As Peter 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.