Writing Influences: Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014)

(Photo courtesy of the Boston Restaurant Blog, October 2009)

Some years ago, I found myself tending bar at a roadhouse called Rick's Tavern on Route 30 in Southern Vermont. Business was slow that winter, particularly after deer-hunting season ended. My primary tasks at the bar were to open the occasional long-necked Budweiser bottle and pour a steady stream of Captain Morgan's & Coke for a young alcoholic companion who had traded his car for a Rottweiler. He named the Rottweiler "Hagler" after the marvelous boxer of the same name. Many of my evenings were graced by Hagler's presence, which made me feel safe. As neither Hagler nor his master was much of a conversationalist, I supplemented bartending duties with reading on those long, cold nights.

I had recently finished Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard and was looking for something else he might have written that combined personal spiritual quest with adventure. The local library had a copy of his most recently published work, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. In truth, I would have read anything that Matthiessen had written.

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse turned out to be another in a string of consciousness-raisings that I was experiencing at the time. Among its predecessors was The Empire's Old Clothes, by Ariel Dorfman, my first published translation. When I tried to buy Crazy Horse, I couldn't find it anywhere. I eventually learned that it had been "kept off the shelves for eight years because of one of the most protracted and bitterly fought legal cases in publishing history," (according to the book's jacket flap). A governor of South Dakota and an FBI special agent had successfully censored the book by using the legal system to block its distribution.  The tiny library from which I had originally checked the book out was defying the court order that forbade access to the book, and I remember appreciating that little act of civil disobedience in the interest of free speech and the First Amendment. Though not close to Walden Pond, I wasn't far, either; the presence of Thoreau was evident not only in my surroundings, but in Matthiessen's writing, as well.

Crazy Horse tells the story of two killings that occurred on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and of a man doing two life sentences for those killings. The problem is that the prosecution was unable to produce a single witness that could identify the man as the shooter. He has maintained his innocence for the past 36 years.

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse made me think about issues of power, corruption, censorship, sovereignty, and the Constitution. This was the United States, not Chile, where Ariel Dorfman is from, or Austria, where his parents were from. The undisputed public record of the FBI's behavior in this case sowed the seeds of not only the villain in The Shell, but of what some would call the "paranoid conspiracy theories" subscribed to by Colin, the protagonist's grandfather. Colin is a veteran of the Bay Area political scene of the 1960s.

Crazy Horse, and Matthiessen's next one, Indian Country, gave me a picture of people, wisdom, and traditions that were endangered, yes -- Matthiessen's subject more often than not was life-forms in the process of vanishing from the face of the Earth -- but which were still alive. And if they were alive, then there might be hope.

Prior to reading these two books, I'd been thinking about Indians in an historical, anthropological sense. Now I began to think of them as ... people. People who had been living here for thousands of years. People who were no longer living as they once had. I recognized what they had lost as people. I began to wonder what I had lost....