Peter Matthiessen’s death this weekend coincided with a profile of his life and work in the New York Times Magazine section. Although I knew generally about Matthiessen, I had no idea about how varied his life was. The son of a privileged family, he attended Hotchkiss and Yale and married a Smith girl. He was recruited by the C.I.A, as many men of his class and generation were, and lived a double life in Paris. While in Paris, he and several other expatriate writers began to discuss the need for a new literary magazine. Out of those discussions, the “Paris Review” was born. He called upon his friend George Plimpton to become the first editor. A position he held for 50 years. Matthiessen plainly admits that the reason for starting the magazine was to provide more cover for “my nefarious activities, the worst of which was the unpleasant task of checking on certain Americans in Paris to see what they were up to.”
Becoming disillusioned with the C.I.A., he returned to the US and continued his writing. Over the next 15 years he wrote four novels and six books of nonfiction. His nonfiction work is based on his expeditions to remote areas of the world. On one expedition to New Guinea, one of his companions was Michael Rockefeller. Rockefeller would mysteriously die on a subsequent expedition. A new book by Carl Hoffman titled “Savage Harvest” deals with Rockefeller’s death, which Hoffman attributes to being captured by Asmat warriors, roasted and then eaten. Matthiessen agrees with this conclusion.
His second wife introduced him to spiritualism and eventually he became a Zen practitioner. This discipline greatly influenced his life and his work. “In Paradise” is Matthiessen’s last novel, which is on our order list.