Sunday marks the 12-year anniversary of Peter Matthiessen’s death. Believe it or not, this is coincidental to the fact that I’d been thinking of his morning coffee habit.
“Only Penelope gets that mug!” I shouted in mock outrage Monday evening as my wife thoughtfully brought me a helping of Colombian blend to power me through the writing of these very words. As dark and gray as Gotham at its sootiest, it’s a Batman mug, with a stylized Caped Crusader cowl on one side, the green hair and clown-makeup face of his nemesis, the Joker, on the other. Treasured if not eye-pleasing, the hunk of ceramic has held my daughter’s coffee or tea from Noyac to college at Geneseo and back.
And thus are memories triggered.
If there’s a problem with snobbery in the Fabulous Hamptons and the endless, awful ways you can be made aware that you are not part of the in-crowd, in my experience there was a remarkable lack of it in Matthiessen, who — both high-born and an eminent nature writer who ushered in a new dawn of American nature writing — had double the excuses to employ it.
“When in doubt, English,” was his advice on the subject of a major when he heard I was going from Bridgehampton High to Boston University, a “good school,” in his estimation. “You’ll read some great books.” (I flunked out, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Years later, in the lobby of the old single-screen Sag Harbor Cinema, I’d tagged along with a friend whose parents were close with the Matthiessens. We’d all seen some foreign film, purportedly more intellectually stimulating, that is, but Peter seemed to have one eye on the door, not like a leashed animal, exactly, more as if his thoughts were on Nepal or Africa or his writing studio.
“Got a plan?” he asked a young man obviously at loose ends.
These were comments of very few words. Is that why they had staying power? Was it the inexplicable interest they showed?
There’s a lesson for parents in there somewhere. Encouragement. It doesn’t take much.