Yes, you know already: Peter Matthiessen has won the National Book Award in fiction for Shadow Country, a recasting of his earlier triology about the Watsons in Florida. Some ruffled at this book’s inclusion in the category and some sniffed for a controversy here, but the compelling story for me is not in its award contention, but in Matthiessen’s choosing to go back to the material at all. Published as three novels, he sidestepped the fact of their marketplace presence, finding fertile ground in writing already agonized over. Unraveling the work as a trilogy involved a renewed choice to make it his life’s work.
Or perhaps there was no choice? There is a myth I heard once about a poet: after his first book was published, he became unhappy with it, and drove around the country buying every copy. I love this story, the idea of a poet not letting go of his work–consumed by it in the extreme. The publishing engine supporting Matthiessen’s future work must have helped him along the opposite track: publication did not mean finality. It did not mean “finished” to him, despite the presence of many readers who felt (and feel) that it did. The work remained “elemental,” as he describes it in his note at the beginning of Shadow Country. Consummation could still occur for the writer in the revision of the thing.
At 46, Matthiessen wrote The Snow Leopard, a diary chronicling his travels through the Himalayas with the biologist George Schaller. In the jagged, risk-laden landscape, Matthiessen embeds his study of Zen Buddhism. Seeing the snow leopard is the lure in his journey; it props this plotless, beautiful prose up. There’s a peculiar section about meeting a Lama (an end-point, a person who ends up reflecting the snow leopard Matthiessen never sees) that sheds some understanding on Matthiessen as he places himself in his writing and outside, in relation to it:
“The Lama of the Crystal Monastery appears to be a very happy man, and yet I wonder how he feels about his isolation in the silences of Tsakang, which he has not left in eight years now and, because of his legs, may never leave again. Since Jang-bu seems uncomfortable with the Lama or with himself or perhaps with us, I tell him not to inquire on this point if it seems to him impertinent, but after a moment Jang-bu does so. And this holy man of great directness and simplicity, big white teeth shining, laughs out loud in an infectious way at Jang-bu’s question. Indicating his twisted legs without a trace of self-pity or bitterness, as if they belonged to all of us, he casts his arms wide to the sky and the snow mountains, the high sun and dancing sheep, and cries, ‘Of course I am happy here! It’s wonderful! Especially when I have no choice!'”