In the Spirit of Peter Matthiessen

[G_j]

http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/the-current/the-stream/In-the-Spirit-of-Peter-Matthiessen.html?258699491&utm_campaign=googlenews&utm_source=googlenews&utm_medium=xmlfeed

THE STREAM
FRIDAY, MAY 9, 2014

In the Spirit of Peter Matthiessen

There were stormy moments during the legendary author's long relationship with Outside, but nobody was more influential in shaping our vision of what adventure writing could achieve.

By: HAL ESPEN

It’s difficult for me to believe that the indefatigable and incomparable writer Peter Matthiessen is dead. He succumbed to leukemia on April 5 at his home in Sagaponack, on Long Island, a few weeks before he would have turned 87. Over a six-decade career he produced 31 books—a final novel, In Paradise, appeared three days after his death—and left his footprints across a huge swath of the earth’s wild places. His questing intelligence, along with his unflagging stamina and contentiousness, were by turns inspiring and intimidating, and it seemed that he might go on forever.

He poured his heart into fiction, and three of his novels should be reckoned as indelible classics of recent American literature: At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965), Far Tortuga (1975), and Shadow Country (2008). But over five decades his restless spirit sent him out, notebook in hand, on one expedition after another, a vast cumulative itinerary in which Matthiessen embraced the natural world and the indigenous people and cultures who revered that ever-diminishing realm of numinous biodiversity. A very different novelist, Thomas Pynchon, in a blurb for Far Tortuga, wrote, “It’s full of music and strong haunting visuals and like everything of his, it’s also a deep declaration of love for the planet.” Yet Matthiessen became considerably more famous for his journalism than his fiction, which was something he came to wistfully resist and regret until the end of his life.

Matthiessen and his writing were enormously influential in establishing and shaping the literary aspirations of Outside, and he was a strong presiding presence in its pages from the publication’s earliest days. Randy Wayne White, one of the writer’s closest friends (and later an Outside columnist), profiled him for the brand-new magazine in 1980. Matthiessen’s own sporadic contributions include a rollicking, classic 1990 account of close encounters with roaming gangs of grizzly bears in the company of Doug Peacock, another legendary Outside character who had also become one of Matthiessen’s best friends and a perennial fishing buddy. In 1994, Outside published a feature by Matthiessen about his expedition to study endangered cranes in China that was eventually incorporated into The Birds of Heaven (2001).


But Outside’s debt to Matthiessen transcended his appearances in its pages. When the magazine came into being in 1977, it’s no exaggeration to say that he, more than any other single voice, made it plausible to treat travel, rugged exploration, and heroic endurance as worthy of literary ambition. Matthiessen’s work fused travel, nature, and adventure writing in a new way, and so would Outside. He encountered wild corners of the world with sophistication and self-deprecating honesty, rather than with the hoary, hairy-chested posturing of the danger-mad adventure genre—and so would Outside. His books and articles (mostly for The New Yorker) projected their author as a post-Hemingway beau ideal, audacious but without macho bluster. He was a meticulous observer of ecological phenomena and advocate for indigenous cultures and the integrity of untrammeled places. Matthiessen looked the part, too, with his long, weathered terrapin face, raptor’s eyes, and tall, shambling frame.

..more..

[Eleanors38]

1. Great summation of a great writer. Thanks.

[TM99]

2. Sad news.

He was an amazing writer. I read his Nine-headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969–1982 in college. It was pivotal in my philosophical development.

[closeupready]

3. The Snow Leopard is an amazing work.

Written decades ago, but what a classic - it was obviously written from the heart. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for an accounting of a personal odyssey which is likely to remain a classic, just as Arabian Sands, or Innocents Abroad, are still, a hundred years on.

[RainDog]

4. k&r n/t