It was​ in a Quonset hut south of the Potomac that Peter Matthiessen met James Jesus Angleton, ‘a cadaverous, hawk-boned man with dark hair, large elfin ears and a lively intelligent face behind horn-rimmed glasses’, as Matthiessen later described him in an unpublished account of his recruitment to the CIA in the autumn of 1950. They had a ‘pleasant talk’. In True Nature, his new biography of Matthiessen, Lance Richardson speculates that they may have discussed poetry. Both men were protégés of Norman Holmes Pearson, an instructor in the English department at Yale. Pearson was a correspondent of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens as well as F.O. Matthiessen, the Harvard scholar and cousin of his pupil, who had taken his own life earlier in 1950 under a cloud of threats over his leftist leanings and homosexuality. Pearson was in these years at work on a study of Nathaniel Hawthorne; co-editing with W.H. Auden the five-volume anthology Poets of the English Language; and starting the university’s American studies programme. At Yale before the war, Angleton had been a mediocre student, but he’d founded a literary magazine, Furioso, made a pilgrimage to Pound at his villa in Rapallo, and booked the poet’s 1939 tour of the United States. An undergraduate after the war, Matthiessen impressed Pearson with a paper on Faulkner written in his senior year. ‘Where have you been the last three years?’ Pearson asked. ‘You could have won the English prize!’ All three were members of the Elizabethan Club, a campus literary society which, in Richardson’s description, served ‘afternoon tea in a series of genteel rooms, perfect for private conversation … organised around a gargantuan walk-in safe containing a Shakespeare First Folio and a first edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost’. Just think of those spooks whispering about pinkos over their cups of tea an arm’s length from an expensive old book about Satan.

Matthiessen’s father was an architect and a naval reserve officer decorated for his service designing simulators to train gunners to shoot down German planes. Matthiessen missed out on the action: he turned eighteen a few weeks after Berlin fell and was stuck in basic training when Truman dropped the bombs on Japan. He did laundry duty for the navy at Pearl Harbor while he waited to start at Yale. Pearson spent the war in London as chief of the X-2 counterintelligence branch of the Office of Strategic Services, assisting with Ultra, the code-breaking project at Bletchley Park. His code name was ‘Puritan’, and he hired Angleton out of the army to be his right-hand man. They reported to MI6, and Angleton befriended Kim Philby, a bond that would keep him sniffing for moles in the ranks for the rest of his career. After the war Angleton ran X-2 in Italy, and following the CIA’s establishment in 1947 he became head of staff in its Office of Special Operations, which dealt with foreign intelligence, counterintelligence and espionage. (Election interference, sabotage and sponsorship of anti-communist guerrillas were the domain of the Office of Policy Co-ordination, the ‘cowboys’ to the OSO’s ‘librarians’.) Pearson turned down a job in Truman’s State Department to go back to Yale, where he moonlighted as a talent-spotter for his old deputy.

Angleton took Matthiessen on a drive around Washington and told him that Paris was a plum assignment. Until then Matthiessen hadn’t realised he’d been hired. Three months of stateside training would be necessary. Matthiessen baulked at coming down to Washington because it ‘would blow my “cover” before I even had one’. Instead he ditched the teaching duties he’d taken on in New Haven and went to learn tradecraft at a safe house in Manhattan. It was ‘great fun’. He and his instructor did not know each other’s real names. The final test was to explain how he would go about discovering the man’s identity from details gleaned during their acquaintance. He passed, and in June 1951 sailed to France with his wife of four months, Patsy Southgate. His cover – young writer at work on a novel – had the virtue of being true. He was 24 and the Atlantic Monthly had just published his first short story.

‘Sadie’ is set in rural Georgia and narrated by a man called Webster who goes to a stable yard because he wants to buy a few dogs. The dog he most prizes, the ‘real pretty’ pointer that gives the story its title, is killed before he can make the purchase by a brutish poacher called Dewey Floyd who works as a yard hand and lives in the woods. Floyd tells Webster he did it because he was drunk: ‘You see, I was mighty close to them dawgs, an’ that li’l one were my fav’rit. Sadie were a real stylish dawg. I jes don’t know rightly what it was, how I could come to doin it. But I sure’n hell did it.’ He says he could kill a man sober, eyeing his boss, Pentland.

‘Sadie’, as Richardson points out, has several qualities, not a few of them nicked from Faulkner, that would mark Matthiessen’s more mature fiction: a lurid and exotic setting (Matthiessen had visited Jim Crow Georgia with a girlfriend he met in New York), characters’ voices rendered in vernacular dialect, the theme of racism and the use of racial slurs, conflicting accounts of ambiguous crimes and a volatile, charismatic, amoral outsider at the centre. The story got him the attention of the publisher John Farrar, who passed it to Edward Weeks at the Atlantic. Matthiessen was taken on as a client by ‘the toughest agent in town’. Bernice Baumgarten also represented John Dos Passos, Edna St Vincent Millay and Raymond Chandler, who sacked her for calling the Philip Marlowe of The Long Goodbye ‘too Christ-like and sentimental’. She would be hard on Matthiessen’s fiction as well. On receiving 35 pages of a novel in progress, Baumgarten wrote to him: ‘Dear Peter, James Fenimore Cooper wrote this 150 years ago, only he wrote it better. Yrs, Bernice.’

For now, Matthiessen had a secret day job, a new wife, and time to burn. He had met Patsy in Paris in 1949 when they were both exchange students. The daughter of a State Department diplomat and a DC socialite, she was an aspiring writer and a renowned beauty. In Jane Freilicher’s description, ‘with her golden hair, bright blue eyes and soft-spoken voice, it came as a surprise to find that she had a mind like a steel trap – she didn’t suffer fools gladly.’ Matthiessen had an exciting time as a student abroad. He wrote to an old girlfriend back home: ‘Our existence here continues in its usual extraordinary fashion – full, exciting, extremely stimulating and amusing, and very tiring indeed.’ To his journal he confided: ‘Would like to narrow social life down to N and P Southgate or somebody like her.’ N was Nathalie de Salzmann, a 29-year-old divorced mother of three. From childhood she had been a devotee, like her parents, of the mystic G.I. Gurdjieff and ‘the Work’, his ‘proprietary system for self-realisation’. ‘Gurdjieff taught,’ Richardson writes, ‘that most people are asleep, barely conscious automatons who float through their lives without ever fully living them … And in this state of passive sleepwalking, we mistake our mechanical reactions for who we think we are: a singular unchanging “me”. But in reality we are a multiplicity of “I’s”, all of them different parts of a dormant true self.’ As Richardson’s exhaustive and insightful book shows, Matthiessen spent his life trying to wake his dormant true self. Despite his eventual success as a novelist and attainment of the status of Zen master, he kept shuffling his multiplicity of I’s all the way to the grave.

Matthiessen’s affair with N ended after a pregnancy scare and a rebuffed proposal of marriage. Once he and Patsy returned from their year in France, he took to spending his weekends with her at Smith. Engagement was a trend among his Yale classmates after graduation, and he fell in line. ‘Much as I loved that beautiful girl,’ he said, ‘I also knew that I was setting aside, perhaps forever, a strong desire to travel light and see the world.’ In truth none of his three marriages, or the three children and three stepchildren that came along with them, would stop him seeing the world, and for most of the time between his high school years and his death from leukaemia in 2014 at 86 he was emotionally involved with at least two women at once.

‘When you’re 23, it seems pretty romantic to go to Paris with yr beautiful young wife to serve as an intelligence agent and write the Great American Novel into the bargain,’ Matthiessen wrote to his friend Ben Bradlee. ‘Weren’t you ever as young and dumb as that?’ ‘I’m always in the club drinking martinis,’ he told an interviewer when asked to recall his younger self. ‘What did I know from politics?’ (Richardson doesn’t find in Matthiessen’s letters and journals a coherent politics, but some leftist tendencies emerge in a remark on ‘the startling parallel between communist doctrine and the teachings of Jesus Christ’ and in his sympathy for blacklisted celebrities like Paul Robeson, who ‘got a shitty deal’.) If it were merely a matter of Matthiessen’s reputation as a writer, such explanations might have sufficed, but soon after his arrival in France, he made some new friends, and they started the Paris Review. Since Matthiessen’s employment by the CIA was first reported by the New York Times in 1977, the magazine has had the taint of the association. Given the tendency of its founders, their children and their editorial heirs to memorialise the magazine’s beginnings incessantly, often in the pursuit of fundraising, the issue keeps raising its still un-declassified head, to the extent that many young writers have the impression that since the end of the Second World War American literature has been one big government psyop. That’s why they’re not getting published.

Matthiessen told interviewers variously that he ‘was just running errands and carrying messages and false passports between agents in Paris’; ‘sending in reports of national gasoline consumption, that sort of thing’; or reading L’Humanité, the newspaper of the Parti communiste français, which was ‘wrong-headed, ill-written, rhetorical and boring’. In his book Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers (2016), Joel Whitney suggested that among those Matthiessen was surveilling was Richard Wright, who was living in Paris after breaking with the Communist Party in 1944.

Richardson does not rule out Wright as an initial target, but working from Matthiessen’s unpublished accounts of his CIA work, one of which is called ‘THE PARIS REVIEW v. THE CIA: My Half-life as a Capitalist Running Dog’, he reports that in early 1953, Matthiessen’s duties shifted to the cultivation of one potential asset. ‘Monsieur X’ was ‘“a well-known French writer” who’d also made films; an older Jewish man who was committed to Stalin despite the virulent antisemitism in the Soviet Union; a party faithful who was known to peddle L’Humanité on weekends’. Richardson speculates that – ‘though not a perfect fit’ – this might be the Dadaist Tristan Tzara, whom Matthiessen met in the company of William Styron and considered commissioning to write for the Paris Review.

Whatever the identity of this ‘near fanatic’, Matthiessen’s superiors pushed him too far when they ordered him to secure an invitation to join the PCF from Monsieur X: ‘Right there, on that very day, I quit my first job with the CIA, telling these men that I would not submit my pregnant wife to further distress … and also that, while I could be trusted to keep my mouth shut about the very little that I knew … they could no longer trust my politics because I had moved left.’ Thus Matthiessen set the stage for himself to become the Ramsey Clark of American letters, an establishment figure who would come to the defence of enemies of the regime: from endangered wild species to the Native American activist Leonard Peltier, who was convicted of the murder of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, a crime for which, as Matthiessen contended in his 1983 book, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Peltier was framed.

Matthiessen overstated things when he told Charlie Rose that he ‘invented the Paris Review as cover’ for his intelligence work. He got into the magazine business after being approached at Le Dôme by Harold ‘Doc’ Humes, who recognised him from a previous meeting in Pamplona in 1949, where they were both observing the running of the bulls. For $600 Humes had purchased the Paris News Post, something like a crude Time Out, and recruited Matthiessen as fiction editor. When they got a story from Terry Southern, Matthiessen suggested that such a jewel didn’t belong in a shabby listings rag and they ought to start a proper literary magazine. George Plimpton, a childhood friend of Matthiessen’s, was brought on as managing editor, and Plimpton enlisted Donald Hall to solicit the poems. They did a lot of drinking together and decided not to publish criticism, placing the emphasis on short stories, poetry and interviews. Styron was around, as were Evan S. Connell, Irwin Shaw and James Baldwin, whom Matthiessen met at a poker game and failed to get a story from for the Paris News Post. Over the years Matthiessen, Humes and Plimpton would vie for credit as to who ‘invented’ the Paris Review. ‘PARIS REVIEW C’EST MOI,’ Matthiessen told Gay Talese, in a 1963 Esquire article that cemented the legend. Humes credited the name to Matthiessen. ‘I am the Father of the Magazine,’ he once said. ‘George is the Mother.’ And indeed it was Plimpton who did the bulk of the work, maintained discipline, such as it was, and carried things on for fifty years until his death in 2003.

It’s true that Matthiessen’s handler had told him to find a ‘more visible’ cover story before he became reacquainted with Humes, and that without Matthiessen’s enthusiasm and roping in of Plimpton Humes’s editorial efforts might not have come to much, but crediting the CIA with the Paris Review’s founding is an exaggeration. When Humes and Plimpton learned of Matthiessen’s spying in the mid-1960s, a decade after he’d given up his editorial duties, they weren’t too pleased. ‘I suppose every CIA agent must have a job of sorts,’ Plimpton wrote to Humes. ‘Otherwise his presence in a foreign city looks suspicious.’ More contentious is the donation to the magazine by Julius Fleischmann, a dilettante from the Midwest who was throwing money around in Paris. Some of that money came through the Fairfield Foundation, a CIA front that Fleischmann ran. Whether the $1000 he gave the Paris Review was a private donation or funnelled from the CIA reptile fund is still unclear. When Plimpton asked for more money, Fleischmann turned him down.

Over two years​ in Paris, Patsy had a stillborn child and then a son called Luke. Matthiessen quit the CIA just as the inaugural issue of the Paris Review went to press in 1953. Without his stipend and weary of swelling anti-American sentiment in Paris, he decided to take his family back to the US. Matthiessen had grown up in and around New York City (Upper East Side, Westchester, Stamford, Fishers Island). His father was descended from a Dane called Matthias Petersen who built a fortune by hunting 373 bowhead whales. He was famous for his exploits in Denmark, so the family adopted his name as their surname. A century and a half after his death, three of his descendants, the brothers Ehrhard, Franz and Frederick, emigrated to the United States. Ehrhard went into finance; Franz founded the precursor to Domino Sugar; Frederick started a zinc smelting company that sold bullets to both sides during the Civil War. One brother fattened the country up for slaughter, one provided the ammo and the third bankrolled the bonanza. The American combination of debt, sucrose and munitions made all three rich, a fortune consolidated when Ehrhard’s son Conrad married Frederick’s daughter Eda and went to work for Franz.

These were Peter Matthiessen’s grandparents. His father, known as Matty, met his wife, Betty, at a Yale dance. Richardson’s account of the Matthiessen clan is a catalogue of dysfunctional marriages and depressed children of distant parents. At least they were rich. On this subject Peter had mixed feelings. As a boy he felt unloved and collected snakes, which became the subjects of the poetry he started to write at fifteen:

From varied scants of spring-waked life,
Of rain-blown freshness, new-formed green,
And hungry patter, woodland scene,
Slides forth the subtle serpent lean,
With wake of silence, writhing sheen,
To edge of trees, to end of strife.

At Yale he asked his parents to have his name taken out of the Social Register (they ignored the request, to his ‘rage’, as Styron recalled), but a fair amount of his youth was spent living like a playboy. The double-life pattern continued when he and Patsy rented a cottage in Springs, a village at the east end of Long Island. Matthiessen fell in with local fishermen, known as Bonackers, men who spoke a dialect that came down from centuries of sea dogs. They were so coarse that the couple’s housekeeper, from a middle-class African American enclave nearby, was ashamed of the association. Matthiessen tried to keep secret his profession as a writer from the Bonackers, whom he would write about in Men’s Lives (1986), just as their livelihoods and folkways were being washed away by corporate fishing and gentrification spreading from the Hamptons. The Matthiessens were part of an early wave of that gentrification and among their friends were Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock. On a night of partying at the home of the New Yorker writer Berton Roueché, Pollock kicked his feet through the windshield of Matthiessen’s car as Matthiessen was giving him a ride home. Matthiessen recalled Pollock in an unpublished fragment:

Jackson all but destroyed his valuable record collection by shying his records out the window, through the window, into the stove, and increasingly, in the direction of his friends; he then picked up a carving knife and began stabbing it into the kitchen table as close as possible to our hands. When Berton jumped up, Jackson, who was much bigger, began to shove him around, and at this point, fed up, I stood up and socked him on the point of the jaw. He went down hard against the wall, where he lay dazed, staring at me. ‘Nobody ever stopped me before,’ he said finally. Drunk as he was, he was now quiet and calm, and told us we could go home, he would be fine.

Richardson’s biography isn’t short on such anecdotes. We see Matthiessen’s parents scolding him for corrupting his younger brother, Carey, who was once found passed out drunk outside the front door claiming ‘beer is a food.’ Peter was thrown out of the family home on account of his ‘insolence, absenteeism, excessive use of stimulants, speeding tickets and chronic disruption of the social order’. He described his predicament in a letter to his girlfriend Wendy:

I’ll have to learn to at least keep them happy, but I don’t believe I’ll ever really gratify them, especially Dad. He believes me capable (and innately) of being an exceptionally fine person – of the ‘Pres-of-the-Class’ variety – and a pillar of society, so to speak. I am not and will not be, either … I would, perhaps, if I were bored. But God, I’m anything but bored! For me, being model takes concentration, and anything as important as that which needs concentration needs time, and I’d spend that time laughing at myself … in brief, I’d be two persons, and you know the one that would kick the other to death. So do I. I loathe a farce, and I’m not crazy enough about myself as it is, without trying that. It is and always has been either me or the ‘me’ the folks want, always a choice, and since I usually chose incorrectly, always a conflict.

The non-model ‘me’ was hard to shake, the incorrect choices never unusual. There is Matthiessen as a navy officer being rolled out of a cab at the gate of Moanalua Ridge after a weekend of excess in Maui; being reprimanded by an elevator operator at his Aunt Bess’s Manhattan apartment when he returned home with a bag full of liquor, ‘Ya wanna roon yaself? Sham on ya!’; ignoring a girlfriend at the Styrons’ fifth wedding anniversary to argue ‘bullshit-young-novelist-competitive-braggadocio-style’, in Rose’s phrase, with Norman Mailer, who was popping out of the bushes to challenge each new arrival to an arm-wrestling match. And then, through the years, there is Matthiessen the unfaithful husband, all the way up to his final illness in 2014, when his closeness to his assistant was prompting angry notes from his third wife, Maria Eckhart.

Peter and Patsy parted ways in 1956. Tied either to the fishing boat or the writing desk, Matthiessen was insufficiently domestic, always home too late or to bed too early. The marriage ended when Patsy began an affair with the couple’s landlord, who was distressed after running over a local child with his truck. (The bleeding boy died in his arms.) His licence was suspended and Patsy started driving him to work in the mornings. ‘Many years later,’ Luke Matthiessen told Richardson, ‘she told me flat out that she felt the reason she was attracted to him was because she knew that he loved her,’ something she could no longer be sure of when it came to his father. After the divorce was finalised in 1958, she married the painter Mike Goldberg, and she and Luke and his younger sister, Sara, lived between Manhattan and Long Island with Goldberg and Frank O’Hara and his partner Joe LeSueur, an escape, as LeSueur put it, from ‘heterosexual circles dominated by sexist, egocentric males who thought of themselves as, to use Patsy’s most damning epithet, “entitled”’.

By this point, Matthiessen had published two novels. Race Rock, which he wrote in Paris, appeared in 1954 and tells the story of a young man trying to shed his privileged background, though he’s not sure how: ‘It’s just hard to know what to do in these mixed-up times.’ It culminates with a game of Russian roulette and a beach accident that kills a caretaker before the narrator takes leave of his childhood home. Partisans, published in 1955, was conceived by Matthiessen in Paris – a plot to describe to Monsieur X when he was trying to win his confidence. Without mentioning why he made the story up, he told it to Styron and Styron told him to expand it into a novel. In the finished version, a young American journalist in Paris tries to interview a Marxist revolutionary called Jacobi, a character based on Monsieur X and an avowed enemy of the young man’s diplomat father, and comes under suspicion of being employed by the CIA. Matthiessen liked to tell the story of picking up a racy-looking pulp paperback about libertine Paris to read while camping in the Pacific Northwest, only to find he’d bought Partisans repackaged under a different title without his knowledge or permission.

Like Race Rock and Partisans, Raditzer, which appeared in 1961, is an existentialist melodrama written under the spell of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and drawing from autobiographical material, in this case Matthiessen’s stint in the navy. The son of a prosperous lawyer is caught between his parents’ expectations and his ambitions to become a painter. He ships out to Hawaii at the end of the war and never sees action but comes into contact with men from the rowdier classes, particularly the impish title character, a lowlife who sells army supplies on the black market and places his new friend in the way of temptation with an island girl called Myrna. The novel bears comparison to Philip Roth’s novella ‘Goodbye, Columbus’, published two years earlier; both protagonists look to cross a threshold of respectability and break into a realm of bohemian possibility; each holds up Gauguin as an idol of exotic sensual possibility and contraception or abortion as the reality principle. Whatever their class differences, the American writers of that generation were all playing from the same deck. Matthiessen’s final novel, In Paradise, released four days after his death, took up the Holocaust as if out of overdue obligation to the subject matter.

After the split​ from Patsy, Matthiessen stopped playing at being a fisherman and started freelancing for magazines, turning in pieces that he would then expand into or collect in books. More than twenty of these appeared over fifty years, most of which can be categorised as travel and nature writing, always with a shade of political advocacy. Richardson calls him the New Yorker’s ‘gentleman naturalist’. The job description no longer exists, certainly not the ‘gentleman’ bit. He ventured into the wilderness with anthropologists, zoologists, oceanographers, palaeontologists and occasionally crackpots, a few of whom he threw in with during his decades-long search for Bigfoot, a quest that never yielded what he was looking for but introduced him to the landscapes and people that inspired his books on Native Americans as well as his trilogy of novels about the Everglades. He wrote about auks, cranes, peafowl, gulls, condors, sharks, whales, turtles, crabs, otters, beavers, badgers, bears, wolves, lions, cougars, tigers, wildebeest, elephants and zebras. Air travel was now making travel writing simpler in terms of logistics, but globalisation was rendering it both obsolete and politically suspect – however noble Matthiessen’s conservationist intentions. The tendency to romanticise ‘traditional people’ (his preferred term later in life) as noble innocents, especially in their relationship to landscape and wildlife, never quite left him. He was taken to task for it in this paper: ‘His specialty is to articulate that sense of innocent wonder at the natural world usually assumed to be the prerogative of primitive peoples,’ Kathryn Tidrick wrote in the LRB of 25 February 1993. Indeed, innocence, its absence and its possible reclamation is the theme that unifies Matthiessen’s fiction and non-fiction, for better and worse.

His first assignment for the New Yorker in 1957 revived a story he’d chased with Bradlee during their time in Paris, about the 1952 murder of the mayor of Orléans by his jealous wife. William Shawn accepted it and assigned the piece to the editor Sanderson Vanderbilt. When Matthiessen received a set of proofs, he replied: ‘I regret very much that its editor did not consult me about what is, in effect, a complete revision. Throughout, the style seems at best uncertain, and at worst overwritten, arch and laboured. In any case, the writing is not mine, and I do not want my name attached to it.’ He told Baumgarten he wanted to bomb the magazine’s office. ‘Count to ten,’ she replied. ‘Count to a hundred. This is the first money you’ve ever earned. Don’t be stupid and blow it.’ Indeed the fee for the piece exceeded his book advances. Shawn insisted that the material was very good and Vanderbilt had only put it in chronological order. They could sort it out. ‘I don’t think we’ll be able to work together very well after the letter I sent to you,’ Matthiessen said. ‘Mr Matthiessen, I took the precaution of not showing Mr Vanderbilt your letter,’ Shawn replied.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the New Yorker funded excursions that yielded further books of non-fiction and two novels. Matthiessen went to South America in December 1959, and gathered material both for his travel book The Cloud Forest (1961) and his fourth novel, At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965). A thriller about American missionaries and mercenaries clashing at the edge of the jungle over the fate of a tribe downriver that the Christians have come to convert and the mercenaries have been hired to kill, it was his first work of fiction to break the bounds of autobiography. It was a commercial smash and a complex working out of Matthiessen’s feelings about the encroachment of modern forces on traditional cultures through the character of Lewis Moon, a charismatic part-Cheyenne pilot who is willing to bomb the tribe until he goes to live among them and then tries in vain to save them. His advance from Random House was $15,000, but royalties and reprint rights earned him the equivalent of $3 million in today’s money, according to Richardson. It came at the right time, as he now had a new wife, Deborah Love, a student of Zen Buddhism, and four children to support.

Though its point of view shifts between characters in close third-person narration, At Play in the Fields of the Lord is a conventional adventure story, comparable to works by Conrad, Maugham and Graham Greene, as reviewers – friendly and hostile – pointed out at the time. Matthiessen’s next four novels were more ambitious, both formally and in scale. Far Tortuga (1975) grew out of a New Yorker assignment to visit the turtle fishermen of the Cayman Islands. Matthiessen made use of white space on the page in his narration, and rendered the fishermen’s speech in their Caribbean dialect, making scrupulous use of hours of tape recordings he made in the Caymans in the late 1960s. The book polarised reviewers. In the New York Times alone, Robert Stone said ‘its pleasures are many and good for the soul,’ while Anatole Broyard called it an ‘unrelieved bore’. Its formal experimentation had put Matthiessen at loggerheads with his editor at Random House, Joe Fox, who had done much to perfect the structure of At Play in the Fields of the Lord. Far Tortuga would bring their professional relationship, if not their friendship, to an end. They were still fighting about the book over Thanksgiving dinner in 1995. (Fox died six days later.)

Even more protracted were the editorial labours expended on Matthiessen’s last major work of fiction, the Edgar Watson trilogy (Killing Mr Watson, Lost Man’s River and Bone by Bone) that appeared in the 1990s. He had delivered Random House a very long manuscript before realising he could publish it in three volumes, with the boon of collecting three substantial advances. The novels were revised and republished in one volume under the title Shadow Country in 2008 and won the National Book Award.

More and more​ in his fiction, Matthiessen made a fetish of the Faulknerian device of multiple, conflicting and elliptical points of view. The tendency is tamed in At Play in the Fields of the Lord. For all the hyperbolic reactions to it, Far Tortuga is a fine if difficult novel that teaches you how to read it as the narrative advances through foul weather. Shadow Country in its final form is a heap of jumbled repetitions about the life of Edgar Watson, a real-life sugar planter on the south-west coast of Florida accused of various crimes, including multiple murders, who died at the hands of a mob of his neighbours in 1910. The first volume is told by a rotation of dozens of neighbours and relatives, speaking in various forms of swamp hillbilly dialect. The next book, told in the third person, follows Watson’s descendants, who try to piece together the truth of his legend. The final volume is narrated by Watson himself in a higher register. It’s hard to defy the blurb from Don DeLillo that appears on the cover of the current edition – ‘His writing does every justice to the blood fury of his themes’ – but just as hard to call Watson a hero or villain deserving of this epic treatment.

The National Book Award was the redemption of what Matthiessen saw as his true calling as a writer: as a novelist rather than an author of non-fiction. He often compared the former occupation to that of a sculptor and the latter to that of a carpenter or furniture-maker. He is the only American writer to have won the National Book Award for both fiction and non-fiction. He remains better known as the author of The Snow Leopard, which won the non-fiction prize. In 1973, Matthiessen joined the zoologist George Schaller on a trek through Nepal to the Crystal Monastery in the Himalayas. Schaller wanted to observe the bharal, or blue sheep, in rut. Matthiessen was making a pilgrimage, ‘a journey of the heart’, as he put it. Deborah had died of cancer in 1972. During their years together he had converted to Zen Buddhism and they’d taken many trips on LSD. She is the subject of some mournful confession in The Snow Leopard, but the bits about ‘D’ are few and fall like grace notes. The bulk of the text is a diaristic present-tense account of the journey, lyrical descriptions of landscapes and the pair’s progress in the company of porters and sherpas. There is much exposition of Buddhist notions, some engaging, some rote and familiar in the manner of an encyclopedia. The book’s comic climax is a detailed observation of bharal in rut, with Matthiessen doing his best to stay close but elude their detection. He and Schaller also collect a lot of snow leopard scat but never glimpse one in the flesh.

Occasionally Schaller breaks in to swear at a porter or reject modern society, anticipating one of Wes Anderson’s parodic visions of vulgar American adventurers abroad. These two guys have gone to great trouble to watch sheep fuck and pick up cat shit, after all. Some of Matthiessen’s Buddhist pronouncements are trite. ‘Did you see the snow leopard? No. Isn’t that wonderful!’ But there’s an endearing quality to the moments when the chronicler of tough guys and killers allows himself to sound silly, and the man of many ‘I’s’ and ‘me’s’ reveals himself as a permanent little boy:

Disputing the path is a great copper-coloured grasshopper, gleaming like amber in the sun; so large is it, and so magical its shimmer, that I wonder if this grasshopper is not some old naljorpa, advanced in the art of taking other forms. But before such a ‘perfected one’ can reveal himself, the grasshopper springs carelessly over the precipice to start a new life hundreds of feet below. I choose to take this as a sign that I must entrust myself to life and thanking the grasshopper, I step out smartly on my way.