Green Mansions (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By W. H. Hudson and Joe Milicia

Modern classic tells the compelling story of Rima, a strange birdlike girl of the jungle, and Abel, the European who falls in love with her. The book owes much of its popularity to the mystic, near-religious feeling that pervades the story and the beauty of Rimas halting, poetic expressions. The authors knowledge and understanding of nature, the jungle and grasslands lend special authenticity to this captivating fantasy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411431300

W. H. Hudson

William Henry Hudson (1841–1922) was an author and naturalist. Hudson was born in Argentina, the son of English and American parents. There, he studied local plants and animals as a young man, publishing his findings in Proceedings of the Royal Zoological Society, in a mixture of English and Spanish. Hudson’s familiarity with nature was readily evident in later novels such as A Crystal Age and Green Mansions. He later aided the founding of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

NEGLECTED upon its first appearance in 1904, Green Mansions became a popular success a decade later. The story of a Venezuelan political exile and the bird-girl he discovers in a remote jungle, this Romance of the Tropical Forest drew praise from such celebrated writers as Joseph Conrad and John Galsworthy. For decades the tale was greatly admired by both the general public and literary connoisseurs, even adapted as a Classics Illustrated comic book in 1951 and an MGM film in 1959. Since the 1960s, stories with a colonial perspective on a pale-skinned female forest spirit feared by native savages and adored by a white hero have come to seem old-fashioned; Hudson’s tale, however, is much more subtle, even ironic, than such a simple plot summary would suggest. Today the book is of special interest for its ecological implications for the Amazon Basin, its poetic style and ambiguities, and still for the Romantic sweep of its tale of Abel and Rima, doomed lovers amidst an exotic setting.

Though he never visited Venezuela himself, William Henry Hudson (1841-1922) was born and raised in South America, on the pampas of Argentina. His parents were emigrants from the United States who bought a ranch not far from Buenos Aires. Young Hudson’s great interest was natural history, particularly birds. He read Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and works of other naturalists when he was quite young, and he collected bird specimens for the Smithsonian Institution. He left for England in 1874, where he lived for decades in great poverty, struggling to make a living as a writer; he married his boarding-house landlady and in 1900 became a British citizen. Among his publications were novels (beginning with The Purple Land in 1885), short-story collections, ornithological studies and personal reminiscences, but none, including Green Mansions in 1904, lifted him out of poverty. It was only in 1916, when he was seventy-five, that Green Mansions was reprinted to great acclaim — the first book published by Alfred A. Knopf — making Hudson almost overnight a literary celebrity. Among his later books, Far Away and Long Ago: History of My Early Life (1918) was perhaps the most praised.

A Romance of the Tropical Forest is quite a fitting subtitle for Green Mansions, which is a classic romance not only in the modern sense of a love story but according to the traditional definition: a tale with elements of the extravagant, the adventurous, the opposite in spirit to the everyday world of the realistic novel. To a writer of Hudson’s era, and indeed a century before Green Mansions, a romance could have been a ballad-like verse tale of knights and fair ladies but most likely a prose narrative of the medieval past or exotic lands or fantastic happenings, anything from Arthurian legend to Gothic tale of terror (see Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest of 1791 and later products of the Romantic Age) or South Seas adventure (including Moby-Dick). Considering the extravagant nature of Green Mansions, it is amusing that in the prologue, the Englishman who is about to present Abel’s true story to the world dismisses gossip about his friend as romance-weaving. Meanwhile, in his own narrative, Abel recites ancient romances and ballads to the Indian tribe he lives with: the sweet old verse that, whether glad or sorrowful, seems always natural and spontaneous as the song of a bird, and so simple that even a child can understand it. Whether Green Mansions is quite so simple may be questioned.

Rima is hardly the first ethereal female to have inhabited a sacred forest. Greek legend gives us those forest nymphs called dryads and the goddess Artemis (Diana to the Romans), fatal to mortals caught spying upon her or attempting to slay her sacred deer — just as Abel first spots Rima reclining in a glade and later arouses her ire when he is about to kill a snake. But it is notably in the Colonial Era that popular tales abound of a relatively pale-skinned human living among savage, darker-skinned tribes in a wilderness seldom visited by Europeans. In Victorian literature the most famous such figure is still Ayesha (She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed), in H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887), a 2,000-year-old Egyptian woman with the secret of eternal youth, who is worshipped and feared by an isolated mid-African tribe, until discovered by an English explorer. Of course, She is haughty and ruthless, a far cry from the tender Rima — even if Rima when angered by the slaughter of animals is a force to be feared. A parallel of a different sort is Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan, who first appeared in Tarzan of the Apes in 1914. This jungle-dweller might be thought of as a male Rima, except that he is a European foundling rather than the last of some primordial race and associated with primates rather than birds, with all that that implies about early twentieth-century notions of masculinity and femininity. The two might have been ideal mates, both at home high above the forest floor and in special communication with the animal kingdom; but ultimately, Rima is a tragic figure, fragile as a bird in the face of human determination to destroy her.

It is clear that Hudson intended Rima to be — among other things — a symbol of the wilderness itself. Abel comments on her vague, misty, greenish appearance in the shadows of the jungle where she is so utterly at home. She may remind us of the Romantic poets’ heard-but-not-seen birds — Keats’ nightingale or Shelley’s blithe spirit, the lark — or of Wordsworth’s rural Lucy, who is equally identified with nature and dies young: Abel in fact evokes lines from one of the Lucy poems, A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal, on more than one occasion. When Abel finally gets a close look at Rima, he offers a lengthy description that is fantastically strange for its sheer insubstantiality, as if she were something that could be glimpsed only by peripheral vision.

Though almost anyone who has ever heard of Green Mansions calls Rima the bird-girl, Hudson doesn’t use this actual term. All the same, Abel’s narrative constantly compares her to birds, especially the hummingbird, that living prismatic gem. (An especially superb description can be found in Chapter 7.) Later, when Abel asks her where she got her dress (literally gossamer, we learn), she becomes immobile as she ponders how to answer the question: not a silken hair on her head trembled; her eyes were wide open [. . .] like the clear, brilliant eyes of a bird, which reflect as in a miraculous mirror all the visible world but do not return our look. Her native language, learned from her mother, sounds birdlike too. It is curious that although Abel has an extreme facility in acquiring new [Indian] dialects, which had increased by practice until it was almost like intuition, he finds it utterly impossible to comprehend Rima’s speech, even after very extensive exposure. Either he wills not to grasp it, because he wants her to remain the elusive spirit of the wilderness in his own imagination, or this is another of Hudson’s ways of making her as much a symbol as a human character.

As for her death by fire — she is a phoenix who does not rise from the ashes — Hudson may be suggesting that if she is the spirit of the wilderness, the wilderness itself can be obliterated. It is the natives rather than forest-depleting European colonizers who are the ones who destroy Rima. But evidently to Hudson, all human intervention in the wilderness is the beginning of the end; he has little of our contemporary interest in ways that indigenous people can preserve the wilderness by inhabiting it with a sense of ecological balance. Though Abel’s perspective is far from Christian, his narrative does seem to show all humanity as fallen, corrupt, in contrast to the purity of nature.

On occasion Abel fears that Rima is a femme fatale, a tricksy maiden luring him deeper into the forest like a will-o’-the-wisp, the sylvan equivalent of sirens and mermaids. And she does in one scene have a poisonous snake at her ankle. But truly she is more like an anti-Eve — the one unfallen creature in this Eden-like paradise — than a temptress, while Abel gets himself bitten (though he is mysteriously healed, after a panicky flight, as if the bite were the shock of first love). Only occasionally in this book does Rima seem a human character rather than a phantasm. We see the shyness and confusion of one who is falling in love without understanding what is happening; we see her temper and resentment, her impetuous, even heedless and immature moments. But whatever we make of Rima, we must remember that our views of her are filtered through the sensibility of Abel, our narrator.

Like those birds and rural maidens in Romantic poems, Rima on one level is the figment of a poetic imagination trying to grasp a natural world truly beyond human comprehension. Abel is an arch-Romantic in several respects, most obviously in his rapturous appreciation of the wilderness — a place where beasts of prey are often mentioned but never seen. He enjoys not just the varied glory of scenery peculiarly refreshing and delighting to the soul, but feels purified by the secret innocence and spirituality in nature — embodied, of course, in Rima. The book is not truly pantheistic, however, even if Rima was so near to the supernatural that it seemed brought near me. Abel loses all faith after the death of Rima, railing against the universe. Here he is a descendent of the darker side of Romanticism: a man restless by nature who becomes haunted and destructive, more a Cain than an Abel; a Heathcliff of the jungle who carries around his love’s ashes in hope that they can finally be buried together.

In short, Abel is far from the sort of simple hero who seems to be the author’s dream surrogate and the identification figure for the reader. Unfortunately for many modern readers, his least attractive traits, prominently his intense dislike of the Indian savages, may make not only him but Hudson himself look hopelessly colonialist. Still, the author does provide ways for us to look more ironically upon this impassioned, sometimes reckless and haughty individual.

First, Hudson uses a framing narrative, a time-honored device in which an impartial individual introduces the hero’s story, which could be in the form of a diary, a deathbed confession, or a simple confiding. Especially popular among the Victorians (see H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine [1895] and Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw [1898]), the frame provides an air of everyday reality against which the fantastic narrative is placed. In Green Mansions, it is surely significant that it is an Englishman of British Guiana (where Abel has come to settle) who befriends the broken man and presents his life-story to the public. Hudson, by contrasting a presumably level-headed blue-eyed Saxon of the cold north, one who sees Venezuelans as a turbulent people, with our nervous olive-skinned Hispano-American of the tropics, invites his readers to take a cool perspective on Abel, even in amidst the most heated portions of the narrative. It is tempting to speculate that the author, born of Anglo-American stock but growing up on the pampas, saw himself as an amalgam of the two men.

Abel has a number of traits English-speaking readers have long identified with the Spanish and their New World descendents, marking them as Other than Anglo. He admits to having bouts of lust for gold — inflamed by dreams of glittering yellow dust promising pleasure and power — exactly like the conquistadors seeking El Dorado in those very jungles. In his youth he indulges in the firebrand politics of Latin America, drawn by friends and family into an attempted coup for no good reason. He comes to repudiate those idle political passions, yet later, his betrayal of one Indian tribe to its enemies shows him to be mired in a politics of vendetta. Finally, Abel shows the sort of male vanity that Anglo-Saxons often label macho. When he overhears Rima’s prayer to her mother, clearly showing that she is in love with him, he tells us that her petition had unwittingly revealed to me the power I possessed, and it was a pleasing experience to exercise it. At one point, thinking of a city woman he once loved, he opines that women, though within narrow limits more plastic than men, are yet without that larger adaptiveness which can take us [men] back to the sources of life. After telling Rima he will spend a few days with his Indian friends, then realizing it is a foolish plan, he sticks to it so she won’t think he has a weak, vacillating mind. He is gentlemanly enough to stay away from her for several days when he feels his passion for her starting to overwhelm him, but he is also petty enough to withdraw on other occasions to punish her for her elusiveness.

His attitude toward the native peoples is what the modern reader will question the most. Is he a reflection of Hudson’s own prejudices, all too typical of his day? (Rima too makes a distinction between whites and savages and has an instinctive aversion to them — according to Abel.) Or is Hudson critiquing racism by making Abel’s views seem extreme? Even as early as chapter one, Abel tells us that though Orinoco Indians gave him shelter, food, and other aid without recompense, we must not, however, run away with the idea that there is any sweetness in their disposition, any humane or benevolent instincts such as are found among the civilized nations: far from it. I regard them [. . .] as beasts of prey, plus a cunning or low kind of intelligence vastly greater than that of the brute. There are many such passages, though Abel seems restrained compared to Nuflo, Rima’s adoptive grandfather, a peasant who sees Indians as children of the devil, wishes a plague would destroy all of them, and in his bandit days attacked their villages.

Of course, Nuflo is clearly a hypocrite, and Abel, also clearly, becomes possessed by his fury against the tribe who have killed Rima (and, by the way, have reason to distrust him). He feels a savage joy when he kills one man, and much more disturbing, he betrays the tribe which once befriended him to their rivals, leading to a massacre that he possibly participates in. He admits to a moral insanity that, he claims to become aware of only when he looks upon the bloodied corpse of Cla-cla, an old Indian woman who had shown great affection toward him earlier in the novel.

Overall, Hudson makes not only the old woman but Runi, the tribal chief, and others seem more like real human beings, with reasonable suspicions and lighthearted mirth, if also irrational fears and deceitfulness, than Abel seems capable of perceiving. Though he never visited Venezuela, Hudson made excellent use of the books of Victorian anthropology and nature studies that he consulted. His evocation of a beautiful and greatly varied tropical forest, from open savannah to rocky ravine, in repose and amid violent storms, may strike the reader more than his rendering of human character, but the latter is surprisingly subtle at times. His curious mixture of meticulous realism and poetic fancy, though not magic realism in the later Latin American sense, makes Green Mansions a novel greatly deserving of a new generation of readers.

Joseph Milicia (Ph.D., Columbia University) is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Sheboygan. He has published articles on Henry James, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), John Steinbeck, science fiction, and film directors, actors, and composers, and he is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Science Fiction and Multicultural Review.

PROLOGUE

IT is a cause of very great regret to me that this task has taken so much longer a time than I had expected for its completion. It is now many months — over a year, in fact — since I wrote to Georgetown announcing my intention of publishing, in a very few months, the whole truth about Mr. Abel. Hardly less could have been looked for from his nearest friend, and I had hoped that the discussion in the newspapers would have ceased, at all events, until the appearance of the promised book. It has not been so; and at this distance from Guiana I was not aware of how much conjectural matter was being printed week by week in the local press, some of which must have been painful reading to Mr. Abel’s friends. A darkened chamber, the existence of which had never been suspected in that familiar house in Main Street, furnished only with an ebony stand on which stood a cinerary urn, its surface ornamented with flower and leaf and thorn, and winding through it all the figure of a serpent; an inscription, too, of seven short words which no one could understand or rightly interpret; and finally, the disposal of the mysterious ashes — that was all there was relating to an untold chapter in a man’s life for imagination to work on. Let us hope that now, at last, the romance-weaving will come to an end. It was, however, but natural that the keenest curiosity should have been excited; not only because of that peculiar and indescribable charm of the man, which all recognised and which won all hearts, but also because of that hidden chapter — that sojourn in the desert, about which he preserved silence. It was felt in a vague way by his intimates that he had met with unusual experiences which had profoundly affected him and changed the course of his life. To me alone was the truth known, and I must now tell, briefly as possible, how my great friendship and close intimacy with him came about.

When, in 1887, I arrived in Georgetown to take up an appointment in a public office, I found Mr. Abel an old resident there, a man of means and a favourite in society. Yet he was an alien, a Venezuelan, one of that turbulent people on our border whom the colonists have always looked on as their natural enemies. The story told to me was that about twelve years before that time he had arrived at Georgetown from some remote district in the interior; that he had journeyed alone on foot across half the continent to the coast, and had first appeared among them, a young stranger, penniless, in rags, wasted almost to a skeleton by fever and misery of all kinds, his face blackened by long exposure to sun and wind. Friendless, with but little English, it was a hard struggle for him to live; but he managed somehow, and eventually letters from Caracas informed him that a considerable property of which he had been deprived was once more his own, and he was also invited to return to his country to take his part in the government of the republic. But Mr. Abel, though young, had already outlived political passions and aspirations, and, apparently, even the love of his country; at all events, he elected to stay where he was — his enemies, he would say smilingly, were his best friends — and one of the first uses he made of his fortune was to buy that house in Main Street which was afterwards like a home to me.

I must state here that my friend’s full name was Abel Guevez de Argensola, but in his early days in Georgetown he was called by his Christian name only, and later he wished to be known simply as Mr. Abel.

I had no sooner made his acquaintance than I ceased to wonder at the esteem and even affection with which he, a Venezuelan, was regarded in this British colony. All knew and liked him, and the reason of it was the personal charm of the man, his kindly disposition, his manner with women, which pleased them and excited no man’s jealousy — not even the old hot-tempered planter’s, with a very young and pretty and light-headed wife — his love of little children, of all wild creatures, of nature, and of whatsoever was furthest removed from the common material interests and concerns of a purely commercial community. The things which excited other men — politics, sport, and the price of crystals — were outside of his thoughts, and when men had done with them for a season, when like the tempest they had blown their fill in office and club-room and house and wanted a change, it was a relief to turn to Mr. Abel and get him to discourse of his world — the world of nature and of the spirit.

It was, all felt, a good thing to have a Mr. Abel in Georgetown. That it was indeed good for me I quickly discovered. I had certainly not expected to meet in such a place with any person to share my tastes — that love of poetry which has been the chief passion and delight of my life; but such an one I had found in Mr. Abel. It surprised me that he, suckled on the literature of Spain, and a reader of only ten or twelve years of English literature, possessed a knowledge of our modern poetry as intimate as my own, and a love of it equally great. This feeling brought us together, and made us two — the nervous olive-skinned Hispano-American of the tropics and the phlegmatic blue-eyed Saxon of the cold north — one in spirit and more than brothers. Many were the daylight hours we spent together and tired the sun with talking; many, past counting, the precious evenings in that restful house of his where I was an almost daily guest. I had not looked for such happiness; nor, he often said, had he. A result of this intimacy was that the vague idea concerning his hidden past, that some unusual experience had profoundly affected him and perhaps changed the whole course of his life, did not diminish, but, on the contrary, became accentuated, and was often in my mind. The change in him was almost painful to witness whenever our wandering talk touched on the subject of the aborigines, and of the knowledge he had acquired of their character and languages when living or travelling among them; all that made his conversation most engaging — the lively, curious mind, the wit, the gaiety of spirit tinged with a tender melancholy — appeared to fade out of it; even the expression of his face would change, becoming hard and set, and he would deal you out facts in a dry mechanical way as if reading them in a book. It grieved me to note this, but I dropped no hint of such a feeling, and would never have spoken about it but for a quarrel which came at last to make the one brief solitary break in that close friendship of years. I got into a bad state of health, and Abel was not only much concerned about it, but annoyed, as if I had not treated him well by being ill, and he would even say that I could get well if I wished to. I did not take this seriously, but one morning, when calling to see me at the office, he attacked me in a way that made me downright angry with him. He told me that indolence and the use of stimulants was the cause of my bad health. He spoke in a mocking way, with a pretence of not quite meaning it, but the feeling could not be wholly disguised. Stung by his reproaches, I blurted out that he had no right to talk to me, even in fun, in such a way. Yes, he said, getting serious, he had the best right — that of our friendship. He would be no true friend if he kept his peace about such a matter. Then, in my haste, I retorted that to me the friendship between us did not seem so perfect and complete as it did to him. One condition of friendship is that the partners in it should be known to each other. He had had my whole life and mind open to him, to read it as in a book. His life was a closed and clasped volume to me.

His face darkened, and after a few moments’ silent reflection he got up and left me with a cold good-bye, and without that hand-grasp which had been customary between us.

After his departure I had the feeling that a great loss, a great calamity, had befallen me, but I was still smarting at his too candid criticism, all the more because in my heart I acknowledged its truth. And that night, lying awake, I repented of the cruel retort I had made, and resolved to ask his forgiveness and leave it to him to determine the question of our future relations. But he was beforehand with me, and with the morning came a letter begging my forgiveness and asking me to go that evening to dine with him.

We were alone, and during dinner and afterwards, when we sat smoking and sipping black coffee in the verandah, we were unusually quiet, even to gravity, which caused the two white-clad servants that waited on us — the brown-faced subtle-eyed old Hindoo butler and an almost blue-black young Guiana negro — to direct many furtive glances at their master’s face. They were accustomed to see him in a more genial mood when he had a friend to dine. To me the change in his manner was not surprising; from the moment of seeing him I had divined that he had determined to open the shut and clasped volume of which I had spoken — that the time had now come for him to speak.

CHAPTER I

Now that we are cool, he said, and regret that we hurt each other, I am not sorry that it happened. I deserved your reproach; a hundred times I have wished to tell you the whole story of my travels and adventures among the savages, and one of the reasons which prevented me was the fear that it would have an unfortunate effect on our friendship. That was precious, and I desired above everything to keep it. But I must think no more about that now. I must think only of how I am to tell you my story. I will begin at a time when I was twenty-three. It was early in life to be in the thick of politics, and in trouble to the extent of having to fly my country to save my liberty, perhaps my life.

Every nation, someone remarks, has the government it deserves, and Venezuela certainly has the one it deserves and that suits it best. We call it a republic, not only because it is not one, but also because a thing must have a name; and to have a good name, or a fine name, is very convenient

Reviews for Green Mansions (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

[starbox_2 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I loved WH Hudson's "Purple Land." This flight of fancy , though, was unutterably turgid rubbish.When 23 year old Abel is involved in a political coup, he flees retribution to the most distant parts of southern Venezuela.Living with Indians, exploring the local forests, he encounters the girl/ wood nymph Rima....a magical, saintly, otherworldly creature of an unpleasingly fey, irrational and unknowable demeanour.Oof...by golly it dragged on...

[jennyscout · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

While I believe that most modern readers would appreciate the nature observations to be found in this novel or find the philosophical and historical perspective interesting, only a very small (I presume or hope) audience consisting of racist vegetarians would really love it.

[schmerguls · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

On Jan 6, 1946, I said: "Read "Green Mansions" a queer and poetic book : romance. I liked it quite well." As the years went by I seemed to like it better and better, though I have never re-read it.

[charlie68_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book reads well on many different levels. Many are the references to other literature and the prose is very lyrical and deep. Highly recommend.

[perlle_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A hunting tale about the complications of peoples' first contacts. I read this when I was a teenager, so the details are a bit foggy now, but I still find the story haunting and the ending shocking.

[goodwillbooks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a classic, beautifully written, ultimately tragic story of love, and then revenge, in the South American jungle. Does Abel represent civilized man, who, when his ultimate desire - a higher level of consciousness - is taken from him, reverts to the savages with whom he originally consorts? The story is described as a "romance" but it's not the heaving bosom/throbbing manhood type, and the ending is rather shocking.