Apostles of Modernity: American Writers in the Age of Development

6. Stone Ages: Peter Matthiessen and Susan Sontag in Latin America and Asia

 Thami shook his head. “What a wonderful thing to be an American!” he said impetuously. “Yes,” said Dyar automatically, never having given much thought to what it would be like not to be an American. It seemed somehow the natural thing to be. —Paul Bowles, Let It Come Down (1952) In a recent study of 1950s literary culture, Morris Dickstein argues for the complexity of an often-caricatured period.“American culture in the fifties was staid and repressive at the center,”he writes,“in its treatment of women, for example, or its range of political debate, but there was also a liberal idealism that survived from the New Deal and the War.” Dickstein notes the “highly self-critical” edge of a culture where “pop sociology and psychology were virtual cottage industries.”1 One might add that a further “self-critical” arena of debate, suddenly emergent at the turn into the 1960s, was the new field of an actively political writing rooted in environmentalism and the nascent ecology movement. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) signaled a shift in the culture, as the human degradation of the natural world became the site for an acerbic assault on modern life. Carson’s polemic was matched by other telling interventions in the field of environmental writing—books that bound Stone Ages Peter Matthiessen and Susan Sontag in Latin America and Asia 6 128  Stone Ages together accounts of a vanishing natural world with laments for the civilizations (“primitive” or tribal) rooted in these fragile ecosystems. Peter Matthiessen’s work from this time (1961–15) focused on a microscopic attentiveness to specific, threatened ecologies. His work also marked an important moment in the steady globalization of American writing’s imaginative outreach. Like Richard Wright and Paul Bowles, Matthiessen was a peripatetic figure and a traveler-explorer who immersed himself in cultures far from the apparent centers of cultural gravity in the Eisenhower era, the crabgrass frontier and the flannel suits. And like those figures, Matthiessen was a figure whose responses to world cultures anticipated themes that entered the cultural mainstream a good number of years later. The generation of writers who created travel narratives, expatriate fiction, and journalism at this time (roughly the mid-1950s to the mid1960s ) created some of our first accounts of phenomena that are now clichés: globalization, Americanization, transnationalism. They lacked a vocabulary to articulate in theoretical terms the implications of a world moving toward increasing interdependency; but their texts grow from and represent such interdependency. There is a decisive cultural shift in the literal “place” of writing, as a small but significant number of authors pushed out from the Eurocentric metropolis of Anglo-American modernism toward what Wright had described in The Color Curtain as a new geopolitical center. In the travels of Bowles, Matthiessen, Wright, Dos Passos, and Buck a new internationalism takes shape. These writers emerged from Euro-American modernism, but their interests were becoming more cosmopolitan in this interim period between modernism ’s waning and postmodernism’s advent. Having graduated in 1950, Matthiessen went on to found The Paris Review with his friend George Plimpton. Given his Ivy League background and an early immersion in European culture, he seemed set for a career with familiar contours. But he then veered away from an established pathway in the most intriguing ways; he turned from Europe toward what was for an American author the margins of the written world: Asia and South America. In a number of books at the end of the 1950s and the start of the 1960s, Matthiessen quickly drew a diverse Stone Ages  129 terrain for the American traveler-writer. The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness (1961), Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in the Stone Age (1962), and his novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965) set out a fresh global cartography. All three texts, written against the background of America’s deepening involvement in Vietnam, embed themselves in a world of primordial jungles , embattled indigenous peoples, earnest (but troubled) missionary endeavors and repeated conflict between “advanced” and “backward” cultures. Matthiessen tends to be ghettoized as a naturalist writer, but his work resonates in ways that repeatedly break down such narrow definitions.2 For Matthiessen, explorations of the natural open up into reflections, too, on human ecologies. He then constructs a series of important representations...