Somewhere I've read that the individuals attracted to the Peace Corps fall into two distinct age groups, driven by motivations with subtle differences. The first group are the young people--often right out of college--eager to see the world and put their idealism to work.

Marnie Mueller was one of these young people whose participation has lent the program such an aura of enthusiasm and energy. She went to work in Ecuador in 1963, soon after this volunteer service was established by Kennedy. To date she's written one book, Green Fires: Assault on Eden: A Novel of the Ecuadorian Rainforest (1995).

Mueller's sense of civic duty and commitment to justice was inherited at birth. Her mother was Jewish. Her father was a union organizer and community activist. Outraged by the treatment of the American-Japanese during World War II, he moved his family into one of the Californian relocation centers soon after it was established. She was born in this camp. She has a keen sensitivity to the varieties of prejudice that plague human experience.ⁱ

Thirty years after she went to Ecuador she has chosen to write about it. In part because so much time has elapsed, the novel is internally structured to reflect that distance. The narrator is describing her honeymoon in Ecuador, four or five years after having served a tour there in the Peace Corps. While traveling into the Amazon region of the Napo River the couple are drawn into a secret war ostensibly waged against the native people by international oil companies. To exploit the oil resource, a clandestine bombing campaign is being carried out, thereby eliminating any resistance to the project. Colluding in the scramble to gain access to the resource are various representatives of the Protestant and Catholic faiths as well as the Ecuadorian government. As the plot unfolds that narrator is constantly thrown back on memories of a failed Peace Corps experience in Guayaquil. In particular she is haunted by a death of a child that she felt she might have prevented had she been less involved in political activities.

It should be clear that a lot of space is devoted to the anxieties of a political conscience and these questions make for the most interesting parts of the book. No doubt the Peace Corps provoked profound dilemmas for many of its volunteers.ⁱⁱ In one light the Corps represents an American arrogance tied to the interests of capitalist development and a dubious banner of progress hoisted by kids who need only commit themselves for two years. After that they're free to go home and eat McDonald's hamburgers. On the other hand Mueller successfully conveys the sincerity that animated the Peace Corps and so many of that generation that first served in it. As fiction this book isn't powerful material, but the recreation of the motivations and doubts that befell many during the 1960's is quite authentic.

Has it really been a year since I picked up these books by Moritz Thomsen (1916-1991)? Let me thank you again for the recommendation. I want to say that I swallowed them whole but that implies that I poured through them quickly, which I didn't. I would read a few pages, a chapter at most, put down whichever one I was reading and pace around for hours.

Thomsen's back-to-back tours in Ecuador began precisely when Mueller's ended in 1965. Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle (1969) has a legendary status within the organization and has been subsequently used as orientation material for volunteers. Unfortunately, this might be why the book hasn't received more recognition with a wider audience. It may be that the book got pegged as a training manual and the artistry was overlooked.

You may recall that most of this book first appeared as articles in The San Francisco Chronicle.ⁱⁱⁱ Can you imagine reading material like this in a newspaper today? Maybe somewhere on the web, but not in print. Anyway, the opportunity wasn't lost on Thomsen. I do think that the serial publication offered him at least two advantages: He could bite off smaller pieces of his experience and chew them over within the limits of the free time he could devote to the writing, plus he was getting relatively immediate feedback. The form and the circumstances forced a kind of discipline that, in turn, must have given him some measure of encouragement. He mentions receiving letters from The Chronicle readers. Neither element--discipline and readers--is a minor one when forging a commitment to words.

Mystery

A further word on this matter of discipline: Just about the time that I was first writing this series of letters that you are reading I ran into a fellow who had served in the Peace Corps in Africa. I enthusiastically recommended Thomsen's book. After this man read it he excitedly vouched for the accuracy of the general experience and marveled over and over how Thomsen had found the time to write any of it down. I have no doubt that working in a foreign culture, struggling with a new language, and the crises of poverty are exhausting experiences but, if appreciated in full, there is little of life that doesn't have this character, that doesn't sap the will or consume attention. This is always the problem, the ongoing campaign of any writer, any human being: to wrest even one word of praise from the cacophony of life. And if that achievement is no more than the word "God," however that name is configured, then the world has sprung into being and real creation begins.

The other large group of volunteers are in their forties. They had careers and are looking for a more meaningful challenge. Perhaps no less idealistic than the 21 year olds, nevertheless this group brings more technical experience to their service, as well as more maturity. While they may be seeking a second chance, they are not starting from scratch. Typically it's on the basis of their previous skills that they have been accepted and they expect to utilize them again. Where they differ from their counterparts is in already holding an image of what defeat looks like.

Thomsen continued to farm throughout his Peace Corps tours and for years afterward, just as he had in California before he volunteered. In that sense this book, as well as the next, The Farm on the River of Emeralds (1978), are not records of wholly new worlds for the author. Thomsen underwent a radical reorientation of another sort. There are probably very few recruits who remain in-country for the rest of their lives. His allegiance to Ecuador, in the persons of Ramón and his family, proved to be enduring and complete. What thrilled me in this book was the obscure and subtle way in which Ramón emerges as the hero. The fidelity of that "plotting" is surely one of great successes of this first volume.

The full extent of Ramón's importance in the text, as well as in Thomsen's life, really isn't made clear until the sequel. I take the opening of The Farm--I came back to make Ramón the hero of my life--to be the most honest admission of a profound friendship I have ever seen. But the full realization of that relationship would lie ahead...

The bombshell that closes Living Poor is a truth that most readers will find difficult to comprehend. His recognition that the purely physical debilitations of poverty doom most efforts at a revitalization of any sort is too depressing for most of us to think about. The permanent injuries to the mind and body wrecked by starvation mock any Christian beliefs in mercy or the secular faith in medical prescriptions for healing.

Our grounding in motion, our ultimate dependence upon the health of our bodies, proves too much for even Moritz to accept. I take The Saddest Pleasure (1990) to be the belated and, even then, reluctant acknowledgment that this law also applied to himself. And in the face of death what is there to exalt but the best in us, our spirit, our love, our arts? This is that naked journey he is embarked on in Brazil.

How openly his arms embraced all of the Latin American arts... its painting, music and literature. In The Farm there were plenty of intimations of his preparations to make this leap--beginning with his drawing on the cover. His shy descriptions of the effect of listening to Poulenc, alone in his jungle hut, made me weep. Have you ever read a more heartrending admission than his pronouncement over the body of that pathetic victim killed by a passing vehicle? "At least I had music." But the book itself is the best evidence of his turn to the powers of the imagination. My feeling is that he gave that one his all.

In a curious way the last book, My Two Wars (1996) brings Thomsen's work full circle. The man who set out as a Peace Corps volunteer reveals his prior roles in the wars that scarred him for life. The first of these battles is an intensely private one fought against a wealthy and egotistical father who cared little for his son. Even after writing three intensely autobiographical books, Thomsen felt he could not fully account for the destructive extent of this parental bond. The national war, his missions as a World War II bombardier, although more gripping than the private one, at times seemed like an extension of the first. At its very best the interplay of these two narratives produce a synergistic power. His impassioned condemnation of Hitler made me feel as if I had never even guessed the meaning of the noun "degenerate."

Christ, what a hard life Moritz Thomsen lived. What terrific disappointments he had as a writer, a title his self-effacement, not his accomplishment, would hardly allow him to breathe.^iv

-March 9, 1998

Endnotes

ⁱ There are a couple of sites on the web where there is additional biographical information about this author. You'll find an interesting description of her birthplace which she wrote for an on-line magazine at http://www.echonyc.com/~meehan/Soil/Scandal/mueller.html

You can also find an interview posted with her publishers, Curbstone Press, at http://www.curbstone.org/ainterview.cfm?AuthID=21#gfint

ⁱⁱ What motivates people to write about the world around them is a mystery to me. Whatever it is that accounts for writers it would certainly seem that the Peace Corps has engendered, or attracted, no small portion of quality x. Amy Biels' burgeoning list of the books authored by former volunteers certainly suggests that these people have produced an unbelievably disproportionate number.

ⁱⁱⁱ Thomsen mentions this in his preface. That brief opening is well worth reading closely. Although he views the Peace Corps as the last great adventure for Americans he puts the stress on the intellectual character of a quest to comprehend other people. His is not an adventure story. Or if it is, then it is the only variety of great value.

One other note about the preface: Thomsen states that in his reading he had only come across one reference to Rio Verde. It appeared in an account of Pizarro's explorations. I wasn't entirely surprised to see Carl Sauer, in one of his letters, make brief note of an isolated black society on the Esmeraldas that warranted anthropological study.

^iv I'm stunned to think that My Two Wars was published only months before I first began reading Thomsen, five years after his death. Coincidentally, Living Poor, out of print for years, was just reissued by the University of Washington Press in 1997.

© Copyright 2003 Eric Metcalf