When I first met Peter Matthiessen I was in my mid-twenties, feeling rather nervous and unhappy and very much out of my element on my initial visit to Paris. I had published a first novel to considerable acclaim in New York, but small word of the book's existence, and nothing of its success, had reached France during that balmy and beautiful spring of 1952, and I suppose I was a little disappointed that Peter did not display the deference I thought fitting to the situation. Thus at first glance I thought Peter a trifle cold, when in reality his perfectly decent manners were really all one should have expected in view of the fact that I was merely another of the dozens of visiting American firemen who, at the behest of well-meaning friends back in the States, came knocking at the Matthiessen door that year. Peter and his wife, Patsy, lived in a modest but lovely apartment on a Utrillo-like backstreet in Montparnasse; spacious, airy, its one big room filled with light, the Matthiessen pad (the word was just coming into use about then) became the hangout for many of the mob of Americans who had hurried to Paris to partake of its perennial delights, to drink in the pleasures of a city beginning to surge with energy after the miseries of the recent war. “U.S. Go Home” was painted by the Communists on every wall—it was possibly the most ignored injunction in recent history. For the Americans happily established there, Paris was home, and no place was more homelike than the Matthiessen establishment on the rue Perceval. To this day I recollect with awe the sense of an almost constant open house, in which it was possible at practically any time to obtain music and food and drink (Peter was unfailingly generous with what seemed to be a nearly inexhaustible supply of Scotch) or, if need be, a spot to sleep off a hangover and—of course always—conversation. George Plimpton and Harold Humes were among the many visitors, and much of the conversation had to do with a literary magazine which the three friends were then in the process of bringing into hesitant life and which now, seemingly deathless, is known as The Paris Review. I am rather proud of the fact that the interview with me, done by Peter and George Plimpton, was the first of the celebrated Paris Review series (although not the first published)—first undoubtedly because at the time I was the only published novelist any of us knew.
We also talked a great deal about books and writing. We were swept up in the very midst of a postwar literary fever. Peter had not yet written a book (his fledgling effort, the affecting story “Sadie,” had been published in The Atlantic) but he was, after all, barely twenty-five; he had time to burn and I remember telling him so, from the senior and authoritative vantage point of a writer who was two years older. So it is not to belittle Peter's capacity for work—and he is one of the most industrious writers alive—to say that much of our time during that spring and summer was spent at play. My French was rudimentary, while both Peter and Patsy had an excellent command of the language, and this helped bring me in contact with French people I might not have met; my linguistic ability slowly improved. That same savoir-faire of Peter's enabled me (a gastronomic idiot) to become acquainted with the native cuisine, and one of the remembered joys of that long-ago season, when a solitary dollar could buy considerable French joy, is our single-minded cultivation of the restaurants of Montparnasse and Saint-Germaindes-Prés. We had become good friends and I saw a lot of Peter during the following year in Europe—in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, where Peter and Patsy rented a house for the summer; in Rome, where to my enormous and happy surprise Peter turned up with a group of Paris Review cronies at my wedding the next spring; and finally during a splendid sojourn at Ravello, on the Amalfi Drive, where for several weeks Peter and Patsy (along with their newborn son, Lucas) shared a house with Rose and me and played tennis and interminable word games, talked for long hours about writers and writing, and swam in the then pellucid and unpolluted Mediterranean.
In 1954, when we all moved back to America, Peter set up housekeeping on Long Island and began to write seriously (though spending much of his time in good weather plying a trade as commercial fisherman), while Rose and I began to plant domestic roots in the hills of western Connecticut. During this period we kept close contact, visiting back and forth with considerable regularity, and it was at that time that I read Peter's first novel, Race Rock, in manuscript, beginning a tradition that has lasted to this day; amiably critical of each other's output, Peter and I have read (I think it is safe to say) nearly every word of each other's work—at least of a major nature—and I like to think that the habit has been mutually beneficial. Later I read Partisans and Raditzer with the same careful eye that I had Race Rock; as talented and sensitive as each appeared to be, the statement of a writer at the outset of his career, they were, I felt, merely forerunners of something more ambitious, more complex and substantial—and I was right. When At Play in the Fields of the Lord was published in 1965 there was revealed in stunning outline the fully realized work of a novelist writing at white heat and at the peak of his powers; a dense, rich, musical book, filled with tragic and comic resonances, it is fiction of genuine stature, with a staying power that makes it as remarkable to read now as when it first appeared.
But before At Play was published Peter had to begin that wandering yet consecrated phase of his career which has taken him to every corner of the globe, and which, reflected in a remarkable series of chronicles, has placed him at the forefront of the naturalists of his time. I saw Peter off in 1959 on the first of these trips—bidding him a boozy bon voyage athwart the Brooklyn docks, on a freighter that was to carry him up to the remotest reaches of the Amazon. Seemingly unperturbed, his spectacles planted with scholarly precision on his long angular face, he might have been going no farther than Staten Island, so composed did he seem, rather than to uttermost jungle fastnesses where God knows what beasts and dark happenings would imperil his hide. Weeks later I received a jaunty postcard from a distant and unheard-of Peruvian outpost, and I marveled at the sang-froid and the self-sufficiency but also at the quiet excitement the few words conveyed; in later years I would receive other droll, understated communiqués from Alaska, New Guinea, and the blackest part of Africa.
From what sprang this amazing obsession to plant one's feet upon the most exotic quarters of the earth, to traverse festering swamps and to scale the aching heights of implausible mountains? The wanderlust and feeling for adventure that is in many men, I suppose, but mercifully Peter has been more than a mere adventurer: he is a poet and a scientist, and the mingling of these two personae has given us such carefully observed, unsentimental, yet lyrically echoing works as The Cloud Forest, Under the Mountain Wall, The Tree Where Man Was Born, and The Snow Leopard. In the books themselves the reader will find at least part of the answer to the reason for Peter's quest. In these books, with their infusion of the ecological and the anthropological, with their unshrinking vision of man in mysterious and uneasy interplay with nature—books at once descriptive and analytical, scrupulous and vivid in detail, sometimes amusing, often meditative and mystical—Peter Matthiessen has created a unique body of work. It is the work of a man in ecstatic contemplation of our beautiful and inexplicable planet. To this body of natural history, add a novel like At Play in the Fields of the Lord and that brooding, briny, stormswept tone poem, Far Tortuga, and we behold a writer of phenomenal scope and versatility.
[Introduction to Peter Matthiessen, A Bibliography: 1951–1979, compiled by D. Nichols; Canoga Park, Calif.: Orirana Press, 1979.]