The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  Jim heard me out and then, after a silence I was determined not to break, said he would sell me a piece but he was not remotely interested in being edited. Not even a comma, especially not even a comma, without checking with him. That was fine with me. I already had a hands-off policy when it came to excerpts and wrote thank-you notes suggesting that I was there only to get thorns out of paws. It was always satisfying to see how careful some writers were with pieces from their books. Cormac McCarthy once sent back a galley of my cut from All the Pretty Horses with a single comma circled as an intrusion—a copy editor’s change that I had not caught. Tom Wolfe would sometimes rewrite entire paragraphs if you asked him to look at one sentence. The best writers, like Jim, were always hard enough on themselves. Here is a paragraph of a letter from Jim to a friend of his, the writer and editor Robert Phelps, when he had finished polishing Solo Faces:

  I mailed off the revised Solo Faces two days ago. Endless fretting and worrying about things that are at their best imperfect anyway. I added a chapter, changed the ending, and did innumerable small things throughout. It’s a bit better. It’s astonishing how the crossing out of a line, sometimes a phrase, or the substitution of something right for something false can suddenly let light in on an entire chapter. My typist accidentally left out seven lines at the end of Chapter 16 and I said, wonderful, it’s much better without them. I’m already ashamed of the first version.

  I had not read that letter, of course, but when I did Jim’s characterization of the isometric relationships between the words he chose redefined him for me as a so-called writer’s writer. Maybe that’s what Mario Puzo meant, too.

  —

  IN THE SPRING OF 2013, All That Is was published by Knopf, and when Jim appeared with Richard Ford at the 92nd Street Y, the room was buzzing like an opening night of beloved theater. I was in the balcony, first row. After they both read, Richard led a conversation between them. He told me later that he’d been keeping company with Jim both personally and in his books “these past months”—the buildup to the pub date, I assumed. A great, great delight it had been, and Richard wanted the evening to be commensurate with his private experience. They sat center stage, a small table set with water between them. Richard looked lean and handsome as always. Jim looked strong, too. Handsome still, but no longer young, like a man grown comfortably fit into his sixties, when in fact Jim was eighty-seven. “Dashing” was how I’d heard a woman describe his arrival at a book party on Park Avenue a few nights previous.

  “I never thought I was very smart,” Richard offered, charmingly, at one point and went on to explain that Jim had always known he was smart and the result had been a confidence that was the foundation of Jim’s sentences and the ambition he used to put them together. Richard quoted Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller”—which ends on a note that a storyteller “is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story.”

  Jim nodded but didn’t say anything. They had already agreed that the pages that were the easiest to read were the pages most difficult to write. Jim said the new novel gave him a chance to show himself in a mature way. The crowd was riveted by the two of them—Richard so tall and commanding, and Jim still, somehow, a fighter pilot.

  I went home hungry for more Salter and opened Burning the Days. Two letters from Jim were there in the pages as bookmarks. One had come with the book galleys, thanking me for Esquire’s support and noting correctly that although I had not been there at the beginning I was there to run pieces of that book at the end. It was written on Gotham Hotel stationery but he had datelined it Bridgehampton, June 9. It was 1997 and the book would be published that fall. Although we had always described the pieces as memoir, I saw on the galley subtitle that Jim had insisted on Recollection over Memoir. He had signed off hoping that we would see each other over the coming summer.

  The second letter was from early that summer, explaining how the New Yorker would not also be publishing an excerpt because “they dislike publishing anything another magazine will be publishing.” This meant Jim was choosing to publish in Esquire instead of the New Yorker even though it would be costing him money (at least $10,000) and prestige (not to mention reach). On top of that, he had not yet been published in the New Yorker, where his friends and rivals had been running for years. Jim turning away from that was an act of loyalty unmatched in my experience as an editor. I put the letters in a safer place and reread Burning the Days into the night.

  —

  ALL THAT IS was a compounding critical success and sold very well, especially the foreign rights. It was finally the commercial book everyone who knew Jim had been hoping for, although he didn’t talk about success as a matter of principle. His friend and neighbor Peter Matthiessen told me he thought Jim was somehow disappointed by the sales but that, of course, you would not hear that from Jim. That’s just the way it was if you were a serious writer…it was competitive. He and Jim were almost the same age, and Peter was just completing what would be his last book, the novel In Paradise, published three days after Peter died, just a few months later, at eighty-six.

  There was a small graveside service when Peter was buried at the tiny cemetery just down the road from where he lived in Sagaponack. I saw Jim that afternoon at Peter’s house, where friends gathered to remember him. Jim spoke briefly about the respect Peter had earned among his neighbors, but did not mention his writing.

  When the remembrances were finished we talked about how Peter would be missed, but Jim did not say that he had just written 1187 perfect words about their friendship and the writing life they had shared. The piece went up the next day on the New Yorker’s website:

  I was reluctant to give him my work to read. I was afraid of his disapproval and too proud for advice. This may seem funny, considering how much we were with one another and how freely we talked, but there was always that slight competitive element to things. He did give me suggestions about “Burning the Days” that I took.

  I’m leaving out the trips to Europe and the intimacy that developed between our families. My children felt close to him, especially Theo, my younger son. When you celebrate Christmases together and everyone’s birthdays and other events through the years, a dense and indestructible fabric is made, really too rich to imitate or describe. We sailed up the Nile. We were in France together, St. Petersburg, Italy. We drank together, sometimes quite a bit. For a few years, in our sixties, we had a ritual of throwing ourselves into the cold sea on November 1st, then having an icy martini with our wives on the beach.

  There was more above and below those two paragraphs, all about writing and friendship, all of it too rich to imitate or describe…

  —

  IN LATE 2010 I called Jim and told him that the Paris Review would like to give him its highest honor. “Oh no,” he said, and tried to talk me out of it. Obviously it would be much better to encourage someone younger. Well, obviously not, because as defined by George Plimpton, the Hadada, as it was called, should go to “a unique commitment to literature” over time. The name came from George’s favorite bird, the hadada ibis, which has an extremely loud and distinctive “haa-haa-haa-de-dah” call—hence the name. Jim’s story collection, Last Night, was dedicated to George with a single word beneath his name: Hadada. I pointed this out.

  So, well then, yes, maybe for George. Jim would be honored.

  Accepting the award, he explained with a straight face that in the African language from which the word comes, hadada means “Hail, great father.” As in “Hi, Da-da!” So it would be hard to get too serious about a prize with such a silly name. But Jim got very serious about what it meant to him in light of his history with George and the Review, which had published A Sport and a Pastime and where he had first placed a short story. And then he said, holding up the small statuette of the bird, “This is my Stockholm.”

  The room went silent—five hundred people frozen in awe of such soulful irony—before exploding into standing ovat
ion.

  —

  SOMETIMES WE PLAYED TOUCH FOOTBALL, sometimes we ate oysters and sometimes we just stood together at cocktail parties. I wanted to keep up but hold back at the same time, to soak him in somehow.

  My father died as a navy pilot in 1944, just when Jim was leaving West Point for flight school and, ultimately, F-86 fighter jets. I never said anything about that until the night of Taylor Plimpton’s wedding. We were standing at the bar with Jim’s wife, Kay, watching a storm over Gardiners Bay, and there was something about Jim’s posture that reminded me of a line from Tom McGuane, another admirer of Jim’s, about a man “putting his drink down behind him on the bar without looking, like a cavalry officer.” And I told Jim that line, and then that my father had flown F4 Corsairs in the Pacific.

  “Well, you never mentioned that,” Jim said. Then that squinty smile. “But of course you didn’t,” he said. “Of course you didn’t.”

  I was on a plane to California when I learned that Jim had died. It was June of 2015. I looked out the window to see if the sky was one of Jim’s skies, filling with the bright cumulus that comes with fair weather, as he had written in Burning the Days. Or perhaps his clouds would become dense and towering, their edges struck with light; epic clouds, the last of the sun streaming through. And then he wrote, flying itself, the imperishability of it, the brilliance.

  −ENDIT−

  Rocks, Feathers, Shells (1,942)

  ONE THANKSGIVING NIGHT in a modern, art-filled beach house on Gardiners Bay in Amagansett, several women, some in their early twenties, some much older, put garlands in Peter Matthiessen’s hair as we sat around drinking. I lifted my phone to take a picture and he turned away, looking in profile, one of the women said, like Alexander the Great as she had once seen him on a coin in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, minted in gold when he was still alive.

  “Or an old lizard,” Peter said, when she showed him the picture I’d snapped. Every woman we both knew found him attractive and commented on it at one time or another—including my wife and ex-wife and my sons’ girlfriends.

  Peter liked to tease women—from twenty-one-year-old river guides to his old friend Jean Kennedy Smith. She liked to be called “Daphne,” a joke I didn’t understand, but it was somehow sexy. One night we were pouring wine at Peter’s kitchen table in Sagaponack and he was beaming, still handsome many decades beyond when they had met at a long-ago Kennedy family picnic in their teens.

  “You are still so full of yourself,” Jean said, her eyes sparkling.

  “I know, Daphne,” Peter said, “I know.”

  I thought of the story Plimpton told about Peter showing up with a single, perfect peach at the Paris door of the beautiful, ineffable, literary Patsy Southgate, whom he had met at the Sorbonne. This was the early 1950s and they were starting the Paris Review; all the men were in love with her, the story went, but she was Peter’s from the beginning and he had become engaged to her and then behaved badly in a way that George implied without detail.

  “Peter got her back,” George would say, sometimes frowning. “That peach was perfect.”

  When Patsy died, her obit in the New York Times noted that “in a city that treasures beauty she was renowned as the most beautiful woman in Paris.” It went on to tell Plimpton’s story in reverse, with Patsy arriving at Peter’s door with an orange and the line “I thought you needed this.” Peter told me that both stories were true.

  Peter’s second wife, the poet and writer Deborah Love, was beautiful too, and interested in LSD and Zen, both of which they explored together—with one evolving into the other for Peter. When she was dying of cancer, his friend Jim Harrison told me, Peter slept in her hospital room for weeks, even though they had been on the verge of divorce. In The Snow Leopard, he quoted her beloved Zen expression: “No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.”

  For all the years I knew Peter he was with Maria Eckhart, once an advertising executive, born in Tanzania, whom he married in a Zen ceremony at Sagaponack in 1980. With Maria, his creative output increased as she alternatively protected his privacy and turned their home into a kind of intellectual safe house. Maria would joke that Peter “is a lot of trouble.” Whatever she meant by that was unknowable beyond the great care she took of him. Writers’ romantic lives have always seemed fraught and complicated by success (Hemingway, Mailer, et al.), but that can be an obvious function of fame and money for anyone. More interesting are the exceptions, writers with discretion and wives whose magnetism matched their own, like Peter’s.

  —

  AT THE END OF 2012, Peter left on his last expedition, to Sagsai, Mongolia, to observe its ancient eagler culture, in which, he told me on the phone, men hunt wolves, foxes and deer from horseback using female golden eagles, which they carry on their arms. He had not seen that before, but he didn’t sound as enthusiastic as usual about an upcoming trip. He didn’t have to go, of course, and friends told him that, but Mongolia was where he had spent months with his beloved cranes for The Birds of Heaven—the cranes he loved not only as magnificent and stirring creatures but as heralds and symbols of all that is being lost. It was as if he was being called back. He said he had to go and he did, but it was a hard trip. Peter returned exhausted and was diagnosed with acute leukemia.

  Just off the kitchen of Peter’s house in Sagaponack was a small patio with a wooden table where we sat one Sunday after he had started treatment. He was optimistic about the chemo, although it put him down for one week a month, and said he was looking forward to physical therapy. He was thinner but still looked strong. We talked about the touch football games with Jim Salter and other local writers played in the potato field behind the house, and how he used to sneak onto private golf courses for a quick round now and then and had been caught only once. And we talked too about Leonard Peltier, as we always did.

  Lawsuits challenging Peter’s insistence on Leonard’s innocence had blocked the paperback edition of In the Spirit of Crazy Horse for close to ten years, but it became a best seller in 1992, including this passage:

  Whatever the nature and degree of his participation at Oglala, the ruthless persecution of Leonard Peltier had less to do with his own actions than with underlying issues of history, racism, and economics, in particular Indian sovereignty claims and growing opposition to massive energy development on treaty lands and dwindling reservations.

  The ladder of court rulings highlighted important free-speech issues, but Leonard remained in prison. Peter had never backed down from his story, and he was still outraged at President Clinton’s refusal to pardon Peltier after Clinton had met with Peter at the White House but then pardoned the tax cheat Marc Rich, who had fled to Switzerland. Leonard’s release date was still 2040 and Peter was still in touch with him. They spoke on the phone on special occasions like Leonard’s birthday. Or if Leonard just wanted to talk.

  “Does Leonard know about the leukemia?” I asked.

  Peter nodded, and smiled slightly.

  “Is Leonard a Buddhist now?” I asked.

  “In his way.”

  I learned later that Leonard’s last words to Peter were “Don’t leave me behind.”

  —

  PETER AND MARIA LIVED in Peter’s low-ceilinged, two-story wooden house separated from the dunes of Sagaponack Beach by a half mile of those potato fields. You could smell the ocean from the patio. He had bought it cheaply in 1961 from the graphic designer Alexey Brodovitch, who, as art director of Harper’s Bazaar, had developed a signature use of negative space, although he had gone the other way on his country property, planting tree after exotic tree. Peter planted more trees and hedges, until the six acres were so densely protected that you could only guess there was a house inside by noticing the dirt track that led into his bird-thronged sanctuary. No cats allowed because of the songbirds.

  On the porch was the huge skull of a finback whale Peter had salvaged from the nearby surf. Peter wrote about it in a way that spoke to his life in that house, walk
ing to the ocean as he did every day.

  From the beach landing, in this moody sky and twilight, I saw something awash in the white foam, perhaps a quarter mile down to the eastward. The low heavy thing, curved round upon itself, did not look like driftwood; I thought at first that it must be a human body. Uneasy, I walked east a little way, then hurried ahead; the thing was not driftwood, not a body, but a great clean skull of a finback whale, dark bronze with sea water and minerals. The beautiful form, crouched like some ancient armored creature in the wash, seemed to await me. No one else was on the beach, which was clean of tracks. There was only the last cold fire of dusk, the white birds fleeing toward the darkness, the frosty foam whirling around the skull, seeking to regather it into the deeps.

  Inside the house were spears and poison arrows on the walls, along with Michael Rockefeller’s photographs of Stone Age war in New Guinea. There were books everywhere, sorted into what seemed like small, discrete libraries of his interests. On a shelf in the small study off an upstairs bedroom was his collection of the Paris Review, every issue arranged in order over six decades, from the first issue planned in Paris cafés in 1953, when he was the fiction editor, to the most recent, for which he had judged the year’s literary prizes.

  Peter’s Zendo, where he taught and led services, was in a converted stable with a grassed yard and a centered Japanese maple and a small statue of Buddha. Inside on the floor was a heavy, bowl-shaped gong that a writer who’d once profiled Peter had noted would reverberate for as long as you could hold your breath. A shaded path around the side led to a raked stone garden perfectly in line with the gong and the window of the Zendo.

  On the other side of the house, beyond the patio in the direction of the ocean, was his writing “shed,” as he called it, where he worked every day he was not on the road. Much bigger than a shed, it was a high-ceilinged cottage with a sleeping loft and a long desk. The work he did there was an extension of his solitary travel and astonishing in its range—from journalism anchored in descriptive naturalism to narrative-driven fiction to personal essays to experimental combinations of all of the above. The Snow Leopard won the 1979 National Book Award in the Contemporary Thought category, and then the National Book Award for Nonfiction (Paperback) the next year. In 2008, at age eighty-one, he received an almost unprecedented third National Book Award, for Shadow Country, a one-volume 890-page revision of his three novels set in frontier Florida published in the 1990s. His favorite of his books was Far Tortuga, an innovative masterwork of simplicity that reflected his experimentation with form and innovation with language. Peter wrote more than thirty books, his last the ambitious novel In Paradise, published the week he died.