saved his life and, instead of a sentence of death, sets him free.
This is only the beginning of a series of adventures that mark Lamb’s struggle to get back to the young wife he has left waiting for him in Montevideo, a struggle that bears a certain resemblance to that Greek classic, The Odyssey. The resemblance seems acknowledged when we are told that Montevideo is called Modern Troy. Among the other things that happen to him, Lamb encounters an old man, insane with grief, his only son killed in the war, who thinks his new visitor is his son returned to life. Then he saves a woman who lost her father and her brothers in the war and is being forced to marry a feckless fraud who has taken her father’s place and wants to take her home. Every woman Lamb meets - and he meets a lot of them - is a different kind of problem. A young woman only six months married, but already bored with her husband, tries to tempt him, but without success. Another woman, Dolores, is more successful. She intoxicates him with a kiss, and with that kiss becomes intoxicated herself. Forced to admit that he is already married, she calls him a disgrace, but because “they love each other madly,” they spend their last few hours together, sitting hand in hand, waiting for the dawn, when he must leave, thinking, as only a true romantic could do, that their “separation would be an eternal one.” Like Odysseus, Lamb finally reaches home, and not only finds his wife still waiting, but, an even greater miracle, manages one last time to help Santa Coloma, the hero of the failed revolution, make his escape so he can, with the patience he has so often been taught by defeat, begin again the always difficult preparation for the next rebellion.
Lamb’s adventures are the surface of the story, the story told by countless authors since it was first told by Homer. Beneath the surface, however, the reader discovers more than a gifted storyteller, a rare intelligence that leads us to places we had not known existed. How many other writers could declare, without the slightest reservation, that civilization is a mistake, with its “million conventions…vain education…striving after comforts that bring no comfort to the heart.” We had happiness once, but “we went away from it in search of another grander kind of happiness which some dreamer - a Bacon or another - assured us we should find. We had only to conquer Nature, find out her secrets, make her our obedient slave, then the earth would be Eden, and every man Adam and every woman Eve. We are still marching bravely on, conquering Nature, but how weary and sad we are getting ! The old joy in life and gaiety of heart have vanished….”
It is another, if perhaps a stranger, indication of Hudson’s ability to see into the nature of things, that he could write a line that, a generation later, would be written by another writer born and raised in Argentina, Jorge Borges, who may have remembered when he wrote it a line he once wrote about a mathematical theory he did not understand but hoped one day to plagiarize: “I have often begun the study of metaphysics, but have always been interrupted by happiness.” Hudson, nearly half a century earlier, had written: “I have not read many books of philosophy, because when I tried to be a philosopher ‘happiness was always breaking in,’ as someone says….”
The Purple Land sold almost no copies when it was first published in l885; Green Mansions became an enormous commercial success when it was published in America near the end of Hudson’s long life in 1922. The story is told by Abel who, “a young man of unblemished character, not a soldier by profession…allowed myself to be drawn very readily by friends and family into a conspiracy to overthrow the government of the moment, to the object of replacing it by more worthy me - ourselves, to wit.” The attempt failed, and Abel has to flee for his life. He goes to the Orinoco because “to visit this primitive wilderness had been a cherished dream.”
From his boyhood on the Argentine pampas, Hudson loved nothing so much as the study of birds. They were God’s perfect creatures, their movements and their voices more graceful, more rhythmic, than any other living thing. Rima, the girl in Green Mansions, is the most birdlike creature in all of English literature. Abel meets Rima, or rather they gradually discover each other, as he becomes aware of her presence, the music he hears among the trees, the sense that someone, or something, is following him, watching from a distance during his long walks through the thick green forest. Rima becomes everything to him, “Because nothing so exquisite had ever been created. All the separate and fragmentary beauty and melody are graceful motion found scattered throughout nature were concentrated and harmoniously combined in her.” She spoke a language “without words, suggesting more than word to the soul.”
Rima lives in the forest, that part of it where the natives never go because they think her a demon there to bring them death and destruction. They find their courage and burn her to death in a gigantic tree where she tried to hide. Abel swears vengeance. In Heart of Darkness, which some would argue is the finest work of ninety pages in the English language, Joseph Conrad describes how Kurtz, a European sent to Africa to bring civilization to the natives, becomes more savage than any native ever was. In Green Mansions, Hudson’s character,Abel, becomes just like Kurtz, the only difference that Abel is driven, not by a failed idea, but by a lost love.
It is all quite deliberate, each step planned carefully in advance. After Rima is killed, he goes to a tribe the enemy of the tribe that killed her. His mind is clear; he knows precisely what he wants to do. It is a rebellion against God, his hatred a rebellion against all morality: “there was nothing evil, nothing cruel and contrary to nature, that I would not be guilty of, glorying in my guilt.” Nor was this the temper of a few days: “I remained for close upon two months at Managa’s village, never repenting nor desisting in my efforts to induce the Indians to join me in that barbarous adventure on which my heart was set.” Everyone does what they are supposed to do: everyone is killed “who had lighted the fire round that great green tree on which Rima had taken refuge, who’d danced around the blaze, shouting ‘Burn! burn!’”
When he leaves, making his way out of the forest, Abel has a vision of being with Rima again. “No longer the old vexing doubt now! ‘You are you and I am I - why is it?’ - the question asked when our souls were near together, like two raindrops side by side, drawing irresistibly nearer, ever nearer: for now they had touched and were not two, but one inseparable drop, crystallized beyond change, not to be disintegrated by time, nor shattered by death’s blow, nor resolved by alchemy.”
W.H. Hudson draws the reader as close to what he has written as Abel was drawn to Rima, that strange being in whom everything beautiful and wonderful were combined in a way never seen before. No one had written anything like The Purple Land and Green Mansions before Hudson; and no one will ever write anything like them again. They stand apart, equal and alone, something Hudson, and only Hudson, could do.
Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; Edmund Burke.
--Marshal Zeringue
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