Arts and Letters

I think of Peter in the present tense. I see him walking on the beach. What time of day? Is the ocean rough? Where will his work take him next?

His journeys across the planet, into the Himalayas, and the Congo Basin, and the far east of Siberia, and forever elsewhere, should not lead us to forget the man at the L-shaped desk in his writing shack on Long Island. Here is the sentence, the paragraph, the revised page. Here are the pauses—the man who writes in longhand, once upon a time.

I also think of Peter as he thought of himself, primarily a writer of fiction. His novels and stories are largely an examination of the human spirit, of men and women often shaped by the primal forces of wild places.

One story begins: “He comes by train out of the wilderness of cities…”
A novel begins: “Sea birds are aloft again, a tattered few.”
Another story: “On the pale flats the lone trace of man was a leaning stake marking some lost channel that a storm or shift of current had filled in.”
A novel, simply: “Daybreak.”

We were writing buddies, Peter and I. Our talk tended to lean toward writing. His prose is taut, often beautiful, earth and sky-inspired, and in all his work, fiction or nonfiction, he guides us toward a deeper consciousness of the natural world and of the formidable energies that threaten its delicate balance.

Peter, briefly:
Co-founder of the Paris Review.
Commercial fisherman.
Member of the Company, as the CIA was sometimes called.
Zen Buddhist monk.
Husband, father, grandfather.
Author of more than thirty books.
Winner of the National Book Award in both fiction and non-fiction.
Naturalist and explorer.

Fiction is its own form of exploration. Peter tells us that fiction is “the free creation of something never beheld on earth.”

He says, “Perhaps their work is what writers become, in the way of people who, in old age, come to resemble their dogs.”

A friend dies and Peter in his master’s robe performs a simple Zen ceremony at a grave site in Sagaponack.

The daughter of a friend is married and Peter is the roshi, the master who blesses the couple in a modest ritual.

He is a man who carries friendship in his face and voice. And he has the eye of a trailblazer. He marks the trees for us. He travels to places we didn’t know existed and he writes about people and wildlife trying to eke out survival in the face of systematic ravage.

His enduring devotion to Zen Buddhism leads him ultimately to undertake a number of journeys to the death camps of World War II. In the last letter I would receive from Peter, in the grip of his illness, he refers to the “highly problematic novel” that he has been “struggling with forever.”

The novel is called In Paradise, and the first sentence reads: “He has flown all night over the ocean from the New World, descending from moon stare and the rigid stars into the murk and tumult of inversion shrouding winter Poland.”

Moon stare. The murk and tumult of inversion.

These words exist in space as a language in the making, a kind of earth poetry. And when I finished reading the book, I wrote to tell Peter of my deep respect for what he’d accomplished in the face of the challenge he’d set himself, and a ended with a practical suggestion:

“Take a walk on the beach.”

Too late for that, it turned out.

Near the end of the novel, Peter writes: “In the high windows, ice blues of the firmament pierce wild blood reds: all Heaven has been murdered….”

The Zen novelist leads us into his final meditation.