LITERARY LEGACY

For over five decades, Peter Matthiessen resided on a serene six-acre property near the Atlantic Ocean in Sagaponack, Long Island. There he planted trees, studied migrating birds, and preserved patches of wilderness. He also created more than thirty distinguished works of fiction and non-fiction. He wrote, often in longhand, in a little fisherman’s shack a few hundred yards from his house. Between the writing studio and the house was an old horse barn that he transformed into a Zendo, a Zen meditation hall. It became the focus of his spiritual life in his later years. When Matthiessen first arrived in the 1950s, the East End belonged almost exclusively to fishermen and farmers–along with a few painters who were attracted to the region's remoteness and luminous sky. He supplemented his early writing income by becoming a commercial fisherman and in this way came to admire the courage and self-sufficiency of his adopted Bonacker community, which he so masterfully portrayed in Men’s Lives.
 
As we know well, Matthiessen brought an unusual array of gifts to his writing. A lover of the natural world, he travelled widely and was a supremely knowledgeable observer of an array of unique fauna and flora. This is evident in the many travel and natural history books he published including Birds of Heaven, African Silences and The Tree Where Man Was Born. As early as 1959, three years before Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, signaling the perils of climate change, Matthiessen had published Wildlife in America in which he mourned the passing of many animal species. He brought a poet’s sensibility to his descriptions of people and places, leaving us some of the most beautifully crafted pieces of writing on nature in the English language. Yet he was also an accomplished novelist with a natural empathy for Indigenous people everywhere: from his writings on the struggles of Native Americans and the importance of maintaining their connection to the land in both Indian Country and In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, to the Caribbean masterpiece Far Tortuga and later his trilogy Shadow Country set in the wild Floridian landscape at the turn of the twentieth century and for which he won the 2008 National Book Award for Fiction. The legend of Edgar Watson in Shadow Country has been called “the story in miniature of the Western frontier”, an examination of the greed and lawlessness with which our forefathers plundered the Everglades and virgin coast of Florida. 
 
In the years since Peter Matthiessen's passing it has grown increasingly clear that he was not only an important American writer, but also a prescient voice eloquently testifying to the danger of our current human condition–divorced as it is from nature, forgetful of our responsibilities to others, and insensitive to the urgent need to realign ourselves with the forces of the natural world. In book after book, Matthiessen pointed out that we are destroying species, traditional human cultures, and our own happiness by endlessly imposing our will upon other living creatures. His was an activist’s voice, a naturalist’s call to arms, which he supplemented with a journalist’s determination to provide us with the facts to support his vision. Yet however dark his warnings were, he never allowed them to become despairing or nihilistic. 
 
In 1973, still grieving the death of his wife, Deborah Love, Matthiessen set out on a long-planned expedition to the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau with the biologist George Schaller. They intended to study the mating habits of blue sheep and hoped to catch sight of the elusive snow leopard, but for the author it became a meditation on death, loss, and spirituality, in particular the Zen Buddhist philosophies which had been first introduced to him by Love. The resulting book, The Snow Leopard, became one of Matthiessen’s most celebrated works and won him his first National Book Award. As a result, he remains the only American writer to win National Book Award in both fiction and non-fiction. It was also a pivotal moment in his life, when he became fully committed to Zen practice and a spiritual life, and thus added a crucial dimension–an interior depth–to his writing. In Nine-Headed Dragon River, Zen Journals 1969-1982; Are We there Yet? and Zen and the Writing Life Matthiessen makes this inspiration explicit. His final novel, In Paradise, involves a group of meditators who gather at the selection platform of a former Nazi death camp to contemplate the legacy of evil and offer a prayer for man’s redemption.