Peter Matthiessen Travelled the World, Trying to Escape Himself

On November 20, 1959, at a dock in Brooklyn, writer Peter Matthiessen boarded the cargo ship Venimos bound for Iquitos, a port city deep in the Peruvian Amazon. He had just published “Wild Life in America,” a travelogue and polemic that focused on North America's endangered species, blamed the humans who destroyed their habitats, and established Matthiessen as a nature writer in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. Now he was ready for wilder lands. When Matthiessen stepped onto the gray deck of the ship, the writer William Styron, his close friend, looked at him with admiration. More than twenty years later, Styron recalled the scene: “He could have gone no farther than Staten Island, so calm he seemed, rather than into the remotest reaches of the jungle, where God knows what beasts and dark events would have endangered his hide.”

Matthiessen loved danger; one might even say that he courted it. During his long literary career, during which he wrote thirty-three books and became famous for both his fiction and non-fiction, he traveled to places most writers would never dare to go. He flew through thick fog across the Bering Sea in pursuit of musk oxen. He accompanied a team of Caymanian turtle hunters on a schooner barely seaworthy. He wandered the Serengeti alone, evading predators and scrutinizing dead prey. Most notably, in 1973, he accompanied famed field biologist George Schaller on a late-autumn trek to the Dolpo Mountains in Nepal. Schaller was looking for rare Himalayan blue sheep; Matthiessen sought enlightenment, which he compared to the elusive snow leopard, scented but rarely seen. The book that resulted from this trip, The Snow Leopard (1978), won Matthiessen the first of two National Book Awards.

At the same time, he accumulated many of the trappings of upper-middle-class life: four children; house on Long Island; a devoted wife, followed by another, and then another. Yet he never allowed family circumstances to constrain him. A solitary figure, at once charismatic and cold, Matthiessen behaved like a man obligated to nothing except his work. He accepted almost every month-long research trip that was offered to him; at home he isolated himself in his writing shed. He had a rugged appearance that complemented his adventurous lifestyle, and he had girls in almost every port. “It seems that I am still in some sense pathologically restless and not a suitable match for anyone,” he wrote after the breakdown of his first marriage to his friend George Plimpton, with whom he founded the company. Paris Review. His daughter, Rue Matthiessen, described him similarly: “My father always had an amazing ability to move on, sometimes throwing old associations off his shoulders like fresh snow.”

To a certain type of literati, Matthiessen was nothing short of awe-inspiring. Here was an artist who looked death in the face and lived to write well enough about it. To those closest to him, however, he was a more complex figure, sometimes attentive and interested, sometimes incredibly callous. In truth, even as he neglected his family, Matthiessen was concerned with what it meant to be a responsible person, especially in a world where nature and those whose livelihoods depended on it were threatened by the untamed forces of modernity. His nomadic life inevitably raises questions. What was Matthiessen looking for? And what was he running from?

Lance Richardson's True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen (Pantheon) offers some answers. The first biography of the writer, and an interesting one at that, the book tells the story of how he grew from a privileged child into a respected nature writer and crusader for various leftist causes. Matthiessen was born in 1927 to wealthy New Yorkers with chronic depression, people who were more likely to pour a stiff drink or go to bed than talk openly about their feelings. The family divided their time between a house in the New York suburb of Irvington and an apartment on Fifth Avenue near the prestigious St. Bernard School, which Matthiessen attended from the age of six. (Plimpton was a classmate.) In 1937, Matthiessen's father, Mattie, an architect, moved the family to rural Connecticut, where Peter and his siblings could move freely.

Matthiessen, the second of three children, was a constant troublemaker. He said nothing. He swore. At the family's summer home on Fishers Island in Long Island Sound, he broke out the attic window with a hunting rifle. He was uneasy at home and in New York's high society in general, and found solace in the natural world. As a teenager, he developed a bird-watching habit that would last for decades. Fishers Island, with its kelp-strewn beaches and diverse wildlife, seemed to Matthiessen to be a kind of “pre-lapsarian Eden,” as Richardson put it. In the summer there he could immerse himself in the green beauty and live unaffected by social expectations. Richardson claims that even as an adult, Matthiessen longed to find such a paradise. Every time he went to a distant place, he looked for a new Eden.