Unexpected connections

Coming across my home town, Bletchley, in a biography of Peter Mattheissen was a surprise, even though it was only a mention in passing because of The Snow Leopard author’s recruitment by the CIA to spy on Americans in Paris at the dawn of the Cold War. His stint of spying was revealed in 1977, and was from then onwards a cause of wriggling deflection. This immediately made me think of the great American classicist, Moses Finley, who I have also been reading lately , who left American for England because of an accusatory of ‘Un -American Activities’ at about the same time.

Two slight connections underlining how biographies can also provide history lessons.

I am reading Lance Richardson’s excellent new biography of Mattheissen, with its perfect title , ‘ True Nature: The Lives of Peter Matthiessen’, and am benefiting from its account of Mattheissen’s privileged and emotionally tangled early life, in the wake of World War 2. His military service, working in the naval laundry in Hawaii, followed by some pre Yale tramps around Europe in 1948, and an introduction to the circles around Gurdjieff- I should have seen that coming. Then his precocious emergence into the literary scene, at twenty three, with a short story, and now marriage and a job with the CIA in Paris. At that moment when the USA was very fearful of Soviet influence spreading across the world, and was prepared to use underhand tactics to stop it.

There is, of course, in this a reminder of the seeds of culture wars to come, where elements in the US have never come to understand the difference between social democracy and communism, and checks on the power of the rich and tyranny. Epitomised today by Trump’s assault on the BBC, and the funding of anti environmentalist politicians by US business.

This biography is very good and it is already beginning to deliver on its promise to reveal the man and celebrate his literary achievements.