Biography
Marc Covert
| Moritz Thomsen, four years old, Seattle, Washington,
USA |
Moritz Martin Thomsen II was born on August 3, 1915, in
Hollywood, Calif., to Charles Moritz Thomsen and Marie
(Titus) Thomsen. His parents divorced when he was five
years old, and he and his younger sister Wilhelmina (“Wyllie”)
were sent to live with their grandparents, Moritz Thomsen
Sr. and his wife, in Seattle, Wash. Charles Thomsen married
El Vera Anderson in 1925 and built a large French Provincial
manor named Wildcliffe in Kenmore, Wash., in 1927, where
the family moved that year.
Moritz attended the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon,
from fall 1933 through winter 1939 (he also attended Washington
State University in 1936), majoring in English and journalism,
but did not graduate. He then went to Columbia University
in 1939 and 1940, where he studied to be a writer. While
there he took a class in novel writing from Helen R. Hull
(1888-1971), who taught creative writing at Columbia for
over 40 years and was one of the most successful female writers
of that time. He left Columbia in 1940 without earning a
degree.Thomsen returned home to Wildcliffe and, with his
father’s assistance, bought a small dairy farm in Winthrop,
Wash., where he lived briefly until being drafted into the
U.S. Army in 1940. He spent the beginning of his Army career
assigned to an artillery unit at Fort Lewis, Wash., where
he volunteered for permanent K.P.—kitchen duty—to escape
the drudgery of constant drilling. The Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor prompted him to volunteer for hazardous duty,
and by 1943 Thomsen was assigned to a B-17 bomber crew with
the Eighth Air Force, 91st Heavy Bombardment Group, based
in England. Before reporting for active duty he married a
young woman named Dorothy, whom he had met in Winthrop. He
flew 27 combat missions over Germany, Holland, France, and
other countries as a lead bombardier, earning the Distinguished
Flying Cross and reaching the rank of Captain.
In 1945 Moritz Thomsen was honorably discharged from the
service. He bought a farm in Los Molinos, near Chico, Calif.,
where he raised hogs for 19 years. His wife Dorothy remains
an enigmatic figure; she lived with Thomsen after the war
but he never wrote about their separation in any of his books;
they had no children. In 1959 and 1960, Thomsen wrote a column
by the name of “Mill Run” for the Los Molinos Sun, a local
bi-weekly newspaper.
By 1965, Thomsen’s failing hog farm and mounting debts forced
him to sell what property and possessions he could and walk
away, bankrupt, from his dream of farming while writing novels
and short stories. He joined the Peace Corps soon after,
partly in a rage at the country that, in his eyes, had allowed
him to slowly hemorrhage (along with many other servicemen
who became farmers after the war), and partly in repudiation
of his father’s conservative, pro-business politics. He was
sent to the small coastal fishing village of Rioverde, in
Ecuador, to serve his two-year stint, and stayed there for
an extra tour of duty, from 1965 to 1969. His experiences
there would be captured in his first book, Living Poor: A
Peace Corps Chronicle, published in 1969 by Washington State
University Press.
Thomsen began his life as an expatriate with his Peace Corps
service; he returned to the United States only once, in
1969, to finalize his book deal with WSU and to do some
training work with the Peace Corps office. His father died
in Seattle during that trip, their tempestuous relationship
unresolved, and Thomsen returned to Ecuador to buy a farm
with Ramón Prado, a poor fisherman from Rioverde, in November
1969. That farm, and his stormy, complicated relationship
with Ramón, would be the subject of Thomsen’s second book,
The Farm on the River of Emeralds, published in 1978 by
Houghton Mifflin (a Vintage Edition was published, with
a postscript by Thomsen, in 1989).
By 1977 Thomsen and Ramón had a final falling-out, and Thomsen
was forced to leave the farm he had bought across the Esmeraldas
River from their original property. He went to live in
Quito, high in the Ecuadorian Andes, and, still smarting
from his forced eviction, took a trip to Brazil in 1978
at the age of 63. That trip became the basis for his third
book, The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey on Two Rivers, written
before 1982 and published (with an introduction by Paul
Theroux) by Graywolf Press in 1990.
In 1982 Thomsen and Ramón reconciled their friendship and
Ramón helped him buy a farm in Tachina, a coastal Ecuadorian
town. He lived there, farming and writing, until leaving
in 1988 to move to Quito, and then, due to his suffering
from an advanced case of emphysema, to the port city of
Guayaquil. Thomsen became something of a recluse there,
living alone in a succession of two apartments, receiving
visitors when they came from the United States or Quito
or the coastal cities, and putting the finishing touches
on two manuscripts: My Two Wars, the story of his unsettling
relationship with this father, coupled with the story of
his war service; and Bad News From A Black Coast, his final
manuscript, apparently finished just months or weeks before
his death.
Moritz Thomsen died in Guyaquil, Ecuador, on August 28, 1991,
at the age of 76. The cause of death is listed variously as
emphysema, coronary thrombosis, or cholera. My Two Wars was
published posthumously by Steerforth Press (edited with an
introduction by Page Stegner) in 1996. Bad News from A Black
Coast was excerpted by Salon.com in July 1998, but to this
date has not been picked up for publication. Thomsen’s copyrights
are held by his heirs, Rashani Rea and Bruce Harris, the two
surviving children of his late sister Wilhelmina. |
