Booksology Matthiessen liked peril; one could even say he courted it. In the course of a long literary career, during which he wrote thirty-three books and was celebrated for both his fiction and his nonfiction, he travelled to places most writers would never dare to go. He flew through thick fog across the Bering Sea in pursuit of musk oxen. He accompanied a crew of Caymanian turtle hunters on a barely seaworthy schooner. He roamed solo across the Serengeti, dodging predators and scrutinizing dead prey. Most memorably, in 1973, he accompanied the famed field biologist George Schaller on a late-autumn hike in the Dolpo Mountains of Nepal. Schaller was looking for rare Himalayan blue sheep; Matthiessen was looking for enlightenment, which he compared to the elusive snow leopard, sensed but seldom seen. The book that resulted from this trip, “The Snow Leopard” (1978), won Matthiessen the first of two National Book Awards.
At the same time, he accumulated many of the trappings of an upper-middle-class life: four children; a house on Long Island; a devoted wife, followed by another, and then another. Yet he never let domesticity tie him down. A solitary type, at once charismatic and cold, Matthiessen conducted himself like a man beholden to nothing save his work. He said yes to nearly every months-long research trip suggested to him; when home, he sequestered himself in his writing shed. Blessed with rugged good looks that complemented his adventurous life style, he practically had a girl in every port. “I still seem to be pathologically restless in some way and am no fit mate for anybody,” he wrote, after the breakup of his first marriage, to his friend George Plimpton, with whom he’d co-founded The Paris Review. His daughter, Rue Matthiessen, described him similarly: “My father always had a stunning ability to move on, sometimes shucking earlier associations like fresh snow from his shoulders.”
For a certain type of literary man, Matthiessen was nothing less than awe-inspiring. Here was an artist who had stared death in the face and lived to write reasonably well about it. For his intimates, however, he was a more complicated figure, sometimes attentive and engaged, at other times incredibly callous. In truth, even as he neglected his family, Matthiessen was preoccupied with what it meant to be a responsible person—particularly in a world where nature, and those whose livelihoods depended on it, was threatened by the unchecked forces of modernity. His roving life inevitably prompts questions. What was Matthiessen looking for? And what was he running from?
The second of three children, Matthiessen was the resident troublemaker. He mouthed off. He cursed. At the family’s summer house, on Fishers Island, in Long Island Sound, he used a hunting rifle to take out an attic window. Ill at ease at home, and in New York’s high society more generally, he found solace in the natural world. As an adolescent, he developed a birding habit that would endure for decades. Fishers Island, with its kelp-strewn beaches and diverse wildlife, loomed in Matthiessen’s mind as a kind of “prelapsarian Eden,” as Richardson puts it. During summers there, he could immerse himself in verdant beauty and live untouched by social expectations. Richardson argues that, even as an adult, Matthiessen longed to find some similar paradise. Each time he set out for a far-off place, he was looking for another Eden.
