Alex Shoumatoff

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Alex Shoumatoff, (born November 4, 1946 in Mount Kisco, New York), is an American writer, known for his literary journalism, nature and environmental writing, and books and magazine pieces about world travels, political and environmental situations and affairs. His byline is sometimes posted from some of the most remote corners of the world. He was a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine, a founding contributing editor of Outside magazine and Condé Nast Traveler, and is a senior contributing editor to Vanity Fair magazine, his main outlet since 1986. He has 10 published books and since 2001 has been the editor of a Web site, DispatchesFromTheVanishingWorld.com, devoted to "documenting and raising awareness about the planet’s rapidly disappearing natural and cultural diversity." Hundreds of pages of his writing since approximately 1970 are posted on the site, as well as his c.v. and biographical information. Career highlights include an article he wrote about the mountain gorilla advocate Diane Fossey eventually became the film Gorillas in the Mist and another film that purchased but never made about the Brazilian rainforest eco-martyr Chico Mendes. Shoumatoff was recently called "the greatest writer in America" by Donald Trump[1] and was also recently called "one of our greatest story tellers" by Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair. Shoumatoff is arguably the most widely traveled magazine journalist, with the broadest range in subject matter, writing in English.

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[edit] Ethnicity and Family Ancestry

Shoumatoff comes from an old Russian family that goes back dozens of generations. He relates the family history, particularly of his grandparental generation (aristocrats who fled the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and made new lives for themselves in America) in his 1982 book, Russian Blood (see part 1 and part 2 of the original New Yorker magazine excepts from 1978). His paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Shoumatoff, became a prominent portrait artist who was most notably painting President Franklin Roosevelt when he collapsed before her with a massive cerebral hemorrhage ending his life and famously escorted his mistress, Lucy Rutherford, away from the scene before the media arrived. Her brother, Andrey Avinoff a "gentleman-in-waiting" to the Tsar at the time of the Russian revolution, and an artist and renowned lepidopterist (immortalized in Vladimir Nabokov’s The Gift), became the director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh from 1925 to 1945. His paternal grandfather, Leo Shoumatoff, was the business manager of fellow-Russian-emigre Igor Sikorsky's aircraft company, which developed the helicopter and the first passenger airplane. His other grandfather, Boris Adamovitch, who he never knew even though at one point they lived within a few hours of each other in New Hampshire, was a colonel in the Empress's cavalry guard. His father, Nicholas Shoumatoff was an industrial and mechanical engineer who designed paper mills around the world, an entomologist, and alpine ecologist who wrote the books Europe’s Mountain Center, and Around the Roof of the World.

[edit] Childhood, Education

Shoumatoff grew up in the 1950s in Bedford, New York, an exurban enclave of old-line Wasps that is now most famously inhabited by George Soros, Ralph Lauren, Carl Icahn, Martha Stewart, Donald Trump, and other megabucksters. He went to the local country-day school, Rippowam, where he later, in his mid-twenties, taught middle-school science for two years. His father was the president of the New York Entomological Society and the Bedford Audubon Society, and he spent an idyllic boyhood romping in the woods and fishing in the rivers and streams that flowed through town. Upon his graduation from the eighth grade, the family moved to London and began to summer in Switzerland's Bernese Oberland. His father, a passionate mountain climber, took Shoumatoff and his older brother Nick up the Monte Rosa and other major peaks in the Alps. In 1959 he became the youngest person (eleven) to climb the Monch, the relatively easy snowpeak between the Eiger and the Jungfrau, and four years later, the Exum Ridge of the Grand Teton in Wyoming. When he was four, his parents put him in a summer camp in Gstaad, Switzerland, where he learned to speak French.

Shoumatoff did his secondary schooling at St. Paul’s School, a then all-boys boarding school in Concord, New Hampshire, where he was at the top of his class (getting the highest college board scores in the nation in both Attic and Homeric Greek) and the captain of the squash team. He was admitted to Harvard as a sophomore, where his friends included Bill Weld, who would become the governor of Massachusetts, and many other notables.

On vacations in New York City, flashing a fake i.d. that said he was the crown prince of Afghanistan, Shoumatoff went to jazz clubs and heard John Coltrane, Dizzie Gillespie, Stan Getz, and Chet Baker. When he was 16, having been blown away by a record of the South Carolina blues man Pink Anderson, he bought a guitar and wandered down to the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village, New York, where Bob Zimmerman, soon to become Bob Dylan, and other young aspiring tunesmiths were hanging out. Izzy Young, who ran the operation, sent him to Harlem to take lessons from the Reverend Gary Davis, a legendary, forgotten, blind black southern country blues, gospel, and ragtime guitar player, who was living in a shack behind a row of condemned buildings and playing in the street. Davis would have a huge impact on Shoumatoff. (See The Rolling Stone profile of Davis, Shoumatoff’s first published magazine piece ).

At college Shoumatoff was on The Harvard Lampoon. He studied poetry writing with Robert Lowell in a class that included fellow literary journalist Tracy Kidder. After rarely attending classes his first two years, he buckled down and graduated magna cum laude in English and Greek literature, with summa cum laude on this thesis, “The Heroic Language of Chapman’s Homer.” His senior year roommates included Douglas Kenney, who went on to write the scripts of Animal House and Caddyshack, and to found the National Lampoon.

[edit] Early music, writing career

Graduating at 1968 into the turbulence of the late 1960s, Shoumatoff planned on becoming a poet in the great tradition that he had been studying in college, but after hearing the young Dylan’s “Another Side of Bob Dylan,” he decided to become a songwriter. After a brief stint on the Washington Post as a night police reporter, with a draft classification of I-A and having no desire to go to the Vietnam War, he enlisted in an obscure Marine Corps reserve intelligence unit, which trained him to be parachuted behind the Iron Curtain and to melt into the local population. He was given intensive Russian Language schooling in Monterey, California, and there he fell in with the psychedelic counterculture, which was in full flower on the coast. Now 22 years old, he realized that he had made a huge mistake thinking he could do what the Marines were expecting, including the ghastly interrogation techniques they were teaching him. He turned to the Reverend Gary Davis with his moral predicament, and Davis made him a minister in a heated moment in a store-front church in Harlem. This enabled him to get an honorable, IV-D discharge from the Marines (the D standing for Divinity). Shoumatoff was raised Episcopalian but eventually he developed an aversion to institutionalized religion and realized that he was really an animist, and had been all along. In his 20's he had become a Baptist and a member of Catholic Church of Brazil. Later, he got deeply into Tibetan Buddhism and the shamanism and has participated in rituals of indigenous people in South and North America and Africa. Today he maintains no official religious designation.

In 1970 Shoumatoff chose to “drop out” with his “old lady,” Mary Lee Coe, a girl from Colorado, and they lived on an old farm in New Hampshire. Here, he taught French at a local college and drove a school bus, wrote songs at the rate of two or three a day and became deeply interested in birds, then trees and mushrooms, and eventually every form of life, following the naturalist tradition that ran so strongly his family. (His older brother by then was the curator of the nature museum in a county park in their native Westchester County). Breaking up with Mary Lee in the fall, he drifted out to northern California, hanging out on a succession of communes and playing music around bonfires and writing more songs. He sold his profile of Gary Davis for $300 to Rolling Stone, then a broadside printed on newsprint that chronicled the progress (and eventual demise) of the Sixties counterculture, and got a song-writing contract with Manny Greenhill, the manager of Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, and Doc Watson. He went to New York City to perform his songs but was not confident enough in his singing and guitar-playing to put them over on strange urban audiences, and ended up instead writing for magazines, starting with the Village Voice. He developed a piece on Florida into his first book, Florida Ramble, and married his editor’s assistant, Leslie Ann Moore. The young newlyweds lived in the Marsh Sanctuary in Mount Kisco, where he was its resident naturalist, and there was an overgrown Greek amphitheater that Isadora Duncan had danced in, which he restored and put on a production of Midsummer Night's Dream. The marriage lasted only two years, and the heartbroken Shoumatoff, after turning in his second book, a natural and cultural history of Westchester County, New York took off for the Amazon which he had been longing to explore since listening to the accounts of his Harvard pal Timothy Plowman, who was a student of the legendary ethnobotanist of the Amazon Richard Evans Schultes. Also since seeing the film "Black Orpheus" and listening to the bossa records of Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz, he was eager to get to Brazil and away from many of the racial barriers that existed in the States. He spent nine months in the rainforest, making the first ethnobotanical collection in the recently-first-contacted Cayapo Indian village of Mekranoti, getting to a remote Yanomamo Indian village where that no one from the outside world had set foot in, and nearly dying of falciparum malaria. His book on what he learned and experience on this expedition, The Rivers Amazon, was published by Sierra Club Press, and compared by reviewers with the classic books on the Amazon by Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Walter Bates.

Returning to Mount Kisco with a beautiful young Brazilian wife and his perspective on the modern world permanently altered, he learned that his Westchester book had been taken by the New Yorker and joined its staff in 1978, the year his first son, Andre, was born. Nicholas Neto followed, and the family bought a house in Katonah, then moved down to New Rochelle. Shoumatoff established himself as "consistently the farthest-flung of the New Yorker’s far-flung correspondents," as the New York Times described him, doing pieces on the pygmies in the Ituri Forest, on the lemurs of Madagascar, tracing the legendary Amazon women up a tributary of the Amazon, the Nhamunda, that no one except the local Indians and mestizos had been up since a Frenchman in 1890.

On these trips, Shoumatoff took along a small traveling guitar to break the ice and jam with locals. On his frequent trips to Brazil, which he ended up writing four books about, he met the masters of bossa nova, Antônio Carlos Jobim and Luis Bonfa, and wrote the first piece in English (for the New Yorker magazine's "Talk of the Town"), about tropicalia's sophisticated heartthrob Caetano Veloso, and his own southern country blues and ragtime guitar-playing style began to acquire a samba beat. In Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), he jammed with Okay Jazz, Le Grand Maitre Franco’s famous Zairian rumba band, and became a close friend with the ethnomusiciologist and bass player Benoit Quersin (who played on Chet Baker’s legendary 1956 recording in Paris). Quersin would accompany him on several of his adventures into remote, unknown corners of the world, including Madagascar and up the Nhamunda in the Amazon. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for a book on “cultural ecology” in the tropics (In Southern Light).

[edit] Writing and journalistic techniques

During his early writing period, Shoumatoff focused on mastering "long fact writing," as it was called at the New Yorker, which was edited by William Shawn. He learned precision of language from its masterful editors and its famously rigorous checking department. Shoumatoff recorded everything that he was told, observed, or thought, in to date over 360 little red Chinese notebooks, filling some 70,000 pages. The New Yorker gave its writers free rein, allowing them to chose what they wanted to write about, at whatever length they felt was needed. To this day Shoumatoff, in his commitment to giving the reader, to the best of his ability, "the full picture, in all its complexity and ambiguity," still writes very long, to the consternation of some magazine editors.

[edit] Subject Matter

Most of his books, beginning with Florida Ramble, and continuing to his last published book, Legends of the American Desert, are comprehensive portraits of places (a state, a county, a rainforest, a desert), and often originated with a magazine article. They identify and present, in an easy-to-read mixture of travelogue and exposition, elements that Shoumatoff believes make the place the way it is: flora and fauna; natural, cultural, and political history; local dialects and belief systems. His writing is often characterized by a fascination with "the Other," disenchantment with the modern consumer culture, and an insatiable curiosity. According to the essayist Edward Hoagland, "admirably protean, encyclopedic, and indefatigable, Shoumatoff has the curiosity of an army of researchers and writes like a house afire."

Some of the many subjects he has written about in great depths that were expanded into books :

[edit] Mid and Later Life and Career

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In 1986 Shoumatoff wrote his first piece for Vanity Fair, about the murder of Dian Fossey, which was made into the movie “Gorillas in the Mist.” Shoumatoff became one of the newly resurrected magazine’s stars, writing about everything from the fall of Paraguay’s dictator Alfredo Stroessner (see Dispatch #28) to trying to pinpoint the source, in central Africa, of the AIDS virus. In 1990, his book The World Is Burning, about the murder of the president of the Amazon Rubber-Tappers' Union Chico Mendes, was optioned by the actor/producer Robert Redford, but the movie was never made. In the early 1990s, he became obsessed with golf, and to justify all the time he was spending on the links, he invented a new form of journalism-- "post-gonzo, participant-observer, dada"-- that he called "investigative golf." (See Dispatch #12, Annals of Investigative Golf: The Gavea Golf Club in Rio de Janeiro ).

In the mid-late 1990s, realizing that many of the places that he had been writing about since the 70's no longer existed or had changed drastically, he strengthened his focus on the environment and an interest in creating a written record of these places and/or cultures and species. He wrote about global warming and the Kyoto conference (see Dispatch #5 ) in 1997 and started his Web site four years later. Today it is read each month by people from ninety countries.

In 1997, his book Legends of the American Desert: Sojourns in the Greater Southwest, (Knopf, l997) was published to high acclaim. It was on the cover of the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle book reviews, was named a New York Times notable book of 1997, Time Magazine and New York Post's top ten books of 1997, and Mountain and Plains Booksellers' Association best non-fiction book of 1997. This is Shoumatoff's last published book.

In 2007, Shoumatoff posted a reflection on all the changes he had seen and experienced A Writer Looks At His Career that is a memorable exercise into the writing and magazine world. He also delivered his hew book on Tibetan Buddhism to Houghton Mifflin. Having back-burned his music career for 37 years, he also recorded his first compact disk, "Suitcase on the Loose," produced by Kate McGarrigle and featured on VanityFair.com including his song from the 70's Pennsylvania Turnpike Blues that was featured on NPR's weekend edition of All Things Considered just before the 2008 Pennsylvania primary.

He continues to write hard-hitting environmental and social pieces primarily for Vanity Fair magazine and has said recently that he plans to devote his remaining literary, traveling, and networking energies to doing what he can to help avert the coming collapse of many of the planet's life-support system due to human overpopulation and hyper-consumption.

[edit] See also

[edit] Books

  • Florida Ramble (1974)
  • The Rivers Amazon (1978)
  • Westchester, Portrait of a County (1978)
  • The Capital of Hope (1978)
  • Russian Blood (1982)
  • The Mountain of Names (1985, 1995)
  • In Southern Light (1986)
  • African Madness (1988)
  • The World is Burning (1990)
  • Legends of the American Desert: Sojourns in the Greater Southwest (1997)

[edit] External links