In His League: Being George Plimpton (Page 4)

In assessing the history of the journal, how consequential was its early liaison with the CIA? In light of the paucity of scholarly material, the person most qualified to make that assessment is Peter Matthiessen. If he believes the waters have been "muddied" by recent revelations, then he should endeavor to cleanse them. But over the years, and to this day, Matthiessen, who says he quit the CIA in disgust in 1953, has been tight-lipped. On those rare occasions when he has discussed this matter on the record--Aldrich's book being one of those occasions--his normally pellucid language becomes opaque. Coming from him, such reticence is disheartening. Since the late 1950s, Matthiessen has been an indefatigable activist and truth-teller. It's difficult to think of another major American writer who has devoted himself to such a wide range of causes, movements and struggles, many of which involve pressing ecological and environmental matters. The result is a body of work, much of which appeared in William Shawn's New Yorker, defined by political commitment, literary distinction, lived experience and action.

Matthiessen, who is 81, has yet to undertake a memoir, but the moment for him to clarify the origins of The Paris Review has arrived, even if the questions at stake are primarily of interest to cold war historians, aficionados of little magazines and devotees of Frances Stonor Saunders, and even if the subject matter arouses in him a degree of personal discomfort. Such a reckoning may well enlarge his reputation rather than diminish it. The questions he should answer include: Why, in George Being George, did he float the name of Raoul Fleischmann when Aldrich had already informed him that Julius Fleischmann was the actual Paris Review donor? (It's worth noting that Raoul's name is absent from Stonor Saunders's exhaustive and uncompromising account, while the book has many references to Julius.) Was Julius acting on his own behalf when he contributed that $1,000, or was he a conduit of funds from the US government? Did any of the other early donors, of whom there were at least eighteen, have direct (or indirect) ties to the CIA or its front organizations? As for Matthiessen, what did his CIA masters hope to achieve by allowing him to use the avowedly apolitical Paris Review as his "cover"? Were these the same men who backed Encounter, in which Julius Fleischmann was also a principal stockholder and which, like The Paris Review, was created in 1953? What were Matthiessen's duties as a CIA agent in Paris in the early days of the cold war, and what were the precise circumstances of his departure from the agency?

Matthiessen's silence and reticence about such matters would end up angering some of his Paris Review colleagues. Not until the 1960s did he inform them of the true origins of the journal: Plimpton got the news in 1963 and Doc Humes in 1967. (Regarding the delay in telling Doc, Matthiessen maintains that he didn't think Doc could handle the information.) During the research for her film, Immy Humes unearthed a letter from Doc to Plimpton written shortly after Doc had received Matthiessen's revelation about the CIA. As Immy Humes says in George, Being George:

The letter from Doc was extraordinarily lucid for somebody who had literally lost his mind and was listening to implanted broadcasts from his furniture. He says he's going to resign from The Paris Review unless Peter goes public with his story--he's to be congratulated on coming out on all this, but he needs to write it in public in The Saturday Evening Post or, God help us, in The Paris Review. Peter never did.

Breaking the news to his old classmate Plimpton was perhaps more difficult. "I assured him," Matthiessen told Aldrich, "that I'd kept my two Paris activities strictly separate and that the Review had never been contaminated by the CIA. Even so, he was shocked and very angry, understandably so. Who, after all, wants to hear that the 'love of his life,' as he himself would call it, had been conceived as a cover for another man's secret activities?"

Aldrich affirms in his editor's note that he modeled George, Being George on Edie, the classic oral biography of Edie Sedgwick that Jean Stein (mother of The Nation's editor and publisher) and George Plimpton published in 1982. Edie is primarily Stein's book; Plimpton was brought in to edit and organize Stein's colossal stack of transcripts. Aldrich has chosen a steep mountain to scale. While George, Being George resembles Edie in form--pithy interview fragments, artfully arranged and configured, cascade down the page--the setting, tone and mood diverge considerably. Edie is about a privileged young woman's descent into the Warholian abyss, where bohemian eccentricity collided with the berserk. What has Aldrich discovered? That Plimpton had affairs with a slew of young women and attended orgies in Manhattan in the 1970s.

For the most part, there's no comparison between Plimpton's genteel milieu and the pandemonium of both the Factory and the psychiatric institutions that were a second home to Edie. And while George, Being George contains a stirring assemblage of voices (including Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese and Harold Bloom), Aldrich's cast pales in comparison with Stein's dramatis personae: Capote, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Jasper Johns and Warhol, to name a few. From these voices Stein and Plimpton sculpted passages that rise from the page and lodge in the mind. Ondine: "Those were the days I lived in Central Park. I'd wake up by the lakes and swim in them." Gerard Malanga: "Andy [Warhol] would also probably deny being high on LSD, yet I found him at six in the morning [on Fire Island] rummaging through the garbage cans." Henry Geldzahler: "When [Edie] was being paid less attention to, she didn't know who she was. That possibility of destruction was built into the weakness of her personality. We have to get used to the reality that we're alone. If you can't get used to it, then you go mad. And she went kind of mad." Nothing in Aldrich's book is quite so fine as these passages. But what ultimately distinguishes Edie from George, Being George is the stagecraft employed by Stein and Plimpton, the drama they created through the scrupulous arrangement of voices into a rich, structurally coherent montage; Aldrich's book is a less dynamic collection of skillfully orchestrated monologues. Still, aficionados of Plimpton, The Paris Review, the "quality lit set" and Manhattan's upper crust will savor Aldrich's book like a dry vodka martini.

Aldrich tells us that he wrestled with the chronology of Plimpton's life. It was more or less linear until George returned to Manhattan in 1955, at which point his days began to whirl into a carousel of assorted routines in which "chronology becomes almost irrelevant":

There was the Review to edit and the staff to hang out with; games to play at the Racquet Club; books and articles to write for anyone who would pay for them; New York ceremonies to MC; girls to make love with; and always, from every direction, the endlessly seductive pull of friendship to respond to. The only big changes in his life that followed chronology were his marriages--which, notoriously, hardly changed anything in his life.

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