True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen

In this probing biography, journalist Richardson (House of Nutter) combs through the life of a towering literary figure best known for The Snow Leopard, a mystical Himalayan travelogue, and for cofounding the Paris Review. Peter Matthiessen (1927–2014) was a “tangle of contradictions,” Richardson writes: a “Zen priest,” an “LSD pioneer,” a “strident social activist” who supported Cesar Chavez, and a novelist and nature writer who developed the “environmental writing” genre, he was also briefly “an undercover agent for the fledgling CIA.” Born into immense wealth, he was often punished as a child “for feeling too much.” At Yale, along with classmates like William F. Buckley Jr., he was covertly recruited into the CIA by a “gentle, generous” professor. The question of the CIA’s funding of the Paris Review forms its own spy thriller at the center of Richardson’s narrative—he makes a convincing case that the magazine was not a propaganda outlet but social cover for spying. Indeed, it was after two years of “political education” from the leftists he was spying on that Matthiessen quit the CIA, later expressing “embarrassment” over his involvement. Elsewhere, Richardson writes movingly of the melding of ecology and divinity in Matthiessen’s literary work, and of his years of activism. The result is a touching, unsparing, and fully rendered portrait of a complex figure of 20th-century literature. (Oct.)