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An examined life worth sharing
By MARGO HAMMOND, Times Books Editor
His head barely bobbing above the foaming surf, Peter Matthiessen is plunging farther and farther out into the Atlantic, cutting fearlessly through the ocean's impressive waves. I, on the other hand, am making no progress as each curl crashes over me, propelling me unceremoniously onto the beach's stretch of sandy shore. It was Matthiessen's idea to go swimming at this spot near his home in Sagaponack during Long Island's off-season, but he is the only one doing the swimming. A party of four -- the only other souls on the beach, all sensibly avoiding the angry water -- look on in amusement. Greeting Peter by name as we leave the beach, they are used to seeing this peripatetic author, a longtime resident of the area, in action. Turning 75 last May, he is what a friend of mine likes to call a liver. Just reading his curriculum vitae would wear out most people half his age. At 17, he joined the Navy. By 1952, he was a Yale graduate, a published writer, the co-founder of the prestigious literary journal the Paris Review -- and only 25. He has trekked the Himalayas; climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and clocked 10,000 miles, crisscrossing South America, from the Amazon rain forest to the Peruvian jungles, up the Andes and down to Tierra del Fuego. He has traversed Siberia's Lake Baikal, the oldest and deepest freshwater lake in the world and for 17 months he tracked the great white shark from the Caribbean to South Africa, the Indian Ocean and the South Australian coast. And that was just for some of his nonfiction work. Matthiessen's fictionalized account of the life and murder of E.J. Watson, a real-life character who was killed by his neighbors in the Ten Thousand Islands, had Matthiessen trolling the Everglades swamps. The first book, Killing Mister Watson, was this year's choice for the local librarians' One Book, One Bay initiative. Other novels have plunged him into the Brazilian rain forest (At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which was made into a movie) and set him sailing in the Caribbean (Far Tortuga). For our interview, Matthiessen had picked me up in nearby Sag Harbor in his old red Ford truck. There are no hotels in Sagaponack, a farming community that boasts a farm that has been owned by the same family since the 17th century -- the oldest in the nation. The town has only one business, a grocery store cum post office. "When I first got here, a man named Lee ran the gas pump, the post office and the store and had plenty of time left over, that's how relaxed it was," he told me as we passed the store. The gas pump has been removed. The place still looked pretty relaxed to me. On the road into Sagaponack, Matthiessen, whose craggy profile seems to have absorbed the wonders he has observed, was pointing out where his friend Kurt Vonnegut lives and where the late James "Jim" Jones, the author of From Here to Eternity, used to live. Jones' wife Gloria still lives there. We passed the cemetery where Matthiessen's second wifeis buried and the two-room, red schoolhouse where Matthiessen's four children (two with his first wife, writer Patsy Southgate and two with Deborah) went to school. Dodging poison arrowsAt his home in Sagaponack, set back on a woodsy 6 acres he bought nearly 40 years ago for $35,000 ("the only good financial move I ever made"), the first thing Matthiessen shows me is a wall of photographs taken in New Guinea when he was researching Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in the Stone Age New Guinea. They are of young warriors in battle. Some of the black and white images were taken by Matthiessen, others by Michael Rockefeller, who had introduced Matthiessen to the tribesmen. Rockefeller, who was gathering artifacts in the region, vanished shortly after their trip together. His remains were never found, but Matthiessen says young boys from a neighboring tribe admitted to murdering him. Rockefeller's collection of masks, boats and weapons are now part of the Michael Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
In a barely audible whisper, Matthiessen describes a terrifying moment he witnessed during one of the battles they photographed. Crouched down in the brush to watch the clash, Matthiessen spotted warriors from the opposing tribe sneaking up on a greenhorn who was prancing around, oblivious to the ambush. Matthiessen points out the boy in one of the photographs: a scantily clad youth holding an arrow aloft. Silently motioning to him, Matthiessen tries to warn the kid of the lurking danger. Finally, he gets his attention and the boy runs for cover. "So you saved his life," I say. Matthiessen nods solemnly. "And he knew it, too." How many writers do you know who have dodged poison arrows to get a story? Matthiessen takes me across to his office, a charming cottage hidden in the greenery behind the main house. He hands me what looks like a praying mantis: It is a Stone Age ornament carved out of bone by the New Guinea people. Rockefeller sent it to him by mail. It arrived after Matthiessen heard the news of his friend's demise. Matthiessen's property is one of the few patches of woods in this relentlessly flat farm area. When he was a kid, his parents came to summer nearby in the more tony Hamptons, but he and his brother would come to this land to poach pheasants. The author's idyllic office, with its windows that frame the surrounding nature, was one of three buildings left on the land when Matthiessen bought the property (the cottage was used by the previous owners as a giant playhouse). The property's main brick house had burned down, so Matthiessen turned a two-story utility building that once held an eight-car garage, horse stalls and chicken coops into his home. The stables became his zendo or meditation house. Matthiessen is a Roshi or Zen priest. He was introduced to Buddhism by his second wife in the after the two of them had been experimenting with LSD in the '60s. "We wanted the high without the chemicals," he explains. Deborah died of cancer in 1972. Now Matthiessen's Zen students come to the zendo each night to mediate. They sometimes frighten his third wife, the former Maria Eckhart, whom he married in 1980, as they peer into the windows or appear at the kitchen door. Matthiessen meditates in the mornings at this peaceful spot, which faces a grove formed by a horseshoe of privets, a hedge plant Matthiessen has let grow uncharacteristically high for privacy. The writer as activistThe couple's main house, a far cry from the overly decorated homes in the snobby Hamptons, reminds me of a European country estate, especially the roomy kitchen. The main room is dominated by an imposing stone fireplace and French doors that open onto a brick patio. Peter, Maria and I sit on the patio, eating sandwiches Maria has prepared. Zeus, the couple's black cat, jumps up on the table to join us. Maria, who could be a double for actress Judi Dench, was born in Tanzania and speaks with a lilting British accent. "My wife is a terrific gardener," Matthiessen had told me earlier, but when I mention this, Maria waves her hand as if swatting a fly. The Matthiessens' home is filled with artwork, a mixture of the exotic (contorted Maconde sculptures from Tanzania) and the stubbornly local (paintings by Peter's best friend, the late Sheridan Lord, who painted minimalist pastoral scenes of Sagaponack houses and barns dominated by the earth and sky). The author's most prized possessions, however, seem to be simple found objects. Along the side of his house is an enormous whale skull. "I found it on the beach the same day I finished a book called Men's Lives," he tells me, referring to the book he wrote about the dying fishing industry on Long Island's South Fork. "I went for a walk on the beach -- it was December -- I saw this in the surf. I thought it was a human body, curled up in a fetal position." Like a boy's pocket crammed with rocks and shells, Matthiessen's office is filled with personal "souvenirs." There are photographs of Maria (in her modeling days) and of fellow writers and friends: George Plimpton, whom he's known since he was 8-years-old and whom he brought in to edit the Paris Review; E.L. Doctorow, who lives in Sag Harbor and Vonnegut. There are old tools from a slough in Tanzania, a shark's tooth and a piece of stone with ancient Sanskrit writing on it from a palace in Lhasa that had been knocked down with sledge hammers and was being used to build roads. In talking about such destruction, Matthiessen's usually soothing voice suddenly takes on an edge, and I am reminded that this tireless man has not tramped across five continents just to look at pretty scenery. A natural activist not only of the body, but also of the heart, he has spent a lifetime championing environmentalist causes and the causes of people that sociologists like to refer to as "at risk." Although born into wealth, Matthiessen developed a social conscience early, even if it may have been only to annoy his parents: at 15, he had his name dropped from the Social Register. In the '60s, he wrote Sal Si Puedes: Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution and profiled Chavez who was agitating for the rights of farm workers for the New Yorker. A red flag that defines threadbare hangs in his office. He carried it on the picket line with Chavez. Two of Matthiessen's books concern the plight of American Indians, Indian Country and In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. The latter argues for the release of American Indian activist Leonard Peltier, convicted of the murder of two FBI agents in South Dakota in 1975. Closer to home, he addressed the woes of Long Island's embattled fishermen in Men's Lives: The Surfmen and Baymen of the South Fork. It is a world he has known firsthand. While struggling to earn a living as a novelist, Matthiessen worked as a commercial fisherman and a charter boat captain. And his latest cause? The protection of the Arctic Wildlife National Refuge. He is writing an article about the area, which is under siege by the Bush administration, for Outside magazine and, in characteristic Matthiessen style, he plans a book on the subject. He speaks out against the pending pro-drilling energy bill every chance he gets. "It's a disgrace," he says with that unexpected vehemence. "There are wonderful American Indian people up there and their culture will be wiped out. It's our last great wilderness, the last great stronghold for large Ice Age mammals -- grizzlies, polar bears, caribou and wolves. It's just an extraordinary place that's untouched, beautiful, and these bastards want to trash it -- for six months worth of oil at the most." On Sunday, Matthiessen will be a featured speaker at the Times Festival of Reading. He is coming to discuss the Watson trilogy, which he is collapsing into one volume for the Library of America. He also will present his latest book, The Birds of Heaven, another research project that sent him around the world -- through Mongolia, Siberia, China, Tibet, Australia and Europe -- this time, in search of 15 species of cranes. And he will certainly make an impassioned plea in defense of the Artic Wildlife Refuge. And when that edge inevitably enters his voice as he talks about those who care so little about the land they live on, I will think about the bumper sticker on that old Ford truck of his. Given to him by Vonnegut many years ago, it is so faded you can barely make out the words. It reads: "Your planet's immune system is trying to get rid of you." Peter Matthiessen: a select bibliographyPeter Matthiessen will speak 1:15 p.m. Nov. 3 in Dendy-McNair Auditorium at the Times Festival of Reading on the campus of Eckerd College. FICTION
NONFICTION
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