Peter Matthiessen Travelled the World, Trying to Escape Himself

But it wasn’t until he arrived in Paris, during his junior year abroad, that he could truly nurture his bohemian streak. The city was still reeling from the Second World War. The power went out intermittently, and families scrimped to get enough food. But to Matthiessen, a wealthy American who benefitted from a favorable exchange rate, it was a place of increased freedom, far from the reach of his parents and governed by entirely different rules. He lingered in cafés, had love affairs, and read Baudelaire and Proust. “I can’t describe the feeling of relaxation and complete ease which is partly based on France itself and partly on escaping from those endless messes and complications at home,” he wrote to one of several women he was seeing at the time.

By this point, Matthiessen was already toying with the idea of becoming a writer. Back in New Haven, he took creative-writing classes and read Steinbeck and Faulkner. He published a short story in The Atlantic Monthly, secured a literary agent, and attracted the interest of a publishing executive, the stepfather of a close friend—all before turning twenty-five. It was a confidence boost for a young man who didn’t really need one. He was thus surprised to have other stories rejected by magazines, and further surprised when his agent wrote to say that his novel in progress had already been written by James Fenimore Cooper. Decades later, he described such rejection as “a salutary experience for a young writer,” although one imagines it didn’t quite feel that way at the time.

But Matthiessen didn’t stew over his failures. He was on the move once again, headed back to Paris with his wife, Patsy Southgate, a Smith graduate who would eventually become a key figure in the New York School of poetry. Like many of his contemporaries—James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Styron—Matthiessen was in Paris to channel the legacy of literary modernism and to write innovative fiction. But he was also there on a clandestine mission for the recently formed Central Intelligence Agency, which had recruited him out of Yale and charged him with surveilling Communists and fellow-travellers. (The experience would form the basis for his second novel, “Partisans,” published in 1955.) He founded The Paris Review, with Plimpton and the writer Harold L. (Doc) Humes, in part to give himself a more substantial cover story. As Richardson notes, it’s not clear how much, if any, C.I.A. money went to the magazine. What is clear is that Matthiessen’s socializing with left-leaning French and expatriate artists served the deep state’s agenda.

Matthiessen’s time with the C.I.A. sits uneasily within his biography. He rarely spoke of it, but at least once called it “the one adventure of my life that I regret.” In the years that followed, he tried to make up for his collaboration with the federal government by practicing “advocacy journalism,” much of it written for this magazine. He championed migrant farmworkers, defended traditional Inuit whaling practices, and, at a time when few white Americans took Indigenous rights seriously, supported the American Indian Movement (AIM), a loosely organized, occasionally militant grassroots group that promoted Native traditions and political interests.

This advocacy work culminated with “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse” (1983), a controversial account of the trial of the Native activist Leonard Peltier, who was convicted of murdering two F.B.I. agents, and the F.B.I.’s “war” against aim. Matthiessen, not without reason, portrays the Bureau as paranoid, dishonest, and in league with corporate interests. Soon after the book was published, two libel suits—one from an F.B.I. agent, the other from William Janklow, the South Dakota governor, who was once accused of raping a Lakota girl—took it off the shelves. The book would remain out of print for the duration of an eight-year legal battle that ultimately saw Matthiessen and his publisher, Viking, absolved.

In “Crazy Horse,” Matthiessen collates dozens of Native voices, who speak of a desire for liberation: from landlessness and poverty, from the indignities of reservation life. Matthiessen contextualizes their demands within the history of colonial violence, and persuasively argues for the release of Peltier, who spent nearly fifty years behind bars before his sentence was commuted to house arrest by President Joe Biden, this past January. The heft of the book—at more than six hundred pages, it is exhaustively researched and exhausting to read—reflects the writer’s convictions. Unlike many of his peers, Matthiessen was anti-consumerist, anti-imperialist, and antiwar. But the book might also reflect his strenuous effort to escape his past mistakes, to atone for the years he spent spying on his fellow-artists. If Matthiessen couldn’t turn back time, he could write his way toward repentance.

In 1953, Matthiessen quit the C.I.A. and, accompanied by Patsy and their newborn son, Lucas, returned to New York, where they rented a cottage on the East End of Long Island. (Seven years later, following his divorce from Patsy, Matthiessen would buy a house in Sagaponack, which would function as a home base until his death, in 2014.) The area was popular with summer tourists, but in the off-season it was inhabited by poor fisherman-farmers known as Bonackers. Matthiessen idolized his neighbors, particularly the men: tough, laconic types who prized independence and who weren’t afraid of hard work. Courting their approval, he fished on their boats from late spring through fall, then spent the cold months working on his fiction. In “Men’s Lives” (1986), his poignant study of the trials facing commercial fishermen on Long Island, he recalls these years spent partly on the water as “among the most rewarding of my life.”

Even as he tried to disavow his wealthy background, living hand to mouth and engaging in hard physical labor, Matthiessen knew that he would never truly belong among the sun-battered men he so admired. As Richardson notes, in “Race Rock” (1954), Matthiessen’s first novel, the protagonist and authorial alter ego, George McConville, compares himself unfavorably with the male laborers who live in his village: he is “a canary among crows,” a sensitive type with soft hands. He envies men from the working class and those with Native heritage; he believes they are “on closer terms with life than he had ever been.”