The Paris Review was partly a CIA front, and one of its founders led a double life to match. In the London Review of Books, Christian Lorentzen reviews a new biography of Peter Matthiessen, the novelist, nature writer, and CIA operative who helped start the magazine as cover.
Lance Richardson's "True Nature" lays out the contradictions: a privileged rebel who quit the Agency on ethical grounds, a serial adulterer playing family man, a writer split between fiction and the wild. Matthiessen waved off his spy years — "I'm always in the club drinking martinis. What did I know from politics?" — and once punched Jackson Pollock at a party; the painter's response: "Nobody ever stopped me before."
Previously:
