My Generation (54 page)

“Howya doin', Witherspoon?” said Captain Boggs in a hearty voice. “Dese is two writer gentlemen. Doin' de VIP tour.”

“Howdy,” said Witherspoon, as he flashed a smile and in so doing displayed a mouth full of blackened teeth in a beetle-browed skeletal face that had doubtless inspired many bad dreams. “I've got diabeet-ees,” he went on to say, as if to explain the needle in his arm, and then, without missing a beat, added: “They done railroaded me. Before Almighty God, I'm an innocent man.” Terry and I later recalled, while ensconced in the lounge car of the Super Chief, the almost hallucinatory sensations we both experienced when, most likely at the same time, we glimpsed the tattoos graven on Witherspoon's hands:
LOVE
on the fingers of the right hand,
HATE
on those of the left. They were exactly the mottoes that decorated the knuckles of Robert Mitchum's demented backwoods preacher in
The Night of the Hunter
. Witherspoon himself had a preacher's style. “I hope you two good writers will proclaim to the world the abominable injustice they done to me. God bless you both.”

“Mr. Witherspoon,” Terry deadpanned, “be assured of our constant concern for your welfare.”

I had undergone a recent conversion about capital punishment, transformed from a believer—albeit a lukewarm believer—into an ardent opponent; hence my chagrin, after we bade good-bye to Witherspoon, when Captain Boggs walked us down a narrow corridor and acquainted us with the vehicle that would soon speed the Hillbilly from Hell back whence he came. We trooped into a sort of alcove where the captain motioned us to stand, while he went to one wall and yanked back a curtain. In glaring light there was suddenly revealed the electric chair, a huge hulking throne of wood and leather, out of which unraveled a thicket of wires. I heard Rose give a small soprano yelp of distress. In the lurid incandescence I noted on the far wall two signs. One read:
SILENCE
. The other:
NO SMOKING
. I felt Terry's paw on my shoulder, as from somewhere behind me he whispered: “Did you ever dig anything so fucking
surreal
?”

Captain Boggs said: “De supreme penalty.” His voice slipped into the rhythmic rote-like monotone with which I was sure he had addressed countless VIP honorees. “De procedure is quick and painless. First is administered two thousand volts for thirty seconds. Stop de juice to let de body cool off. Den five hundred volts for thirty seconds. Stop de juice again. Den two
thousand mo' volts. Doctor makes a final check. Ten minutes from beginnin' to end.”

“Let me out of here,” I heard Rose murmur.

“I always likes to ax de visitors if they'd care to set down in de chair,” the captain said, his cheerful grin broadening. “How 'bout you, Mr. Starling?” he went on, using the name he'd called me by all morning.

I said that I'd pass on the offer, but I didn't want the opportunity lost on Terry. “What do you think, Tex?” I said.

“Captain Boggs,” said Terry, “I've always wanted to experience the hot squat—vicariously, that is. But I think that today I'll decline your very tempting invitation.”

I've recently discovered that the quite accurate notes I kept about our trip, which allow the foregoing account to possess verisimilitude, become rather sketchy after we leave the Cook County Jail. This is probably because our trip farther westward on the elegant Super Chief was largely a warm blur of booze and overeating, causing me to discontinue my notes except for a few random jottings, themselves nearly incoherent. (I want to mention, however, while the fact is fresh in mind, that some months after our trip I read that Witherspoon never had to receive that voltage; his death sentence was commuted, through a legal technicality, to life imprisonment.) I thought of Terry recently when I read, in an interview, the words of a British punk-rock star, plainly a young jerk, nasty and callow but able to express a tart intuitive insight: “You Americans still believe in God and all that shit, don't you? The whole fucking lot of you fraught with the fear of death.”

Terry would have given his little cackle of approval at the remark, for it went to the core of his perception of American culture. Like me, Terry was an apostate Southern Protestant, and I think that one of the reasons we hit it off well together was that we both viewed the Christian religion—at least insofar as we had experienced its puritanical rigors—as a conspiracy to deny its adherents their fulfillment as human beings. It magnified not the glories of life but the consciousness of death, exploiting humanity's innate terror of the timeless void. High among its prohibitions was sexual pleasure. In contemplating Americans stretched on the rack of their hypocrisy as they tried to reconcile their furtive adulteries with their churchgoing pieties, Terry laid the groundwork for some of his most biting and funniest satire. Christianity bugged him, even getting into his titles—think of
The Magic Christian
.
Nor was it by chance that the surname of the endearing heroine of
Candy
was—what else?—Christian. His finest comic efforts often come from his juxtaposing a sweetly religious soul—or at least a bourgeois-conventional one—with a figure of depravity or corruption.
Candy
was surely the first novel in which the frenzied sexual congress between a well-bred, exquisitely proportioned young American girl and an elderly, insane hunchback could elicit nothing but helpless laughter. (“Give me your
hump
!” she squeals at the moment of climax, in a
jeu de mots
so obvious it compounds the hilarity.) One clear memory I have is of Terry in the lounge car, musing over his Old Grand-Dad as he considered the imminent demise of the Super Chief and, with it, a venerable tradition. His voice grew elegiac speaking of the number of “darling Baptist virgins aspiring to be starlets” who, at the hands of “panting Jewish agents with their swollen members,” had been ever so satisfactorily deflowered on these plush, softly undulating banquettes.

In fact, he had a fixation on the idea of “starlets,” and it was plain that in Hollywood he would be looking forward to making out with a gorgeous ingénue from MGM and embarking on a halcyon erotic adventure. Toward the end of the trip we stayed up all night and drank most of the way through Arizona and Southern California, watching the pale moonscape of the desert slip by until morning dawned and we were in Los Angeles. Rose and I had to catch a late-morning plane to San Francisco but we all had time, it suddenly occurred to me, to visit the place that was the reason for Terry's trip. This was Forest Lawn Memorial Park, the “Whispering Glades” of Waugh's scathing send-up of America's funerary customs; how could Rose and I leave Los Angeles without viewing the hangout of Mr. Joyboy and his associate morticians? Terry agreed that we should all see it together. It was inevitable, I suppose, that the studio had arranged to put Terry up at that decaying relic the Chateau Marmont; for me it was an unexpected bonus to catch a glimpse of the mythic Hollywood landmark before heading out to Whispering Glades.

Terry and I were both in that sleepless state of jangled nerves and giggly mania, still half blotto and relying heavily on Rose and her sober patience to get us headed in the right direction. At Forest Lawn, in the blinding sunlight, our fellow tourists were out in droves. They were lined up in front of the mausoleum where the movie gods and goddesses had been laid to rest, stacked up in their crypts, Terry observed, “like pies in the Automat.” Marilyn Monroe had passed into her estate of cosmic Loved One only two years
before, and the queue of gawkers filing past her final abode seemed to stretch for hundreds of yards. Cameras clicked, bubble gum popped, babies shrieked. One sensed an awkward effort at reverence, but it was a strain; the spectacular graveyard was another outpost of Tinseltown. As we ambled over the greensward, vast as a golf course, we moved past a particularly repellent statuary grouping, a tableau of mourning marble children and a clutch of small marble animals. A woman onlooker was gushing feverishly, and Terry said he felt a little ill. We all agreed to be on our separate ways. “A bit of shut-eye and I'll soon be in tip-top shape,” he assured us as we embraced. We left him standing at the taxi stop. He had his hands thrust deep in his pockets, and he was scowling through his shades, looking fierce and, as always, a little confused and lost but, in any case, with the mammoth American necropolis as a backdrop, like a man already dreaming up wicked ideas.

[
Paris Review
, Spring 1996.]

W
hen 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.]