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. Read More