In Standpoint, Jason Wilson writes about the Argentinian-born novelist and naturalist who wrote about summers roaming around Southern England:

Until very recently, we couldn’t hear ourselves talk when we sat in the back garden as the planes flew low overhead and drowned out our voices. But today when the sky is clear and we can hear birds singing, I think again of William Henry Hudson.

W.H. Hudson is now largely forgotten but, in his day, he was famous as a naturalist and novelist. His legacy in his native Argentina—where he is known as Guillermo Enrique Hudson—is as a founder of ornithology with his Birds of La Plata, and as the author of an autobiography, Far Away and Long Ago. When he died in London in 1922, at the height of his fame, the Times obituary wrote that he was ‘unsurpassed as an English writer on nature’ and referred to him as the latest in a line of great naturalist writers such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, both of whom had explored South America. The bird sanctuary in Hyde Park, with its stone memorial carved by Jacob Epstein, commemorates Hudson; he was a leading light of the RSPB in its early years.

Born in Argentina in 1841 to parents who had emigrated there from New England, Hudson worked there as a gaucho and self-taught ornithologist until he left his birthplace for good. On arriving in England at the age of 32, he wrote fiction and published countless nature sketches that were collected into books to earn his living. He became very popular around the First World War and his nature sketches were read in the trenches.

As rural England was lost for good to industrialisation he knew that urban life lacked what he loved most, a feeling for the freedom of an untamed nature. Hudson roamed Southern England all his summers, staying in peasant cottages and boarding houses, and interacting with life beyond the towns. Every winter he would return to his turret in Paddington and write about what he had witnessed from notes taken on the spot; he could write ten pages about a raven or a sparrow. But what made his reputation was that he viewed everything through a foreigner’s lens. Curiously he had learned about English nature through his reading of unfashionable poets while growing up in Argentina. Hudson rarely mentioned that he was Argentine-born and underwent the sternest of tasks in Victorian England of starting from the bottom as a penniless outsider, but by the end of his life he had attained sufficient fame as a writer not to have to worry about money.

He viewed his life in his turret in Paddington—where he lived with his wife Emily, an opera singer who was also his former landlady—akin to being locked up in a ‘prison’. He always preferred the rural to the urban, the wilderness to the city, but he sought the former in the latter. He wrote to escape from the grime and the dirt.

In other news: Gary Indiana is not impressed with Blake Gopnik’s 976-page biography of Andy Warhol. “A prodigy of research, Gopnik claims to have interviewed ‘more than 260 lovers, friends, colleagues and acquaintances of the artist’ (261? 263?), and consulted ‘some 100,000 period documents.’ None of this effort has produced anything resembling a fresh idea. Information that has been available for decades is rolled out as startling news, embedded in a dense lard of fatuous pedantry and vapid generalizations. Gopnik’s writing generally reads like boilerplate cribbed from bygone reviews and magazine articles, recast in a squirmy, sophomoric prose that deadens everything it touches.”

Coleman Hughes writes about how he changed his view of Black Lives Matter: “I still believe that racism exists and must be condemned in the strongest possible terms; I still believe that, on average, police officers are quicker to rough up a black or Hispanic suspect; and I still believe that police misconduct happens far too often and routinely goes unpunished. But I no longer believe that the cops disproportionately kill unarmed black Americans . . . For every black person killed by the police, there is at least one white person (usually many) killed in a similar way. The day before cops in Louisville barged into Breanna Taylor’s home and killed her, cops barged into the home of a white man named Duncan Lemp, killed him, and wounded his girlfriend (who was sleeping beside him). Even George Floyd, whose death was particularly brutal, has a white counterpart: Tony Timpa. Timpa was killed in 2016 by a Dallas police officer who used his knee to pin Timpa to the ground (face down) for 13 minutes. In the video, you can hear Timpa whimpering and begging to be let go. After he lets out his final breaths, the officers begin cracking jokes about him. Criminal charges initially brought against them were later dropped. At a gut level, it is hard for most people to feel the same level of outrage when the cops kill a white person. Perhaps that is as it should be. After all, for most of American history, it was white suffering that provoked more outrage. But I would submit that if this new “anti-racist” bias is justified—if we now have a moral obligation to care more about certain lives than others based on skin color, or based on racial-historical bloodguilt—then everything that I thought I knew about basic morality, and everything that the world’s philosophical and religious traditions have been saying about common humanity, revenge, and forgiveness since antiquity, should be thrown out the window.”

Donald Trump’s niece, Mary, will supposedly publish a “harrowing and salacious” book about her uncle this fall: “Mary’s father, Fred Jr, Donald’s brother, died in 1981 from a heart attack after a long struggle with alcoholism. Mary Trump’s book, the report says, will allege that his father, Fred Sr., and Donald ‘contributed to his death and neglected him at critical stages of his addiction’. The president has said in the past that he regretted having put pressure on his brother to run the family business.”

Michael Brendan Dougherty reviews Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement: “The Age of Entitlement is a tightly telescoped, revisionist history of America from the death of John F. Kennedy to the election of Donald Trump. The protagonist is the Baby Boom generation, and the story follows their journey from teenage years to drafty McMansions to the old folks’ home. Author Christopher Caldwell’s thesis is that the culture war that spans the Boomers’ lives is actually a constitutional conflict. On one side stands ‘the de jure constitution of 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it.’ The rival constitution is the modern doctrine of civil rights, ‘which lacks this traditional kind of legitimacy but commands the near-unanimous endorsement of judicial elites and civic educators and the passionate allegiance of those who received it as a liberation.’”

Charlotte Allen takes stock of Olivia Gatwood’s “poetry”: “By her account, she has been a finalist, if not quite a winner, in poetry slams, competitions in which poets shout out the most dazzling and/or shocking verses in front of live audiences. Indeed, Gatwood’s ‘f— property. f— cops’ tweet, with its bardic mix of anaphora and outrageousness, had all the earmarks of the slam poet at work. In addition, she has a 2019 book, Life of the Party, published by the Dial Press, a division of the prestigious Penguin Random House, quite a coup for a woman whose only previous poetic print publication was a skinny, obscurely published chapbook. A back-flap photo reveals that she looks a poet, too: a brunette bouffant, a sleeve tattoo, and a melancholy air of being much put-upon. But it’s an odd book, so odd that I started to wonder if it wasn’t an elaborate and slyly humorous sendup. It starts with the opening sentences in the introductory ‘Author’s Note’: ‘In June in Boston, the sun rises at 5:10 a.m. I know this because, one week, I stayed up every night until that exact minute.’ Wait! Doesn’t the sun rise at a different time every day, even in Boston? Gatwood’s sleeplessness, owing to her reported fear of having a stranger break into her apartment and strangle her, is prelude to the overarching theme of the 160-odd poems that follow: men, and how just plain scary they are. Every male in Gatwood’s life seems to be a serial rapist: ‘men whose names I know — men I loved and trusted — who violated my body, the bodies of my friends, the bodies of their daughters, and, I’m certain, the bodies of countless women I do not know.’”

Thomas Penn writes about the Brothers York: “During the mid-15th century, England was crippled by civil war. The conflict dragged on for three decades and more, successive waves of violence engulfing the country before subsiding again, leaving behind a wreckage of mutual mistrust, suspicion and profound instability. This sequence of vendettas and turf wars became known as the Wars of the Roses: a struggle between the two royal houses of York and Lancaster, red rose against white, for the English crown. This was the story told by the Tudors, the leviathan of a dynasty that professed to unite these two warring houses. It was neater that way. Yet for most of this period only one of these families dominated England: the house of York. The Yorkist kings—Edward IV, followed by his youngest brother Richard III—ruled the country for just under a quarter of a century, between 1461 and 1485. These years saw the civil wars change in nature. In 1461, the conflict was indisputably between two rival families, the usurping 18-year-old Edward taking the crown from the tremulous grasp of the Lancastrian king Henry VI. In the years that followed it began to turn inwards: a destructive chain of rebellion, deposition, vendetta, fratricide, usurpation and regicide, all originating within the house of York itself. The dynasty’s end was brutal.”

The singular voice of Charles Portis: “It is likely no surprise to readers who love the novels of Charles Portis that everything delightful about his books was delightful about him as a person. The surprise, if anything, was how closely his personality tallied with his work. He was blunt and unpretentious, wholly without conceit. He was polite. He was kind. His puzzlement at the 21st-century world in which he found himself was deep and unfeigned. And yet almost everything out of his mouth was dry, new and pungently funny.”

Photo: View from Hohensalzburg Fortress

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