TRUE NATURE: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen, by Lance Richardson
Peter Matthiessen, the only writer to win the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction, was born into an old WASP family. His father was a society architect in Manhattan and the family summered on Fishers Island. Peter went to the elite private schools St. Bernard’s and Hotchkiss, and then to Yale, where the men in his family had matriculated for generations. He tried to shuck off this freight of privilege.
Matthiessen (1927-2014) didn’t want to be “sucked into the system,” he wrote. He was almost pathologically restless. It’s unclear if he had a private income, but money rarely seemed a problem. His unruly life can remind you of something Clive James said about E.E. Cummings — that he “was as hot against materialist society as only a poet living on a trust fund can be.”
After Yale he served in the Navy, where because of poor eyesight he was mostly consigned to laundry duty. This stung. He was recruited into the C.I.A. and worked undercover in Paris while writing fiction. It seemed a patriotic thing to do.
This was around the same time, 1953, that Matthiessen founded The Paris Review with George Plimpton, Harold L. Humes and others. Was this “brand-new, utterly unknown and apolitical magazine of laughable potential circulation,” as Matthiessen put it, a front for U.S. intelligence in Europe? It’s a possibility that, like a moth occasionally sneaking out of the sweater drawer, has led to a good deal of paranoid rummaging through the archives of the now-venerable publication.
In his new biography, “True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen,” Lance Richardson turns this connection inside out and finds it unlikely that The Paris Review’s content was meddled with. It’s not even clear what Matthiessen did for the C.I.A. He mostly refused to talk about it. Though the magazine’s finances were always a mess, it didn’t need the agency’s money. Its early backers came out of the Social Register and the Christmas-card lists of the editors’ parents.
Matthiessen’s politics drifted left. He quit the C.I.A. It was clear that he could write. When just out of Yale he sold a short story to The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker came calling. He essentially abandoned The Paris Review as well — editing wasn’t his thing — though he remained on its board of directors for life.
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