While traveling around the Amazon for The New Yorker, barely out of his 20s, Peter Matthiessen turned his wondering eye on some missionaries, and on the local Carajá people, and mused, “All temporal ambitions are insane. Yet I, for one, cling to them.” Just 10 days later, in Lima, breaking up with a longtime American girlfriend, he wrote to his boyhood friend George Plimpton, “I still seem to be pathologically restless in some way, and am no fit mate for anybody.”
All his life Matthiessen was on the move—“I dreamed of simplicity, but I’m as far from it as ever,” he confessed at 66—and one challenge for any biographer is that he saw his own failings with such unsparing clarity, at war with himself till the end. When young, he tried to erase his name from the Social Register, at the same time as he was going through Hotchkiss and Yale; in his early 20s, he helped, over hashish cookies, to found The Paris Review, while also working undercover in Europe for the fledgling (and at the time highly regarded) C.I.A.
Even as he was traveling to Antarctica, the Himalayas, Africa, he was, as a Zen priest, teaching others to sit still. Writing could offer a way to fight through to a deeper peace or resolution, but, nonetheless, his second wife, Deborah Love, observed, “You seem a man in 1,000 pieces, running after each one.”
Lance Richardson, whose earlier biography was of a “rebel tailor” on Savile Row, tracks his elusive prey along every uneven path with heroic thoroughness in his huge biography, assisted in great part by the journals, unpublished manuscripts, and letters the prodigious author generated in such profusion. It’s startling now to be reminded that Matthiessen was raising passionate alarms about the environment three years before Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. He was writing on ayahuasca (for The New Yorker, no less) seven years before the Summer of Love. He spent years trying to protect the rights of Indigenous peoples decades before it became fashionable.
If a cat has 9 lives, Matthiessen seemed to have 29. The man who was a teenage friend of Jackie Kennedy’s was later to be found punching out Jackson Pollock on Long Island. He offered light polishing on the script of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, saw an early story of his turned into Luis Buñuel’s The Young One, and tried for years to write a screenplay on the union leader Cesar Chavez. He filled six 160-page notebooks with material on Bigfoot and at 85 appeared, briefly, as a Zen sage in Terrence Malick’s L.A. reverie, Knight of Cups.
None of this served him well as either father or husband; his three wives and four children always had plenty to complain about in a man who could be away for seven months at a stretch. Even as he was dying and his long-suffering wife Maria was struggling to tend to him round the clock, she was moved to write him a letter of farewell because he insisted on spending much of his time with a much younger, and adoring, female assistant. His tireless energy led to more than 30 meticulous books and a flood of majestic articles; it also allowed him to sustain many passionate relationships at the same time.
Richardson pursues all of this with a sure hand, finding a “current of savage power running beneath a calmly controlled surface” even in an early story, and stitching mountains of data together into a fair-minded, grippingly paced, and tremendously readable narrative. He follows Matthiessen into the high passes of Nepal, offers richly detailed accounts of battles with editors and wild journeys on LSD, and even carries us imperturbably through the riddles of Zen practice and all of his subject’s agonized self-flagellation.
It’s never to be forgotten that Matthiessen’s luminous and intense work won the approval of giants, from Don DeLillo to Saul Bellow; he remains the only writer ever to have received the National Book Award for both fiction and nonfiction. At 82 he was still riding rapids in Montana, exhilarated, and working to uncover some lost paradise in the world, and in himself. No recent writer gave voice to visionary longings with such elegant craftsmanship or such lyric beauty.
If there’s something slightly missing by the end, it may be simply because Matthiessen always found himself not quite complete and sensed there was something more, just around the corner, on the page and in real life. Till his final breath, he was in search of some grand summation or crowning epiphany. In the absence of that, we now have an all but definitive account of his days, and of the astonishing writer who soared at times above the always conflicted and imperfect man.
Pico Iyer is a Columnist at Air Mail and the author of more than a dozen books, including Aflame, published earlier this year
