FAR TORTUGA
by PETER MATTHIESSEN 408 pages. Random House. $10.95.
Captain Raib Avers and eight ragged black and mulatto crewmen set out from Grand Cayman Island to hunt turtles in the southwest Caribbean. Their ship is the Lillias Eden, a once proud schooner now yoked to brand-new twin diesel engines in its converted cargo hold. Avers’ legendary temper is even blacker than usual. Though it is late in the turtle season, he needs a good catch to pay for the overhaul of his ship. He rashly refuses to worry about Eden’s lack of a chronometer, life jackets, fire extinguishers, or a radio that can send as well as receive. In a profession where a single mistake can be fatal, Avers brazenly courts calamity.
Literary sea voyages often carry a heavy ballast of allegory. The potential, after all, is readymade; it requires no great leap of imagination to see a ship as a tiny world adrift in eternity. Far Tortuga shuns such metaphysics in favor of hard surfaces. Avers is no Captain Ahab, nor is the Eden a ship of fools. The captain and his crew simply make up an exotic collection of drifters, drunks, petty criminals and indefatigable optimists, worth knowing, this novel implies, for their own sakes.
Silver Showers. To prove this point, Matthiessen writes the novel (his fifth) as if he were on board the Eden and living on short rations. Every fictional resource is jettisoned except snippets of descriptive prose and huge chunks of West Indian pidgin dialect (“Dis de oniest place I ever see bonita on de inside of de reef”). He does not even allow himself access to his characters’ thoughts. As far as this novel is concerned, they are what they say.
Far Tortuga therefore sets sail with a babel of unattributed dialogue swimming in blinding expanses of white space. Pages go by bearing single words: “Polaris,” “horizon.” Taken singly, these pages seem too easy, too close to the work of lazy poets who write a word like “loneliness” in the middle of a blank piece of paper and call it an insight.
But soon a wind starts to whistle somewhere behind those empty spaces. The rhythmic monotony on board ship (“Will relieves Buddy, Byrum relieves Will, Wodies relieves Byrum”) is broken by staccato quarrels and spurts of activity when the turtles are hauled in. The crew members emerge from anonymity as their speech patterns and private obsessions are repeated. The dialects begin to tease the ear with unheard melodies. Descriptive passages, when they occur, achieve a haunting beauty: “Where the bonita chop the surface, the minnows spray into the air in silver showers, all across the sunlit coral.”
Matthiessen is a noted explorer and naturalist as well as a novelist. Back in 1967, he sailed on a turtle boat out of Grand Cayman. As thoroughly as possible with words on paper, he has duplicated that experience, creating along the way an uncommonly successful mixture of fact and fiction. Far Tortuga is a treatise on turtling, an account of the dying days of sailing ships on unspoiled waters, and a history of a locale that winter tourists tripping through the Caribbean rarely see. Most memorably, it is a spare adventure tale about simple men driven to the extremities of pain and death by ignorance, greed, weakness and inexplicable fate. ∙Paul Gray
“My readers think I’m much older,” says Peter Matthiessen, 47. “I guess they figure all nature writers must be somewhere in their 80s.” Though his curly hair and lean cowboy frame suggest anything but senescence, the range of Matthiessen’s literary output might well suggest a much older man—or several younger ones. In a sense, he is two writers: the world-traveling author of seven respected books on exploration and naturalism (including Wildlife in America), and a novelist whose best-known work, At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965), is regarded as a minor classic that pits “civilized” folk against the innocence of a primitive South American tribe. “The ominous overtones of South America both repelled and attracted me,” recalls Matthiessen. “There is an incipient air of violence, a heart-of-darkness atmosphere.”
Matthiessen’s life began with a rich and stable childhood in New York City. He received a gilt-edged education at Hotchkiss and Yale, along with a junior year at the Sorbonne. After his graduation in 1950, he began writing short stories and a first novel, then headed back to Paris in 1951 where the colony of American writers included Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Terry Southern. At a bar in Montparnasse, Matthiessen and some friends lamented the critical pretentiousness of most little magazines and, with a $1,000 investment, produced the first issue of the Paris Review, a graceful literary magazine still going strong.
Matthiessen’s career as an explorer began in the U.S. in 1956, while he was doing research for an article on American wildlife. Though he had nothing more than a childhood passion for snakes and college courses in botany and zoology as background, Matthiessen loaded his green Ford convertible with textbooks, a shotgun and sleeping bag, and set off to see every wildlife refuge in the country. Nearly three years of work produced a book and a loose understanding with The New Yorker, which has since helped underwrite some of Matthiessen’s explorations.
These have included trips to South America, New Guinea (in the same expedition on which Nelson Rockefeller’s son Michael was lost), the Bering Sea, Africa, the southwest Caribbean of Far Tortuga and most recently Nepal and the Himalayas to look for snow leopards.
Matthiessen has tried some inward travel too. Experiments with mescaline and LSD led him to Zen, which he credits with helping him and his second wife bear her fatal illness two years ago (his first marriage ended in divorce in 1958). “Drugs show you where to go,” he says, “but they don’t get you there. The point of Zen training is to learn to pay attention to the present moment.”
Matthiessen calls himself “too freaky” to go into politics. But he is deeply committed to the subject of his only political book—on United Farm Workers Leader Cesar Chavez. Matthiessen regards Chavez as “the perhaps single leader worthy of the name in the whole country,” and he sometimes performs small chores for the farm workers. These days, he spends most of his time at his home far out on Long Island, writing in the mornings and playing with Alexander, 10, the youngest of his four children, most afternoons. Matthiessen expresses mild disappointment that his nonfiction books are better known than his novels: “Nonfiction writing is like building a cabinet. I know how to do it. Now I’d like to experiment.”
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