Word: matthiessen
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...