Peter Matthiessen thought The Snow Leopard was overrated, perhaps because he didn’t need to defend it. It won two National Book Awards (one in contemporary thought, a category that ominously no longer exists) and was a best seller. Perhaps he felt it needed to be demystified a bit. Plus, it was not a novel, and he considered himself a novelist, not a nonfiction writer. Facts were nonfiction’s “fatal constraint.” He preferred his novel FarTortuga, about Caymanian turtlers, told in patois, white space, and jagged typography. When it was published in 1975, three years before The Snow Leopard, the magazine editor Terry McDonell “ran to my bookstore, and I bought Far Tortuga and I took it home, and I opened it up, and I began to read, and I said, ‘What the fuck?’”—which at the time was not an atypical response. It was in the rusty vein of The Old Man and the Sea—man against the elements, the unquenchability of the human spirit, the passing of the old ways, and so on. For an earlier New Yorker piece titled “To the Miskito Bank” Matthiessen had spent about two weeks on a dilapidated turtle boat out of the Cayman Islands bound for Nicaragua, more interested in an obsolete means of livelihood on the open seas than in the plight of the great turtles hunted almost to extinction, though he did write, “The green turtle’s air of innocence is troubling, and now and then one meets a turtle’s eye and recalls the swift thing that flew so gracefully in the ocean.”

He told his editor William Shawn that he was “going to hold back” the best of his experiences for the novel, saving “the higher truth” for Far Tortuga. That book is hardly a cri de coeur on behalf of the winsome turtle, bound to ancient migration routes and nesting sites, though the purity of sun, sky, and seabirds is certainly in contrast to the harsh life of the turtlers, with their dreams and ghost stories (and even more so to the Jamaican “eggers” they come across, high on ganja and rage). Contrast is Matthiessen’s method—the flayed skin of an angelfish on the white sands of a quay, its face floating amid the trash of bottles and cans—as well as a gracefulness in tonal shift, in viewpoint, the paradox of a shuddering glide:

One by one, the turtles are hoisted from the catboats by means of a bridle secured to the bases of the fore flippers. Suspended from the tackle at the tip of the foremast boom, they are swung inboard over the rails. Athens grabs the heavy tail of a hanging male, to steady it, then pierces its flippers with a red poker brought from the fire in the galley stove: a hissing sound and a quick sweet stink of flesh. The turtle blinks. Then it is lowered to the deck, where palm thongs are run through the flipper holes, and the flippers are lashed tight across the belly.
…big fella here hatched from de egg and come up out of de sand dere at Turtle Bogue and feel dat water and run for de sea fore something get’m; after dat, he disappear. And in all de years since, ain’t nobody knows where dat old turtle been until de time we seen him flouncin out dere off dat pan shoal.
Green turtle very mysterious, mon.
Green turtle, mon.

Certainly some awful, if higher, truth can be gleaned from this.

Matthiessen had the ardor of a naturalist, the patience of a historian, and the stamina of a long-distance runner. He was a keen listener and notetaker, and his work ethic was superb. In True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen, Lance Richardson breaks down the manner he employed for his nonfiction “nature” books:

He begins as the unsentimental observer attuned to minute details…. But in the process of looking so closely, his “detachment” falters; an objective stance gives way to feeling, and the tone turns philosophical…. This rhetorical movement of estrangement, from the particular to the universal, from empirical observations to contemplation of something abstract and infinitely large, is one of Matthiessen’s hallmarks.

His novels went further, depending upon a multitude of voices—all but drowning out the environment against which they posed and played. He spent years researching and writing the Watson trilogy, which was published in three volumes during the Nineties. All told, Killing Mister Watson (1990), Lost Man’s River (1997), and Bone by Bone (1999) amounted to 1,350 pages. It was his Florida magnum opus, sure, but in an unusually lighthearted remark he compared it to a dachshund: the legs were “sturdy,” but the middle was a “long belly…slung woefully” in between. Lost Man’s River, the woeful middle, appeared in a Vintage paperback in 1998, the year his first wife and mother of two of his children, Patsy Southgate, died at Stony Brook University Hospital on Long Island, the same hospital where he would spend “more than ten horrendously painful days” before returning home to Sagaponack to die on April 5, 2014. Though Patsy and Peter had been divorced for forty-two years, her obituary prominently included a youthful photo of them together, a decision she very probably would have resisted.

Matthiessen devoted a decade to his trilogy even though the passion and debacle of In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983), his book about the Native American activist Leonard Peltier and the militant American Indian Movement, had left him “sick of writing.” He pronounced that the “search” involved in the process “becomes less exciting as you go along.” Yet after finishing Bone by Bone, his swamp saga ending as it had begun with the notorious E.J. Watson dead, he immediately turned to restructuring the whole as a single slimmer work, cutting it by almost five hundred pages and titling it Shadow Country (2008). This bit of determined bravado won him another National Book Award.

A psychic once told Matthiessen that he had four “unseen helpers” who guided and assisted him on his life’s path: Byron, Thoreau, Marat, and Aesop. Such strange synergy could explain a lot, actually.

Matthiessen was charismatic, fearless, selfish, and unfaithful in the extreme to those who loved him. He was not an exceptional novelist; he was too methodical, too controlled in his vision. Nor was he an obvious adept of the Buddhism he practiced half his life; he was too ambitious, too narcissistic. But he was incredibly focused, and grew to possess considerable spiritual discipline. Yet after he descended from his arduous and purifying trek into the Himalayas that gifted him with The Snow Leopard, after his many moments of transport and enlightenment, in a squalid mountainside village he pissed on a chained dog that was barking at him, and his delight in the animal’s useless rage gave him “the greatest peace and satisfaction.” On the eve of returning home, after having wanted to “go lightly into the light and silence of the Himalaya, without ambition of attainment,” he felt he had perversely emerged as something “mutilated, murderous: I am in a fury of dark energies.”

Had it all come to nothing? And as beautiful and perplexing as The Snow Leopard was, had it also been misrepresented as a grief trip, a heart pilgrimage after the death of his wife and the mother of his third child, Alex? Matthiessen’s second marriage, in 1963, to Deborah Love, was a volatile one, and after nine years they were on the brink of divorce, mostly because of his long absences and numerous affairs, when she died of a savage recurrent cancer at forty-four. It was Deborah with whom he first tried LSD, and it was she who introduced him, somewhat reluctantly, to Zen. Matthiessen took to it enthusiastically, and early on he had a disquieting but exhilarating experience of kensho—an awakening, “a seeing into…one’s own nature.” Greeting Deborah at the door of their New York apartment one evening after long hours of zazen meditation—she was smiling and wore a new brown dress, he noted—he saw “Death gazing out at me from those wide, dark eyes.” He became fixated on his wife, or rather on her death as it was playing out within her. Tending to her, he felt

immersion in all things…to a joyous belonging so overwhelming that tears of relief poured from my eyes. For the first time since unremembered childhood, I was not alone, there was no separate “I.” Wounds, anger, ragged edges, hollow places were all gone, all had been healed; my heart was the heart of all creation.

As Richardson notes, “Deborah’s diminishment [was] effectively subsumed into Peter’s spiritual growth…. Confronted with her visage of Death, what he saw, his overriding takeaway, was a clearer image of himself.” A friend and early reader of The Snow Leopard, the poet Donald Hall, urged Matthiessen to mention Deborah more. She was “absolutely central” to the book, he argued. “I felt sad for her, that you were not thinking of her,” he wrote in a letter. “And I felt a little annoyed with you.” Eventually Deborah did find her way into the text as “D,” though sparingly. One notable exception when her full name was used was when Matthiessen mentioned her as a serious fellow traveler on the hallucinogens path: “my companion was a girl named Deborah Love who was adrift on the same instinctive search.”

In the acknowledgments, Maria Eckhart, who would become Matthiessen’s third wife and “who made sensible and constructive suggestions throughout the several drafts,” was thanked along with “the many writers, poets, and explorers of the mind whose words have contributed to my understanding.”

Matthiessen became obsessed with Zen, out of competition, guilt, or an instinctive need for devotion and apartness—urges that empowered and shamed him throughout his life. The name bestowed upon him when he was ordained as a Zen priest was Muryo—“Boundless.” And it did seem that his pathless path accepted no boundaries. He embodied contradiction. He could use a quote of Rilke’s to introduce The Snow Leopard—“This is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter”—but find himself lacking the courage to comfort his son Luke on the sudden death of his little boy Christopher, struck by a car. Easier to go down in a shark cage and touch a great white as it glided by to tear apart the bait of a rotting horse (this was for the 1971 documentary Blue Water, White Death). In a letter to Jim Harrison he compared the experience to “stroking one’s own corpse, a spiritual, even metaphysical meeting.” He could describe an elephant herd, their “ears like delicate great petals,” moving in “a dream rhythm, a rhythm of wind and trees,” yet make a breezy account of the cargo the camp’s Land Rover transported in the Serengeti: “a whole butchered zebra, drying elephant ears, innumerable townspeople and tribesmen, tortoises, birds, chameleons, and a diseased baboon.”

He could be surprisingly thin-skinned about criticism. He made such a fuss to Harper’s about a poor review of his novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965) that the magazine forced the critic to retract his opinion in a later issue. He held grudges and could be patronizing. He harbored somewhat grandiose ambitions for his work, feeling that reweaving the Watson trilogy into a single piece might lead to its being finally appreciated, “rediscovered…like ‘Moby-Dick’ was.” His caring could sometimes feel not particularly profound. His stepdaughter Rue noted that “he did not respond well to need.” An editor found him “kind of an amazing personality” but “difficult.” He wanted a simple existence but complicated his life with endless travels, projects, and affairs. He kept the love letters of dozens of women, excising the dates to obscure their currency. According to Maria, the lovers quoted Rilke as well, often employing the same poems.

He was an experienced adventurer, a good camper, trustworthy, and self-reliant. He was thrifty, patrician in bearing, a monied New England WASP without the fussy burden of a belief in God. Not that belief was foreign to him. He believed in Bigfoot, for example, more or less. (Richardson treats this fascination with calm resolve.) He didn’t believe in the promises of heaven. (He probably couldn’t see himself as an “unseen helper” either.) He didn’t believe in the afterlives of reincarnation. But if such was the way these matters were arranged and he did come back, he would like to be a ranger charged with protecting the last white rhino on earth, or a shorebird, which he found “the most affecting of wild creatures.” Seabirds in general, he wrote, had always reminded him of “solitude and transience, one’s own swift passage toward the void.”

But he really couldn’t see himself returning. More likely, through the transports that Zen provided, he would have seen himself coming before, in some space most whole, most absolute, most home.

The drawing he provided for Burt Britton’s Seventies book of writers’ self-portraits—subtitled Book People Picture Themselves—consists of a few upright lines of marsh grass, a squiggle of black for water, and the small Vsigns of birds in flight. Above his signature he wrote, “MY FACE (BEFORE MY PARENTS WERE BORN).” This is pure Matthiessen: a bit of posturing and deflection while yearning to hit the mark—not knowing where, exactly, the mark resides.

As a young man in Paris, Matthiessen dabbled in Gurdjieffian philosophy (which he soon deemed “too esoteric”) and elementary CIA spook stuff—his “front” was what would become George Plimpton’s treasured Paris Review, which he helped cofound. He dismissed his CIA dalliance as merely facilitating “a free trip to Paris to write my novel.” But it was his time many years later with Deborah, however, that fundamentally changed his trajectory, for it was she who introduced him to what Richardson refers to as

vocabularies of spirituality and mysticism, which he would then absorb and incorporate into this writing. Indeed, it is difficult to overestimate the influence she would have on his thinking during the eleven years they spent together.

After her death he filled the survivor’s void with work—increased study of Zen and more involvement in social advocacy. Most consuming was the writing of In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, a monumentally researched history of our government’s assault against Native Americans and the very earth itself, beginning with the broken treaties and racist policies of Manifest Destiny and proceeding through to the conviction of Leonard Peltier in the killing of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

Matthiessen was impressed by Peltier, and when a New Yorker submission about the incident was rebuffed—a young editor, as Matthiessen recalled, said that “nobody wants to read about Indians. Nobody cares about them”—he decided he would commit to a book-length project. Peltier’s guilt or innocence, he believed, was beside the point. “I’m not arguing,” Mathiessen told the writer Vine Deloria Jr., “that Leonard is ‘innocent’ of finishing off the two agents (though I think he is); I am arguing that he is innocent, for a whole century of reasons, whether he finished off those men or not.”

In the case of Crazy Horse, he wanted to cut out “every bit of poetry.” He wanted to write something “flat, hard-nosed, tough.” His earlier essays on Native Americans, collected and published the following year in Indian Country, had often idealized and sentimentalized the American Indian as possessing a wisdom lost to white people, a spiritual superiority and connection to the land. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse was in a different register—raw, suspicious, and a bit tedious. It was also prone to litigation—almost immediately engulfed in lawsuits and accusations of libel (one from the governor of South Dakota) that Matthiessen’s publisher, Viking, spent millions of dollars and seven years contesting. Shortly after publication, copies were removed from bookstores and pulped. After the plaintiff’s claims were ultimately dismissed in a victory for free speech—“First Amendment privileges of expression do not hinge on the basis of objectivity” was the court’s judgment—Crazy Horse was republished by Viking with a new epilogue in which Matthiessen described a meeting he’d recently had with X, “a small, husky figure…faceless in a dark blue woollen hood pulled all the way down to the collar of a black windbreaker. Opaque black glasses covered his eyes and black gloves hid his hands.” X revealed that it was he who had killed the agents, though he would deny it if subpoenaed; he didn’t want to go to prison. He was speaking out now to exonerate Peltier, who had already spent years behind bars. X didn’t feel guilty; the agents had fired first. Peltier was innocent.

Matthiessen spoke with X for five hours and found his story utterly sound. Unfortunately it was a hoax, perpetrated by some of the same Indian contacts he had counted on in the past. Yet he seemed unperturbed by his own credulity. At a rally for Peltier in Washington, D.C., shortly after the X travesty, he stood by the integrity of his book and compared it, in impassioned detail, to

an old-fashioned hydrant in a rough neighborhood…scraped and battered from hard use, and stunk up by all these leg-lifters and ankle-biters, but still sturdy and still solid, still dependable, and still delivering the fresh water of the truth.

When Matthiessen chose to believe in something he believed in it indefinitely, even when people were slightly embarrassed on his behalf. This was the case with Bigfoot, Sasquatch, the giant, inscrutable, hairy being whose haunts were the last scraps of the wild. Matthiessen spent months in the exotic company of Bigfoot devotees who shared footprint molds, films, photos, and other proof. He even met a live little Bigfoot named Oliver who turned out to be a chimpanzee, the unusual sunken appearance of his face due to the removal of his teeth. Matthiessen passed much time in the dead of night in the wracked wilderness, waiting for a sighting, sometimes witnessing strange lights and experiencing strange feelings. He compiled hundreds of pages of notes and wrote a number of outlines and drafts of a “SASQ-NOVEL.”

Bigfoot was an unlikely spirit totem of the unknown, presenting by all accounts as shy, scary, and stinking worse than roadkill. He was spotted around remote campfires or glimpsed trotting over clear-cuts. If one strenuously put one’s mind to it, Bigfoot could be emblematic of environmental guilt or an image of battered Nature’s unexpected resilience and morphication, and maybe that was much of Bigfoot’s appeal to Matthiessen for so many years. He was confident in his abilities and range. As he told one interviewer, “I could write one safe and successful nature book after another. I know how to do it, I can turn those out. I know what the Peter Matthiessen readers like. That doesn’t interest me.”

Such a statement, dismissing as it does The Wind Birds, Sand Rivers, The Birds of Heaven, and African Silences, let alone Wildlife in America, would have to make any enthusiast of his work feel awful. But he always wanted a challenge; it was the aspect of writing that intrigued him most, and “nature books”—all about beauty and continuing, irreparable loss—no longer provided one. You could learn how to break the heartbreaking news beautifully once, twice, even a dozen times, but at some point you had to move on.

When Matthiessen was thirty-one he wrote his greatthrenody, Wildlife in America. It was published in 1959, three years before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Originally the book was to be titled Lost Americans, and it was the encyclopedic account of our relationship with wildlife and the country’s land and water—a history of waste, greed, mismanagement, and slaughter. It was the most moving and possibly most influential of any book he wrote, though the Audubon Society, even then primly thwarting its own relevance, withheld endorsement because it did not show the organization “in the proper light.” Wildlife in America and Silent Spring were the two pillars of a golden age of conservation and environmentalism in the United States, an age long past with the degradation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the opening of the pristine wilderness of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling and extraction.

Matthiessen, along with many thousands of others, had fought for years to preserve ANWR. Would he have been devastated by the casually vindictive political decision to destroy it? Or would he ask himself, “How do I react as a Buddhist?,” sit with zazen for hours, and then find the ability to enjoy a simple, carefully prepared lunch?

A year after his marriage to Maria, his studies led to his being ordained a Zen priest in the ceremony of shukke tokudo (“leaving home and entering the Way”). Tokudo demands dedication to Zen practice and to sangha, a Buddhist community where each helps the other in the cultivation of mindfulness. Maria was not so fascinated with all of this. She liked to keep an orderly home and garden and have pretty dinner parties. She was even more unenthusiastic when she learned that parting with human attachment was central to Peter’s new life of monastic service and that this tokudo business was deemed more important than marriage.

Between the house and Matthiessen’s writing studio was the zendo, a meditation hall converted from an old barn for dharma or talks on Buddhist practice. It was an active zendo even when Matthiessen—now a venerated teacher, Muryo Roshi—was away, which was often. Maria was unnerved by the presence of so many practitioners of silence. She never got used to zendo or zazenkai, retreat days, when they spilled across the grounds and into the house itself. She was unnerved for years, for decades, and often retreated to a house Matthiessen had bought for her in the village of Sag Harbor, five miles distant.

In 2012, when Matthiessen was eighty-five, he was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a cancer of the bone marrow. Suddenly he was old and very, very sick. He would have, at most, eighteen months to live. He stoically withstood the chemo treatments and continued to work, though he discontinued the use of his writing studio because the mold in the walls would further compromise his battered immune system.

He worked in a room in the house. On the wall were framed photographs, one of two slim young men in swim trunks, another of an aged Matthiessen holding a small box in his hands. He pointed them out to an interviewer from The New York Times just days before he died. “That’s me and Bill Styron on a dock in Italy,” he said about his friend from the Paris Review days. “We were drunk. That was right before I left the CIA.” The other: “That’s me with Bill’s ashes.” About both death and the CIA he appeared, at the end, untroubled.

William Styron, who Matthiessen said was the friend of his life, had died in 2006, yet the publishers chose to quote him on the back cover of Matthiessen’s last book, the novel In Paradise (2014):

Peter Matthiessen has created a unique body of work. It is the work of a man in ecstatic contemplation of our beautiful and inexplicable planet…. We behold a writer of phenomenal scope and versatility.

Of course Styron had never read In Paradise, in which there is scant contemplation of our beautiful and inexplicable planet. Set at an interfaith retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, it is modeled on a Bearing Witness program that Matthiessen once attended with its cocreator, Bernie Glassman, another Zen roshi. Initially he thought his experience there could be presented in diaristic form (much like The Snow Leopard), but then he decided that only with a novel (his belief in the novel’s awesomely singular capabilities never waned) could he reach something new, could he behold a truth long concealed from him.

The title of the book that consumed Matthiessen’s last months comes from Luke 23:43, the words of Jesus to one of the thieves next to him on Calvary—“Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise.” It was a title he had considered for At Play in the Fields of the Lord. In an unorthodox interpretation and a Zen sleight of hand, the shalt is replaced with art, so transforming all future into the now. In both The Snow Leopard and In Paradise, what is being declared is that whatever the circumstances, you are in paradise right now. There is no hope anywhere but in the moment.

But there is nothing ecstatic about In Paradise. It offers no kensho. It follows an earnest, quickly quarrelsome group touring the infamous death camp, attempting “witness” and some cosmic reconciliation. Stunned into silence by the cold horror of this environment they are not. Their voices become divisive, aggrieved, accusatory—a towering babel, a bedlam. The protagonist who would have been Peter Matthiessen in a nonfiction piece is Clements Olin, a Polish American academic who, horrified by his own imaginings of the agonies of the crematoria, is distracted by a young Catholic novitiate in their group. He keeps thinking of her “young female form hiding naked as a nut within the husk of her dull clothing.” Uncomfortably and helplessly he nurtures a “lecherous curiosity about the live young body under those dead clothes.” He is also rattled by the discovery that his mother, unknown to him from infancy, was possibly Jewish—and executed by the Nazis. Matthiessen has shucked off his WASP lineage at last, enjoying the freedoms that only fiction can impart.

In Paradise was published three days after Matthiessen’s death. It lacks the opening list of an author’s previous work. The prompt here is that this novel is singular, an achievement of the highest order, addressing that most intractable of subjects, the Holocaust. But In Paradise is a gray book, his most uneven and least illuminating. It ends with Olin alone in a church where any possible imminence has fled, “broken-brained and wholly brokenhearted.” Oddly, it seems that it is his unsuccessful pursuit of the novitiate that bothers him most in the broken world, a world devoid of beast or bird, which harbors not even the smallest sparrow. The earth has been rendered empty of all but human nature. It is this absence of the vast Other that, unaddressed, is most disquieting.

My admiration for Lance Richardson’s True Nature is deep. It’s a classic of biographical art and arc that captures the antithetical aspects of its restless subject’s actions and character while never losing sight of his literary achievements. My admiration for Matthiessen has wobbled a bit but is still essentially grateful. Yet he increasingly scorned his greatest attribute as a writer—a keen attentiveness to the natural world. That he could not channel his consuming study of isolate mindfulness into the more generous articulations of the form he so revered—the Novel—had not occurred to him.