Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"Issues of Privilege and Labor in Peter Matthiessen's Men's Lives"
Gene McQuillan
American Studies and English, The City University of New York
gmcq@idt.net
One of the obvious yet crucial terms for discussing travel writing is that of "privilege." Recent travelogues and scholarship, including texts by writers as varied as Edward Said, Paul Theroux, Mary Louise Pratt, Mark Salzman, James Buzard, Jamaica Kincaid, Annette Kolodny, Jon Krakauer, or Stephen Greenblatt, rarely proceed far without some serious consideration of basic yet troubling questions. Who gets to visit and who gets to be visited? Who writes and who gets written about? Who can go where under what circumstances and who cannot?
My 20-minute presentation will focus on Peter Matthiessen's Men's Lives and the following question: who writes and who WORKS? Matthiessen is best-known for a series of books about his extended journeys to remote locations. Whether he has been writing about South America (At Play in the Fields of the Lord, 1965), Africa (The Tree Where Man Was Born, 1972), or Asia (The Snow Leopard, 1975), his travels exemplify the life of a writer who seemingly has an open-ended ticket to anywhere. That is why his 1986 book, Men's Lives, presents such a challenge to the image of the "privileged" travel writer. The book is set on the South Fork of Long Island near his home in Amagansett, and carefully describes the lives of the "baymen" who fish there. The fortunes of the baymen have been declining steadily over the last two decades, due to pollution, tourism, sports-fishing, and just plain bad luck. Matthiessen knows a few things about their lives, having "crewed" on their boats as a youth and having guided tourists in his own fishing boat during summer breaks from college.
The book clearly emphasizes that Matthiessen cannot initially approach the men as a writer; he must approach them as a worker, and his credibility and his right to portray them are premised on basic things: Does he know someone on their crew? Can he tie a dependable knot? Does he know how much a net costs? Does he really know what it means to get hurt while doing this job? Matthiessen can answer a convincing "Yes" to all of these, and for this reason the book becomes a compelling account of how one travel writer manages to speak with and for those who lack the freedom to roam to the world. In the words of Robert Hughes, the book is "not only an intensely felt elegy to passing relations between work and nature, but a precise and distinguished social history."
Gene McQuillan
The City University of New York
gmcq@idt.net
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