Laureate of The Wild

By Pico Iyer

"He'd heard from a Mongolian ornithologist," says the writer, and you know there's only one major American novelist who could be speaking, "that there were quite a number of cranes in the eastern part of Mongolia. So we spent two weeks exploring the river systems there. There are only 15 species of crane, and seven of them are seriously endangered. And they're all very beautiful -- the biggest flying creatures on earth -- and they seem to me a wonderful metaphor. They require a lot of space, a lot of wilderness and clean water." + They are symbols of longevity. "And about half the population's on the mainland; the other half's in Japan." He smiles. "They've probably been separated for millions of years. I like that. It humbles one."

Peter Matthiessen is talking on a leisurely Sunday afternoon in a secluded sunlit space at his six-acre compound on Long Island, New York. His shaggy black yakling of a dog, Tess of the Baskervilles, is sitting at his feet, and he is stretching out his long, strikingly lean -- somewhat cranelike -- legs into the sun, picking up clumps of grass as he talks, and now and then turning off the tape recorder with a desultory toe. Already this week he's been to Idaho and Colorado to attend a conference on freedom of speech and the American novel. He's enjoyed a "very nice evening" with Salman Rushdie and turned in a 132-page manuscript to Conde Nast Traveler on his recent trip to eastern Nepal, from which he brought back photographs of prints that may support the existence of the yeti, or Abominable Snowman. He has two books just off the presses -- on Siberia and Africa. In between all these activities, he is working on the second part of his semifictional "Watson Trilogy," based on a real-life Florida murderer, and is preparing to lead a tour group into remote Bhutan for more investigations of the crane.

Not far away is the converted stable that is his meditation hall: after 20 years of study, Matthiessen was, three years ago, formally accredited as a Zen teacher. His Zen name -- Muryo, or Without Boundaries -- seems inspired. For what other Zen-minded patriarch can claim to be a founding editor of the Paris Review? How many other American novelists have written whole books in Caribbean patois that were influenced by the principles of classical Japanese art? How many other New Yorker writers have taken part-Cheyenne mercenaries for their alter egos? And which other scion of America's Eastern ruling class has devoted 628 pages and seven years of libel suits to defending the name of a young Native American charged with murder? While others pursue careers, Matthiessen has forged a path, and often it seems a high, chill path through what he calls "some night country on the dark side of the earth that all of us have to go to all alone."

The two words that friends invariably use when describing this rare bird are Wasp and patrician -- Matthiessen's voice resounds with the kind of arrowhead sternness they hardly seem to make anymore (and his sister was the college roommate of George Bush's sister). Tomato has seldom had a longer a, and visitors are handled with a reserve at once concealed and intensified by easy courtesy. Yet the other thing always said about Matthiessen is that he's persistently tried to escape the comfort of his upbringing and put himself in wild places where privilege has no meaning. At 65 he's already spent a decade wrestling with Mister Watson, the fierce and accursed and untamable killer who was, by all accounts, "a good husband and a loving father, an expert and dedicated farmer, successful businessman and good neighbor."

The story of Matthiessen's life sounds like a colorful adventure tale. The son of a New York City Social Register architect, he had already, by the time he graduated from Yale, studied at the Sorbonne, served in the Navy and sold fiction to the Atlantic. After a short stint teaching writing at Yale, followed by a spell in Paris, he began working as a commercial fisherman to support his art. Then, separated from his first wife (he has had three, and four children), he loaded a few books, a gun and a sleeping bag into his Ford convertible and set off to visit every wildlife refuge in the country; by the time he was 32, this self-taught naturalist had produced the definitive guide Wildlife in America. Already, too, he was showing that he needed a lot of space, and wilderness, and clean water. His early novel Raditzer is an almost allegorical tale of a restless, artistically minded son of wealth -- Charlie Stark -- who goes to sea "unable to answer his own questions, and nursing ill-defined resentments" and finds himself irresistibly drawn to an orphaned ne'er-do-well who seems his shadow self. By the time of his next novel, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, the two sides are even closer -- in characters whose names alone (Wolfie and Moon) suggest that men have murderous beasts in them, and pieces of the heavens.

From the beginning, in fact, Matthiessen has hewed to the same harsh, uncompromising path: nearly all his books are set in a primitive, half- mythical landscape where men are alone with nature and a lost spark of divinity. You will not find much contemporary in the books, and there is scarcely a mention of domestic relationships, or cities, or Europe. Nearly all of them simply trace the dialogue of light and dark. "One reason I like boats so much," he explains, "is that you have to pare everything down to the bare necessities, and there you are, the captain of a little boat, without a shelter, without a past, without future hopes."

That starkness seems to call to him like a bell in a forest clearing. "I longed for something very, very spare," he says of his favorite book, Far Tortuga, and he notes with pride that there's only one simile in all its 408 pages. "Simply putting down the thing itself was so astonishing," he says. "I often think of the antennae on a cockroach coming out from under a ship's galley, and the light catching these two extraordinary, delicate mechanisms -- that light, and those things, to me is the echo of eons of evolution. What do you need with a simile or metaphor?"

The austerity of that approach gives the books something of the quality of redwoods -- lofty, solid monuments invested with an almost classical presence. They can also seem unbendingly solemn. "I like to think I have a merry side," he says, almost wistfully, and in conversation he certainly talks often of "fun," his sonorous voice rolling up and down with command and theatricality, now mimicking a genteel old lady, now a Taoist sage. "I've never in my life -- or hardly ever -- laughed so loud as during the creation of my fiction," he says, while acknowledging that his humor may be too laconic for some tastes. At the same time, he remains unflinchingly serious in his determination to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves.

In nonfiction, in fact, his principal role has been that of a warning bell and an elegist, trying to rescue traditional values and forgotten instincts from the ravages of progress. ("Modern time, mon, modern time," runs the knelling refrain of Far Tortuga.) "The world is losing its grit and taste," he says with feeling. "The flavor of life is going." And he rises to highest eloquence when talking of the way ever brighter urban lights have caused a "loss of the night" -- the fading of the stars he knew as a boy and of the dark waters on Long Island Sound that used to terrify him. "I used to be able to record 16 species of wood warblers on my property, all in a very short time," he says. "Now I'm lucky to see eight or 10 warblers all spring -- of any species."

Matthiessen was an environmentalist before the term was fashionable -- just as he was a "searcher" before it became a '60s job description, and an apostle of "male wildness" before Robert Bly got out his drums. Yet he is too tough-minded to dwindle into New Age pieties, and even though he does not hesitate to call the Gulf War "one of the great disgraces in our history," he equally stays clear of reflex anti-Establishmentism: at times, he says, he has been obliged to remind more militant friends that police self-discipline makes this "a very easy country to be brave in."

In his nonfiction works, such as The Snow Leopard, physical and metaphysical worlds often conspire melodiously. His novels, however, can seem like mountain climbs -- effortful, punishing, dauntingly ambitious mountain climbs that demand as much of the reader as of the author. Often their virtuosity almost obscures their virtues. "Peter always takes the difficult way out," says one editor. Matthiessen all but acknowledges this when he says, "I am really not in the least bit conscious of the reader. Maybe that's braggadocio, or flamboyance, but I really don't think that way. I think you're doing your best work when you're not even conscious of yourself. That's what's so thrilling about it -- you're out of yourself."

That unsparingness may also begin to account for the fact that the sum of his parts -- and of his books -- sometimes seems greater than the whole. Here, after all, is a writer with all the gifts -- an exceptional ear, an unequaled eye, a ravenous soul, a committed heart and a muscular radiance. While his more famous Long Island neighbors have ground out books every few years, he has written six novels, a collection of short stories and 20 nonfiction works, all of them rigorously crafted, meticulously researched and compendious. And yet, as his oldest friend, George Plimpton, says, "He's never been truly recognized." In part, perhaps, because so much comes easily to him that he has had to create his own challenges. "I think there's some sadness -- not bitterness, but I know there's some sadness -- about this," says Plimpton. "But Peter is determined to go his own way. He's made it difficult for himself."

It may also be that he juggles so many balls that it's hard for his audience to follow the high, clear arc of any one. With his number listed in the phone book and his receptive manner, he may be one of the most overburdened writers in America, a natural ear for anyone concerned with Buddhism, Africa, Native Americans or any of the other topics on which he's written authoritatively. Everybody seems to have some request or other of this ubiquitous loner. There are also other kinds of pressure. "Peter's a dream man in a certain kind of way," says a longtime friend, "handsome, adventurous, patrician, very well- bred, and he's done all these things." The small world of the Hamptons buzzes with tales of women who've given up everything just to live within sight of him. Yet in prose, at least, his remains a relentlessly male world -- Men's Lives, the title of one book, might almost be the summary of his entire oeuvre.

After all his striving, there is a kind of fittingness in the fact that it was Zen, in a sense, that found him -- in the form of three small Japanese masters he encountered in his driveway one day, invited by his late second wife. An aristocratic, solitary, exacting discipline that prizes immediacy, irreverence and unanalytical attention to the moment, Zen might almost have been made for this practical rebel ("We deserved each other," Matthiessen says with a self-mocking laugh). His commitment to the discipline has never been halfhearted. "Peter is very, very serious about Zen practice," says Helen Tworkov, author of Zen in America and editor in chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. She recalls how he once took three months off from his "incredibly full life" to lead a Zen retreat. "Peter doesn't take himself for granted," she says. "Here he is at the age of 65, and he's still committed to exploring what life is about. There are very few people of his age, or accomplishment, or stature, who are trying so hard."

Trying for what? one sometimes wonders. Perhaps for the same simple thing that Mister Watson's neighbors seek: a good night's sleep. "Simplicity is the whole secret of well-being," he writes in The Snow Leopard. "The secret of well-being is simplicity," he writes in Nine-Headed Dragon River. His great remaining ambition, he says, is "to figuratively clean out my office. I've really said what I have to say, and I really would rather, if I could bring myself to a halt and stop traveling, fool around with fiction, maybe more experimental fiction."

Maybe so. But 17 years ago, in a talk with TIME, he used almost exactly the same words. And so one is left with the noble, and slightly poignant, image of a restless, ambitious, complex man trying and trying for simplicity. "There's a line in Turgenev," he says, "in Virgin Soil, that absolutely haunts me. It's a suicide note, and the entire note is, 'I could not simplify myself.' What an arrow through the heart!"