Third reading: D.W. Buffa on the Novels of W.H. Hudson

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

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.

Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series is on the Novels of W.H. Hudson. It begins:

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.

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...[read on]

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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; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson.

--Marshal Zeringue