Peter Matthiessen's Magnificent "The Snow Leopard"

If you are interested in the ways and means of factual writing, as I am, Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard is a must read. Yet for many years, I resisted it. Why? Because it has the reputation of being about a spiritual quest. I’m not a spiritual person. I consider myself a realist. I’m allergic to magical thinking. 

There is a lot of Zen in The Snow Leopard. But it’s only one strand in the book’s rich fabric. Other strands are nature, travel, and adventure – all of which I relish. The Snow Leopard is an unforgettable account of a gruelling expedition that Matthiessen and field biologist George Schaller undertook, in 1973, into the remote mountains of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and possibly glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard.

Four things I love about The Snow Leopard:

1. It’s written in the first person major.

The book is an account of personal experience, which, for me, is the most real form of writing. Apparently Matthiessen’s use of “I” in The Snow Leopard was a departure from his usual approach. Maggie Doherty, in her “Rambling Man” (The New Yorker, October 20, 2025), says,

But what truly distinguishes the book is its personal nature. From early in his journalistic career, Matthiessen had abhorred the use of the first person, which he associated with a “National Geographic style of expedition writing,” sensational and unserious. In “The Snow Leopard,” however, he lets the “I” lead the way, offering access to his inner life, even as he questions the entire concept of the self. 

2. It’s written in the present tense.

No verb form conveys immediacy better than present tense. Matthiessen’s use of it in The Snow Leopard is inspired! Here are some examples:

I sit back in straw and dung warmth against the sunny stones. A brilliant black-red beetle comes, and a husky grasshopper, rubbing its fiery legs. A crow flaps to a cedar by the river, and the crow’s wings, too, are filled with the hard silver light of the Himalaya.

GS lingers and I keep on climbing, then pause to drink and wash in a mountain brook. Greenfinches come, and a hawk flies down the valley. Asters and everlasting, lavender and white; the soft humming of a bumblebee consoles me. Sitting awhile on a warm rock, I enjoy the view of Yamarkhar as it comes into the sun. At this season, the flat roofs are bright with the fire colors of the harvest, which will sustain the inhabitants through the long winter – yellow squash, red peppers, bronze tobacco, a red millet, maize, and hemp, which is used for twine and cooking oil as well as marijuana. 

The path enters a narrowing ravine that climbs to a higher cleft between boulders, and the cleft is reached at the strike of the rising sun, which fills this portal with a blinding light. I emerge in a new world and stare about me. A labyrinth of valley mounts toward the snows, for the Himalaya is as convoluted as a brain.

3. It’s structured as a diary.

Each chapter is a day in the journey, beginning on September 28 and ending on December 1. I love this type of structure – chronological, sequential. The journey determines the shape of the narrative. To me it’s the most natural (and real) form of narrative – much preferable to thematic structure. 

4. It brims with wonderful descriptions of nature.

This, for example:

At a canyon bend stands the headman of Tarakot, who wears Hindu puttees and carries no pack of any kind. He is pointing at the bouldered slopes across the stream. “Na!” he cries. “Na!” Then he goes on. A pale form jumps across a gully, followed quickly by six more; the animals move up a steep slope to a haze of green between the rocks and snow. I watch them climb until, at snow line, they are swept up and consumed by clouds that have rushed up the valley from the south: this wonderful silver-gray-blue creature in the bharal, the blue sheep of the Himalaya – in Tibetan, na – that we have come so far to see.

And this:

Higher, where the snow has melted, a hill fox jumps from tussock grass and runs to a group of rocks, then turns to watch. Its black points and rich red coat are set off by a frosty face and chest and an extraordinary long thick tail, dark brown and black with a white fluffy tip; the tip remains visible long after the creature’s glowing colors sink among the stones.

Joy Williams, in her “ ‘A Fury of Dark Energies’ ” (The New York Review of Books, September 24, 2026), says that Matthiessen’s “greatest attribute as a writer” was his “keen attention to the natural world.” Based on my reading of The Snow Leopard, I’d say she’s right.

Credit: The above portrait of Peter Matthiessen by Andrea Ventura is from Joy Williams' " 'A Fury of Dark Energies' " (The New York Review of Books, September 24, 2026). 

October 20, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Alexandra Schwartz says that Joan Acocella’s “The Frog and the Crocodile” is one of her favorite Acocella pieces. It’s one of mine, too. Schwartz writes, 

Acocella’s essay deals with the improbable five-year affair between the Left Bank philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and the tough-guy Chicago writer Nelson Algren—its title comes from their pet names for each other—and was occasioned by the posthumous publication of Beauvoir’s love letters. Acocella begins with a block quote from one of the letters, a rarely attempted flex that may be the critic’s equivalent of opening a song with the bridge. We hear Beauvoir, unimpeded, as she professes her love and confesses her insecurity: Will Algren hate her if she cannot devote her life to him? Then, where Algren should answer with sweet reassurance, we get Acocella, shining the bright light of truth in our eyes. “He will hate her,” she writes. Talk about cutting to the chase.

That last line made me smile. Acocella was known for “cutting to the chase.” She talked very straight. In “The Frog and the Crocodile” she shows us a Beauvoir who was both offering herself as Algren’s love slave and asserting her independence. Acocella says of her, “From letter to letter, sometimes from paragraph to paragraph, she zigs and zags from submission to dominance.” Acocella’s history of the relationship is fascinating. And, as Schwartz points out, “Acocella doesn’t plead on Beauvoir’s behalf or condemn her. Instead, she reads the work and life in light of each other, and the results illuminate our understanding of both.” 

Schwartz’s tribute to “The Frog and the Crocodile” is excellent. I enjoyed it immensely. 

2. I also enjoyed Maggie Doherty’s “Rambling Man,” a review of Lance Richardson’s True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen. Matthiessen wrote one of my favorite books, The Snow Leopard (1978). It’s not an easy book for me to like. As Doherty says, “The spirit of Zen infuses The Snow Leopard.” For many years, I resisted it for that very reason: too cosmic for my taste. But last year, I gave it another try. It’s an account of a trek that Matthiessen and field biologist George Schaller made in 1973 high into the remote mountains of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and possibly glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard. I relish its use of first-person present tense, its chronological, diaristic structure, and, most of all, its magnificent descriptions of those wild, exotic snow mountains. For example:

At each stupa on the canyon points, the prayer stones are lit by fire-colored lichens; in the shine of thorn and old carved stones, the print of leopard and thick scent of juniper, I am filled with longing. I turn to look back at Tsakang, at the precipices and deep shadows of Black Canyon, at the dark mountain that presides over Samling, which I shall never see. Above the snowfields to the west, the Crystal Mountain thrusts bare rock into the blue; to the south is the sinuous black torrent that comes down from Kang La, the Pass of Snows. And there on the low cliff above the rivers, silhouetted on the snow, is the village that its own people call Somdo, white prayer flags flying black on the morning sun.

Doherty, in her piece, says, “It’s tempting to read The Snow Leopard as a work of confessional writing, in which Matthiessen details his weak points as a husband and a father.” I can see where it might be tempting. The book contains several introspective passages in which Matthiessen mourns the death of his wife. But it’s also a thrilling travel adventure. That’s the way I read it. 

September 9, 2024 Issue

Seamus Heaney is one of my heroes. I first encountered his work on a 1985 trip to Halifax with several friends. One of them, Alan Buchanan, brought a slim book of poetry with him and read some of it to us as we drove. The book was Seamus Heaney’s Field Work (1979). Alan read it with great gusto. I relished every line. “You drank America / like the heart’s / iron vodka,” “I ate the day / Deliberately, that its tang / Might quicken me into verb, pure verb,” and this beauty – “A rowan like a lipsticked girl.” Soon after, I discovered Heaney’s critical writings. His essay collection The Government of the Tongue (1988) is one of my touchstones. I mention all this because, in this week’s New Yorker, Maggie Doherty reviews The Letters of Seamus Heaney. I read it avidly. What was Heaney’s letter-writing like? Doherty doesn’t exactly say. She provides an excellent outline of his life. She quotes some of his poems, e.g., “Digging,” “Churning Day,” and “Funeral Rites.” She praises their sound:

Like a good anthropologist, young Heaney had a knack for thick description, but, as with Hopkins, the great pleasure of his early poems is their sound. Combining the hard consonants of Old English, which he’d studied in college, with the Latinate style favored by many lyric poets, he developed a voice that was by turns ruthless and refined. Consider the first lines of “Churning Day”: “A thick crust, coarse-grained as limestone rough-cast, / hardened gradually on top of the four crocks.” Each consonant cracks like a peppercorn between the teeth. These are poems you taste.

She occasionally provides a brief excerpt from a letter, e.g., “In a letter, he described California as a ‘lotus land for the moment’; walking to campus, he passed ‘hippies, drop-outs, freak-outs, addicts, Black Panthers, Hare Krishna American kids with shaved heads.’ ” But there are no extended quotes, nothing to indicate whether the letters themselves are worth reading. She says of the collection that it “shows the man to be both responsive and responsible, generous with praise for his fellow-writers, grateful for feedback from trusted readers, and open to the dissenting opinions of his colleagues and countrymen, even as he maintains his own beliefs.” Okay, all very interesting. But what of the writing purely as writing? Are there any flashes of the Heaney magic? Doherty doesn’t say. It’s a very disappointing review. 

November 22, 2021 Issue

“The best way to understand a writer is to interpret the work,” says Maggie Doherty, in her absorbing “Think Twice,” in this week’s issue. Really? Recall Susan Sontag’s famous dictum: “To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings’ ” (“Against Interpretation,” 1964). Sontag favoured experiencing the work – “experiencing the luminousness of the thing itself, of things being what they are.” Robert B. Pippin, in his recent Philosophy by Other Means, is pro-interpretation. He writes, “But the injunction that we should ‘stop interpreting’ a work and just ‘experience’ it is like demanding that we just look at the words on a page and not say what they mean.” He has a point. Nevertheless, I find myself drawn to Sontag’s approach – one that aims for “a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art.” It seems to me that if a work is closely described, its meaning will follow. Peter Schjeldahl, in the Introduction to his great Let’s See (2008), says, “As for writerly strategy, if you get the objective givens of a work right enough, its meaning (or failure or lack of meaning) falls in your lap.” Boom! As usual, Schjeldahl nails it. 

But on further reflection, I realize I've overreacted. Doherty isn't arguing for interpretation as the critical approach. She's saying if you want to understand the writer, look at his or her writing. With that, I agree.