At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matthiessen

First published: 1965

Type of plot: Naturalistic adventure

Time of work: The early 1960’s

Locale: Oriente State, a fictional province in an unnamed South American country in the Amazon jungle

Principal Characters:

• Boronai, the chief of the Niaruna Indian tribe
• Les Huben, a Protestant missionary from the United States who wishes to convert the Niaruna
• Andy Huben, his wife
• Martin Quarrier, Huben’s assistant missionary
• Hazel Quarrier, his wife
• Billy Quarrier, his nine-year-old son
• Commandante Guzmán, the military governor of Oriente, who plans to attack the Niaruna
• Lewis Moon, a mercenary soldier and a Cheyenne Indian
• Wolfie, Moon’s fellow mercenary
• Pindi, Moon’s Niaruna lover
• Aeore, a Niaruna shaman and rival of Boronai
• Uyuyu (Yoyo), a Niaruna converted to Christianity

The Novel

At Play in the Fields of the Lord has the plot elements of stereotypical nineteenth century colonial novels and twentieth century Hollywood adventure films. The discovery of a savage Indian tribe, living in a remote and dangerous jungle, brings a handful of whites to a decrepit town on the edge of terra incognita. An ambitious and ruthless military commander competes with ne’er-do-well mercenaries and intrepid missionaries to establish first contact with the savages. All must battle the elements—oppressive heat and an unhealthy jungle—as well as resist the temptations of drink, which relieves boredom, and of forbidden passion, which eases loneliness.

The novel is not, however, a typical adventure tale. Matthiessen employs these romantic elements only to invert them. The Indians of this novel, the Niaruna, may be primitive by modern standards, but they are not savage, especially in comparison with the whites who would bring them “civilization.” The outcome of the adventure will not be typical: These whites will discover, not some lost treasure, forgotten city, or secret of life, but the dark reality of their own hearts. One fortunate intruder will discover a small light amid the darkness.

Matthiessen constructs the tale around two contrasting protagonists, Martin Quarrier and Lewis Moon. Quarrier is a missionary, Moon a mercenary soldier. Quarrier is a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, Moon a Cheyenne Indian. Quarrier comes to Oriente to propagate the Gospel, Moon to bomb the inhabitants into submission. Though they start the novel with opposite intentions, the plot leads them to one moment of common purpose and understanding before they discover their destinies.

The first half of the novel prepares the protagonists to meet the Niaruna. When Quarrier arrives at the capital city of Madre de Dios, he is anxious to begin his missionary work. He seems well supported by his wife, Hazel, and son, Billy, as well as by his coworkers, Les and Andy Huben. From the start, however, Quarrier is uneasy. Hazel quickly grows lethargic and fearful. Les Huben’s idea of conversion seems superficial. Andy Huben unwittingly arouses Quarrier’s sexual interest. No one except Billy seems as anxious to learn about the Niaruna’s culture and language as does Martin Quarrier.

Madre de Dios is no more hospitable to Lewis Moon. His employer, Commandante Guzmán, is imperious but stupid. His partner Wolfie attends to—and is content with—the alcohol and whores of the town. The presence of missionaries fills Moon with uneasy memories of the proselytizers who controlled the Cheyenne reservation where he spent an unhappy, degraded youth. When a Niaruna shoots an arrow at the airplane during a reconnaissance flight, Moon is awed by the Indian’s bravery. That night, Moon steals away from Madre de Dios.

In the second half of the novel, Quarrier and Moon contact the Niaruna. Quarrier reopens an abandoned station along the river, and Moon parachutes into the Indian village. Quarrier intends to preach; Moon plans to help the Niaruna resist.

Quarrier’s efforts are futile. The Niaruna, except for a handful of the timid and weak, avoid the missionary’s enticements. Hazel becomes virtually catatonic with fear. Billy dies of a fever, but Les interprets Quarrier’s loss by declaring it God’s means to convert the heathen. Quarrier begins to despair: At best, he attracts “rice Christians,” converts who profess Christianity to gain tools, food, and trinkets.

Moon fits in surprisingly easily with the Niaruna. He becomes Kisu-Mu, a being descended from heaven, a god-man with inexplicable links to the divine. Boronai, the Niaruna’s headman, befriends Moon and teaches him the ways of the tribe, even allowing his woman Pindi to become Moon’s lover. A jungle diet and strenuous activity soon harden Moon’s body. Most Niaruna quickly accept Kisu-Mu as part of their world—all except Aeore, who shot the arrow at Moon’s plane earlier. Aeore quietly awaits the chance to show that Kisu-Mu is not a god.

At the climax of the novel, the paths of Moon and Quarrier intersect. When Boronai dies of an influenza, Aeore persuades the Niaruna to destroy the mission, and he plans a confederation with other tribes to resist the intruders. Moon risks his life to bring a warning. Huben calls for military intervention by Guzmán, but Quarrier seeks out the Niaruna to head off violence. The Indians spare his life, but during Guzmán’s attack on the village, Quarrier is murdered by Uyuyu, a converted Indian among the attackers.

Moon, now outcast from two societies, hides in Boronai’s funeral canoe and escapes into an incredible isolation: “He did not know within a thousand miles where he might be, nor on what river, nor in what country.”

The Characters

Just as the plot does not fulfill the romantic expectations of the adventure story, so too the characters of At Play in the Fields of the Lord belie the stereotypes and idealizations of romantic characters. Matthiessen’s characters are naturalistic creatures whose behavior is usually determined by environment.

The environment in which the characters move, the jungle and the river towns upon its fringes, are overwhelming and hostile physical presences. This description of Madre de Dios typifies the difficult stage upon which these actors must play out their fates: It “formed a yellow scar in the green waste. With its litter of rust and rotting thatch and mud, the capital of Oriente State resembled a great trash heap, smoking sullenly in the monotony of rivers.” The landscape is the antagonist of everyone in the novel; it constantly assaults the senses and the spirits of these characters. Ultimately the landscape triumphs over both the indigenous and the intruders.

The Niaruna are creatures of the rain forest who resist easy labeling. They are not noble savages inhabiting some remote and primeval Eden: The jungle is too harsh to be a garden. By hunting and cultivating, the Niaruna find enough to live on, but no surplus. The Indians are constantly alert to combat the dangers from animals, poisonous plants, and rival tribes. Their humanity is fragile: As Aeore points out to Moon, the Niaruna paint their bodies because, in the jungle, how else can human beings distinguish themselves from the animals?

On the other hand, though primitive in technology and social organization by the intruders’ standards, the Niaruna are neither ignorant barbarians nor Satan worshipers. They have adapted ingeniously to the rhythm of the jungle, knowledgeably working the land in both dry season and rainy season, cunningly harvesting the river in its rising and falling stages. The Niaruna possess a stoic philosophy that enables them to accept privation, injury, and death without self-pity. Moon marvels, for example, at the quiet dignity of the Indians as Boronai, on his deathbed, receives a last respectful visit from each tribesman.

The citizens of Madre de Dios also reflect their environment. As unpleasant as the jungle, the town is at least less dangerous, but the lack of danger seems to foster inertia and decay. Freed from the necessity to wrest a daily living from the jungle, the townspeople are content to get drunk and to fornicate. Guzmán and Father Xantes, its leading citizens, possess more energy but are no less degenerate: Guzmán uses his energy to tyrannize over the townspeople; Xantes abstains from grosser pleasures, yet he abstains, too, from active pastoral care. He is content to bear silent witness to the sufferings of humanity.

The North American missionaries, who have come to transform the Niaruna, find themselves transformed by the jungle and the Indians. Utterly repelled by the constant physical realities of procreation and death, Hazel retreats into sullen passivity. Stung by resistance to his energetic pastoral work, Les hypocritically interprets misery and failure as happiness and progress: In his newsletters, he conjures unwarranted hope from the senseless death of Billy and the accidental martyrdom of Quarrier. Quarrier learns that the jungle accentuates his physical limitations (clumsiness, poor sight, low stamina) even as it challenges his assumptions about conversion. Only Andy seems little affected; she pays more attention to consoling the others as the environment’s demands drain them.

Of the missionaries, only Andy Huben and Martin Quarrier engage the reader’s interest. They show some capacity to learn and some humility in abandoning the prejudices with which they arrived. They alone express some sympathy with the Niaruna and antipathy for the fate they help to bring upon the Indians. Andy is an underdeveloped character, however, and Quarrier is physically unattractive; neither gains much sympathy with readers. Quarrier is something of a tragic figure, a man doomed to suffer by his own limitations as well as fate. He is an admirable man, capable of transcendence, but events overwhelm him before he can act on his insight. The reader feels a sense of loss at his death because someone valuable, someone ultimately (though not thoroughly) good has been defeated.

The soldiers of fortune, as dissolute as the missionaries are respectable, are more interesting and adaptable characters. Wolfie is unkempt, uncouth, and likable, a Falstaffian type who is admirable despite his qualities. He is at least honest about his ignoble ambitions.

Initially Moon is as unsavory as Wolfie, but he grows as the novel proceeds. Moon becomes the center of the novel because he bridges the worlds of North and South and because, like Quarrier, his encounter with the Niaruna leads him to abandon the goal which brought him to Oriente. Like Quarrier, too, Moon wins more of the reader’s sympathy as he loses the sympathy of the other characters in the story. Moon moves closer to the Niaruna than any other character by becoming one of them and accepting the discipline of the jungle.

An Indian at heart, Moon alone lives well in isolation; he alone can sense the harmony which exists between man and a harsh environment. The novel ends with Moon transfigured: “Laid naked to the sun, he felt himself open like an enormous flower. Soon he slept. At dark he built an enormous fire, in celebration of the only man beneath the eye of heaven.” Moon is a comic figure, in the classic sense, who defeats his antagonists and finds his place in the scheme of things.

Critical Context

At Play in the Fields of the Lord signaled the coming together of Matthiessen’s two interests, the literary and the anthropological. Before 1965, he had published three novels on themes and in styles typical of a postwar novelist: a coming-of-age tale in Race Rock (1954), the making of a young revolutionary in Partisans (1955), and a study of human evil in Raditzer (1961). Beginning with Wild Life in America (1959), Matthiessen wrote several anthropological works on remote areas on the globe; the major ones before 1965 concern South America in The Cloud Forest: Chronicle of the South American Wilderness (1961) and New Guinea in Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in the Stone Age (1962).

The themes of the anthropological books echo the themes of At Play in the Fields of the Lord. Matthiessen chronicles the disappearance of primitive ways of life as well as primitive ways of apprehending reality and understanding experience. Civilization’s thought patterns, as well as its technology and bureaucracy, threaten prior ways of enacting the natural harmony of man and nature.

The attempt to portray this conflict of ways of thinking has led Matthiessen to technical experiments in At Play in the Fields of the Lord and in a later book Far Tortuga (1975). Both books use surrealistic devices (the abandonment of traditional grammar, synesthesia, the depiction of impression rather than sequential events) to immerse readers in new patterns of perception. Far Tortuga is much more surrealistic; in At Play in the Fields of the Lord, the experimental passages treat Moon’s consciousness, the imagery of the landscapes, and the Niaruna’s sense of experience.

Bibliography

Bawer, Bruce. The Aspect of Eternity. St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1993. Contains an essay called “Peter Matthiessen, Nature Boy,” a generally unflattering critique of Matthiessen’s novels prior to Killing Mister Watson. Argues that Matthiessen romanticizes the primitive and hypocritically attacks American and Western civilization. It also traces what Bawer calls an “antagonism toward fathers” in Matthiessen’s work.

Bishop, Peter. “The Geography of Hope and Despair: Peter Mathiessen’s The Snow Leopard.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 26, no. 4 (1984): 203-216. Places Matthiessen alongside other literary travelers such as Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and D. H. Lawrence. Discusses in-depth The Snow Leopard and compares it to Far Tortuga and At Play in the Fields of the Lord. Sees the book’s lack of conclusion as its success. A thought-provoking article which presents psychological insights into Matthiessen.

Gabriel, Trip. “The Nature of Peter Matthiessen.” The New York Times Magazine, June 10, 1990, 30. An insightful profile, based on interviews with Matthiessen and his circle. Gabriel focuses on Killing Mister Watson but also provides an overview of Matthiessen’s career. Neither sycophantic nor hostile, Gabriel presents a nuanced portrait of the man behind the books.

Grove, James P. “Pastoralism and Anti-Pastoralism in Peter Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 21, no. 2 (1979): 15-29. Discusses this highly praised novel and reflects on the influence of Zen on Matthiessen’s views. An in-depth treatment of the content and intent of this novel within the theme of pastoralism.

Raglon, Rebecca. “Fact and Fiction: The Development of Ecological Form in Peter Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 35, no. 4 (1994): 245-259. Looks at Matthiessen’s work, Far Tortuga especially, as a criticism of the dualistic view of nature and humanity. Raglon argues that Matthiessen sees no separation between nature and humanity and writes instead of their necessary interrelatedness.

Shnayerson, Michael. “Higher Matthiessen.” Vanity Fair 54, no. 12 (1991): 114-132. Contains considerable biographical information and gives a balanced view of Matthiessen’s personal strengths and weaknesses.