Is it possible to be an armchair Zen Buddhist? That’s one of the questions that Peter Matthiessen’s great quest The Snow Leopard seems to present. No book I’ve read, certainly among those written in my lifetime, gives a more authentic account of a “journey of the heart” than Matthiessen’s celebrated trek to the Dolpo, the high, ancient Tibetan plateau of the Himalayas. I am not alone in that belief. Since it was first published in 1978, The Snow Leopard has no doubt been the inspiration for more hippy trails and backpacker expeditions to Kathmandu and beyond than any other volume (it is unmovable at the top of Amazon’s “Himalayas” chart). I’ve read the book a few times over the years, though never yet visited the places it describes. Returning to its opening pages now, in a beautiful new Folio Society edition marking both the 40th anniversary of its initial publication and four years since Matthiessen’s death, nevertheless feels like an uncanny invitation to breathe a little more deeply and see a little more clearly.
Matthiessen embarked on his journey in the autumn of 1973 at the invitation of the celebrated field biologist George Schaller, (whose photographs of the people and places of that trail we publish for the first time). The purpose of Schaller’s trip was to study the rutting habits of the bharal, the Himalayan blue sheep that inhabits the high plateau and which Schaller hoped to prove was the genetic forebear of all sheep and goats. Matthiessen, who remains the only writer to have won America’s National Book award both for fiction and for nonfiction, was drawn to the expedition for other reasons, however.
For one thing, there was the semi-mystical possibility of sighting a snow leopard, the bharal’s predator, an animal seen by only a very few western travellers. There was also the chance to live for a while among the Dolpo Pa, the leathery mountain people who lived a “pure” form of Tibetan culture cut off from outside influence (Matthiessen, born into Wasp-ish east coast privilege, had already spent half a lifetime as a writer escaping it in search of remote indigenous tribes and landscapes untouched by man).But more than that, the journey to the Himalayas came at a moment in the writer’s life when his mind was desperate for clarity and, perhaps, solace.
In his introductory chapter, written from notes made on the journey, Matthiessen sets out how his second wife, Deborah Love, mother to two of his four children, had died 20 months earlier, at the age of 44, from a sudden and quickly spreading cancer. Their marriage, he notes, had been intense and sometimes strained – in the days before her diagnosis they had agreed to divorce – but they were eventually joined to the end. (“I found her goodness maddening,” Matthiessen admits in the book, of their earlier trials, “and behaved badly… yet love was there, half-understood, never quite finished.”)
During the 1960s, Matthiessen, who had lived with the Amazonian tribes of Brazil and taken their “spiritual medicine”, ayahuasca, introduced Love to LSD and other hallucinogens. She in turn had given him the rudiments of Zen Buddhism, which she taught, and which became his primary study for the remaining 40 years of his life (he eventually became a Zen monk and established his home at Sagaponack on Long Island, New York, as a Zen Buddhist retreat). He tested that framework of thought for himself in the pages of The Snow Leopard, in the landscape in which the Buddha himself walked.
There is a timeless cast to Matthiessen’s book. Though it can be read as a beautifully detailed, very human account of an arduous and sometimes dangerous real-life climb towards the “crystal mountain”, a sacred place for Tibetan Buddhism, there is also an undeniable allegorical current to his progress. Matthiessen begins his quest like some medieval pilgrim in the valley of death, having journeyed to Kathmandu from Varanasi, the holy city on the Ganges where “the scent of charred human flesh pervades the ghats [steps beside the river]”. The first day the expedition leaves town, Matthiessen is confronted by a swaddled corpse at the roadside: “I nod to Death in passing, aware of the sound of my own feet upon my path.”
However, it is life with which he is concerned on his journey, in particular, the moment-by-moment effort of experiencing the here and now of the world as it is. His precise attention to describing that world is a sustaining joy of the book. The mechanics of the journey, the falling-outs with Sherpas, the blizzards that throw the party off course and the arguments about baggage are punctuated by paragraphs and passages in which each sentence becomes a haiku-like concentration of the landscape: “The path continues down into the oaks,” he will write. “I sit back in straw and dung warmth against sunny stones. A brilliant black-red beetle comes, and a husky grasshopper, rubbing its fiery legs. A crow flops to the cedar by the river, and the crow’s wings too are filled with the hard silver light of the Himalaya.” In this immersive way, Matthiessen takes his reader painstakingly up towards the crystal mountain where, at 18,000ft, he begins to lose some of his sense of self in the thin air: “The earth is ringing. All is moving, full of power, full of light.”
None of these brief epiphanies would ring true were Matthiessen not equally alive in the book to the ways in which his mind constantly deviates from the Buddhist “eightfold path” into petty annoyances and blisters and frustrations and deeper anxieties. One of Matthiessen’s primary distractions, beyond the complicated feelings of grief for his wife, was his guilt at leaving his children behind in New York, especially his young son Alex, then eight years old and still unmoored by his mother’s death. The day he had parted from his son, Matthiessen had driven him to school in the morning and tried to explain how long he would be gone on his distant quest. Alex had fought back his tears, before blurting out “Too long!” – an admonition that haunted Matthiessen in the mountains and which lodges too in the mind of the reader of his book (how could he?). In the foothills of Annapurna, he records receiving a handwritten note from his son, which runs as follows:
Dear Dad
How are you. I am fine. I was very sad, I was even crying, because I didn’t write to you. But I feel a lot better since I am writing to you now. The cat and dog are great, but I’m going to be sad when they die. School is doing pretty well. I hope you can make it back for Thanksgiving. Did I spell that right.
I hope your mountain boots are still good. I hope you are having a very good time.
Love, Alex
PS Save my letters and bring them home so I can see if they got to you. Hugs and kisses. By By a million times for now. Love, Your sun, Alex
This letter was signed off with a drawing of a cartoon shiny sun, but its sentiments shadow the book. Matthiessen is disturbed by that disquiet common to all compulsive travellers – in searching for his private nirvana, was he not selfishly neglecting more important responsibilities? He did not make it home for Thanksgiving.
I spoke to Alex Matthiessen, his father’s “sun”, on the phone last week. He is now 53 and works in New York as a consultant and campaigner on environmental issues; formerly he was CEO of Riverkeeper, which strives to maintain and improve the Hudson river and protect the drinking water of 9 million New Yorkers. He has written an introduction to this new volume of The Snow Leopard in which he examines both his own relationship with the book and with his father.
He recalls how “in the years since the publication of The Snow Leopard, many friends, and even a few strangers, have harshly criticised my father for leaving me behind for three months so soon after my mother’s death. I appreciate the solidarity, and don’t entirely disagree with the sentiment, as those months he was away were sometimes bewildering for me. But they also marked some of the wildest and most fun times of my life, it being the early 70s and all…”
As he talks about the book, he tells me how he has now read it three times. First in high school when he found that “for a young reader it is quite dense – there are a lot of what you might call technical descriptions of Zen Buddhism, so I enjoyed it, but it was of limited value to me”. In his 20s, he picked up the book again, when he travelled the Annapurna circuit in Nepal, “and the whole book came much more alive to me, though the Buddhism sections still had less import than the descriptions of people and culture and land”.
The third time he read his father’s words was nearly two years ago, when he was invited to retrace the journey to the crystal mountain in the company of his father’s original companion, George Schaller. This time, he says, “because [my father] had died and was gone I felt a greater imperative, if you will, to use the book as a way to more deeply understand him and his thinking, not only what that experience had been like for him, but also who he was in life”.
Alex had some misgivings about going on the recent trip at all, feeling a “bit miscast” because he had nothing directly to do with the original journey. But again the invitation came at a significant moment in his life. He had, he explains, been through a very rough couple of years since – but unrelated to – his father’s death. The stress had got in the way of his grieving, so the journey came as an opportunity to reconnect.
Alex took notes on every day of the trip just as Peter had done, partly, he says, so he could one day share his experiences with his young son, as his father had shared his journey with him. At the suggestion of others – Alex does not think of himself as a writer – he is currently contemplating if he might turn those field notes into a book. His travelling companion, George Schaller, was 83 years old when he undertook the trek, but still impossibly sprightly. “George had a lot of insights into what it was like being up on the mountains with my father,” Matthiessen says. “But as you can imagine, perhaps, he is kind of a reserved fellow. He is not necessarily one to dish emotionally, as it were.”
A few things about the trek had undeniably changed. When Matthiessen senior made the journey, there was a genuine sense of extreme remoteness. The author had cropped his long hair short to his skull as he set out and began to walk barefoot like the Sherpas when they left paved roads. As a reader, you feel exactly how, camping in his wet cotton and wool clothes at minus 20C, he would “quake with cold all night”.
Alex notes how hi-tech gear made the journey less arduous 40 years on. The region is not as removed from the world as it once was; companies now offer “Crystal Mountain Tours” following the original “Snow Leopard route” to the Dolpo. “I was hoping for the real kind of ass-kicking trip that he described,” Matthiessen says. “It was what I needed, but in the end it wasn’t quite that, physically.”
Mentally, spiritually, it was perhaps more demanding. Talking to Alex, I mention how over the years that one or two people have told me how special the book has been to them, in helping them to understand or cope with death. In particular, my friend the writer Sonali Deraniyagala, who lost her whole family in the 2003 Sri Lankan tsunami, once told me how the book was just about the only thing she had ever known truly to comfort her. “It’s odd to say but I found that the book really helped with the actual physical pain,” she said. I wondered if Alex felt it to be primarily a book that encompassed grief.
“I don’t see it exactly in that way,” he said, “but I do trust the judgment of many others who have also told me they have read it and felt just as your friend did. It is a very insightful commentary on loss. I don’t know that my father himself was deeply wounded by grief – I think he had a Buddhist approach, acceptance, to it. But I do think it is very sensitive to the complexities of his relationship to my mother and how it ended. I found it very honest and unflinching in that way.”
He read the book in sequence with the retraced journey. Did it feel strange to read about his father missing him as a boy in those exact landscapes?
“It’s true I had a vivid presence in the book, if not a frequent one,” he says. “There were obviously moments of great sadness on my trip. It was unavoidable that in certain moments when he was talking about me or my mother or whatever… it would cause me to really intensely miss him too. One very beautiful day, I sat above Phoksundo lake, the gateway to the Upper Dolpo, reading about him being there, and I had these very strong feelings of joy and sadness combined into one. I tapped back into how wonderful our relationship had been – we really did have a very strong bond and friendship.”
All his life, Alex notes, people have asked him – “sometimes breathlessly” – what it was like to have Peter Matthiessen as a father. “The simple and perhaps obvious answer is it was wonderful – a literal privilege – and tough, as any of his wives or children would attest.” He shares an interest in Zen – he does his best to make time for meditation practice – but does not approach it with anything like his old man’s rigorous commitment. He tries to appreciate, too, like his father, that any journey is itself the destination. There is a moment quite early in The Snow Leopard when Peter Matthiessen acknowledges that “I would like to see a snow leopard, but if I do not, that is all right too.” Alex never saw the ostensible object of his quest either and equally “didn’t get my hopes up too much. I did see a lot of other wonderful wildlife – wolves, migrating cranes flying over to India, a lot of blue sheep… ”
Like any quest worth a yellow brick road, Matthiessen’s original journey ended in something like anticlimax. The door to the crystal monastery, which had become the focus of his spiritual ambition, was locked when he eventually arrived through the snow. The wise lama he has been longing to talk to for months turns out to be a “crippled monk who was curing goatskin in yak butter and brains” who they had walked straight past further down the valley. Zen, Matthiessen noted, “has no patience with mysticism”. Enlightenment isn’t reserved for the tops of mountains. His book dramatises how it is more likely intuited while you “trudge and pant and climb and slip and climb and gasp” getting up there. The most magical thing about Matthiessen’s own original journey, and his book, though, remains the fact that, from your armchair, you can still travel with him, every step along that road.
The Folio Society edition of The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen, introduced by Alex Matthiessen with photographs by George Schaller, is available exclusively from foliosociety.com, £36.95
