True Nature by Lance Richardson

True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen

By Lance Richardson

Pantheon 2025

The title of Lance Richardson’s True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen signals certain tonal decisions in two ways simultaneously: the mention of a “pilgrimage” is a clear nod to the kind of prana-swami cod mysticism that was an intermittent fascination and consistent marketing gimmick for Matthiessen, and the “true nature” alludes to the typical line publishers, editors, and literary friends would take with Matthiessen whenever he was within earshot, that he was a polymath, a shifting prism of personalities, a “tangle of contradictions,” as Richardson puts it before his book is five pages old. “People are always asking me to introduce them to Peter Matthiessen,” Richardson quotes the author’s friend James Salter as saying once to an adoring crowd, “but the thing that is hard to know is which Peter Matthiessen they would like to meet.”

Such are the rhetorical absurdities one must expect to read about an author if that author writes both fiction and nonfiction. You mean to say you wrote a novel about missionaries and also a natural history of birds? The sheer enormity of it.

Fortunately, Richardson is far better than this little gimmick, which was tired even in the first half-decade of Matthiessen himself employing it to underwrite every personal betrayal, justify every callous rudeness, and exalt every pointless eccentricity. Richardson might mention the kind of protean unpredictability that his subject liked to affect, but his actual account of that subject has no time for PR. This is a brilliant biography, bristling with ground-clearing primary-source research, filled with every findable fact about this writer, and, in an added twist as rare as it’s welcome, written with serious narrative flair. If Richardson decided to write lives like this of all Matthiessen’s deplorable contemporaries – William Gass, Richard Yates, Norman Mailer, James Jones, Irwin Shaw, William Styron – he’d have the field to himself for the rest of his born days.

In 1961’s The Cloud Forest, Matthiessen wrote of traveling through the Peruvian wilderness with his friend Andrés, who merited one of this author’s earliest published (earlier examples abound, possibly to be seen in The Letters of Peter Matthiessen, if such a gruesome volume ever appears) blendings of appreciation, self-pity, and cultural condescension. “His clothes are torn and his legs are swollen, and he carries with him a secret dread about his heart,” he wrote. “But he scarcely complains, and, as the saying goes, I hope I am half the man he is when I reach his age.”  That hope is dashed early in True Nature, which is, underneath its scrupulous research and evident and justified affection, one long record of Matthiessen never in fact becoming half the man Andrés was. 

Instead, we have the usual record of the famous literary mid-century misogynists, with some variations throughout. There are the wives, the mistresses, the (as Matthiessen put it) “booze, dope, bad sex, shouting bad words, and blood,” the preening egotism, the backstage pettiness, the occasional grand gesture, and the accumulating honors for a lifetime of work. In Matthiessen’s case, that work tended to be more eloquent and more valuable than that of his contemporaries, and over a longer stretch of time. Unlike with so many of his cohort, there is no embarrassing Late Style.

His breakout 1978 nonfiction hit The Snow Leopard, for instance, has enchanted two generations of readers (Richardson included, as he charmingly relates) with its premium admixture of crystalline prose and mystical hooey. “Sun rays,” goes a typical passage, “glance from snow pinnacles above and the black cloughs dance in their escadrilles over the void, and dark and light interpenetrate the path, in the all-pervading presence of the Present.”  A quarter-century later, in The Birds of Heaven, readers find that the strength of the prose hasn’t lessened a bit. It’s a legitimate achievement, one that’s brought endless hours of reading pleasure to endless thousands of people, and it gets its full due in these pages.

Likewise his fiction, which Richardson treats with impressive even-handedness. He calls Matthiessen’s debut novel Race Rock “overstuffed and overwritten,” rightly continuing that it’s “cluttered with purple metaphors and awkward jump cuts into the past that arrive in the middle of a sentence to simulate the fractured quality of memory.” And although Matthiessen later professed to thinking more or less the same about his early work, he would still have searingly condemned Richardson for such a verdict, if he’d been alive to see it. For the whole of his career, he was both thin-skinned and vindictive in reaction to any criticism at all, as was most infamously demonstrated when he exploded at Harper’s for running a dismissive review by Roderick Cook of his first true fictional masterpiece, At Play in the Fields of the Lord. “The problem was not so much the tepid verdict,” Richardson writes, “as the fact that the critic … had skimmed the novel at most, and then invented a summary that bore only cursory resemblance to the novel’s actual plot.” This is a risk authors run, but Matthiessen couldn’t abide by it and raged against the magazine, which then forced Cook to write what Richardson refers to as a “humiliating mea culpa” in a subsequent issue of the magazine.

In the Cook case, the baseline motive was clear: Matthiessen was furious that a critic might be interfering with what he hoped would be a major payday, and his strategy was far-sighted; At Play in the Fields of the Lord, Richardson writes, was “the single biggest financial success Matthiessen would ever have,” netting him millions in today’s currency and allowing him to walk away from most of the deadline work on which he’d depended in order to support his growing collection of wives, ex-wives, mistresses, heirs, and by-blows. But the incident didn’t free him from his own insecurities; Richardson’s book, ever faithful to the facts, contains other examples of this great author getting wind of some coming negative review and either raging about it or pre-emptively sabotaging it, or both, all while dispensing it’s-a-tough-world writing advice to long-suffering friends (Salter comes in for some of this, and poor Jim Harrison for a good deal more) of the type he’d never have tolerated receiving himself.

Richardson follows his subject all the way to the end, when Matthiessen is dying of leukemia on Long Island, dreaming almost to the last of writing projects that would never happen, and mainly thanks to this superb biographer’s industry and fairness, there’s a surprising warmth about this account, which is surely the definitive life of this writer.

After his fatal diagnosis, during his stubbornly heroic final fight, Matthiessen received a letter from his wife Maria telling him that she couldn’t put up with his philandering anymore and would be leaving him (it didn’t happen; people never stopped loving this man). In the letter, which shocked Matthiessen, she wrote, “I have always loved you very much, but I have not always liked you.” Thanks to Richardson’s clear eye, readers will feel that dichotomy like a personal thing.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News