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By Root 2975 0

near Bedford Village, New York. The Matthiessen family was full of nature lovers. Peter’s father, Erard Adolph Matthiessen, became a spokesman for the Audubon Society and The Nature Conservancy; a hunter, he had nevertheless been inculcated with ecology by his two boys, Peter and George. The Matthiessens loved Connecticut, where they collected reptiles, bird-watched, and hunted. They lived in Long Ridge, an idyllic rural Connecticut town northwest of Stamford. “My brother and I were always finding animals,” Peter Matthiessen recalled. “We played near the Mianus River. One afternoon we found a copperhead den on our property. We took seven as pets. Mother made us get rid of them.”16

Erard Matthiessen joined the U.S. Navy during World War II to help design gunnery training devices. Young Peter followed in his father’s footsteps, joining the U.S. Navy during the Truman years. But his true love was bird-watching. The shifting patterns of nature fascinated him. As a student at Yale University, Matthiessen studied biology and ornithology. Nature writing became another of his passions, fanned by his reading of Thoreau and Muir. In his early short story “Sadie”—which won the Atlantic Prize—Matthiessen demonstrated a flair for descriptive writing. Upon graduating from Yale in 1950, he married Patricia Southgate. Bold, daring, filled with artistic inspiration, Matthiessen moved with his bride to Paris, where they took classes at the Sorbonne. To promote literature, Matthiessen cofounded the Paris Review in late 1951, along with Harold Humes and George Plimpton. By 1953, this handsome monthly English-language journal offered its first issue. (The same year, the Matthiessens had a son, Luke, and Peter finished his first novel, Race Rock.)

Matthiessen approved an American bald eagle donning a Phrygian cap for the journal’s logo. The Paris Review, based in New York City, ran a long interview with authors in every issue. With Jack Kerouac publishing “The Mexican Girl” and Samuel Beckett contributing a selection from Molloy to the Paris Review in the 1950s, one could reasonably assume that the journal was simply an antiestablishment publication promoting avant-garde arts and letters. But as Matthiessen divulged in 1978 to the New York Times, he had “invented” the Paris Review as a cover for his spying for the CIA.17 “I was only in the Agency for two years—1951 to 1953,” Matthiessen recalled. “Trending left, I quit over a disagreement on my Paris assignment. Plimpton, who had been in Cambridge, took over the Review. My interest was in writing fiction. The Atlantic Monthly had published two of my pieces. But fiction paid poorly. So I started writing nonfiction essays for magazines to live.”18

Plimpton became the Paris Review editor in chief in 1953, in New York City. The journal had nothing to do with the CIA. Meanwhile, Matthiessen worked on both charter and commercial fishing boats (flatfish, blowfish, tarpon, and tuna) out of Montauk, Long Island, earning extra money from the blue-green depths of the Atlantic. He also captained various shark-watching excursions. “I’d see eighty or ninety sharks in a day as a boy,” he recalled. “Now they’re scarce everywhere.” Matthiessen was collecting good material on sharks, possibly to use in a book or article. Worried that huge corporations were destroying the planet, concerned that the U.S. government was doing too much nuclear testing, Matthiessen decided to become a generalist biologist in the Hornaday vein. During the cold war, the Bering Sea seemed like a moat protecting Alaska from invasion. But Matthiessen was concerned that the Aleutian chain and the Pribilofs—with their wildlife—were being killed by the Atomic Energy Commission.

Besides his rambles in Connecticut and his charter fishing off Montauk, another influence on Matthiessen, in biotic terms, was his brother, George, who studied marine biology at Princeton University and conducted research at Woods Hole Laboratory. While writing wildlife articles for Sports Illustrated, Matthiessen was accumulating reams of information about North