By Linda Arntzenius

It’s been said that individuals only come of age with the demise of their parents. The same might be said of institutions. With the recent death of literary lion Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014) and that of legendary journalist George Plimpton (1927-2003), the institution that is The Paris Review has surely come of age.

Founded in 1952 by Matthiessen and Harold L. Humes along with Donald Hall and Thomas Guinzburg, The Paris Review’s first issue appeared in the spring of 1953, with Plimpton replacing Humes as editor. TIME Magazine has called it “the biggest ‘little magazine’ in history” and who could disagree.

For its first few years, it was produced out of a small room in the publishing house Éditions de la Table Ronde, then for a time (1956 to 1957) from a Thames River barge anchored on the Seine. It must have been cramped quarters since the staff took to meeting at Café de Tournon on the Rive Gauche.

Early 1950s Paris was a place of pilgrimage for many writers. The expatriate community included a number of established and struggling American authors, William Styron, James Baldwin and Irwin Shaw, among them. All out war had been replaced by Cold War. It was a time of ambiguity and change. Oh to have been a fly on the wall and eavesdrop on the witticisms, the banter, the gossip, perhaps even the odd shady character who passed through the doors of that Left Bank Café.

As Matthiessen acknowledged some 50 years later, The Paris Review was a good cover for his CIA activities. Like many well-connected Yale graduates, he was recruited by the CIA to keep an eye on “suspicious” (read: left leaning or communist sympathizers) expatriates. The Paris Review wasn’t the only overseas journal being supported by the CIA, another notable was Encounter. And Matthiessen wouldn’t be the first or the last old boy from Yale looking out for his country’s interests against the rise of the Russian bête noire.

The revelation of Matthiessen’s CIA connection raised a few eyebrows when it came out in 2007. In a 2008 interview with Charlie Rose, Matthiessen acknowledged that he had “invented” The Paris Review “as cover.” The connection, however, is a mere sidebar to the journal’s stellar history and the larger-than-life adventures of its founders.

One wonders whether Matthiessen and Plimpton had any idea what their “little magazine” would become or indeed any inkling of what they themselves would achieve. That Plimpton would carve a unique niche as a journalist who inhabited his subjects like no other. That Matthiessen would influence a generation of naturalists, environmentalists, travel writers, and simple dreamers like myself who read his now classic 1978 The Snow Leopard and promptly set about planning my own Himalayan adventure; one that has sustained my nostalgia for those places where “men and mountains meet” ever since.

The Snow Leopard recorded an expedition Matthiessen took with field biologist George Schaller into the Himalayas in 1973. Its candid account not only of the physical journey and its author’s insights about nature, man, and himself—the book was written shortly after his second wife Deborah Love died of cancer—turned Matthiessen into something of a guru. During the 1960s, before LSD was outlawed, Matthiessen and Love, a writer who introduced her husband to Buddhism, were “guinea pigs” in experiments exploring its use. Their Long Island home was a summer retreat for a circle of New York writers. Matthiessen would become a practitioner of Zen Buddhism and, eventually, a Buddhist priest.

I took in little of the Zen aspect of Matthiessen’s book when I first encountered The Snow Leopard back in the early 1980s and was so transported by descriptions of “snow and silence, wind and blue,” that I set off from Kashmir in the north of India to the Buddhist enclave of Ladakh in the Karakoram mountains to experience firsthand what Matthiessen describes so exquisitely. Focused as I was on the haunting beauty of a journey in which “the precise bite and feel and sound of every step . . .  fills me with life,” I missed much of Matthiessen’s spiritual quest until his recent death and the outpouring of reminiscences that it provoked prompted me read the book again, this time in the 2008 paperback reissue with a new introduction by Pico Iyer. Clearly I am not alone in finding Matthiessen’s prose transcendent. “I have been reading Peter Matthiessen’s silver classic for more than a quarter of a century now, and every time I do, like any classic, it gives off a different light,” says Iyer.

PILGRIM SOULS

Cut from the same cloth, Matthiessen and Plimpton shared privileged Manhattan backgrounds. Both served in WW II, Plimpton as a driver and demolitions expert for the U.S. Army (much later, his parties would become famous for fireworks displays) and Matthiessen designing protection for transatlantic merchant convoys for the U.S. Navy. Both were born in 1927 and the War interrupted their studies; Matthiessen’s at Yale, and Plimpton’s at Harvard. Matthiessen majored in English and studied zoology at Yale. He also wrote a short story which won Atlantic Monthly magazine’s prestigious Atlantic Prize; his junior year was spent at the Sorbonne. At Harvard, Plimpton also studied English. A classmate and close personal friend of Robert Kennedy, he would later be among those who wrestled Kennedy’s killer Sirhan Sirhan to the ground after the assassination in 1968. As an undergraduate he wrote for the Harvard Lampoon and was a member of the Hasty Pudding Club. After graduating, he went on to King’s College, Cambridge in England, from which he earned a bachelor’s in 1952.

Both men began their literary careers in Paris. And both took on life’s experiences with gusto. Matthiessen, the novelist, traveled the world and inspired generations of naturalists, environmental conservationists and travel writers. Plimpton, the journalist, invented his own style of risk-taking participatory journalism to take his readers inside the world of sports. He “tried out” all manner of professions: the life of a professional athlete (boxer, pitcher, quarterback, tennis player, bridge player, golfer, ice hockey goalie); a musician with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra; a circus aerialist; even performing his own stand-up comedy routine at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

GEORGE PLIMPTON

His book titles record his exploits. Plimpton authored some three dozen, including Paper Lion (about playing professional football with the Detroit Lions, 1966), Out of My League (baseball, 1961), The Bogey Man (travelling with the PGA Tour, 1967), Mad Ducks and Bears (Detroit Lions linemen, 1973), Shadow Box (the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire, 1977), One More July (NFL training camp, 1977), and Open Net (professional ice hockey with the Boston Bruins, 1985). He also appeared in cameo roles in more than 30 films, including Lawrence of Arabia, and Good Will Hunting.

At one time, while working as a percussionist with the New York Philharmonic, he struck a gong with such force during a performance of Tchaikovsky that conductor Leonard Bernstein burst into applause.

The witty accounts of George Plimpton’s various “careers” were so well-loved that he was poked fun at in two New Yorker cartoons. A November 6, 1971, cartoon by Whitney Darrow, Jr. shows a cleaning lady on her hands and knees scrubbing an office floor while saying to another one: “I’d like to see George Plimpton do this sometime.” In another, a patient looks up at the masked surgeon about to operate on him and asks, “Wait a minute! How do I know you’re not George Plimpton?”

Described as having “boundless energy and perpetual bonhomie,” Plimpton had a circle of friends that included Norman Mailer, William Styron and Gore Vidal. He loved practical jokes and pulled off a corker for Sports Illustrated in an article about an invented baseball pitcher called Sidd Finch, whom he described as a Buddhist with a 168-mile-an-hour fastball. Plimpton enlarged on his character in his 1987 novel, The Curious Case of Sidd Finch.

Robert Kennedy, Jr., Hugh Hefner, Graydon Carter, Ken Burns, Ric Burns, James Lipton, Gay Talese and Matthiessen were among those to describe him in last year’s documentary film Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself, which uses Plimpton’s own narration and archival material for a portrait of the man who lived life to the full. “As an artist, his life was his greatest work of art,” said the film’s co-writer and co-producer Tom Bean.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. described him thus: “Like my father, he saw life as a great adventure. You could either embrace and embark or you could wait until the tide rolled out and you lost your chance. I think George never wanted to lose his chance. He always launched his ship on a high tide and found whatever adventure was waiting for him there.”

PETER MATTHIESSEN

For a time, Matthiessen also wrote non-fiction for Sports Illustrated. After returning from Paris, he produced a series of articles that later formed the basis of his successful 1959 book Wildlife in America, a history of the extinction and endangerment of animals and birds as a result of human settlement. He traveled farther afield to the Amazon and Tierra del Fuego for Cloud Forest (1961), and to New Guinea for Under the Mountain Wall (1962).

Besides The Snow Leopard, his best known works include the novels Far Tortuga (1975) and At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965). The latter, about the encounter of a group of American missionaries and members of an indigenous South American tribe, was adapted into the film of the same name in 1991.

Matthiessen’s 1969 Sal Si Puedes focused on farm union leader Cesar Chavez. A spokesman and fundraiser for the Audubon Society and the Nature Conservancy, in addition to nature and travel, he examined American Indian issues and history. His 1983 In the Spirit of Crazy Horse argued for the innocence of the Lakota leader Leonard Peltier whose controversial conviction and sentencing for the shooting deaths of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975 is questioned by Amnesty International. His last work, a novel, In Paradise, set inside a WW II concentration camp during a weeklong Zen retreat, has been described as “a brave and deeply thought-provoking novel by one of our most stunningly accomplished writers.” It was was published in April.

He is the only writer to have won the National Book Award for both fiction and nonfiction.

THE PARIS REVIEW

With Matthiessen and Plimpton at the helm, could The Paris Review have been anything less than extraordinary? After establishing the magazine, Matthiessen left it in Plimpton’s hands and returned to the United States in 1954, although he continued his involvement. In its first five years, the literary quarterly published Jack Kerouac, Philip Larkin, V.S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Adrienne Rich, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett, Nadine Gordimer, Jean Genet, and Robert Bly.

By 1973, when the magazine left Paris for Plimpton’s New York apartment on 72nd Street, it had a firm reputation for quality fiction and for introducing little known writers to fame, Terry Southern and Philip Roth, among them. Its signature “Writers at Work” series of one-on-one interviews (Matthiessen’s idea, executed by Plimpton) laid bare the life and craft, as well as the personal idiosyncrasies of contemporary writers. Plimpton drew on writers he knew personally, beginning with E.M. Forster, whom he had met in his student days at Cambridge. Interviews with Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, T. S. Eliot, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Irwin Shaw, Elizabeth Bishop, Vladimir Nabokov, among others, followed.

Milestones of contemporary literature that made their first public appearance on the pages of The Paris Review include Italo Calvino’s “Last Comes the Raven,” Philip Roth’s “Goodbye Columbus,” Donald Barthelme’s “Alice,” Jim Carroll’s “The Basketball Diaries,” Matthiessen’s “Far Tortuga,” Jeffrey Eugenides’s “The Virgin Suicides”, and Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections.”

Plimpton served as editor for 50 years and the magazine today continues to live up to its auspicious beginnings with even more to offer its readers under Lorin Stein, editor since April 2010. The magazine’s print edition and its website (www.theparisreview.org) have both been overhauled to critical acclaim; its online archive is a goldmine of literary interviews. Today’s Paris Review has more non-fiction (a recent issue has a piece on Alan Turing and artificial intelligence).

From 2006 to 2009, Picador published the four-volume set of The Paris Review interviews. In 2012, the magazine published the anthology, Object Lessons, a selection of twenty short stories from its archive, each with an introduction by a contemporary author. A resource for those interested in literary technique, it has works chosen by the likes of Jeffrey Eugenides, Lydia Davis and Ali Smith.

As Stein wrote in 2010, “Our generation grew up with the Review as a fact of life. It was America’s literary magazine. To our minds, it still is. It has launched our favorite writers. It has made a special claim for the quarterly as such, being both timely and lasting, free of the news of the day or the pressure to please a crowd. Most of all, the Review has shown, repeatedly, that works of imagination can be as stylish and urgent as the flashiest feature reporting, and can do more to refocus our picture of the world.”

And, I might add, our picture of ourselves.