From The New York Times:
In the winter of 1953 the young writer Peter Matthiessen came to the edge of a crisis. He and his wife, Patsy, who was also an aspiring writer, were living in Paris. Patsy was eight months pregnant with their second child, the first, named Thomas, having died within hours of his premature birth the year before.
Peter never talked about my little cousin Thomas. Not that I ever would have asked him, yet I also know that my uncle would not stint on blaming himself. In memoir notes that Peter prepared before he died, in 2014, the loss of the child and the blame for it are handled tersely and honestly. He writes that the concierge where he and my aunt were living rapped his cheeks in the French manner — “smack, smack!” — and admonished him to try again: “But you’re young! Just make another one!”
To safeguard Patsy’s second pregnancy, the couple moved in late 1952 from their Left Bank apartment and its three tiring flights of stairs to a ground-floor apartment on the Right Bank. Their old flat, with its sunny terrace, was where an American coterie — which included Terry Southern, Bill Styron, James Baldwin, Harold Humes and George Plimpton — had concocted the fiction and poetry magazine called The Paris Review. The new apartment, Peter wrote, was “narrow” and “gloomy” and “far from all our cafe haunts and friends.” Patsy, as she neared term, was confined to bed. But what was most unsettling, Peter discovered that he was being followed. Left alone in their apartment, his wife was getting ominous phone calls, with just silence at the other end.
Postwar France was politically unstable; the city churned with Communists, fellow travelers, Gaullist plotters and foreign spies. In the late 1970s The New York Times revealed that Peter had worked for the C.I.A. during his two years in Paris. In fact, he sold the idea for The Paris Review to the other two co-founders, Humes and Plimpton, to firm up his cover for the agency. To be sure, my uncle had published award-winning short stories and had completed a first novel — that work was genuine and would continue — but the C.I.A. suggested that an additional activity, a real job, would deflect suspicion from the nosing around in left-wing circles that he was being paid to do. Nevertheless, in early 1953 the agency could not or would not tell Peter who was tailing his car in the streets.
. . . .
He began a second novel, called “Partisans.” The protagonist is a journalist working under cover in Paris on an investigative story about an elusive Communist. The journalist’s name is Barney Sand — initials B.S. Listening to the sound of his own voice, Sand broods that it “belonged to a man in mirrors whose face seemed more foolish every day.” Waiting to undertake the next move in his mission, Sand thinks: “To wait, to wait, as it now seemed to him he had waited all his life: for graduation from school, for enlistment in the Army, for combat that never came, for the war to end, for college to end, for promotion in two jobs he did not want, for a love that did not exist — waiting for a raison d’être which never arrived because he could not recognize it.”
. . . .
Before he married and went off to Paris, he was often in one sort of trouble or another without really knowing why. He dodged a court-martial while in the Navy. He blew up his own engagement party — insulting Patsy’s mother and making out with a bridesmaid. To paraphrase St. Augustine on his own bad-boy phase, Peter became to himself a place of unhappiness in which he could not bear to be, but he could not escape himself. Time and again he would bring himself to the lip of a crisis and, meaning to leap over, leap in.
. . . .
Quitting the C.I.A., Peter took his wife and newborn son, my cousin Lucas, back home. He settled in Sagaponack, on Long Island, still and always a footloose man but more focused. In midlife he produced two fine novels, “At Play in the Fields of the Lord” and “Far Tortuga,” and a glorious spate of nonfiction about the natural world.
. . . .
If he were alive, he might voice one regret about his sterling career. His time in Paris kept bobbing to the surface, both the good part about The Paris Review, as the magazine’s stature among intellectuals increased, and the negative part about his role in the C.I.A. Well before the C.I.A. story became public, Peter had acknowledged the connection to Plimpton and Humes, and after the revelation he tried to placate other friends for having been less than candid. He protested that he was young and had no politics to speak of, other than a vague, Ivy League sense of patriotism. “People tend to forget,” he wrote in his memoir notes, “that 60 years ago, at the start of the Cold War, the C.I.A. had not yet earned the evil repute it has today, and I look back on my own brief participation with more chagrin than shame.” He also wrote, “I was no good at this low work and hated the deception that went with it, which I found nerve-racking and disagreeable and made worse by the fact that it all seemed petty and pointless as well as an idiotic waste of public money.”
Putting on a pained smile, Peter would observe that by introducing him to socialists the C.I.A. had educated him in the wrong direction. My uncle, don’t forget, became a champion of left-wing causes.
Link to the rest at The New York Times