In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Lance Richardson, the Australian journalist and author of two acclaimed biographies, chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about his choices while researching and crafting True Nature: The Lives of Peter Matthiessen. The celebrated author of The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen was co-founder of the Paris Review and a towering figure of 20th-century American literature.
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True Nature
As he set out to write a biography of the author Peter Matthiessen, Lance Richardson confronted a biographical paradox: which Matthiessen should he write about? This Renaissance man defied easy categorisation because he was simultaneously a successful novelist, naturalist, Zen Roshi, CIA operative, environmental crusader and serial philanderer. Lance’s achievement in True Nature lies in refusing to reconcile these contradictions, instead revealing how each fractured persona pursued the same elusive goal of enlightenment, Matthiessen’s ‘true nature’.
Peter Matthiessen
Lance Richardson’s path to True Nature was deeply personal. With a degree in anthropology from the University of Sydney and a deep love of travel, he had already journeyed to many of the places Matthiessen visited and wrote about. When he finally read The Snow Leopard, his ‘gateway drug’ to Matthiessen’s work, he became fascinated by a writer who moved fluidly between science and spirituality, quoting physics and the oldest and most sacred scriptures of Hinduism in the same breath. How did Matthiessen develop this capacious way of seeing? Where did it lead? These were the questions Lance asked at the beginning of the project.
Though True Nature is unauthorised, Lance eventually gained cooperation from Matthiessen’s three wives and children. Maria Matthiessen, the author’s widow, became Lance’s most crucial source, providing candid interviews about their marriage and letters that had not yet gone to the archive.
Unexpected Sources
Some revelations about Matthiessen came from unexpected places: his dog walker witnessed the author’s grief when George Plimpton, co-founder with Matthiessen of the Paris Review, died. And Matthiessen’s first girlfriend from 1945 gave Lance 120 letters Matthiessen wrote to her during the Second World War when he was stationed in Pearl Harbour.
Peter Matthiessen in The Himalayas
During the seven years Lance spent conducting research for the biography, he retraced Matthiessen’s footsteps to many of the places the author most loved. During his Himalayan trek, Lance visited the Crystal Monastery in Nepal’s Dolpo region. Though altitude sickness forced his early departure, he spent a transformative day at the monastery, experiencing what Matthiessen called ‘the island’, a space so elemental and silent that ego falls away. That feeling infused Lance’s writing about Matthiessen’s spiritual quest.
Crystal Monastery in Nepal
True Nature opens in Matthiessen’s musty, ivy-covered writing shack on Long Island, where for four decades he worked 12-hour days surrounded by talismanic objects: a slate from the Klamath River, a dried snake from Baja and ashes from a copy of The Snow Leopard ceremonially burned in the Himalayas. By describing Matthiessen’s workspace, Lance gestured toward the enormous scope of the author’s life.
Tukten, Peter Matthiessen, Jang-bu, Gyaltsen and Ang Dawa at the Saldang Pass in Dolpo, Nepal, November 1973.
Most significantly, Lance found Matthiessen’s unfinished memoir notes labelled ‘ROUGH OUTLINE FOR A BIOGRAPHER (IF ANY).’ This discovery confirmed what Lance had long suspected: Matthiessen anticipated posthumous scrutiny but never curated his papers. That task fell to the meticulously organised Maria Matthiessen, whose filing system preserved her late husband’s legacy.
Lance’s ethical challenges were considerable. Matthiessen’s spiritual teachings sat uneasily beside his serial infidelities and neglect of his children. Lance’s position was uncompromising: ‘As a biographer, I think your only obligation is to the truth’, he stated. He refused to polish Matthiessen’s legacy, instead giving space to Maria and other women to tell their own stories, using pseudonyms when subjects declined involvement in the project.
Peter Matthiessen.
In the epilogue, Lance quotes Matthiessen’s Dharma talk as ‘Muryo Roshi’, the author’s Dharma name as a Zen master, on what remains after death: not the small relative mind of ego and experience, but essential Buddha mind, the emptiness at the heart of everything. It is the perfect ending for a life that never found closure, a man who spent 86 years searching for a contentment he never quite reached. What Lance captured wasn’t a unified self, but a portrait of pathological restlessness, Matthiessen’s own term for the deep disquiet driving him across continents and spiritual traditions. True Nature reminds us that biography’s highest calling isn’t reconciliation but honest witness to complexity.
Praise for True Nature
‘Matthiessen’s many masks are on display in True Nature, a deeply researched and artfully executed biography. . .. Mr. Richardson has drawn from an enormous range of sources—importantly, he appears to have received the full cooperation of Ms. Eckhart and Matthiessen’s children—to better understand a gifted, difficult man who, for all his adventures and good fortune, seemed resolutely dissatisfied.’
— Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
‘Elegant and rigorous. . .. Restlessness is deeply rooted in American mythology. . .. Few have embodied this supposedly American quality with more complexity than the writer Peter Matthiessen. And few have captured it with more clarity than Lance Richardson.’
— John Kaag, The Atlantic
‘The first biography of the writer, and an engaging one at that ... grounded in remarkably candid interviews with Matthiessen’s family members and lovers.’
— Maggie Doherty, The New Yorker
‘Beautifully written, insightful, and engaging, True Nature is a tour de force depiction of a charismatic, restless, self-absorbed, immensely talented literary lion.’
— Glenn Altschuler, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
‘True Nature is enthralling, expertly told, and based on extraordinary research.’— Michael O'Donnell, The American Scholar
‘Impressive . . . A rigorous and balanced account of this restless soul. . .. Richardson shows how Matthiessen’s devotion to writing never wavered, despite depression, lawsuits and the painful gestation of several novels. In the process, he reveals the many sides (to quote Matthiessen’s own editor) of ‘an immensely complicated, neurotic, charming, iron-willed, uncertain, demanding author.’
— Guy Stagg, The Spectator
‘Capacious . . . Richardson’s carefully cross-hatched study of his subject depicts him in the wild, in all habitats and seasons. . ..
A very considerable American life.’
— Stephen Smith, Financial Times
‘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.’
— Publishers Weekly (starred)
‘Even-handed, perceptive, smoothly narrated and exhaustively researched. . .. Richardson is very good on the limits of Matthiessen's vision, the romantic fog on his lens.’
— Timothy Farrington, Literary Review
‘In True Nature, Lance Richardson offers vivid summaries of Matthiessen’s far-flung adventures. Well written, diligent in its reading of both fiction and nonfiction, and indulgent of Matthiessen’s idiosyncrasies.’
— James Campbell, Times Literary Supplement
‘A riveting account of the tumultuous, untamed, yet determinedly focused life of Peter Matthiessen, a writer of planetary greatness. A superb nature writer, an uncompromising social and environmental activist, a devotee of Zen’s endless path toward transformation, and by all accounts a failure as a proper family man, Matthiessen has been gifted with an excellent biographer in Lance Richardson, whose True Nature approaches this life with a Zen-like quality of calm, gratitude, and expansiveness all its own.’
— Joy Williams, winner of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction
‘True Nature is a stunning achievement by a brilliant biographer. Lance Richardson takes his readers on a wild ride with Peter Matthiessen. And what a journey: founding The Paris Review, working undercover for the CIA, Zen master, chasing the snow leopard in the Himalayas. This gracefully written biography is absolutely enthralling.’
— Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
‘Brooding, sexy, troubled Peter Matthiessen, one of the last great WASP renegades, has had the immense posthumous luck of finding an ideal biographer in Lance Richardson, who patiently and artfully dissects a body of work that evades easy description. Matthiessen emerges from this book as an unexpected radical, an underappreciated Modernist, and a pioneering environmentalist.’
— Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sontag: Her Life and Work
‘Lance Richardson brilliantly captures Peter Matthiessen’s pathological restlessness in this riveting tale of a legendary life. Richardson creates an extraordinary portrait of an elusive writer who sought to protect the world’s last wild places; there is adventure, beauty, compassion, and deep insight on nearly every page. Compellingly crafted and doggedly researched, True Nature is a masterpiece of literary biography.’
— Heather Clark, Pulitzer Prize finalist for Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath.
True Nature Interviews and Podcasts
‘An accidental biographer on Peter Matthiessen’ — John Williams, The Washington Post
‘What Really Happened with the CIA and The Paris Review?‘ — Dan Piepenbring, The Paris Review
‘Who Was Peter Matthiessen, Really?‘ — Terry McDonell, Literary Hub
‘Are We Entering a New Golden Age of Biography?‘ — Megan Marshall, Literary Hub
Gone to Timbuktu — interview by Sophy Roberts
Personal Landscapes — interview by Ryan Murdock
Required Reading from Liberties — interview by Morten Høi Jensen
Creative Journeys — interview by Jeremy Bassetti
The Virtual Memories Show — interview by Gil Roth
Nature Revisited — interview by Scott Chaskey
Lance Richardson’s first book, House of Nutter: The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and named one of the notable books of 2018 by the Sunday Times, Mail on Sunday, Esquire and the American Library Association. He has been awarded several fellowships, including a year-long residency at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He teaches on the MFA in Writing programme at Bennington College, Vermont.
To Learn More About Lance Richardson, You’ll Find Him Here: