Peter Matthiessen, author of more than 30 books, died on Saturday (April 5, 2014) in Sagaponack (NY) at age 86. His timing was impeccable: his latest (and probably last) novel, In Paradise, was published on April 8th by Riverhead Books. Matthiessen was noted for accomplishing a remarkable feat, namely being the only writer - so far, anyway - who's won the National Book Award (NBA) in both the fiction & non-fiction categories.
On the other side of his soul's ledger, Matthiessen co-founded the Paris Review as a CIA front in 1953 - unbeknownst to his childhood friend & co-founding editor George Plimpton. Matthiessen justified spying on Americans in France by saying that, in those early days of the Cold War, working for the CIA was seen by his elite peers as honorable government service. In later interviews, Matthiessen rather cynically admitted that doing undercover dirty work for the CIA gave him "a free trip to Paris to write my novel."
More important, perhaps, is the fact that he wrote several outstanding books on a wide variety of subjects, from Zen Buddhism in the Himalayas (The Snow Leopard, 1978, NBA non-fiction winner) to 1967's The Shorebirds of North America (retitled The Wind Birds in 1973). His was an adventurous literary career, one befitting a descendant of Scandinavian whale-hunters who became an early user of LSD as well as a professional fisherman. He served in the postwar US Navy, posted at Pearl Harbor, before attending Yale University.
I first read Matthiessen's non-fiction, specifically the epic true-life tale In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983). A passionate account of the dramatic lives & tragic fates of several young, idealistic so-called Native Americans - including famed activist turned prisoner Leonard Peltier, it could only have come from the protest-driven late 1960s & early '70s, days of rage in much of American society. As this historically informed narrative unfolds, the morally ambiguous (hence true-to-life) protagonists, including Peltier - "red-skinned" people whom few non-Indians had ever considered heroic - exchange gunfire with a pair of interloping federal agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation (adjacent to South Dakota) one summer day in 1975. The FBI agents are portrayed as overly aggressive servants of their paranoid director, J. Edgar Hoover.
Another famous victim of the racist system was black middleweight boxer turned inmate (after being wrongfully convicted of murder) Rubin "Hurricane" Carter (1937-2014: he died in Canada on 4/20 - RIP), who was finally set free, after 19 frustrating years, at age 48 in 1985. That was a full decade after Bob Dylan released arguably the greatest protest song yet issued, "Hurricane" (1975), a catchy ditty cleverly disguised as a lengthy diatribe, with Dylan in fully unfettered prophet mode, bitterly indicting Carter's tormentors in the courts, press & police stations of Paterson, New Jersey.
Meanwhile, 69-year-old Leonard Peltier still sits like Buddha in a [federal] cell (to borrow Dylan’s phrase from “Hurricane”). Both Matthiessen & his publisher (Viking Press) were sued for libel by an FBI agent & the ex-governor of South Dakota as a result of some truths laid bare in In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. The lawsuits were ultimately dismissed, but only after costing the defendants $2 million in legal fees. Worse yet, Viking had to temporarily withdraw the book.
Collaborating with the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs), the corrupt FBI enabled the violent tribal corruption that AIM (the American Indian Movement) opposed. In the '70s, AIM seemed almost as revolutionary as the Black Panthers had been in the '60s. You felt from Matthiesseen's dynamic, intimate, empathetic yet sceptical prose that Peltier was more angel than devil.
The reader comes to realize that the fugitive Peltier was in danger of being executed for allegedly shooting dead a pair of foolhardy feds on the rez, then (wisely) running away. Regarded by his many leftist supporters as a political prisoner, Peltier functioned in the court of public opinion as either (1) a scapegoat for all the angry young men with dark skin who frightened the powerful "white" majority; or (2) a wrongfully convicted AIM martyr. The historical context that Matthiessen provides is critical, lest later readers forget that Caucasian men dominated the American government on all levels circa 1976.
Matthiessen strove to understand the struggles of society's neglected members, uneasy about his own privileged upbringing in Manhattan. For example, he traveled with Cesar Chavez - former barrio-dweller, the migrant farmworker's labor-organizing friend - and later wrote a book about it called Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (1969). Matthiessen was a smart writer who showed a lot of heart for oppressed peoples & striving individuals everywhere. He was, therefore, an uncommon creature among American men.
"Perhaps the power of Matthiessen's writing in part derives from his ability to tap into his dark side, his Jungian shadow," wrote his biographer, William Dowie. "If so, it would explain at least one similarity between him and the writers to whom he is compared in his major fiction: Melville, Conrad and Dostoevsky."
In the late '60s Matthiessen emulated his second wife Deborah Love's embrace of Zen Buddhism. He traveled to Nepal in 1973 on a spiritual quest while still mourning Love's death from cancer the preceding year. It was masked as a biological expedition to study wildlife, including the beautiful, endangered & elusive Himalayan snow leopard. "Zen," Matthiessen explained to The Guardian in 2002, "is really just a reminder to stay alive and to be awake. We tend to daydream all the time, speculating about the future & dwelling on the past. Zen practice is about appreciating your life in this moment . . . there is no reality apart from the here and now."
A rugged yet enlightened renaissance man of the modern age, Matthiessen absorbed the lessons of environmentalism & advocated for the Earth in his nature & travel writing. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould - a formidable science writer himself - described Matthiessen as "our greatest modern nature writer in the lyrical tradition." Matthiessen revealed in 1999 to the Paris Review (no longer a CIA front) that, for him, "nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet. It can never be sculpture. It can be elegant & very beautiful, but it can never be sculpture. Captive to facts - or predetermined forms - it cannot fly."
Accordingly, Matthiessen considered fiction his highest calling. Several novels were spawned by his reportage abroad, including At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965), about the interaction between missionaries & native tribes in the Brazilian rainforest, focusing on the damage done by Western civilization; and Far Tortuga (1975), an experimental take on the vanishing Caribbean tradition of turtle hunting. His new novel In Paradise (2014) tells the story of a group sharing a meditation retreat at the site of a former Nazi death camp. His 1990 novel Killing Mr. Watson kicks off a trilogy based on a murderous Florida cane planter who was murdered in turn in 1910. This series of books was subsequently compressed into a fictional magnum opus, Shadow Country (2008), Matthiessen's controversial NBA winner.
Matthiessen continued to write articles in recent years at his roomy home, where he welcomed spiritual aspirants to the property's zendo (meditation space). A detached Buddhist observer, he nevertheless cared deeply about the planet & the existential as well as political struggles of all human beings. He deserves respect from contemporary as well as future readers. Matthiessen's prolific & complex body of literary work certainly deserves our continuing attention.
[NOTE: Thanks to Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, whose New York Times obituary is the source for several quotes & facts included in this tribute.]
© 2014 by Joe Crawford Mrazek
