The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen (review)

62 Western American Literature re-draws many illustrations from other artists and photographers. If they are well known, like Russell or Remington, he credits them, but if lesser known he does not. To sum up: It seems that Mr. Mails has tried to accomplish too much too soon. At a casual glance, his book, The Mystic Warriors of the Plains, might be considered a veritable encyclopedia of the Plains Indians, and no doubt the uninformed consider it as such. But the many errors and dis­ crepancies must limit its value for the serious student. REGINALD LAUBIN, Moose, Wyoming The Snow Leopard. By Peter Matthiessen. (New York: Viking, 1978. 338 pages, $12.95.) In the autumn of 1973, Peter Matthiessen trekked into one of the remote mountain countries of the world, the Dolpo region of Nepal. He made the hike with George B. Schaller, the great field biologist, who was investigating Himalayan blue sheep and whose science-mindedness makes an interesting contrast to Matthiessen’s introspection. As the journal unfolds, it becomes apparent that Matthiessen, who made the trip not long after his wife’s death and who had for several years been a student of Buddhism, was making a serious pilgrimage. The goal is Shey Gompa, the Crystal Monastery, but Shey Gompa is of course only a correlative of self-knowledge, enlightenment. Each high pass may become a watershed in the author’s life, as more and more is left behind. For weeks, no motors are heard; the diet (in contrast to most expeditions) is simple; the world is weather, moun­ tain terrain, and the strengthening, adaptable body, within which context the mind grows ever lighter and freer. Finally, the hikers reach the monastery, and here Matthiessen’s account centers. Shey Gompa is closed, locked up for the winter. But at a cliffside retreat not far away Matthiessen meets a crippled monk, “curiously age­ less . . . a handsome cripple in strange rags of leather.” This man, silent at first meeting, only calmly smiling, turns out to be a practitioner of the peace Matthiessen is seeking. The days at Shey are deep and clarifying. “In another life — this isn’t what I know, but how I feel — these moun­ tains were my home; there is a rising of forgotten knowledge, like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth.” Naturally Matthiessen doesn’t want to leave — though of course he had planned to, all along. The ironies here have a Zen flavor: the lama of Shey cannot get out; Matthiessen cannot stay — perhaps, in some sense, he cannot even get in. The lama is happy and complete; Matthiessen is Reviews 63 incomplete, like the rest of us — but he has written this book. He comes back down, over the passes and down the dark canyons, grumbling, dis­ appointed with himself, into the hot and humid lowlands. Looking in a mir­ ror for the first time in two months, he says, “the blue eyes in a monkish skull seem eerily clear, but this is the face of a man I do not know.” Such a remark epitomizes the openness of The Snow Leopard, and the scene dramatizes its central concern. The book has the immediacy and unplanned-ness of great travel narrative — its journal form is just right — and Matthiessen’s descriptions of the soaring country and the mountain people seem utterly clear, utterly effortless. But behind it all is the author’s Buddhism, giving the book dimension and, more than observation, vision. THOMAS J. LYON, Utah State University California Heartland: Writing from the Great Central Valley. Edited by Gerald Haslam and James Houston. Illustrated by Clayton Turner. (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1978. 224 pages, $4.95 paper, $15 cloth.) Where has California gone? For some, its innocence went with Ishi, last of the native Yahi Californians. For others, its spirit has vanished under the blight of freeway culture, subdivision civilization, and pizza-to-go out­ posts of progress. But there is another California, a legendary country of Bret Harte’s Mother Lode and Muir’s Yosemite, Dashiell Hammett’s San Francisco, Jack London’s Sonoma, Leonard Gardner’s Stockton, Saroyan’s Fresno and Steinbeck’s Salinas, Jeffers’ Big Sur, and Raymond Chandler...