The Cloud Forest by Peter Matthiessen

First published: 1961

Type of work: Nature notes and travel

Time of work: November, 1959-April, 1960

Locale: The Amazon jungle, the Andean cloud forest and sierra, Tierra del Fuego

Critical Evaluation:

If nature books are not widely read today, one reason may be that among naturalists the scientist has taken precedence over the poet. Good nature writing is more than a process of observation, classification, and reporting, and our best natural historians from William Bartram on have infused their work with the larger vision which gives grace and wonder to the particularities of landscapes and things. But for every Henry David Thoreau, W. H. Hudson, John Burroughs, John Muir, or Rachel Carson to whom we can point, there have been scores of other writers about nature who showed themselves strong on facts but short on insight and style. The qualities of a good naturalist, like those of the good writer of travel books, are not hard to catalogue: curiosity, imagination, the power to absorb and organize facts, the ability to recreate scene and image in language, a sure hold on the world of the senses. When the naturalist and the traveler exist in the same person, the combination is a happy one.

Peter Matthiessen belongs to the select company of those who have enriched our knowledge of the wilderness and the wildlife to be found there. He is a novelist also, and a good one, and he brings to his nature writing the same sense of scene, imagination, and passion for realistic detail that we find in his fiction. Matthiessen is more than a novelist who makes nature his hobby, for there is nothing dilettantish in his method. When he writes about the wilderness and its creatures, his intelligence and his feelings are alike involved; he penetrates beneath the surfaces of things and creates an act of vision or a mood. Wildlife in America was the book in which he first demonstrated the clean skill with which he joins scientific information and illuminating perception in his spare yet evocative prose. In that forthright, disturbing book he presented the first really comprehensive survey of the endangered wildlife of forests, prairies, and waters in the diminishing unspoiled regions that are being swallowed up by industry and urbanization all the way across America. In THE CLOUD FOREST, he has ventured into an almost unmapped part of the world in order to bring back an honest and fascinating report on what he found there.

The book is beautifully structured, a traveler’s journal bringing together nature notes, descriptive sketches, and personal adventure. The long journey, covering in all some twenty thousand miles in the next five months, begins quietly enough with the departure of the M.S. Venimos from a Brooklyn pier on a cold November evening. The freighter is bound for Iquitos, Peru, a river port twenty-three hundred miles up the Amazon. Matthiessen’s destination is less certain: the Andean rain forest and the sierra, Mato Grosso, and Tierra del Fuego. Though his route may remain unplanned, his reason for the trip is clear in his mind, the desire to see the last wild terrains of the earth’s last wilderness before they are transformed by advancing civilization. Today these are to be found, except for Antarctic and the oceans, in South America. But if Matthiessen is in a hurry to reach those faraway places, the Venimos is not. The freighter follows a leisurely course that takes in the Bermudas, Haiti, the Windward Islands, Barbados, Trinidad, and British Guiana before it finally arrives at the Brazilian port of Belem. Along the way Matthiessen has had time to make a record of everything he sees—sea birds, weather, the marine life of the Sargasso Sea, the native life in a dozen ports of call.

Once the Venimos has begun the long voyage up the Amazon, Matthiessen is aware that he is following a course already covered by several distinguished travelers who also wrote books about their observations and experiences, the naturalist H. W. Bates in the nineteenth century, H. M. Tomlinson and Peter Fleming in this. Although comparison is inevitable. THE CLOUD FOREST holds its own beside THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE and BRAZILIAN ADVENTURE. Matthiessen’s account of the upriver voyage lacks the metaphysical dimension of Tomlinson’s travel classic; that is a loss, but the only one. Certainly he has written a more thoughtful and personal book than the story of exploration that Fleming told with such Etonian nonchalance.

Like all travelers in the outlands, Matthiessen falls in with the ubiquitous missionaries and like most, again, he is of mixed opinions about them. He finds a note of the incongruous in the village where two loudspeakers regularly carry Baptist hymns and messages to the Catholic natives. For the missionaries in the lonely jungle compounds he has a great deal of respect, but recognition of the good they do is tempered by the realization that frequently the missionary is speeding up the destructive processes of “civilization” to which the Indian finds it almost impossible to adapt. His belief is that the Indian tribe brought into contact with the white man on the latter’s terms has possibly only half a century of tribal identity and existence left; and he supports this claim by citing examples of the Carajas, who declined in number from approximately one hundred thousand to about two thousand between 1845 and the present, and of other tribes already extinct. Matthiessen’s sympathy is clearly for the Indian, lost in the time of his own customs and remote beyond jungles and rivers, creatures as much a part of the wilderness as the birds, animals, and reptiles that he writes about with such vividness and clarity.

In Pucallpa, a colorful but ugly Peruvian outpost at the foot of the Andes, Matthiessen first heard of a tremendous fossil mandible, so large that five or six men could not lift it, to be seen in the jungle not far from the Inuya River. Incredulous at first, he was told by others whose word he respected that his informant was a man not given to tall tales. That story, as well as vague rumors of some pre-Inca ruins, still unknown to explorers, to be found near the Picha River, led eventually to Matthiessen’s hazardous journey through the rushing Pongo de Mainique in flood time. First, however, he went on to visit Lima and Cuzco, inspected the monolithic Inca fortress, Sacsahuaman, and traveled to the famous mountain city of ruins, Machu Picchu. Then he was off to Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, and Tierra del Fuego. Puerto Montt, in Chile, is the southern limit of travel in South America. Cape Horn, however, is more than one thousand miles to the south, and that was Matthiessen’s destination, or as close to it as he could get. For no other reason than a long-standing desire he visited Patagonia, the Strait of Magellan, and Tierra del Fuego, bleak regions made famous by Darwin, and then returned to the Mato Grosso in Brazil.

By early April he was in Cuzco preparing to set out on an expedition to find the giant fossil he had heard about in Pucallpa several months before. His white companion on the venture was Andres Porras Caceres, a jungle veteran and the brother of a Peruvian friend. Their journey took them down the Urubamba River through a region partly unmapped and almost unknown to white men. From the beginning things went badly. They had difficulty with Indian guides, supplies, suspicious or hostile planters. A guide, Cesar Cruz, failed to show up at the appointed meeting place. By the time they arrived in an area controlled by a sinister family named Pereira they had practically committed themselves to the descent of the flood-swollen Urubamba through the dreaded rapids called the Pongo de Mainique. Aboard a raft made of six balsa logs and guided by three Machiguenga Indians—Torbio, Raul, and Agostino—they passed through the dreadful canyon without accident. Later Matthiessen learned that few travelers have ever traveled the rapids during the season of high water and that he and Andres Porras were probably the first white men ever to do so in flood time.

The discovery of the fossil jaw—for Matthiessen finally found Cruz, who guided him to the site—is almost an anticlimax after the adventure of riding the Pongo. The aftermath was even more anticlimactic. Peruvian authorities confiscated the fossil on the complaint of an alleged owner and refused to allow the jaw, the remnant of some giant prehistoric reptile, to be removed to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Matthiessen had to be satisfied with some excellent photographs reproduced in his book. He never did find the Picha ruins.

THE CLOUD FOREST may easily become a classic of its kind in the succession of books about South America by such writers as Hudson and Bates. It has the authentic touch that Thoreau once described in his journal: “In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is only another name for tameness. It is the untamed, uncivilized, free and wild thinking in Hamlet, in the Iliad, and in all the scriptures and mythologies that delights us,—not learned in the schools, not refined and polished by art. A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvellous, ambrosial and fertile, as a fungus or a lichen.” Peter Matthiessen’s book tells us about the conditions of nature and of man among other creatures in nature’s wilds. Henry Thoreau, walker in the wilderness, naturalist, and poet, would have approved.

Bibliography

Dowie, William. Peter Matthiessen. Boston: Twayne, 1991.

Gabriel, Trip. “The Nature of Peter Matthiessen.” The New York Times Magazine 10 (June, 1990): 30-31, 42, 94-98.

Holland, Patrick, and Graham Huggan. “Postmodern Itineraries.” In Tourists with Typewriters, edited by Holland. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.

Matthiessen, Peter. “An Interview with Peter Matthiessen.” Interview by Kay Bonetti. Missouri Review 12, no. 12 (1989): 109-124.

Norman, Howard. “Peter Matthiessen: The Art of Fiction CLVII.” The Paris Review 150 (Spring, 1999): 186-215.

Payne, David G. “Peter Matthiessen.” In American Nature Writers, edited by John Elder. Vol. 2. New York: Scribner’s, 1996.

Roberson, William H. Peter Matthiessen: An Annotated Bibliography. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001.

Ross-Bryant, Lynn. “The Self in Nature: Four American Autobiographies.” Soundings: An Interdisiplinary Journal 80, no. 1 (Spring, 1997): 83-104.

Shnayerson, Michael. “Higher Matthiessen.” Vanity Fair 54 (December, 1991): 114-132.