Peter Matthiessen in New York City, 1961. Photograph by Ben Martin/Getty Images.
When Peter Matthiessen’s name comes up in conjunction with The Paris Review, two facts are sure to emerge. The first is that Matthiessen was one of the magazine’s founders, and that his enchantingly shabby Paris apartment provided a bumptious gathering place in its earliest days. The second is that he was, at the time, an undercover CIA operative, and that the creation of the magazine was somehow wrapped up in his spycraft. The New York Times revealed Matthiessen’s CIA affiliation in a bombshell 1977 story with the headline “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A,” which examined dozens of publications and cultural organizations that had been secretly “owned, subsidized or influenced in some way by the C.I.A. over the past three decades.” Matthiessen’s connection rated only three brief sentences buried at the center of what he called a “long gray article”; the reporter, John Crewdson, noted that there was no evidence the CIA had used the writer “to influence the Paris Review.” Even so, Matthiessen spent the rest of his life facing questions about his role. He had left the agency in 1953, after about two years, but he never divulged the details of his work for the organization, which remain unclear even now, eleven years after his death.
Some have speculated that the Review itself received CIA support as part of the agency’s broader effort to prop up pro-Western art and literature. At the peak of its influence, in the fifties and sixties, the CIA fronted money to support a broad array of cultural production, from the seemingly innocuous to the expressly anti-communist. Among many other ventures, it had its hand in abstract-expressionist painting, jazz, Radio Free Asia, literary magazines, academic books on Finland and East Germany, a Roman newspaper, and an animated film adaptation of Animal Farm. While some artists were aware of the source of their funding, many were not. Given that The Paris Review portrayed itself as studiously apolitical—recall William Styron’s famous anti-manifesto in the first issue, fashioning it as a home for “the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders”—Matthiessen’s CIA involvement has raised questions and eyebrows since its revelation in the seventies.
Lance Richardson’s True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen is the first biography of the writer. Matthiessen, born in New York in 1927, was the author of ten novels, two collections of stories, and nearly two dozen works of nonfiction; he is the only writer to have won the National Book Award for both fiction (for Shadow Country, in 2008) and nonfiction (for The Snow Leopard, in 1980). A keen observer of the natural world, he traveled widely in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean in search of remote places where one could find a “glimpse of the earth’s morning,” as he described it. True Nature offers a deft assessment of his work and a capacious telling of the forces that shaped his interest in everything from Zen Buddhism to environmentalism to cryptozoology to labor rights. Richardson conducted hundreds of interviews over seven and a half years, and his archival research yielded, among many other insights, a clearer picture of The Paris Review’s first years, when Matthiessen was doing double duty as a fiction editor and a secret agent. I spoke to Richardson by phone to ask what he’d discovered about Matthiessen’s years in Paris.
INTERVIEWER
What do we know about why Peter Matthiessen decided to join the CIA—the decision that led, eventually, to the founding of The Paris Review?
LANCE RICHARDSON
Before he died, in anticipation of a possible memoir, Matthiessen wrote out a series of narratives about what he’d been doing in Paris. The title of one of them is “THE PARIS REVIEW V. THE CIA: My Half-life as a Capitalist Running Dog.” They were incomplete, and I had to be careful about assuming everything was one hundred percent accurate—not because Peter was necessarily trying to leave a trail of lies or anything, but because he was writing this decades after it happened, and he had his own agenda. In terms of other materials, the CIA wouldn’t give me anything. I filed FOIA requests. I talked to their entertainment liaison, who works with Hollywood. But they don’t declassify personnel records.
As Matthiessen tells it, he had finished Yale in 1950 and wanted to be a writer, but how do you just become a writer? His English professor Norman Holmes Pearson tapped him on the shoulder and asked if he wanted to do something for his country. This was happening quite a lot at Yale at the time. One of Matthiessen’s contemporaries estimated that two dozen of their classmates were recruited for the CIA through various professors. The agency called them the “P source,” for “professor.” Matthiessen wrote that Pearson opened him “like an oyster.” Not because he was ideologically driven—his politics at that point were unformed and chaotic—but because he wanted a stipend and an excuse to go to Paris, which was a city that he and his first wife, Patsy Southgate, really loved. The CIA then was reputationally much more benign, at least domestically. It hadn’t yet become known by most Americans for its involvement in coups and things like that.
INTERVIEWER
They were active in Korea, Guatemala, and Iran in those years, arranging paramilitary operations and working, in the last case, to bring the shah back to power, though as you say none of that had come to light. At this point, then, they were into election interference and some psyops, but no exploding cigars and mind-control experiments yet?
RICHARDSON
Right. They sent Matthiessen first to D.C. to meet with James Angleton, a now-famous spymaster who at that time headed up the agency’s Office of Special Operations, which handled foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, and espionage. Then Matthiessen went to spycraft training in New York, which he called “great fun,” and he got on a boat to Paris in 1951. He stumbled into this world of espionage as an excuse to write a novel and be in a city that he associated with freedom.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think Matthiessen’s time in the navy, during the final stages of World War II, may have motivated him to join the CIA?
RICHARDSON
Absolutely. He was at the Hotchkiss School during the war, in high school, and he would watch a lot of the young men slightly older than him go off to fight. He saw it as a rite of passage, a badge of honor. By the time it was his turn, when he was doing basic training in Sampson, New York, V-J Day happened. So he missed out. His letters to his girlfriends at the time are really conflicted. He was happy the war was over, but he also felt that he’d been denied something. Eventually, toward the end of 1945, he got sent off anyway, to Hawaii. His job was to do the laundry of the real soldiers who were being demobilized and sent home. He felt incredibly emasculated by this. There’s one point in his notes for his memoir when he says, and I’m paraphrasing here, that he saw joining the CIA as another opportunity to make up for something he had been denied during the war.
INTERVIEWER
His apartment in Paris, at 14, rue Perceval, was integral to the romance of the early days of The Paris Review—a kind of midcentury bohemian, glass-walled paradise where they threw all these parties. It was heated with lumps of coal dust, and there was a huge painting of a cat’s head on the wall. What was his life like in Paris?
RICHARDSON
In an article Gay Talese wrote for Esquire in 1963 about those early days of the magazine, he called the apartment “a monstrous fishbowl.” But those parties, and that bohemian lifestyle, were just one aspect of Matthiessen’s life. He would take the metro to meet his CIA handler in the Jeu de Paume, and they would stroll from the museum to the gardens near the Louvre and discuss his assignments. What he was actually working on for the CIA is still opaque. Matthiessen described it later as “deceiving people” and “serial lying.” Until the CIA releases its files, it’s always going to be a bit shadowy. I assume he was spying on other expat Americans, his friends. That’s probably why he was always cagey about it—the shame he felt about doing that.
INTERVIEWER
Matthiessen wrote about cultivating a source he dubbed “Monsieur X,” whom he called “a near fanatic” and “a veteran Communist agitator.” But there was speculation that he could’ve been spying on the novelist Richard Wright as well, right?
RICHARDSON
I would not have been surprised if he was reporting on Wright. Wright was being watched at the time by the CIA. And then Matthiessen turns up in Paris around the same time, and they have an overlapping social circle. It seems unlikely to me that he wouldn’t have reported back about Wright.
INTERVIEWER
What led him from spying to starting a magazine?
RICHARDSON
The problem with Matthiessen’s cover soon became clear—the labor of a writer is pretty invisible to the outside world. It looks like we’re just sitting inside and not doing anything at all. Matthiessen’s handler told him he needed a visible profession. And one day in one of the cafés he runs into Harold “Doc” Humes, another American who was running a magazine called the Paris News Post, which he had acquired for six hundred bucks, because that was the trend among expats in postwar Paris. Everyone had a little magazine going in that time—there was Merlin, Points, Zero.
Humes was a real character, a bit of a loose cannon. He was wearing a cape when Matthiessen saw him at the café that day. He brought on Matthiessen as his fiction editor. But Matthiessen saw the Paris News Post as a lightweight endeavor. He suggested one day to Doc that they flick it off and make something better. Doc jumped at the idea—or, if you take his word for it, it was really his idea, and he planted it in Matthiessen’s head. Peter didn’t want to be the top editor, so he phoned up his friend George Plimpton, whom he’d known since they were children on the Upper East Side. Plimpton was in Cambridge, England, at the time, about to graduate, not sure what he was going to do with his life. And he seized the opportunity to come over to Paris and start editing this new magazine, with Matthiessen still on as the fiction editor.
INTERVIEWER
So, in a funny way, it was really the fact that writing is far too solitudinous an activity that gave us The Paris Review. Along with the CIA, of course. Matthiessen was intimately involved with choosing work for the first issues—he really did two jobs at once. I mean, it wasn’t like he was phoning it in at the magazine. But did the CIA ever give The Paris Review money?
RICHARDSON
The question of whether the CIA ever directly funded The Paris Review is an incredibly complicated one. The editors were all raising money to run the magazine, canvassing all their parents’ friends. Julius Fleischmann, of the instant-yeast family, was one of Matthiessen’s father’s friends. He and Matty Matthiessen would drink highballs on boats down in the Caribbean together. Fleischmann was a well-known philanthropist and arts patron, but it came out later that he was also a frontman for the CIA. So it’s hard to say, when he gave money to the Review, if it was his own money or if he was funneling it to the magazine through the Farfield Foundation, which the agency used to fund pro-Western propaganda.
INTERVIEWER
You write about “arguably the most contentious document in the Paris Review archive,” a letter from Matthiessen soliciting funding from Fleischmann. His donation was comparatively small—a thousand dollars.
RICHARDSON
That was still quite a lot of money, but not compared to the check that the Farfield Foundation sent to a more political London literary magazine called Encounter in the same year, 1953, for forty thousand dollars. A few years later, there’s a letter in the archive in which Plimpton gets his secretary to go back to Fleischmann for more money, and Fleischmann’s secretary says, Sorry, we can’t help you. So if the magazine really was of interest to the CIA as an ideological tool, why would they give a small donation and then decline any further donations later? I think they were interested in the magazine purely as a cover for Matthiessen, and once Matthiessen quit his spying job, in 1953, they no longer needed it. He was working as the fiction editor by then, and brought in stories like Sue Kaufman’s “Tea at Le Gord,” which Plimpton especially liked, and which appeared in the third issue. It’s about an American student negotiating the price of a homestay with a French woman.
INTERVIEWER
You could argue that, ideologically, the magazine’s founders toed the CIA line unintentionally. In the biography, you have this amazing quote from an interview Patsy Southgate gave to Talese in 1963—“They’re a bunch of reactionaries; their idea of a radical step is to eliminate the comma.” Did your research change your thinking about the politics of the magazine in those early days?
RICHARDSON
Talese is meticulous with his archives. In his basement on the Upper East Side there’s a box of files of interviews with all the original Review people, and he very graciously allowed me to see them. Southgate, by the time he spoke with her, was Matthiessen’s ex-wife, and she was quite bitter about their relationship and her time in Paris. She gave an interview where she’s strafing all the founders of the magazine, saying that they were trying on these bohemian masks because they were “very insecure about their maleness,” as a way of making up for not doing anything in the war—that it was very macho, and she was relegated to the kitchen. Her version of the story hadn’t really been told—and provides more of a feminist take on the early years of The Paris Review. A lot of the existing accounts of The Paris Review’s founding had involved a lot of mythmaking. They were more like Plimpton burnishing the legend of the magazine, the expat community, the parties, and the scrappiness of the staff—a legend that started somewhat unintentionally with Talese’s article in Esquire,which is actually fairly caustic about the privilege and entitlement of these young men. Talese did not come from that world. His father was a tailor—he always likes to tell that story—so he was skeptical of the whole thing. But because that article is so evocative of an era, he helped create the legend of The Paris Review, and then Plimpton ran with it, because that’s who he was.
INTERVIEWER
How do you think the revelations about Matthiessen’s intelligence work affected his relationship with Plimpton and the magazine? You note that his editorial correspondence with the Review mostly stopped sometime around the summer of 1955, and that once he moved back to New York he felt increasingly detached from the day-to-day operations. He would mail his story selections to Plimpton in Paris, whom he felt was “needlessly abrasive” in his responses to writers. They had a fight about this sometime in the late fifties or in 1960, at the latest, and Matthiessen resigned as fiction editor, though he remained on the magazine’s board as a founder. But it’s not until later that he decides to come clean about his CIA involvement. He told Plimpton in 1964 or ’65, and I don’t think there’s a record of how that went. But Humes, whom he told in ’66, had recently taken a heroic dose of LSD and had a breakdown—
RICHARDSON
Doc was in London having a mental health crisis, and Peter was like, Now is the right time to tell you that all of your paranoid fantasies are actually based in reality. His timing was a little questionable. Humes threatened to resign from the magazine afterward, and Plimpton had to talk him down—which meant Plimpton was now upset at Peter, too, for rocking the boat. Plimpton was shocked and outraged, too. Their friendship was already tinged with ambivalence. Plimpton looked at what Matthiessen was doing, and wanted to be a writer himself, but became better known as an editor. Matthiessen looked at Plimpton and, I think, saw him as a bit of dilettante. There was some animosity. I’m speculating here, but I imagine Plimpton resented that Matthiessen’s CIA affiliation gave a taint to his life’s project. There was a bit of grit in the shell even decades later. In 1988, Matthiessen submitted a short story to the magazine about a CIA agent, and Plimpton supposedly threw it across the room because he thought it was rubbish. Matthiessen got very mad about that. The story, “Lumumba Lives,” which was published in Wigwag, went on to become a runner-up for the O. Henry Award. But that reaction is telling—these were grown men throwing each other’s papers across the room.
INTERVIEWER
Maybe there’s also a difference in the ways they wore their WASP backgrounds. Both men came from rich, patrician families, eager to keep up appearances, worried about how things looked on the outside. I think of Plimpton with his table at Elaine’s, ever the bon vivant. Meanwhile, Matthiessen wrote of his urge to “simplify” himself. He craved acceptance from men with blue-collar backgrounds, and he took pains to expunge himself from the Social Register, literally. His interests in Zen and LSD, his ceaseless wandering—was he always, in a sense, running away from his past?
RICHARDSON
Matthiessen felt he had to atone for all the advantages he’d enjoyed coming from this powerful family. Around 1968, he got involved with social justice movements, with Cesar Chavez and then later with the American Indian Movement. He wrote a two-part New Yorker profile of Chavez, which he then expanded into a book. And then In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, his chronicle of the shoot-out at Pine Ridge in 1975, where two FBI agents and a Native man died, was the most controversial thing he ever wrote. He was subjected to a lawsuit from the governor of South Dakota and another from an active FBI agent. His third wife, Maria, said to me at one point that he felt like he had to make up for not only his own privilege, but to atone for all the dreadful things America had done. He took this enormous burden on his shoulders, and he put it on the shoulders of his children as well. It was part of the problem of his home life—his own neurosis about where he’d come from, which he then foisted onto his children.
INTERVIEWER
You write that his family “were often made to feel like rocks in his rucksack that he was desperate to offload.” Given that sense of conflict, and his later political leanings more generally, why do you think he could never fully admit what he’d done for the CIA?
RICHARDSON
He never legally had clearance to talk about it publicly. It wasn’t declassified. So on one level, he would say he wasn’t allowed to. On another level—and probably a more significant one—I think part of his evasiveness was just because there was shame involved for him. When he did get involved with Chavez’s United Farm Workers, and also the American Indian Movement, these were groups that had already been infiltrated by government agents. If Matthiessen were exposed as actually having been one of those government agents, he would lose all credibility with these people, and everything he’d done to further their cause would be thrown out the window. There’s an amazing letter that he wrote to Leonard Peltier in 2008, after the Times had run a piece about Doc Humes that mentioned the CIA link. And Matthiessen says that he’s ashamed of his former association, but that it had been over for more than half a century, and it never had anything to do with his commitment to Peltier’s cause. Leonard writes back and says, I’ve known about this for decades—it doesn’t matter at all.
INTERVIEWER
I notice that Matthiessen had a fondness for the word primordial—that he was attracted to an idea of prehistory, and that he sought out landscapes that still evoked the world as it was before humankind put it under the plow. What do you think was driving his wandering from place to place, and his interest in remoteness especially?
RICHARDSON
Matthiessen had this idea of what he called “the island.” He was always looking for a lost paradise, and in the late sixties he considered writing a book called “The Search for an Island.” His editor wrote in a memo that Matthiessen’s “most deep-felt interest is in finding a place isolated from the world.” Sometimes it was a physical place—he typed up a note once about having a “bay for crabs and oysters” and a house “close-chinked against the wind, with its pine fire and fat pile of drying wood”—but sometimes it was more of an abstraction. In either case it was a place where you could exist without all the encrustations of ego and the expectations that inevitably emerge as you become older. You’re in a childlike state. You can think of it as an Eden before the fall, a prelapsarian place where you can be your pure self without having to worry about, I don’t know, paying taxes and all the responsibilities we have as members of society.
He yearned for the island, and he found it in his life, in fleeting glimpses. The most important one he found was Shey Gompa, the “Crystal Monastery,” in Nepal. The weeks that he spent there were some of the happiest in his life, following the wolves or the blue sheep, meditating, just existing. I wanted to go there and physically be in that space. Even though I was only there briefly because I was ill, I got it. It’s an extraordinary place, so high that you feel like you’re at the edge of the atmosphere. I felt for a moment what it was he’d been searching for.
INTERVIEWER
What drew you to Matthiessen as a subject?
RICHARDSON
I read his book The Snow Leopard about fifteen years ago. It came out in 1978, and covers the two months he spent in the Himalayas, when he was mourning the death of his second wife and hoping to glimpse this legendarily elusive animal of the mountains. I couldn’t initially explain why this book struck me so forcefully. It was something about his sensibility. Matthiessen took science and spirituality—these two modes of thinking that we often treat as incompatible—and wrote in both registers simultaneously. I was really interested in how this allowed him to see the world. He had this unique capacity to glimpse these two separate traditions at once.
INTERVIEWER
And that led you to a kind of method biography in which you followed in his footsteps, taking a trip to the Himalayas like the one in The Snow Leopard. How did that trip—which you describe as somewhat disastrous—inform your biography?
RICHARDSON
Initially the idea of the trip to the Himalayas was just what I put in the book proposal, because I wanted to have an adventure. I wasn’t even planning on doing a biography. I was going to write a book about the landscape and animals Peter had written about. I was going to revisit them and see how they had changed. In the process of doing the research, it became clear that his life was so far-flung, that he had never settled, and that he had seen so much of the twentieth century from these unexpected angles. It was impossible to categorize his work, which was much more idiosyncratic than was sometimes believed—he wrote one novel, Far Tortuga, entirely in Caribbean dialect—and he never succeeded in figuring himself out. So I backed into the biography. But I had been like, Yeah, sure, I’ll go walk across the Himalayas. How hard can it be? I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I got very ill at that altitude. A doctor, when I got back, told me I had the symptoms of pulmonary edema. But it was worth it. I’d do it all again.
INTERVIEWER
Matthiessen wrote so well about the natural world and the environment, and yet he resented being pigeonholed as a nature writer. Why do you think he didn’t like that term?
RICHARDSON
He thought it was passive and soft. He was more interested in something aggressive or active that was connected to his desire to create change. He preferred the term “environmental writer”—he didn’t see a difference between being an environmental writer and being an environmental activist. But he resisted that, too, because in his mind, he was a novelist. He had a hierarchy of forms of writing, and at the very top was the novelist. When it came to nonfiction, he saw that as a lower tier, as a type of cabinetmaking, whereas fiction was art. He really bristled at having become more famous for his nonfiction than his fiction. And ultimately, in 2008, when he won the National Book Award for his novel Shadow Country, he saw that as a vindication. That meant more to him than all the success of The Snow Leopard, a book that he always felt very conflicted about—which I find extraordinary. If I wrote something on the level of The Snow Leopard, I would hang up my hat. I’d be done.
Dan Piepenbring writes the New Books column for Harper’s Magazine. He is working on a book about ketamine.