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current Monday
Report below!
This week's report by Richard Cummings
The Fiction of the State: The Paris Review
and the Invisible World of American Letters [Part 2]
The ULA presents this special two-part Monday Report, which is Exclusive
in this form. For an introduction & brief background, please click here.
Click here to read Part One of this report.
At a reception at a famous bookstore in Oxford, Plimpton recited the usual history of
The Paris Review, including the part about how, running with the bulls in Pamplona,
with Sadruddin Aga Khan, he made the prince an offer he could not refuse to be the
publisher. On the last night, we all gathered at a restaurant in Paris for catfish and
fireworks. Plimpton avoided me, but I put that down to the fact that he was absorbed
in hosting the event. I filed away in the recesses of my mind what Linville had said
with the Patsy Southgate revelations and thought no more about it. I did wonder why
they had told me these things. After my experience with the Lowenstein book, I had
no intention of digging into people’s CIA affiliations any longer. I remembered how
the writer Robert Sam Anson, who had worked for Newsweek, had come up to me at
the John Steinbeck Book Fair at the Benson Gallery one summer after the publication
of The Pied Piper and excoriated me. “I knew Allard Lowenstein,” he shouted as I sat
at a table with copies of the book in front of me, a rather boisterous Blanche Weisen
Cook directly to my left. “I was in the CIA. He would have told me if he had been in the
CIA.” Blanche recounted to me how she had been vilified for her “Declassified
Eisenhower” in which she disclosed Eisenhower’s role in the CIA’s overthrow of
Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala, and the part played by former Luce
publication executive, C.D. Jackson. as Eisenhower’s director of psychological
warfare Sometime later, I was having lunch with Shana Alexander at Bobby Van’s
when Anson came over to say hello to her, avoiding eye contact with me. After he left,
I asked Shana if she knew that Robert Sam Anson was in the CIA. Between
swallows, she casually said, “Robert Sam Anson was in the CIA. Lots of people at
Newsweek were.”
But I did see George socially, on and off. A particularly glittering New York event at
which I encountered him, was the lavish reception at the Morgan for Stephen
Spender, sponsored by the American Academy of Poets. In his eighties, Spender was
still leonine and handsome. After he concluded his reading, we all adjourned to a
champagne reception in a spacious, candle lit hall, where Spender held court.
Plimpton, the de facto host, was effusive. He managed to be both gregarious and
distant to me. It was a perfect venue for Plimpton. Spender had been the editor of
Encounter, which like The Paris Review, had been a beneficiary of CIA largesse. It
was a sort of old home week.
A few years after the Linville incident, I was at an authors’ party at the home of Martin
and Judy Shepard, publishers of the Permanent Press, which had published my
secessionist book, “Proposition 14.” The novelist and playwright John Sherry, who
was probably Peter Matthiessen’s closest friend and who had published “Maggie’s
Farm” with Permanent Press, came over to me. I knew Sherry well. He was a
gregarious and exuberant man, but now he was deadly serious. He told me he
needed to speak with me out of earshot of the other guests, and led me to a corner of
another room, which was empty and gestured for me to sit down next to him. He
informed me in hushed tones that Peter Matthiessen had confessed to him that
Sadruddin Aga Khan and his foundation had never put up a penny for The Paris
Review and that all the money had come from the CIA. Sherry went on to say that, in
his mind, Matthiessen, who wanted to be remembered as a novelist, was not a good
one and never would be. Sherry lambasted “At Play In The Fields Of The Lord,”
insisting that Matthiessen had no talent for writing novels, and that his good work was
his nature writing. I took all of this in, knowing as I did about how the Congress for
Cultural Freedom had funded publications such as The Partisan Review and
Encounter, all of which Frances Stone Saunders would recount in her
groundbreaking work, “Who Paid The Piper.” But, while she stated that Matthiessen
had been in the CIA, she had not gotten the goods on The Paris Review. I learned
later that she had gotten a letter from Matthiessen about the CIA and The Paris
Review, in which he said that the “CIA dumped the job on me.” I also learned later
from a British scholar that the CIA had originally intended to set up art critic Clement
Greenberg in Paris as the editor of a Paris edition of The Partisan Review, but
dropped this option to go with Matthiessen and The Paris Review.
Shepherd Stone, who headed the Congress for Cultural Freedom, was a snob and
insisted that those who worked for him be graduates of elite American colleges and
universities. Stone might well have disdained Greenberg, who was a graduate of
Syracuse University and who had been an itinerant necktie salesman before
becoming the leading booster of abstract expressionism and Jackson Pollock. Along
with Barnet Newman, Greenberg had become the CIA’s favorite huckster of the avant
guard, which he did as well for the benefit of the value of his own art collection. Quel
fumiste, the Parisians might have said. No, Matthiessen, with his WASPy good looks
and his literary pedigree (his uncle was F.O. Matthiessen, the brilliant, socially
prominent leftwing literary critic at Harvard, who committed suicide before being
outed as gay) was the better choice. Besides, Greenberg was Jewish (Stone, a
Dartmouth graduate, was also, but he had changed his name and assimilated) and the
CIA was imbued in the Fifties with the kind of anti-Semitism that was rampant at Yale,
where much of the CIA recruiting had gone on.
Was this the end of it? What more was there to know about The Paris Review? I
wondered why Sherry had chosen to tell this to me with such a sense of urgency.
Our conversation ended, we got up and joined the other guests. But it didn’t add up.
If all this were true, and I had no doubt that it was, surely George Plimpton wasn’t in
the dark. He must have been “witting” all along, as they say in Agency parlance. As I
would find out, it was more than that.
In the fall of 2003 I received some e-mails from Daniel Gallagher, an America graduate
student in Paris researching American writers who wrote novels in Paris. He had read
some articles by me on the Internet (I am a columnist for Lewrockwell.com,) at least
one of which made reference to Peter Matthiessen and The Paris Review. Becoming
intrigued with my thesis that the magazine was a CIA front, he read the New York
Times article from December 26, 1977 that outed Matthiessen as CIA, using his career
as an author only as cover for his intelligence activities, by John M. Crewsden and
Joseph B, Treaster, “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by C.I.A.: A Worldwide
Network for Dissemination of Propaganda was Built by CIA.” Gallagher commented:
“It is true. The Paris Review was a hoax, part of the CIA world-wide propaganda effort.”
Through a friend, Gallagher located James Rentchler, who at first was identified only
as a retired Foreign Service Officer. Gallagher agreed to approach him on my behalf
with questions I had suggested. Rentchler, it turned out was extremely rich, living in
Paris and writing his memoirs. The Rentchler family is from Cincinnati, heirs to a giant
railroad fortune. They all went to Princeton. George Rentchler was in my class there
and was a friend. James Rentchler worked in the White House for both Presidents
Carter and Reagan in the National Security Council on European affairs and served as
Ambassador to both Guinea and Malta. His flat, as Gallagher described it was filled
with photos of American presidents and government officials. There were “hundreds”
of them, according to Gallagher, who noted the presence of an official looking
American flag.
Rentchler told him that he worked in the “cultural section organizing cultural events
all over the world.” Rentchler himself brought up George Plimpton and the CIA, so
Gallagher’s question about Plimpton and the CIA “dove-tailed so beautifully that his
response just flowed out” Gallagher wrote: “When asked if George Plimpton's father
was CIA, he said ‘absolutely,’ he was very well connected.’ I then asked him about
George, saying that I had not found any trace whatsoever linking him to the Agency
and he smiled and said that George was ‘an agent of influence,’ and that he traveled
here, there, did this, did that, etc. ‘Those guys at the Congress for Cultural Freedom,
George was in with all of them, he knew all those guys.’ That’s what he said.” When
Gallagher asked him who else he should speak to, he referred him to Frances Stoner
Saunders. Gallagher was bemused. He wrote, “The Review was a total CIA
propaganda machine, from 1953 right up to the last issue.”
Agents of influence for the CIA, as Tom Braden pointed out in a number of articles,
were writers, editors and publishers who penetrated the culture on behalf of the CIA.
They were invariably paid. That George Plimpton never took a salary from The Paris
Review was undoubtedly true. He didn’t have to.
The Paris Review was soon to have a change in publishers. Following the death of
Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, Plimpton persuaded Drue Heinz to become The Paris
Review publisher. She also funds a major literary prize through the Drue Heinz Trust.
At the same time, it reopened its Paris office, staffing it with novelist Harry Matthews,
naming two editors for a new London office, this all at a time when anti-American
sentiment was escalating in Europe because of the invasion of Iraq. Leading vocal
critics of America policy were John LeCarre and Harold Pinter. Coincidentally, James
Linvlle took up residence in London, subletting Perry Anderson’s flat. Soon after, the
influential, virulently anti-war London Review of Books published Anderson’s pro-war
article, “The Casuistries of Peace and War.” Linville vehemently denies that this
coincidence had anything to do with a change of policy at the LRB, but he
acknowledges that “at dinner parties, and such,” he did argue against the anti-
American position of British writers and intellectuals, in what he described as
“informal debates.” While acknowledging that the CIA sought to recruit him, he
insists that he rebuffed their efforts. In addition to this, an “anonymous donor”
purchased The Paris Review archives for $500,000 and donated all it to the Morgan
Library in New York, while Charles Ryskamp was still the director.
With all of this information at hand, I sent several e-mails to The New York Times to
suggest corrections in articles it had published on The Paris Review. After George
Plimpton died, Bill Borders sent me an e-mailed me with Plimpton’s obituary, asking
me what, if anything was wrong with it. I told him that Peter Matthiessen was not a
founder of The Paris Review and that Harold Humes had founded it and that
Matthiessen had taken it over it at the behest of the CIA, getting rid of Humes. “To
write about Matthiessen and The Paris Review without mentioning that it was his CIA
cover is bad journalism,” I argued. “It omits this important aspect of The Paris Review-
that it was part of the propaganda effort against the Communist and Soviet influence
in Europe during the Cold War.” I went on to explain what I had learned about
Plimpton. There was no response. In a recent article in the Times that the The Paris
Review had not renewed Brigid Hughes contract, the reporter described Plimpton as
“the founding editor” of The Paris Review. I e-mailed Dan Okrent, the ombudsmen, to
correct this error and to, once again, set out the facts of The Paris Review. A brief
correction appeared, saying only that Plimpton was not the “founding editor” but
rather “one of the founding editors.”
In late fall of 2003, I went into New York to have a dinner meeting with Taki and Scott
McConnell of The American Conservative to discuss my proposed article on Plimpton
and The Paris Review, to be titled, “An American In Paris.” The article, a lean and to
the point (two pages) piece that stated all the facts, appeared in February of 2004 and
produced a deafening silence. I did send it to my former agent, Tim Seldes, who had
been Plimpton’s agent, and he said he found it “fascinating” and that he would show
it to Sarah. She never responded, at least not directly to me. But on the way back on
the Hampton Jitney to Bridgehampton from the dinner with Taki and Scott McConnell,
I happened to pick up a copy of The New York Post and came across a very small
article, just a couple of paragraphs, that said the Nixon administration, during the
1970s, had notified publishers that it didn’t want any books to be published on
Ethiopia. It was for national security reasons. Did America have the D notice system
that prevailed in Britain, so the government could effectively censor by “request” in
the interests of national security? Some time later, I phoned Ned Chase, one of the
editors who had asked me to do an Ethiopian book and then reneged. His wife told
me he had Alzheimer’s. She was horrified by what I told her. I then wrote a letter to
George Braziller telling him that I knew what had happened to the Ethiopian proposal,
but that I forgave him because I didn’t know what I would have done under similar
circumstances. He rang me up, suggesting that we get together for lunch.
We had lunch at Le Café Crème on Madison Avenue, a small French brasserie that
was completely authentic. It was so Parisian, I thought Braziller and I should have
been speaking French, as though we were in a Chabrol film. He asked after Barney
Rosset. I brought up the article and George laughed. But a bit later, he said he could
not recall the circumstances surrounding his return of the “Eagles Among The Lions”
proposal to John Schaffner. He did relate that his book club, The Book Find Club,
had been the victim of McCarthyism and that he “got wise and went into literature
instead.” It was all very congenial. Afterwards, George gave me copy of a new book
of his, a handsome edition of Langston Hughes’ great poem “Let America Be America
Again,” with woodcuts by Antonio Frasconi. The poem ends:
“O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath-
America will be!
An ever-living seed,
Its dream.
Lies deep in the heart of me.
We the people must redeem
Our land, the mines, the plants,
the rivers,
The mountains and the endless
plain-
All, all the strength of these
Great green states
And make America again!
It was Braziller’s way of telling me that he had made compromises he didn’t want to,
so he could survive, but that somehow, a better country was still possible. But did he
know about the spying by the CIA on Grove Press, Evergreen Review and Barney
Rosset and the effort it made to close down Grove? After the issue of Evergreen
appeared with Paul Davis’ legendary depiction of Che Guevara on the cover, Cuban
exiles firebombed the offices of Grove. Rosset insists it was done at the behest of the
CIA. His CIA file would appear to bear him out. I saw Rosset’s CIA file and it gave me
a chill. The boxes lined the walls of his loft. They knew all about his finances, what he
was publishing, and they knew what they hated. When the strike broke out that
crippled Grove Press in the early Seventies, it was organized by small unions
unrelated to the publishing industry, the Furriers, Meatpackers, organizations like
that. Why did they pick Grove, when it was a small, independent house with few
employees? If they were starting to organize the publishing industry, it would have
made more sense to do it at Random House or some other large organization with
many editors. But if you thought about it, it made sense.
The unions involved in trying to break Grove were part of the AFL-CIO, and Jay
Lovestone, who founded the American Communist Party but was expelled personally
by Joseph Stalin, headed its international division. Barely escaping from Moscow
with his life, Lovestone became a bitter enemy of the Soviet Union. Recruited to the
CIA, as Ted Morgan has documented in “A Covert Life”, his biography of Lovestone,
he took over the unions’ international office dispensing funds all over the world for
anti-Soviet activities. Grove Press and Evergreen Review were under suspicion.
Grove published radical books and Evergreen Review was a leading anti-Vietnam war
publication. It was a natural target for Lovestone, whose case officer was James
Jesus Angleton. Grove survived the strike, but in a truncated version. By the time it
published “The Pied Piper”, it needed an influx of cash, which is why Barney Rosset
was finally forced to sell it to Lord Weidenfeld and Ann Getty. Evergreen Review
folded entirely, so the CIA got its wish.
But I wondered how the CIA had managed to get to the publishers to tell them not to
do books on Ethiopia. And then, I remembered Robie Macauley. Macauley, who had
once worked for the Congress of Cultural Freedom, and allegedly was let go, became,
after doing a column for Playboy, Senior Literary Editor at Houghton Mifflin. He was
known for developing new fiction writers and for having a passion for fine literature. A
modest, soft-spoken man, he could have passed for a vacuum cleaner salesmen, the
way many CIA intelligence officers could. Because that was, in fact, what he was. At
lunch with me sometime before he died, Robie quietly volunteered that all the time he
had been Senior Literary Editor at Houghton Mifflin, he had run the entire CIA program
in Sub Sahara Africa. That, of course, included Ethiopia. So, it was Robie who had
stuck it to me. After his obituary appeared in The New York Times, listing all his
literary honors, I phoned up the reporter who had written it to tell him he had left out
Robie’s CIA career. There was a brief silence, after which he said, “We can’t put
everything into an obituary.” They had known. They were just keeping it out. In the
case of Roger Strauss, the New Yorker and Salon.com didn’t keep it out. Strauss, the
founder of Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, worked for the CIA, with a secret phone in a
special desk drawer to which only he had the key. With that phone he could reach his
case officer in Langley. All his European acquisition editors were CIA agents.
Strauss was also, rather conveniently, Peter Matthiessen’s publisher.
Before the publication of God And Man At Yale, William Buckley wrote an article for
Commonweal, in which he argued for the creation of a “totalitarian bureaucracy.”
Buckley had been recruited to the CIA out of Yale. His case officer at the Agency was
E. Howard Hunt, novelist and Watergate conspirator. Buckley co-founded The
National Review with former Trotskyite, James Burnham, who also worked for the
CIA. Buckley got his wish for a bureaucratic dictatorship when the National Security
Act was amended in 1949. Under the direction of George Kennan, the CIA developed
its covert action capability, all of which Kennan later regretted as “the biggest mistake
of my life,” as he put it. Still, that power was abused, as the CIA engaged in illegal acts
against David Ellsberg, Barney Rosset, Angus McKenzie, and many others, including
me, because the censoring of unwritten books is a form of unconstitutional prior
restraint. This has had a powerful effect on free expression in America, engendering
timidity in the publishing world from which it has never recovered.
Now, with the enactment of the Patriot Act, these illegal activities are legal, including
protective detention, with the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus suspended by
implication. Writing under these conditions becomes the supreme challenge in a
society that George Orwell would easily have recognized. The national security state
has been transformed into the police state, not unlike life under Franco in Spain,
which I personally experienced. You are free to go to the beach when you want, to go
shopping when you want, but the closer you get to the Third Rail of power, the greater
the peril. The bloody crossroads, as Cyril Connolly called them, of literature and
politics has become increasingly bloody, with the result that literary life in America
has become impenetrably bland. “The Lovely Bones,” “The Five People You Meet In
Heaven,” on its goes. Get with the team or shut up. Even the 9/11 novels all seem
contrived and banal. An anti-Bush book by a former government employee did appear
during the election, and a CIA analyst wrote a book criticizing the “imperial hubris” of
the Administration, but after the election, Bush appointed Porter Goss to head the
Agency, and he quickly purged all dissenters. Since then, it is as though an iron
curtain has descended on American publishing.
But why the total silence about the revelations about The Paris Review, given that
Matthiessen has told the truth to a number of people? “The true division of
humanity,” Victor Hugo wrote in Les Miserables, “is between those who live in light
and those who live in darkness.” And Solzhenitsyn said that the first obligation of the
writer was “not to be part of the lie.” But, alas, much of the literary world and the
media that reports on it, choose to remain in the darkness and be part of the lie
because that’s what it takes to make a living in a culture of lies. And maybe, it all has
to do with The Paris Review still being a CIA operation, which is why no one will write
about it as an on going operation, according to CIA policy. There is, in sum,
considerable denial in the world of American letters, and as they say at A.A., I’m told,
“denial is not a river in Egypt.”
George Plimpton ultimately knew the difference between the light and the darkness,
which is why, before he died, he named Barney Rosset of Grove Press, as the first
recipient of the Paris Review Hadada, a bronze statuette of a bird, as “an editor,
publisher or writer who has distinguished themselves in furthering the cause of
contemporary literature.” But just before the 50th anniversary celebration of The
Paris Review to be held at Cipriani’s, George Plmpton died. The celebration went on
anyway, with an indoor fireworks display in honor of Plimpton’s honorary title of
Fireworks Commissioner of New York. Garrison Keillor hosted the event. Guest were
seated with literary table hosts, including Paul Auster, Rick Moody, Michael
Cunningham, Lorrie Moore, John Ashbery, James Alter, Francine Prose and Kurt
Vonnegut. There were readings from The Paris Review by poet Robert Pinsky and
music by David Amram, Israela Margaliat, Ilann Maazel, and the Bethune Big Band.
But the bronze statuette was not presented to Barney Rosset before the other guests.
Rather, as he related it to me, he was shuffled off to a hallway, where it was quickly
presented to him out of sight of everyone else. He was not even invited to the dinner.
Was Robert Silvers still furious over “The Pied Pier?” “George’s last joke,” Barney
quipped. Barney remembered a literary conference in Puerto Rico, where he ran into
George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen and William Styron. Everyone was convivial, with
the three inviting Rosset to drive with them away from the hotel to a bar where they
could “drink in private.” But once in the car with Barney, they began pressuring him
to allow Grove to be used for the publication of the works of Latin American anti-
Communist writers, the way the CIA had published Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright and
others in “The God That Failed.” Barney refused to join the secret team and they put
him out of the car, obliging him to trudge the three miles in the dark back to the hotel.
Matthiessen gave evidence of being remorseful. After the disastrous legal fight with
then governor of South Dakota, Bill Janklow, involving allegations in Matthiessen’s
book on the American Indian Movement, “In The Spirit of Crazy Horse,” he almost lost
his house. He developed a serious melanoma, but survived. Then, he completed his
Everglades trilogy. “Killing Mister Watson,” “Lost Man’s River,” and “Bone by Bone,”
a morality tale on the evils of racism and the excesses of capitalism. The books
contain some passages of exquisite prose, as if it took his confession to John Sherry
for this to finally happen. As Virginia Woolfe observed about writing novels, you can’t
be honest about other people unless you are honest about yourself. Matthiessen is
working hard at being a different man, as if trying to honor James Baldwin’s
professed goal in life: “To be a good writer and a decent person.”
As for myself, I still remember seeing George for the last time. I was coming back
from a play, walking east on West 43rd Street, until I got to Fifth Avenue, heading for
the Jitney. It was late, and the streets were dark. Then, I caught sight of him on his
bike, going against the traffic, his trademark white hair in stark contrast to the
shadows. I saw him raise his arm and wave to me, and I shouted into the night, “Hey,
George!” and waved back. He was gone.
……………………………………………………………………………………………
Richard Cummings is the author of “The Pied Piper-Allard K. Lowenstein and the
Liberal Dream” and the comedy, “Soccer Moms From Hell.” He has taught at the Haile
Sellassie I University in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and the University of the West Indies,
Cave Hill, Barbados, and received the Ph.D. in Social and Political Sciences from
Cambridge.
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