Rue Matthiessen Revisits Ireland, a Long Ago Summer and a Family's Past

In 1965, 7-year-old Rue Matthiessen traveled with her parents and older brother to a rented house on an island in Lough Corrib, a remote lake in Ireland’s County Galway.

Matthiessen’s distant memories of that long ago summer and an urge for greater understanding of her relationship to her parents — as well as their relationship to each other — would feed a desire to return to Ireland, which she did with her own family more than 40 years later.

What she discovered about herself and her parents on that trip — specifically, her mother — is detailed in “Castles & Ruins,” a new book to be published by Latah Books of Spokane, Washington, in February.

Matthiessen’s father was writer Peter Matthiessen and in 1965, he was just finding acclaim with his novel “At Play in the Fields of the Lord,” which was published that same year. Her mother, Deborah Love, was also a writer, poet and an all-around creative soul. Brother Luke, 12, was Peter Matthiessen’s son from his previous marriage to Patsy Southgate.

It was Southgate’s Dublin friends who set the Matthiessens up with the owners of the Lough Corrib home, and that is how they came to be in Ireland in summer 1965. The trip became a focal point of inspiration and fascination for Love, who subsequently wrote her book “Annaghkeen.” Published in 1970 by Random House, the title takes its name from an ancient castle ruin that sat on the shores of Lough Corrib, just across the waterway from the Matthiessen’s rented summer home, and it was a particular focus of interest for Love.

“My mother wrote the book ‘Annaghkeen’ about that summer,” explained Matthiessen, who noted that the isolation of the remote location represented a respite from the chaos of the family’s daily life back home. “The literary world in New York at that time was intense, socially and every other way. There was a lot on them and their marriage was rocky.

“There are paragraphs in my mother’s book where she delights that there’s no phone — maybe a page and a half on going to the local general store and feeding in all these coins to try and make a phone call to the States.”

In 1972, just two years after the publication of “Annaghkeen,” Deborah Love Matthiessen died of ovarian cancer at the age of 44.

“I was 13 when my mom died. I went off to boarding school when I was 12 and was on my own,” Matthiessen said. “[My parents] had a creatively intense, productive, luminous marriage that was also very troubled. It was also transformative for both of them, but too much for me. So I went off to boarding school in 1970.”

Because she was so young when Love died, Matthiessen never had an opportunity to know her mother as an adult. With a lot of unexplored questions about her life, in 2006, Matthiessen, who lives in Sag Harbor, returned to Ireland — this time with husband Steve Shaughnessy and their 6-year-old son, Emmett, who was basically the same age Matthiessen had been when she took the trip with her family in 1965.

“I was taking the 2006 trip to get to know her from the age of 13 to adulthood,” said Matthiessen of her mother.

Though she didn’t set out with a specific end-goal in mind, that summer of 2006 was, in many ways, a trip back in time for Matthiessen. In her wanderings with her own family, she found herself seeking out the places in Ireland where she and her parents had been, and through the journey, found a way to reconnect with her mother through memories and writings.

“Ireland was really remote in 1965, and it was kind of the last time life was like that,” Matthiessen recalled. “Sometime after we got back, the ’60s kicked into gear. Peter’s career was taking off, she was working on her book. It was like childhood was over. That’s why I wanted to go back there. I had no idea of a plan. Only when I got there, it was like opening a Pandora’s box.”

As a result, “Castles & Ruins” is both a memoir and a travelogue. While in Ireland, Matthiessen consulted her mother’s book as if it were a guide of sorts and she used passages of the poetic musings in “Annaghkeen” to anchor the chapters of her own book, connecting the dots between mother and daughter across the decades.

“While I was writing my book, I was excerpting her book. It was like having a conversation with her,” Matthiessen explained. “I’d build my chapters around whatever the theme of her excerpt was. At one point I have an actual conversation with her in a B&B in middle of nowhere. It was a confrontational conversation with her.”

Matthiessen admits that it took some time for “Castles & Ruins” to settle into its final form, and it went through several versions. Though she initially thought she was writing a biography of her mother, by the time she finished the third draft, Matthiessen realized that she had, in fact, penned her own memoir, with the energy of her mother and father (who died in 2014) very much a presence.

“Being back there after all that time, I remember feeling my world was full because she was there, my father was there, and my brother, who was 12 at the time and lived with his mother, was there,” Matthiessen said. “It was before the roof of my life was blown off by my mother’s death. It was like looking into a terrarium or snow globe, remembering.

“When you lose your mother, you’re never the same,” she added. “The fork in the road is so extreme. You always have the echo of the person you might have been.”

In 2006, there was no Google mapping and researching remote places wasn’t nearly as easy as it is now. For that reason, the trip to Ireland for Matthiessen, her husband and son was very much a case of meandering exploration rather than specific destination.

“I had a 6-year-old. The trip was more like grab the stuff, plan the trip and just see what happens,” Matthiessen said. “I took my mother’s book, her poems and some of [my father’s] poems. We went all around, to Shannon and all these different towns. Then some of the things we happened upon just naturally turned up in her book.”

Including Annaghkeen, the castle ruin that had been such a source of inspiration for Matthiessen’s mother and was just one of several on the shore of Lough Corrib. Matthiessen has a watercolor drawing of the lake showing all the castles surrounding it, and she finds something fascinating about the age of these structures that can still be found there.

“The newest one is 1,000 or 1,100 years old. There’s something about that atmosphere because Ireland was never overdeveloped, they were never invaded by the Romans,” Matthiessen said. “Steve’s dad had this great library of books on Ireland that were very scholarly. I used a lot of that library to learn about it and fill in the history of it.”

In terms of her own family history, Peter Matthiessen and Deborah Love began their relationship in 1960, when Rue Matthiessen was 2 years old. They married in 1963, and Rue, the product of Love’s first marriage to Clement Pollock, was adopted by Peter Matthiessen. Luke and his sister, Sara (both of whom died in 2022), were Peter Matthiessen’s children with Southgate, whom he had divorced in 1956. In addition, Peter Matthiessen and Deborah Love had one son together, Alex, who was just 7 months old in 1965, and stayed at home in New York that summer with the family’s housekeeper, whom he adored.

“My father adopted me and married my mother when I was 6 years old,” Matthiessen explained. “My biological father, who I didn’t know, was a writer and died in 1972, a couple months after my mother. She left him when I was a baby.

“When she married my father, she needed a provider. She didn’t want to be single and struggling as a single mother,” she continued. “She needed a father worth something, which my biological father wasn’t.

“That was always the thing that was heartbreaking about their marriage,” Matthiessen added. “My mother had been married twice before, my father, once before. They were sick of themselves and divorces and kids all over the place. They went through periods where things were rough. She was difficult but he was even more difficult. They’d fight, then there’d be a rapprochement and passionate reunions. He was a chronic womanizer and she had to suffer through that. But they stayed married until her death.”

Matthiessen noted that part of the difficulty in the marriage had to do with the gender-specific societal standards in those days. By all accounts, Deborah Love defied conventional expectations of what a wife and mother should by 1960s ideals.

“She was not a domestic person at all, in a kind of way genetically that most men lack being wired that way,” Matthiessen said. “She really was not wired that way. She found it completely boring. She had a calling, and I never held it against her. She was a loving mother, but invested in things not focused on being motherly. She had to be brave to go up against forces that wanted her in the kitchen. My father wanted stuff taken care of, it would’ve been easier for him, but she wasn’t like that.”

The family lived in Sagaponack, and Matthiessen explained that what Love wanted to spend her time doing was not domestic tasks, but rather rituals surrounding the Japanese tea ceremony, yoga and, ultimately, Zen Buddhism. Peter Matthiessen also became a practitioner and was deeply involved in Buddhism. In the early 1980s, he created his Ocean Zendo out of an old horse stable on his Sagaponack property.

“Nothing stopped her but death. I think nothing would’ve stopped her from what she wanted to do,” Matthiessen said. “Peter was absolutely supportive. He thought she was a wonderful writer. On the other hand, he didn’t deal with domestic things. They had a struggle over that.

“They were both very ambitious. I don’t fault either of them. They were absolutely wonderful. I learned a lot and they also had major failings,” she added. “They were twins in some ways, But it’s not always such a good idea to marry your twin.”

Though at times her childhood was difficult, Matthiessen appreciated the way her parents brought her and her siblings into their lives.

“We were just little adults,” Matthiessen said. “There was no such thing as childhood.”

Fortunately, because her parents were prolific writers, Matthiessen not only had their encouragement with her own writing as a child, she also has had their words to look back on as she progressed through life. Even after her mother’s death, she remained close with her father who, in 1980, married his third wife, Maria Eckhart.

“It’s a wonderful thing to have a real record of how they saw the world,” Matthiessen said. “Both my parents were very supportive in my efforts for writing in journals and poems. My father and I talked about writing all the time.”

And the 2006 trip to Ireland? Ultimately, it did provide a sense of peace for Matthiessen.

“Somehow being there and going to these places — in the end we did find the island — it felt really restorative, as if her story was just kind of cut off so young,” Matthiessen said. “She would’ve had so many years. I know how she would’ve been. As I was writing this book about what my life had been, I began to sketch a portrait of who she really was.

“She was not perfect, but she was really an unusual person.”

“Castles & Ruins: Unraveling Family Mysteries and Literary Legacy in the Irish Countryside” will be published by Latah Books on February 20, 2024. The book is available for preorder now at latahbooks.com.