‘A Fury of Dark Energies’

Peter Matthiessen thought The Snow Leopard was overrated, perhaps because he didn’t need to defend it. It won two National Book Awards (one in contemporary thought, a category that ominously no longer exists) and was a best seller. Perhaps he felt it needed to be demystified a bit. Plus, it was not a novel, and he considered himself a novelist, not a nonfiction writer. Facts were nonfiction’s “fatal constraint.” He preferred his novel Far Tortuga, about Caymanian turtlers, told in patois, white space, and jagged typography. When it was published in 1975, three years before The Snow Leopard, the magazine editor Terry McDonell “ran to my bookstore, and I bought Far Tortuga and I took it home, and I opened it up, and I began to read, and I said, ‘What the fuck?’”—which at the time was not an atypical response. It was in the rusty vein of The Old Man and the Sea—man against the elements, the unquenchability of the human spirit, the passing of the old ways, and so on. For an earlier New Yorker piece titled “To the Miskito Bank” Matthiessen had spent about two weeks on a dilapidated turtle boat out of the Cayman Islands bound for Nicaragua, more interested in an obsolete means of livelih...