Writer-Environmentalist Peter Matthiessen

Matthiessen's Works Include "The Snow Leopard" and "At Play in the Fields of the Lord"

a rich man's son who spurned a life of ease in favor of physical and spiritual challenges and produced such acclaimed works as "The Snow Leopard" and "At Play in the Fields of the Lord," died Saturday. He was 86. His publisher Geoff Kloske of Riverhead Books said Mr. Matthiessen, who had been diagnosed with leukemia, was ill "for some months." He died at a hospital near his home on Long Island.

Mr. Matthiessen helped found The Paris Review, one of the most influential literary magazines, and won National Book Awards for "The Snow Leopard," his spiritual account of the Himalayas, and for "Shadow Country." His new novel, "In Paradise," is scheduled for publication Tuesday. 

A leading environmentalist and wilderness writer, he embraced the best and worst that nature could bring him, whether trekking across the Himalayas, parrying sharks in Australia or enduring a hurricane in Antarctica.

He was a longtime liberal who befriended Cesar Chavez and wrote a defense of Indian activist Leonard Peltier, "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse," that led to a highly publicized, and unsuccessful, lawsuit by an FBI agent who claimed Mr. Matthiessen had defamed him.

Mr. Matthiessen was born in New York in 1927, the son of Erard A. Matthiessen, a wealthy architect and conservationist. While at Yale, he wrote the short story "Sadie," which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, and he soon acquired an agent. After graduation he moved to Paris and, along with fellow writer-adventurer George Plimpton, helped found The Paris Review. (Mr. Matthiessen would later acknowledge he was a CIA recruit at the time and used his work with the Review as a cover).


The magazine caught on, but Paris only reminded Mr. Matthiessen that he was an American writer. In the mid-1950s, he returned to the U.S., moved to Long Island's Sag Harbor (where he eventually lived on a six-acre estate), socialized with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and other painters, operated a deep-sea fishing charter boat — and wrote.

In 1961, Mr. Matthiessen emerged as a major novelist with "At Play in the Fields of the Lord," his tale of missionaries under siege from both natives and mercenaries in the jungles of Brazil. Its detailed account of a man's hallucinations brought him a letter of praise from LSD guru Timothy Leary. The book was later adapted into a film of the same name, starring John Lithgow and Daryl Hannah.

In the 1980s and '90s, Mr. Matthiessen published a trio of novels—"Killing Mr. Watson," ''Lost Man's River" and "Bone by Bone"—about a community in Florida's Everglades at the turn of the 20th century and a predatory planter. Unhappy, especially with "Lost Man's River," he spent years revising and condensing all three books into "Shadow Country," published in 2008 and a surprise National Book Award winner. Much of his fiction, from "At Play in the Fields of the Lord" to "Bone by Bone," bestowed a lion-like aura upon nature—grand when respected, dangerous when provoked, tragic when exploited.

Simon Combes

Mentioned in The Dead Beat: "... his paintings ... so detailed I thought they were photos." p. 206. His obituary appeared in the London Independent.

Found Drug Treatment in an African Plant

February 17, 2010
Howard Lotsof Dies at 66; Found Drug Treatment in an African Plant
By DENNIS HEVESI

Howard Lotsof was 19, addicted to heroin and searching for a new high in 1962 when he swallowed a bitter-tasting white powder taken from an exotic West African shrub.

“The next thing I knew,” he told The New York Times in 1994, “I was straight.”

The substance was ibogaine, an extract of Tabernanthe iboga, a perennial rain-forest plant found primarily in Gabon. In the Bwiti religion it is used in puberty initiation rites, inducing a powerful altered state for at least 48 hours during which young people are said to come into contact with a universal ancestor.

By Mr. Lotsof’s account, when he and six friends who were also addicted tried ibogaine, five of them immediately quit, saying their desire for heroin had been extinguished.

It was the start of a lifelong campaign for Mr. Lotsof. And now thousands of former addicts around the world and some scientists contend that ibogaine should be scientifically tested for its ability to halt heroin and cocaine cravings and even end addiction. Ibogaine is used in drug treatment clinics in many countries, but is banned in the United States.

Mr. Lotsof, who was 66, died on Jan. 31 at a hospital near his home on Staten Island. The cause was liver cancer, his wife, Norma said.

Virtually from that day 48 years ago when he first tried ibogaine, Mr. Lotsof became perhaps its leading advocate, lobbying public officials, pharmaceutical companies and independent researchers to investigate its efficacy. In the mid-1980s, he persuaded a Belgian company to manufacture ibogaine in capsule form and begin offering it to addicts in the Netherlands.

By then he had started the Dora Weiner Foundation, named for his grandmother, to develop ibogaine as a medication, to disseminate information about chemical dependence and to refer people to treatment. Mr. Lotsof ran the foundation.

In 1986 he received a patent for the use of ibogaine as a remedy for heroin and cocaine addiction. Five years later, he began working with Jan Bastiaans, a Dutch psychiatrist who had gained renown by using LSD therapy for Holocaust survivors. They treated 30 addicts from around the world, two-thirds of whom stopped using drugs for periods ranging from four months to four years. With 75 percent of addicts typically relapsing within six months of conventional care, the results spurred scientific interest.

“His great achievement,” said Kenneth Alper, an associate professor of psychiatry and neurology at the New York University School of Medicine, “was in inducing the National Institute on Drug Abuse to undertake a research project on ibogaine that produced scores of peer-reviewed publications and paved the way for F.D.A. approval of a clinical trial.” The Food and Drug Administration did approve the trial, Dr. Alper said, but it was never completed because of contractual disputes and lack of financing. Ibogaine remains banned by the federal government.

“In the uncontrolled environments in which ibogaine is typically used, clinics or nonmedical settings,” Dr. Alper said, “the observations indicate that there is a resolution of withdrawal, meaning the addict is detoxified and no longer has withdrawal symptoms and is no longer physically dependent.” Scientifically controlled testing is needed, he said.

Herbert D. Kleber, director of the division on substance abuse at the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia University, said he was skeptical about the efficacy of ibogaine in treating substance abusers, including those addicted to opium-based drugs like heroin. “At various times ibogaine has been proposed to treat opioid withdrawal as a cure for opioid dependence and as a cure for cocaine dependence,” Dr. Kleber said. “But there is a lack of controlled scientific studies to back those beliefs.

“A number of deaths have been associated with its use, especially to treat opioid withdrawal and dependence,” Dr. Kleber continued. “I therefore do not feel it is something that should be used in the absence of such evidence.”

Howard Stephen Lotsof (pronounced LOTS-uv) was born in the Bronx on March 1, 1943, the only child of Abner and Lillian Weiner Lotsof. Besides his wife, the former Norma Alexander, he is survived by two daughters, Rosalie Falato and Holly Weiland.

Mr. Lotsof, who dropped out of Farleigh Dickinson University in the 1960s, graduated from N.Y.U. in 1976. Over the years he wrote or co-wrote scientific papers on ibogaine that were published in respected academic journals, including The Journal of Ethnopharmacology and The American Journal on Addictions.

“These accomplishments are all the more extraordinary,” Dr. Alper said, “in view of the fact that Mr. Lotsof, a graduate of New York University who majored in film, was without a doctoral-level degree.”