Peter Matthiessen: mystical romantic
Matthiessen in 2008
“When in doubt, move.” D.H. Lawrence
The writer Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014) met the challenges of the real world while searching for the spiritual element. Like Satan in the Book of Job, “Going to and fro on the earth and walking up and down on it,” he was always coming from a distant place and going to a strange one. Friends exclaimed: “Everyone had a crush on Peter. He was almost a Fitzgeraldian character.” “I wanted to be a writer, so Peter was like a god.” “There was something terribly glamorous about such a loner. Glamorous but tough—a combination of grace and raw rogue energy that’s very rare.” “His attractiveness arose from some combination of his work (acclaimed), his adventures (exotic), his appearance (lean and craggy handsome) and his aura of thinly veiled vulnerability.” He wanted to be at one with the universe if not with himself.
Lance Richardson’s impressive biography (True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen, Pantheon, 709pp, $40/Chatto &Windus, 736pp, £30) does justice to Matthiessen’s achievement. He came from a wealthy, privileged banking family who had grand estates on Fisher’s Island in Long Island Sound and in Stamford, Connecticut. It’s not clear how much his trust fund was worth. He attended Hotchkiss, an elite prep school. Despite poor vision, he faked his entry into the Navy and was stationed in Hawaii as a noncombatant. After the war he glided effortlessly into Yale.
Like the Cambridge spies in Britain, he was recruited for espionage by his college professor — but for American, not Soviet, intelligence. Joining the CIA appealed to his patriotic duty and compensated for his unheroic war record. Lance Richardson writes that he was taught “how to tail somebody without getting caught; how to photograph documents; how to recognize surveillance; and how to conduct a persuasive interview with a reticent subject to extract desirable information.” The CIA was probably involved in the assassination in the Congo of his hero Patrice Lumumba.
Bird shooter and bird watcher, he had a passion for the wilderness and wildlife, and constantly needed to test himself. He had a “primordial longing”, was drawn to doomed animals, threatened landscapes and indigenous peoples, traveled obsessively and was a perpetuum mobile. He worked as a rugged fisherman, and continued to roam between Antarctica, the Amazon, the Himalayas in Nepal, Mongolia, Russia, the Red Sea, the Seychelles, Maui; with the Grand Cayman turtle fishermen in the Caribbean and with Cesar Chavez’s agricultural workers in California. He thrived on discomfort and used an outdoor latrine at -26o Fahrenheit.
In Madagascar he descended in an underwater “cage that could crumble in the jaws of a determined great white shark”. The shark thrust its snout through the bars but didn’t attack his cage aux folles. He risked dangerous encounters with the fierce warriors of remote tribes in the Highlands of New Guinea, and remarked, “how very simple it would be for the Wittaia to fill our chests with spears and arrows”. I’d like to know more about his personal relations with Michael Rockefeller, who was on this expedition and later mysteriously disappeared.
His first wife, Patsy Southgate, came from the same wealthy background. Her diplomat father was the American chief of protocol. She attended Smith College, met Matthiesen in Paris during their junior year abroad and married him in 1951. Their first infant was stillborn, but they had two other children. He was an indifferent and often absent father—though his absence was a kind of relief. They divorced when Patsy had an affair with their landlord, who ran a construction business. He was later committed to a psychiatric ward and she became an alcoholic.
His second wife, Deborah Love, was the daughter of a wealthy banker in St. Louis. Twice divorced and with a young daughter, she was elegant, intelligent and “spiritual”. Deborah said she wanted a guru “to force me further and further onto the pathless path”. She was interested in the mystical teachings of Alan Watts, in practicing yoga and in dropping acid. She aroused Matthiessen’s interest in Zen, but he resented her complete absorption in Buddhism. They married in 1963 and he adopted her difficult daughter. When Deborah was dying of cancer, “several Japanese monks in brown and green silk robes stood by her bed and chanted in base monotones over the beeping of the hospital monitors.”
Irwin Shaw wittily remarked, “Don’t you realise a man only gets married two or three times in his entire life?” Matthiessen’s third wife, Maria Eckhart, had a Jewish mother. Her German family had fled the Nazis and settled in Tanganyika, where Maria was born in 1939. Her mother committed suicide when she was 13. Her husband Julian Koenig was a partner in a successful New York advertising agency. She met Peter in Bridgehampton, and he told her, “ ‘I don’t want a conventional marriage, I want an open one.’ ‘Well, what does that mean? You sleep with people and I sleep with people?’ ‘Not you!’ ” After they’d lived together for many years, he finally married Maria in November 1980. The reluctant father had six children: three from his wives’ previous marriages, three of his own. His life was plagued by tragedies. His mother and 8-year-old grandson were killed in separate car crashes, his son went blind.
Matthiessen was catnip to the ladies. While on safari in Tanzania with the unsuspecting Maria, he somehow managed to switch tents and sleep with a young ecologist on the expedition. When he was away from home, Maria discovered a thick file of correspondence with his lovers, one lasting as long as seven years. She caustically noted that they all had “the same poems by Rilke, the same abject love, the same moment when you pull away and virtuously say you will stick with the wife of the moment.” He remained slippery and enigmatic, and confessed, “I still seem to be pathologically restless and am no fit mate for anybody.”
He said of his first two novels that “mercifully, no-one has ever read them.” He revised obsessively, asked many friends to read his unpublished work but was irritated by their negative criticism. An extraordinarily patient editor who worked closely with him called him “an immensely complicated, neurotic, charming, iron-willed, uncertain, demanding author.”
Richardson admires his “crystalline descriptions of animals and landscapes that combine hard facts with light-footed lyricism.” But revisions didn’t always work and his style was uneven. The pretentiously titled adventure story At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965) has several inflated passages like this one: “At four miles above sea level, Martin Quarrier, on silver wings, was pierced by celestial light: to fall from such a height, he thought, would be like entering Heaven from above.” But with hardcover sales, paperback and film rights, he made the modern-day equivalent of $3 million.
He knew how to play hardball. When he got wind of a severe criticism of his Africa book, The Tree Where Man Was Born (1972), which was scheduled to appear in the New York Times Book Review, he used his considerable influence to have the review spiked. He also experienced another disaster. After many costly libel suits about In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983), Viking took fright, withdrew the published book from circulation and pulped all the remaining copies.
An 18-day trek into the secrets of the Himalayas, described in The Snow Leopard (1978), failed to find the elusive prey. But the spiritual seeker had a mind receptive to fraud and cryptozoology. He obsessively pursued the nonexistent Yeti in Nepal and Bigfoot in northern California. Bigfoot turned out to be nothing more than an interesting chimpanzee, and the Yeti or Abominable Snowman was expertly identified as a Tibetan brown bear.
In 2012 he contracted bone marrow leukemia, which must have recalled Deborah’s suffering. He endured intravenous chemotherapy over five consecutive days once a month, and his last desperate experimental drugs had horrific side effects and had to be stopped. The traditional Lakota healing ceremony called a yuwipi didn’t work. As he lay dying, his oldest daughter sent him “a vitriolic letter blaming him for ruining her life. . . After decades of struggling with mental illness, she committed suicide in 2022.”
Matthiessen was an outspoken social and environmental activist. He crusaded against the Vietnam War and destructive mining interests; for oppressed Mexican farmworkers and Native Americans. He “railed against overpopulation, biodiversity loss, poaching, the wildlife trade, industrial pollution, pesticides, deforestation, topsoil erosion, the drainage of wetlands and warfare.”
The phenomenally energetic and wide-ranging Matthiessen is a good subject for a biography. Richardson followed Matthiessen’s difficult Snow Leopard route in Nepal, and is especially good on Matthiessen as undercover agent for the CIA, the founding of the Paris Review and Deborah’s agonizing death. But Matthiessen did not equal the modern war hero and arduous explorer Wilfred Thesiger, who walked alone across the Empty Quarter of Arabia and was a much better writer.
Richardson makes some small errors. The photo of the matador in this book does not look like the then tall and handsome Antonio Ordóñez, whom I knew; and the Russian Tea Room in Manhattan is an expensive (not a cheap) restaurant. He also leaves out important information. Maria’s alles in Ordnung household reflected her German background. Matthiessen’s lecture “Create Dangerously” echoed Mussolini’s slogan. His sometime guru, Georji Gurdjieff, was a destructive fraud who ruined many lives. The Hemingway scholar Charles Fenton, Matthiessen’s charismatic teacher at Yale, committed suicide in 1960. Richardson frequently mentions but does not describe the important influence of Conrad and Hemingway. He doesn’t note that, like many American novelists—Mary McCarthy, Mailer, Baldwin, Capote, Vidal, Sontag and Didion—Matthiessen was better at non-fiction.
Richardson uses everything he found instead of what interests the reader, and has many tedious sentences such as, “A member of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians spoke of Na-kan-gianish Um-na-wett.” It would have been much better to enliven his narrative by cutting the excessive detail in the chapters on the Indians and the Watson novels, which had two decades of repetitive revisions. Richardson’s long, distracting, tiny-print footnotes should have been integrated into the text or deleted.
Their mutual interest in Zen had eventually brought Matthiessen and Deborah together, but divided him from Maria. He became a Zen priest and could conduct marriages, christenings and funerals. But there were cracks in the golden bowl. Matthiessen’s Japanese Zen master had sex with many of his disciples and drove two women to nervous breakdowns. When confronted with his crimes, “he shouted, made vehement, implausible denials, and accused his accusers of conjuring oversexed fantasies.” Since his exposure would have fatally damaged the reputation of Zen in America, the teacher was protected by his infatuated followers and allowed to continue his predatory sex for the next 35 years! Matthiessen confessed, “I am not centered—have not been since I let my zazen slip.”
At the opening ceremony of a new temple Trungpa Rinpoche, leader of the Colorado Buddhists, was an honoured guest. In a notorious incident, he’d tried to tear off the clothing and rape William Merwin’s stunning Tahitian girlfriend. Trungpa also slept with many of his disciples. As one of them told me, “he has the smallest prick in Boulder but makes the most of it.”
James Salter—Matthiessen’s neighbour, tennis partner and close friend—died before Richardson began his research, so their important connection is missing from this book. Both men courted danger and risked their lives: Salter as a fighter pilot in the Korean War, Matthiessen as a mountain climber and intrepid explorer.
In July 2007 I had dinner with Matthiessen at Salter’s house in Bridgehampton, Long Island. He was tall, dark, gaunt, weather-beaten and withdrawn, his narrow face lined with deep grooves like rivers from a melting glacier. As his close friend William Styron noted, “He presents to strangers an aloof and hollow-eyed reserve.” Salter told me that in the colonial period Maria had been named Miss Tanzania. Matthiessen said authors now needed an agent who could also edit, though that was not part of their job, and that Jim’s agent Binky Urban couldn’t edit anything. He praised his editor Becky Salatan but, when concentrating on Matthiessen, she did absolutely nothing for my two books at Harcourt. The next day I saw him for a farewell handshake as he cycled like a spectral figure out of the misty beach.
Matthiessen looked ill at that dinner party and died of leukemia on April 8, 2014. On April 20 Salter wrote to me about him: “We knew each other for forty years. He was a major figure here. . . . We sailed up the Nile. We were in France together, St. Petersburg, Italy. . . . Originally I wrote that his wife, Maria, his son Alex, and some of the Zen family washed his body after he died. But his daughters objected. That had been a very private thing, they said, although I had meant it to be marvelous and heroic.” Richardson does not mention the tourist travels, but does discuss the washing of his body.
In his New Yorker profile on April 14, 2014, Salter recalled, “he had a variety of obligations, Zen, social and literary. . . . There were aspects of Peter that faced elsewhere—his spiritual life, his solitary travels, the intimate side of his past—that you knew only by chance or from reading his books.” Though they were close friends, Salter did not ask Matthiessen to read his unpublished work and give an expert opinion: “I was afraid of his disapproval and too proud for advice.” He concluded, “his illness was private. It lasted more than a year, and the treatment was difficult.”
Jeffrey Meyers published James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist in 2024.
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