Review: Tracy Daugherty on Peter Matthiessen
When cataloguing a subject’s contradictions reveals more than the biographer intends
Biographers are strange creatures, presumptuous in proposing to tell another’s story, even when the subject wishes the story to remain unspoken. The presumption is perhaps greater when the subject is a writer, with a strong claim to articulating their own account of themselves. Yet biographers are also self-effacing, withdrawing behind the narrative to serve another as faithfully as possible. Often the nature of the portrait is in question: do we admire the subject more fully through knowing their circumstances, or see their flaws more clearly?
In True Nature: A Biography of Peter Matthiessen, Lance Richardson has written a solid, standard literary biography of Peter Matthiessen, author, activist, and esteemed man of letters. Richardson tracks his subject in a clear, deliberate chronological fashion, documenting every trip, every love affair, every book’s gestation and struggle across Matthiessen’s nearly nine decades. Persistent and lengthy footnotes attest to Richardson’s reluctance to lose any detail. He is a skilled and diligent writer, a ferocious researcher, passionate about his material and highly congenial to the reader. No such thing as a definitive biography exists, but reviewers will likely use the word “definitive” to describe True Nature. Still, Richardson’s straightforward treatment, however true to the facts of Matthiessen’s life, may ultimately deflect a piercing appraisal of who he was.
The book’s early pages are slow going. Matthiessen grew up privileged and spoiled, the son of an architect whose family’s wealth came from oil, zinc, and baleen. Initially, the young would-be writer is not very likeable. Richardson can do nothing to make him more appealing.
True Nature becomes more engaging as Matthiessen comes of age and reaches maturity. He wound up leading an extraordinary life, working for the CIA (Richardson is particularly good on Matthiessen’s clandestine years), traveling continuously to one remote location after another, becoming a Zen master, an environmental activist, a crusader for Native American rights, and one of his generation’s literary titans. He seemed always destined for a literary career, devoted to his writing even as he plotted more adventures. The adventures invariably ended up in his books.
And yet—after all the evidence Richardson has amassed—Matthiessen never becomes terribly sympathetic, and the question arises of what more we really learn from this exhaustive catalogue. Matthiessen is charming, yes. Articulate and compelling. A good drinking buddy. Attractive to many women. But most inescapably, a man with an enormous wingspan—an outsized sense of his own importance.
Read Tracy Daugherty on Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, and Tim O’Brien
A driven, productive writer, he is best remembered now for a handful of books, most prominently The Snow Leopard, hailed for years as a model of “nature writing,” a phrase Matthiessen detested for its reductionism. The Snow Leopard recounts a trip to Nepal in the late 1970s to spot the rarely seen creature and to visit a renowned Buddhist monastery. The book is also an enlightening record of spiritual questing, and a moving (if not entirely honest) grief memoir—not entirely honest because Matthiessen’s account of mourning his dead wife leaves out his active history of adultery.
He is also celebrated for In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, his coverage of the American Indian Movement’s war with the FBI. His research on the topic consisted mainly of speaking to Leonard Peltier, an AIM activist charged with murdering two FBI agents. Matthiessen trusted Peltier, even when Peltier’s accounts were vague or incomplete, and his book contributed significantly to the decades-long campaign to secure Peltier’s release: Leonard Peltier’s two life imprisonments were commuted by President Biden at the end of his term.
However earnestly committed Matthiessen was to advocacy journalism, though, he finally did not wish to be known for it. As with many bookish members of his generation, he considered the novel the grand literary form. Along with Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, he agonized throughout his career that he was more regarded for his nonfiction than his fiction. Angling for retribution against his detractors, he pushed until he came out on top. He achieved his triumph when the National Book Awards and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences recognized Shadow Country, a comprehensive rewrite of a story he’d wrestled for years, combining elements of three earlier novels.
Now—and to be fair, even at the time—some of Matthiessen’s books seemed naively romantic in their observations of nature and objectifying in their simplification of Native cultures in particular. In his journalism, he could be biased to the point of willful inaccuracy. But he conveyed on the page an elegant sensitivity bearing crucial witness to his period. The literary merit of Shadow Country and a few other major works is beyond dispute. The ambition is vast, the writing intelligent and evocative. If Richardson’s book has a shortcoming it is that it occasionally misses opportunities to convey the stirring landscapes and ecstatic states of being that give Matthiessen’s best work a powerful charge.
Consciously or not, all biographies are forms of cultural history. As in a novel, the central figure in a biography needn’t be likeable to be revelatory to be representative of the age. What to make, then, of the culture illuminated by Peter Matthiessen’s trek through it? Richardson avoids simple judgments. He offers the reader a complex, flawed human being. It would be easy to see Matthiessen as hypocritical—the Zen master who could never overcome his worldly ambitions, attachments, and anxieties; the humanist who abandoned his family each time a paid-for travel occasion arose, courtesy of a lavish, now-vanished magazine ecosystem; champion of the poor who insisted on privileged treatment. Richardson’s exhaustive catalogue of these contradictions illustrates that they characterized the culture as much as in the man. Particularly vivid is the disparity between opportunities available to women and men. “I had hoped that we would mature together in fits and starts and look back on a decent life,” one of Matthiessen’s wives once wrote to him. But American realities made mutual growth impossible, obscuring men’s multiple betrayals while isolating women who strayed, lauding men for their attainments while ignoring the labors of women at home, labors that made those victories entirely possible. Matthiessen hoped to leave a body of work praising enlightened alternatives to the American way of life, but his career flourished because of the way things were. In True Nature, American culture emerges, in the form of Peter Matthiessen, as an unceasing mass of appetites demanding to be fed, often at enormous cost to others.
Tracy Daugherty’s has written six novels, seven books of short fiction, and two books of essays, as well as biographies of Larry McMurtry, Donald Barthelme, Joseph Heller, and Joan Didion, among others.
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Fair minded, yet strong. A very clear presentation of the biography and what's missing in it.