Lance Richardson thought he might die for his book, following Peter Matthiessen’s trek over a 17,55o-foot pass to Shey Gompa, the Tibetan Buddhist monastery beneath Crystal Mountain. It was there, in 1973, that Peter tested himself in pursuit of enlightenment in The Snow Leopard, and it was where Richardson had to turn around nearly 50 years later for a rapid descent with pulmonary edema. The appropriateness of that “serious trouble” in the first sentence of his True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen rings “with the rightness of a struck bell”—a vivid metaphor for how difficult Peter was to find.
I had spoken with Richardson as one of the more than 200 interviews he conducted over seven years but was surprised to see myself in the introduction. He wrote that I had “once compiled a list of applicable titles for Matthiessen (boat captain, shark hunter, LSD pioneer…), then threw up [my] hands in exasperation: ‘It seemed as if what I had written was for a sixth-grade report, trying too hard not to miss anything, a list impossibly naive in its comprehensiveness. Peter wasn’t there at all.’ ” True enough, and many of Peter’s other friends felt the same way. “People are always asking me to introduce them to Peter Matthiessen,” James Salter would say, “but the thing that is hard to know is which Peter they would like to meet.”
This article appears in Issue 33 of Alta Journal.
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Richardson writes about them all. True Nature untangles the mixed observations and complaints of Peter’s many friends and lovers over a life that led to the peaks of Zen. Richardson’s fine-toothed research establishes Peter’s importance as a writer and a singular inhabitant of his time. That is the strength of a great biography—which True Nature is, illuminating Peter as an interpreter and translator of all things human as well as a defender of the natural world and everything in it, even as he inflicted great pain on his family, especially the women he loved.
My list was longer than what Richardson referenced, including “zoologist, Vietnam War protester, CIA rat,” and so on, finally landing on “shaman”—underlined. It was 1979, and I was writing an editor’s note for his 14,000-word piece on the Hopi nation for Rocky Mountain Magazine. It was the first time I had edited him, and how generous that felt when in the larger world, Peter’s flags flew so high. We became friends, and now, years later, I went back to the list where I had left it in my worn copy of The Snow Leopard and discovered again “a true pilgrimage, a journey of the heart.”
Richardson, on a first read, found The Snow Leopard to be a thrilling weave of “science and spirituality” drawing with startling ease “on ecology, divinity, ornithology, metaphysics, sometimes in the same paragraph.” Peter had hoped to shed his ego for what Buddhists believe to be a person’s “true nature,” and the question of whether Peter ever found what he’d gone looking for in the Himalayas became the organizing focus of Richardson’s biography as well as its title.
Peter was born in 1927 on the day after Charles Lindbergh completed his flight across the Atlantic, which meant that Custer’s Last Stand was closer to Peter’s birthday than the publication of his Snow Leopard in 1978. This equation amused him as he got older. Peter was ambivalent about his elite WASP heritage and uncomfortable with the expectations that came with it, but he was shaped by the privilege he ultimately wanted to transcend. The Matthiessens were very, very rich, descended from Danish whalers who became prominent Midwestern industrialists, with interests in zinc mining, clock manufacturing, and sugar refining. The family’s holdings included a large estate on Fishers Island off the coast of Connecticut, where Peter ran wild as a boy, listening to birds, overturning rocks, and catching snakes like, he would tell you, a small animal himself. When his mother found out about his collection of poisonous copperheads in homemade glass cages, she told Peter to kill them, but he let them go.
He was already aware of and troubled by his intuitive gifts, which contributed to his mediocre academic performance at St. Bernard’s and the Hotchkiss School. By the time he got to Yale (like father, grandfather, and three uncles before him), Peter was a belligerent adolescent who wanted his name erased from the Social Register—shades of Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye, a comparison Richardson agrees with. He also notes that Peter’s mother, Elizabeth, suggested psychoanalysis when Peter was 19.
As an adult, Peter tried to improve relations—Wildlife in America (1959), his prototype of modern environmental journalism, was dedicated to his father and mother—but Richardson describes an “unscalable wall of ice separating him from his parents.” After an LSD revelation, Peter confronted his mother, asking if she loved him the least of her children. Yes, she said, and she felt guilty about it, but he had been challenging, biting her nipples when she was nursing him.
For the 35 years I knew him, Peter lived in a wooden house on six acres a half mile from the dunes of Sagaponack Beach, on the East End of Long Island. The place was so densely protected by trees and hedges that you could only guess there was a house inside by noticing the dirt track that led into what he had turned into his own bird-thronged sanctuary. No cats allowed because of the songbirds. On the porch was the bleached skull of a finback whale Peter had salvaged from the surf.
Inside, there were spears and arrows on the walls along with Michael Rockefeller’s photographs of tribal conflict in New Guinea. There were books everywhere, put up in small libraries of Peter’s interests. In an upstairs study was his collection of the Paris Review, every issue arranged in order over six decades, starting with the first issue of the publication he cofounded in Paris cafés in 1953. Peter’s Zendo, where he taught and led services, was in a converted stable with a cleared yard and a centered Japanese maple. Inside was a heavy, bowl-shaped gong that, someone who once profiled Peter wrote, “when struck reverberate[d] for almost as long as you can hold your breath.”
On the other side of the house, toward the ocean, was his writing “shed,” as he called it. It was, actually, a high-ceilinged cottage and an extension of his solitary travel of which very few guests ever saw inside. The work he did there was astonishing in its range. The Snow Leopard won the 1979 National Book Award in the Contemporary Thought category and then the National Book Award for Nonfiction the next year. In 2008, at age 81, he received a third National Book Award, for Shadow Country, a one-volume 912-page revision of his three novels set in frontier Florida that were published in the 1990s. His favorite book was Far Tortuga (1975), about a doomed sea turtle–fishing voyage, a masterwork of simplicity that reflected his experimentation with form. Peter wrote more than 30 books, his last the ambitious novel In Paradise, a spiritual inquiry into the horror of Auschwitz, published the week he died.
Richardson has something smart to say about all of Peter’s books, particularly the novels. On Far Tortuga: “All the furniture of the prose has been removed: transitions, connective tissue, conventional paragraphs. What remains is an assemblage of images, described with minimal embellishments and no sentimentality, like the flat, lean stage directions of a script.” Far Tortuga was a sharp departure from At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965), about a missionary and a mercenary who clash over the fate of an Indigenous tribe, written in language as “rhetorically lush and profuse as the Amazon jungle.”
Peter wanted to be thought of as a novelist first, although the power that trailed behind his classic Wildlife in America echoed the memory of every extinct creature and ruined habitat he learned about, and he learned about them all. Peter wrote, “I feel a deep sorrow that my kids will never get to see what I’ve seen, and their kids will see nothing; there’s a deep sadness whenever I look at nature now.”
The disappearance of traditional cultures, like the loss of wilderness, haunted Peter, and he would refer to Camus’s conviction that writers must speak up for people who can’t. Peter’s advocacy journalism, first with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers and later with Native Americans, added up to hundreds of thousands of words that exposed new readers to continuing struggles that had not received much media coverage—due to lack of interest or what Richardson characterizes as structural racism.
Peter’s outrage made him enemies, especially for his defense of American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier, who had been sentenced to life in prison for the 1975 killing of two FBI agents, in the shoot-out at Wounded Knee. Peter’s book about Peltier, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983), sparked high-profile lawsuits that became landmark victories for freedom of the press (the right to criticize public officials) but threatened to cost him everything (as Richardson documents: his reputation, his career, maybe his house). Peter’s work to free Peltier would become an enduring commitment.
What comes as a surprise is that Peter’s strongest work of social justice began almost whimsically with inquiries about Bigfoot, or “The Big Man.” This is new scholarship and clarifies Peter’s linkage of psychedelics and Zen Buddhism through a lens of Native American spirituality. Richardson explains that on Peter’s 1973 trek, he had an ambiguous encounter with a “dark shape,” which he later reflected on as possibly being a Himalayan yeti. What if…
Above Peter’s desk was this from Ikkyu, the iconoclastic Japanese Zen Buddhist priest, poet, and calligrapher:
Having no destination,
I am never lost.
Richardson paints Peter as a man of myriad contradictions and, tellingly, a serial philanderer. I have no stories to relate here about Peter and women except to say that every woman we knew in common found him attractive and commented on it at one time or another—including my two wives and my sons’ girlfriends. The sex lives of our most successful writers have nearly always been fraught and complicated by their success (Hemingway, Mailer, et al.), but never before has a biographer pulled together so well the details of affairs and betrayals between a writer and his wives, whose magnetism matched Peter’s own. Richardson introduces early girlfriends and later lovers but appropriately focuses on Peter’s three wives—all beautiful and smart and badly wounded by Peter’s misogyny.
When Patsy Southgate died of a stroke at 70 in 1998, she had been estranged from Peter for 42 years. Her New York Times obituary noted that “in a city that treasures beauty she was renowned as the most beautiful woman in Paris.” Peter met her at the Sorbonne, where she had come from Smith College. Their expat scene was creative and exciting. Peter was cofounding the Paris Review and, at the same time, spooking around for the CIA (both narratives with very long tails). Nights were wild, Paris was cheap, and they were rich anyway.
Richardson weaves the characters together, introducing George Plimpton and many others who would rise to literary prominence with Paris Review pedigrees. To explain the CIA connections, he writes that Peter’s “politics, like his sense of self, were still far from coherent.” As Peter once explained in a letter to his friend the Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, “when you’re 23, it seems pretty romantic to go to Paris with yr beautiful young wife to serve as an intelligence agent and write the Great American Novel into the bargain. Weren’t you ever as young and dumb as that?”
Peter was never much of a spy, but his first novel, Race Rock (1954), about disaffected but privileged young New Englanders, announced him as a serious writer, and he and Patsy were at the center of a crowd that included Bill Styron, James Baldwin, Terry Southern, and the already established writer Irwin Shaw, who characterized what they were up to as “going through a period of Gallic slumming for the fun of it.”
Plimpton liked to tell a story about Peter showing up with a single peach at Patsy’s door. She loved Peter from the beginning, and he had married her and then behaved badly in a way that Plimpton implied without detail. “Peter got her back,” Plimpton would say, sometimes frowning. That peach was “perfect.” The Times obit for Patsy told Plimpton’s story in reverse, with Patsy arriving at Peter’s door with an orange and the line “I thought you needed this.” Peter told me both stories were true.
Richardson takes the relationship deeper, showing Patsy as a nascent feminist with her own “sharp counter-history” of the Paris Review. A move from Paris to Springs on eastern Long Island put them into a new, rowdier art crowd and an increasingly tempestuous life punctuated by numerous infidelities and the births of a son and a daughter. They had been together for almost seven years when they divorced. (Patsy later married the painter Michael Goldberg and became a notable figure in the New York art and literary worlds.)
Throughout True Nature, Richardson shows Peter experiencing transitions—none, however, as transformative as his journey from LSD to Zen Buddhism over the course of his marriage to Deborah Love, a poet and writer from St. Louis who walked up to him on Sagaponack Beach in 1960. Tall, with alluring intelligence and articulate in “new vocabularies of spirituality and mysticism,” Deborah had, as a friend described it, “no mud on her soul.” On their first date, she and Peter took mescaline.
Deborah recognized herself in Peter’s self-described “deep restlessness” and led him to yoga and Alan Watts lectures. Their marriage grew more and more complex as they experimented with LSD, and their 11 years together were littered with recriminations and the pressures of their respective writing ambitions. Peter’s most significant affair was with Jane Stanton, a socially elite 25-year-old who wanted to write. Jane described Peter as “a very troubled guy…really, probably, the unhappiest man I’ve ever met.”
At the same time, Peter’s relationship with Deborah deepened when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. As Jane later remembered, Peter “would talk obsessively about chemotherapy.… He was willing to try anything to help her. Meanwhile, he’s sleeping with me.”
In The Snow Leopard, Peter refers to Deborah as “D” and recounts moments from their life together, her illness, her death, and how he decided to undertake the Shey Gompa trek as a way to process his grief. The Snow Leopard is coy about Peter’s philandering, but in a line Richardson found cut from an early draft, Peter acknowledged that he was “a faithless husband and poor friend to someone who deserved a great deal better.”
When Deborah died in New York City in January 1972 at the age of 44, Peter was still seeing Jane and had already started courting Maria Eckhart Koenig, a great beauty from Tanzania and a former media buyer, then married to a well-known advertising executive and living in nearby Bridgehampton.
Over all the years of our friendship, Peter was with Maria, whom he married in a Zen ceremony in 1980 (although she had moved into the Sagaponack house with her two daughters five years earlier). With Maria, his creative output increased as she protected his privacy and turned his home base into a kind of intellectual safe house. Maria would joke that Peter “was a lot of trouble,” but what she meant by that was unknowable until Richardson’s biography—which deconstructs their relationship beneath the great care she took of him.
Where Patsy and Deborah chafed against Peter’s expectations, Maria exceeded them to make herself indispensable. She prepared his lunch, which he returned from his writing shed each afternoon to eat, preferably in silence so he could remain in his own head. She also handled all the money, read through all the contracts, and picked up the phone as a first line of defense (especially when the New York Times revealed his involvement with the CIA in 1977).
Sagaponack was a small world of publishing gossip, informal dinners, and affairs within Peter’s much larger world that already stretched from sub-Saharan Africa to Amazonia. People wrote and saved letters as if anticipating their historical significance, which proved crucial to Richardson’s research. When Truman Capote sent Peter an engraved invitation to a “Black and White Dance” to be held in honor of Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, Peter said he couldn’t attend because he would “only get drunk and lose the drift of things for two or three days.” Richardson observes that it was as though Peter “found himself once again in the dreaded Social Register.”
Spending time with him, during those years, you saw something another neighbor, Kurt Vonnegut, described as “charm completely devoid of narcissism, like animals have.” Maria described him in a talk at the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference in 2000: “He is delicious looking, has a sly, quick wit, and just when you are ready to throw in the towel because of his singular self-absorption, he is disarmingly self-deprecating. He also has good teeth.… All in all he is an interesting person to live with.”
At first, Peter’s infidelities seemed minor, and he always apologized. Particularly hurtful, though, was what happened on a much-anticipated safari in the Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania. Maria flew early to visit her father and stepmother before Peter followed two weeks later via London, where he bought her butterscotch and wrote a note to go with her favorite sweet: “I think we are very lucky to have each other.… Looking forward to our safari together…discussing ideas for the book with you, and looking at birds with you, and being naughty in our tent to the accompaniment of tropical boubous.”
The book was Sand Rivers (1981), and unsurprisingly, there was no mention of Peter’s affair with a young ecologist—which he continued afterward on a return stopover in London. When Maria found out, she wrote to Peter, “I have taken this ‘thing’ very hard because I think we were both getting somewhere—flawed and stumbling as we are.” Richardson writes that “Peter could mend almost any rift with his droll, self-effacing humor.” Maria recalls, “We made each other laugh, and that was one of the things that helped us along.” True enough, but Maria lived with pieces of women’s clothing left in the Zendo, uncollected messages from female callers on the answering machine, and Peter’s occasional uncharacteristic decisions to take an afternoon off to run errands.
A few weeks before Peter was to turn 64, he flew to Wyoming to go fly-fishing with friends. Maria came across a file of correspondence from women she did not know but who obviously knew Peter very well. He had tossed the postmarked envelopes and blackened out the dates but couldn’t throw the letters away. Maria wrote to him, “I now regret not having an affair or two under my belt.… But in my heart I cannot. I never was willing to hurt you the way you are apparently willing to hurt me.… Hurting other people is so very damaging to oneself, something you seem unable to understand, although Zen must tell you that every single morning.”
Maria had contemplated divorce before, but this time was different. Perhaps most heartbreaking, Peter’s betrayal involved using fly-fishing trips with friends of both of theirs as a guise for visiting his seven-year mistress near Yellowstone National Park—“a young wildlife activist,” Richardson writes, “who, in her own letters, also chided him for refusing to take responsibility for his selfish choices.”
Richardson suggests that Maria built a protective wall around Peter at her own expense. “With his every need taken care of, all he had to do was write,” Richardson observes. He quotes Maria’s friend Ngaere Macray: “She freed Peter to live his life like Peter Pan.” This came at a cost not just to Maria but also, to varying degrees, to his three children and three stepdaughters.
Mostly, Peter just wasn’t there. Maria specifically asked him to pay more attention to Alex, his son with Deborah Love. In The Snow Leopard, Peter recounts leaving his eight-year-old son behind with a poignant farewell on the first day of school and Alex, tearful, crying that his father would be gone “too long.” Peter promised to return by Thanksgiving, a promise he knew he could not keep.
Peter’s story, his work and life spent searching for impossible enlightenment, plays out as a selfish man of many gifts doing whatever he wanted—not without guilt but with no regrets. That is what Richardson shows, with coat after coat of transparent reporting and scholarship—brilliant work that I found painful to read. But then Maria wrote to me that she still vacillates between “being cross and unhappy about him and wishing I had been a looser sort of wife.… We had wonderful travels though and here he was at his best, and generous with his knowledge and I am forever grateful for that.”
In 2012, Peter found himself taking longer afternoon naps. He had three fainting spells, and his family doctor diagnosed anemia and prescribed vitamin B12 shots. Maria wanted a second opinion, but before he got around to scheduling an appointment, Peter left on one last expedition, to Sagsai, Mongolia, to observe its ancient “eagler” culture in which, he told me on the phone, men hunt wolves from horseback using golden eagles that they carry on their arms. He had never seen that but didn’t sound as enthusiastic as usual about an upcoming trip. He didn’t have to go, of course, and friends told him that, but Mongolia was where he had spent magical weeks with his beloved cranes for The Birds of Heaven (2001)—the cranes he appreciated “not only as magnificent and stirring creatures but as heralds and symbols of all that is being lost.”
Peter said it was as if he was being called back. However, some undiagnosed problem was obvious by the time he reached the Gobi Desert. Peter returned to New York complaining of mounting exhaustion. A bone marrow biopsy revealed acute (stage four) myeloid leukemia, which, given Peter’s age of 85, offered him 18 months to live.
Peter’s chemotherapy drug, decitabine, was given to him intravenously once a month over five consecutive days at the Stony Brook Cancer Center. Maria drove Peter 100 grueling round-trip miles on the Long Island Expressway. Friends were unsure of what to do. Jim Harrison wrote to him about poetry and birds, with only uneasy references: “Hope you are feeling well. I’m a bit shy about asking.” For his part, Peter didn’t avoid the subject of his condition, but didn’t make a fuss about it either.
Just off the kitchen of Peter’s house in Sagaponack was a small patio where we sat one Sunday after he had started treatment. He was optimistic about the chemo, although it put him down for a week each month. He was always thin, but thinner now than I had ever seen him. We talked about the NFL and touch football games played in the potato field behind the house, and Peter talked, too, about Leonard Peltier, as he always did. Peltier’s release date was still 2040, and they spoke on the phone on special occasions like Peltier’s birthday. Or if Peltier just wanted to talk.
“Does Leonard know about the leukemia?” I asked.
Peter nodded and smiled slightly.
“Is Leonard a Buddhist now?” I asked.
“In his own way.”
I thought of Peter’s cranes, not only as magnificent and stirring creatures but as heralds and symbols of all that is being lost.
I read True Nature slowly over five days, aware that Richardson was making extensive use of the LSD journals Peter kept from 1968 onward, and filled a notebook of my own—particularly alert to psychedelic references. Peter lived his long life thoroughly engaged and found nothing as powerful as his passage from LSD to Zen Buddhism. Like Peter, I had experience with LSD, and when we had talked, Peter had called it the “most powerful tool” and had, at different times, suggested to both me and my oldest son that we “pursue a more serious practice of psychedelics.” The afternoon I finished True Nature, I arranged to take a number of doses of psilocybin over the next 48 hours. It was instantly familiar ground. Memories surfaced: I saw my wedding. I saw Peter in his Buddhist robes with Maria at his side, marrying me and Stacey Hadash, reciting an Anishinabe song:
Sometimes we go about in pity for ourselves
And all the while a great wind
Carries us across the sky
Peter Matthiessen died at home on April 5, 2014, and his ashes were interred next to Deborah Love on a day with no clouds and a slight wind off the ocean in the tiny cemetery in Sagaponack. Maria Matthiessen now lives in a house Peter bought for her in Sag Harbor and remains close to Alex and the other Matthiessen children. In February, Leonard Peltier was released from prison after nearly 50 years, and he now lives on Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota.•
TRUE NATURE: THE PILGRIMAGE OF PETER MATTHIESSEN, BY LANCE RICHARDSON
Terry McDonell has published widely as a journalist, top-edited a number of magazines, and was elected to the American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame in 2012. He is president emeritus of the Paris Review Foundation and most recently cofounded Literary Hub.
