The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen

It is a curious thing to advertise for an audience for so private, so idiosyncratic a journey. Not that The Snow Leopard was written in scorn of an audience, but one feels sure it is the same book Matthiessen would have written had its later publishing been impossible. The Snow Leopard is a heraldic book, full of ghosts and demons and largely unfamiliar mythologies; a well-veiled, lowercase Buddhist text set in the virtual top of the world, the Himalayas. It is a book totally devoid of comforting banalities—no kitchens, lingerie, politics, newspapers or clocks other than the timeless clock of the seasons (it's not very helpful to ascribe dates to 10,000 successive Octobers). Like all truly good books it is about death, and the imminence of death is fresh and lively, if you will, because we are drawn hypnotically along into a landscape where neither the beasts nor men are familiar.

On the surface the book is structured simply on the diary of a trek into the Tibetan Plateau of Nepal. In the autumn of 1973 Peter Matthiessen accompanied the zoologist George Schaller (author of the esteemed Mountain Gorilla and The Serengeti Lion) on a journey to the Crystal Mountain, “walking west under Annapurna and north along the Kali Gandaki River, then west and north again, around the Dhaulagiri peaks and across the Kanjiroba, two hundred and fifty miles or more to the Land of Dolpo, on the Tibetan Plateau.” At Crystal Mountain Schaller and Matthiessen hoped to study the bharal, the Himalayan wild blue sheep, protected there from slaughter by the grace of the local Lama. The main complication (an understatement) of the trip was that Schaller needed to study the sheep in their November rutting season when they were most active and accessible, so the hike of over thirty days accompanied by a half-dozen Sherpas and bearers was made in the onset of the mountain winter, with some of the passes to be crossed exceeding in height anything to be found in our lower forty-eight states.

On this particular level the whole trip appears utterly foolhardy. An appendicitis attack or even a minor stumble would very likely be fatal. These are not necessarily major considerations for a scientist like Schaller, but Matthiessen voices them along with his desire to see a snow leopard, a nearly mythological beast, the least accessible of the great cats, perhaps the least accessible mammal on earth. In fact the book could be easily read on the level of a natural history thriller, the manner in which The New Yorker excerpted the text, rather understandably in lieu of the difficulty of the core of the book. And the book succeeds admirably as a fabled nineteenth-century action-adventure yarn: vast gorges, impassable rivers, wolves racing across glaciers, crazed village mastiffs, precipitous cliffs with half-foot-wide trails, the hint of the yeti, or Abominable Snowman, blizzards, snow blindness, thievery, harrowing cold and exhaustion. But then that is only partially what the book is about, and the reviewer finds himself as a decidedly minor-league John Huston, wondering how to suggest that this beloved Moby Dick is so very much more than a whaling romance.

Peter Matthiessen must be our most eccentric major writer. The fact that he is not readily identified as a major writer is only due to a critical lapse, what with former and potential critics giving themselves over to quasi-ecstasy cults, sexual confession, and the sandlot politics of The New York Review of Books (above the quarters of which float the anglicized ghosts of Ché and Fanon). Literature has oddly become the least fuzzy of contemporary arenas, but the bleachers are largely empty. In New York City last April I overheard a fat wag in a chichi boîte say that contemporary literature had surpassed homosexuality as a victimless crime.

Matthiessen's eccentricities are not those of language but of thought. His style is nonexotic and owns a studied Brahmin grace and wit, though the wit is rather more discomfiting than funny. He writes cleanly and beautifully with musical density, a nordic resonance coming out of surprising economy. But he is the odd creature who makes us understand how despite the obvious and perhaps over-discussed talents of Bellow, Mailer, Updike, Pynchon et al., they are the philosophically mundane products of university-based thought in the forties and fifties. This is much less a denigration than an observation about a lack of variety.

Matthiessen is a Zen Buddhist, in a manner more consequential to his work than Bellow's Jewishness, or the neo-Barthian (Karl, not John) Protestantism of Updike, the frazzled existent of Mailer. This morning in a small tourist cabin in Montana looking out over the cordillera of the Absarokas with only The Snow Leopard on hand I rehearsed my favorites among Matthiesen's other books: Wildlife in America, The Cloud Forest, The Wind Birds, The Tree Where Man Was Born, and the novels, At Play in the Fields of the Lord and Far Tortuga. It has never been fashionable critically in our time to be concerned with the natural world outside of man's presence (witness the long search for serious readers by McPhee, Hoagland and Abbey who have generally succeeded with their least efforts). Oddly, in none of the above Matthiessen books is “Zen” even mentioned, though it certainly could be sensed by anyone familiar with this particular form of Buddhism. But it is nonobtrusive, and the writing, characterized by Olympian austerity as it is, avoids the personal. You are left with the notion of how deeply and to what a vast extent Matthiessen's work surpasses the genre he is identified with, but the man himself remains a puzzle until The Snow Leopard.

Running concurrent to the outward journey in The Snow Leopard is an equally torturous inward journey, and the two are balanced to the extent that neither overwhelms the other. Matthiessen for the first time becomes utterly candid about his life, though without the strenuous psychological hygienics of the confessional. He describes early experiments with hallucinogens (mostly lysergic acid) which were attempts at a shortcut to the visionary; his apprenticeship in Zen under Eido Roshi and Maezumi Roshi; and most poignantly, the death from cancer of his wife Deborah some six months before the trip.

There is something in the ineffable nature of Zen that nonetheless makes men try to write about it. It is most commonly misunderstood as another glyph for survival available to modern man, a device of comprehension. Beyond the level of flirtation it is not particularly popular because it is so totally nonsupportive. There is nowhere to turn in the unfolding of one's true nature except to the Roshi who only redirects the pain of discovery. To the student, Zen is the ocean and he is the fish; properly understood, it is consciousness itself, unmediated by opinions, hope, or gods, with few and naked precepts. Usually “dogma” is of value only to the convert or adept, i.e., it is a philosophical shorthand for the experiential. In The Snow Leopard Matthiessen makes the best run I've ever read at explicating Buddhist and Tantric terminology and hagiography. It is his curious novelistic talent to clarify and dismiss the aura of the secretive and arcane. The burden of the Zen man is ultimate claritas, and the occultist urge for the misnomer of mystery is only another excuse for the unlived life. In Zen you give a cup of tea to your demons and disarm them, whether they own interior schizoid colors or the very real apparel of a Himalayan gorge. The life to be lived is in the unintervened moment, where rock, bird, man and beast may be perceived as they are, in league with the universe, captives of time.

Beyond my own clumsily and tentatively stated framework Matthiessen has written a magnificent book: open, vulnerable with his own frailties; thick and lush, a kind of lunar paradigm and map of the sacred for any man's journey, where the snow leopard itself sits grail-like at the edge of consciousness, an infinitely stubborn koan in beast's clothing. Toward the end of the book when Matthiessen's Sherpa guide and mentor, perhaps ally, named Tutken disappears, we return again to the vertigo of the modern. But there is a sense, however slight and fleeting, that the book has transcended the usual limits of language and has given us a glimpse of a world that is not less “there” for the fact that we will never see it.

1978