George, Being George

by Nelson W. Aldrich

  PETER MATTHIESSEN Sometime in the winter of 1951–1952, in the cafés, I ran into Harold L. Humes, Jr., who was running a magazine called The Paris News Post—a restaurant and theater guide, like the old Cue magazine. He wanted me to get fiction for it, which I would not have done except that I needed more cover for my nefarious activities, the worst of which was the unpleasant task of checking on certain Americans in Paris to see what they were up to. My cover, officially, was my first novel, but my contact man (who met me in the Jeu de Paume, of all places) had said, “Anything else you can do while you’re here?” I could now say, “Well, yes, I’m an editor on a magazine.”

  RUSS HEMENWAY Anybody Doc chose to get to know, he got to know. For instance, besides the Matthiessens, he got to know Ambrose Chambers. I think Chambers was the number two man in the Marshall Plan or something, but he was also working for the Agency. He and Doc became very close friends. The Underground City, Doc’s first novel, owes something to those conversations.

  IMMY HUMES Matthiessen and George tell the same story: that The Paris News Post was a “Cue-like magazine”—or sometimes a “fourth-rate New Yorker.” So it was quite a shock for me to see The Paris News Post when I was researching my documentary on Doc. It wasn’t terrible, it really wasn’t; but over the years their story became ossified.

  PETER MATTHIESSEN I discovered Terry Southern in the pages of Doc’s Paris News Post; it was a very good story called “The Sun and the Stillborn Stars,” and I thought it was too good for Doc’s magazine. I also realized that The Paris News Post was a flimsy vehicle. Doc’s staff was ready to mutiny. All three of the guys Doc had working there were furious with him. I too wanted to kill him half the time, although I remained very fond of him. But I saw that his magazine was going absolutely nowhere, so I said, “Doc, I’m not interested in doing this. If we’re going to publish fiction, let’s publish a real magazine.” He agreed, almost overnight, and The Paris News Post came to an end. So we had this idea, and I worked with Doc for a month or so, and I realized, and Patsy realized, that it wasn’t going to work. Doc was too erratic to manage it, and too opinionated. He liked to hold forth; his whole life was about holding forth.

  A COVER STORY

  PETER MATTHIESSEN My call to George in Cambridge had been a stab in the dark. If that call hadn’t worked, the Review might have died on the vine. But the call did work; as soon as George came over to Paris and signed on, he began collecting poems from Donald Hall for the first issue, and we all began talking about funding. We got a hundred bucks from Ellen Berry, who was Philip Berry’s widow. She was in Paris at the time, seeing a friend of my folks and of George’s folks.

  JOHN TRAIN George, when he finally arrived in Paris, in ’52, I believe, lived down the street. The concierges all knew each other, of course, and knew everything happening on the block; that was the Napoleonic function of concierges, to keep control over the population. One day, my concierge told me, “If your friend wants to get his mail, he should give something to his concierge.” It seems that his concierge was withholding it pending a douceur. George started tipping her, and all was well. But then he moved on, as George seemed always to do.

  Dear Mother and Daddy,

  . . . I’ve decided to stay over here in Paris and run this magazine. I think I’d be a fool not to. Here’s the quick background: It’s to be called The Paris Review and is one of the literary quarterly genre; 3,000–5,000 copies are to be printed and distributed in England, the U.S., and France. We are to be printed by La Table Ronde, one of the best publishing houses in France and with a famous quarterly printed bi-monthly of the same name. La Table Ronde is interested in publishing us in that their name (the review and the house) is introduced into American literary circles. We in turn (far more advantageous to us really) through them have knowledge of the particulars of magazine publishing born of seventy years of successful enterprise in this field. This should put us immediately out of the realm of the fly-by-night literary magazines that blossom and die with mushroom rapidity here in Paris.

  The editors are John Train, president of the Lampoon after me; Peter Matthiessen, winner of the Atlantic First last year; Harold Humes, William Pène du Bois, a successful book illustrator (his famous bears appeared in Life two years ago; his latest work is Peggy Ashcroft’s The Young Visitors); William Styron, the Prix de Rome Literature Prize winner for his novel Lie Down in Darkness. . . . [no date]

  RUSS HEMENWAY The rumor around the cafés was that they had no money and no sign of any coming in. Then they began to talk about this figure named George Plimpton. Plimpton was going to come over from Cambridge, and he had tons of money. He was really well connected; he knew everybody. He knew Sadruddin Khan. The money was going to pour in, and they were going to have this big publication. He was supposed to have all this money, “the Plimp,” but it turned out he didn’t. Still, he faced up to the problem of budget better than the others did. At that point, I was leaving Paris. I was involved with the Adlai Stevenson campaign. Doc began to drift away from the Review to do other things and soon left for the States.

  DOC HUMES TO GAY TALESE, 1963 I really didn’t like [George] at first, mistaking the apparent snobbishness and studied front for gratuitous thoughtlessness rather than recognizing the necessary camouflage of an almost tenderly vulnerable man. I know a lot about [him] now that I didn’t when I first met him [in Paris eleven years earlier], and he is a complex, lonely, rather brave human being.

  ROBERT SILVERS George refused to be perturbed by money matters. There was a day when a letter arrived, saying, “I write on behalf of the Banque de Paris. We have need of your help because we have been asked by Horizon magazine to make a payment to Mr. Eugene Walter for an article he wrote in that journal; but, by mistake, we have sent him five hundred dollars too much, so we seek your help in recovering the five hundred dollars that was sent in error.” George then wrote: “In reply to your letter, I’ve been asking myself just who you are referring to. In the café the other day, I saw on the street one of the denizens of the quartier who I recognized as Eugene Womble. I greeted him, as I always do, ‘Ça gaz, Womble?’ Womble did seem distinctly more prosperous than usual; so while I can’t be absolutely sure, I think he may be your man.” The bank wrote him back saying something like “Merci pour un bon moment dans notre journée.”

  PETER MATTHIESSEN For many years I have stated flatly that the chronic rumors that The Paris Review was founded or influenced by the CIA are simply untrue. Though I still believe that, it now appears that some of our star-tup funding may have come from an acquaintance of George’s and mine, Julius Fleischmann, a rich, cultured Chicagoan living in Paris who, many years later, around 1966, turned out to have been associated with a CIA-sponsored outfit called Congress for Cultural Freedom. His foundation served the CIA as a conduit of funds that Congress deployed to sponsor conferences and publications like Encounter, to oppose Communist influence among European intellectuals. Julius—“Junkie”—was one of several friends of our parents who donated money to help print and publish the first issue of the Review. George and I had no idea of his connection to the CIA—not then, certainly—and by the time we learned of it we’d forgotten about his donation. Now, of course, I’ve seen the letter George wrote his parents about our fund-raising efforts, and, difficult though it is to believe that an utterly unknown apolitical magazine of laughable potential circulation was a likely recruit for ideological warfare, the name “Fleischmann” in that letter muddies the picture a bit. What muddies it even more, though, is that the Fleischmann George refers to—Raoul, the publisher of The New Yorker, who was Junkie’s cousin, I believe—was a man who as far as I know had no connection with either the Congress or The Paris Review. Perhaps George confused his Fleischmanns; perhaps we both did. Or perhaps, as I think, the CIA is not in this picture at all beyond having casually approved my use of the Review to strengthen my cover. Meanwhile, around this time, I was becoming disillusioned with the CIA. Anticommunism was breeding witch hunts in t
he States; [Roy] Cohn and [David] Schine were snuffling through our embassies in Europe, and Paris itself was seething with international and ideological conflicts—all of which was politicizing me leftward, as happened to many Americans living in Paris in those days. By the winter of 1953 I was ready to quit, and did. And I have to say that among the many adventures in my life, my paltry experience as a spy in Paris is the only one I remember with distaste and regret.

  ALISON HUMES My father believed there were secret, vital, terrible things that “they” had given him to understand about the world. But “they” were Doc’s only way of making sense of what was happening to him. He couldn’t face the idea that he was just crazy, so instead he reasoned that he must have been really on to something and had become a guinea pig for the government from the time he was in high school. That was his cover story, you see: “They,” the evil forces of the CIA, they wanted to take someone intellectually gifted and turn him into a pawn to be manipulated.

  PETER MATTHIESSEN In the mid-1960s, with the Congress for Cultural Freedom being exposed everywhere as a CIA front, I decided that George deserved to know the truth of the Review’s origins. I assured him 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? I had wanted to tell Doc, too, but had put it off because, as George and I agreed, he might not be able to handle it. He had become so paranoid and dangerous by this time that Anna Lou, who was with him in London, was finally obliged to take the children and flee back to the United States. Not long after that, in 1967, I think, when I tracked him down there with the idea of bringing him home, he was in desperate condition and I was at a loss as to how I might pierce the murk. But my instinct was that hearing the truth about a trusted friend’s CIA connection might retrieve his fantasy-CIA from the lenticular clouds that followed him everywhere and make it as real as this flesh-and-blood old pal walking by his side on the concrete sidewalk. Ill-advisedly or not, that’s what I did. We had an amiable dinner, after which I gave him the other bed in my hotel room, where he also enjoyed a long-overdue bath.

  ALISON HUMES I know from seeing some of Doc’s old papers that he felt betrayed when Peter told him that he’d been working for the CIA. But Peter’s revelations certainly didn’t cause Doc to go crazy, as Peter sometimes feels accused of doing; Doc was already quite mad. The news just fed into his paranoia. In a way, Doc may not have felt betrayed so much as confirmed. His response may have been closer to “Yeah, of course, I always suspected that” than confusion or anger. But Peter’s story must have been a pretty heavy thing to drop on all the other guys at the Review.

  IMMY HUMES Researching the film I made on my father, I found a letter from Doc to George in March of the year when Matthiessen had come to London and told Doc that he, Matthiessen, had been in the CIA when The Paris Review was founded and The Paris News Post abandoned. 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. George’s response to that letter was the most extraordinarily sweet letter to Doc saying, I absolutely refuse your resignation, you can’t possibly resign; come back to New York and you can stay with me in my apartment for as long as you want. Then he sort of puts little asterisks and said, Well, okay, let’s say one year. What a good attitude he had! Just refusing to draw invidious distinctions between people or throw people away; that extraordinarily smart way of being warm.

  DAVID AMRAM George was very good with Doc. If George wasn’t sure what Doc was saying, he would cock his head, like he was listening to some music. I think when Doc would get on one of his particular crazed rants, George seemed able to turn on a different receptor, and instead of listening to what Doc was saying, he would just listen to the sounds as they were bellowed.

  PETER MATTHIESSEN In her film documentary on Doc, his daughter Immy leaves the impression that my London confession in the late sixties, fourteen years after the event, was somehow related to Doc’s longtime CIA paranoia and helped send her dad around the bend. As a narrative device, this distortion of Doc’s chronology is useful, but sadly (for me, at least) it ignores the fact that Doc’s paranoia had been well established for many years before my revelation. George compounds the damage by yelping on-camera that Doc had been “outraged” by my news. That was not my experience, either: It was George who’d been “outraged.” Doc was not upset by my perfidy, if that’s what he thought of it. That the CIA had in some ghostly sense been present at the creation of the Review must have seemed to him perfectly natural, given his sense of his centrality in the way the world worked. Eventually, somewhat recovered, Doc returned to the U.S., where our long telephone discussions and occasional visits over the years remained friendly, although mostly limited to Doc’s oratory, which was still bizarre but never “outraged.”

  GEORGE ON BOTH BANKS

  CHARLES MICHENER George once said to me, “You know, the great thing about Paris in the fifties was you could go anywhere; you could get into any level of society you wanted; so long as you had a black tie and evening clothes, you could go anywhere.” He loved that.

  Dear Mother and Daddy,

  My window looks out on a bleak host of smoking chimneys. I’m on the fifth floor, a very small room, but warm and with a little potbellied stove. Still, Paris is cold and today I [am wearing] my hideous Army underwear. I spend most of my day at the office on the rue Garancière, reading proofs, meeting artists, writers, and other editors, and arguing, of course; arguments seem to be the basis on which these magazines start. Don’t worry, Mother. I’m not going to seed here. This whole project, at least from here, is too enthralling to consider going to seed. . . . [no date]

  MARY LEE SETTLE George lived two lives. He lived a Right Bank life, as you know, and he lived a Left Bank life, and one day I got pretty bloody fed up with this, let me tell you. I said, “George, I’m a nice girl from America. I went to Sweet Briar, for God’s sake. I want you to come get me in a taxi, and I want you to take me to the Ritz for a drink, and then to dinner. I’m sick of this slumming life.” He said, “I didn’t know you wanted to do anything like that. Of course!” So when the time came for me to sally forth from my Left Bank hotel in the one black dress I had left from a Right Bank life, there was George with the oldest taxi in Paris. He had found a suit, I swear to you, that he had worn at Exeter. We got into the taxi, a little embarrassed with each other, like we didn’t know each other very well. We started out, amid the derisive jeers of the whole clientele of the Café le Tournon [the Review hangout on the rue de Tournon, around the corner from their tiny office on the rue Garancière], who watched. We got to the Ritz and we sat down. I had just published O Beulah Land. As soon as we sat down, a waiter came over and said, “Miss Settle, will you and Mr. Plimpton join Mr. So-and-so of the Viking Press?” From that time on, we were drinking carafes, though we had to listen to this old fool. That was our evening on the Right Bank. It was very funny, and for George very lucky, because George didn’t have as much money as people thought he had.

  PETER MATTHIESSEN In that summer of ’52, the hard drinkers besides Patsy and me were Styron, sometimes George and Tom Guinzburg, and Cass Canfield, Jr., a friend of ours from New York (also the son of a well-known publisher of Harper & Row). We’d cross over to the Right Bank to the bar of the Hôtel Crillon, which made excellent dry martinis; then in the evening we might repair to Montparnasse and Le Chaplain.

  DAVID AMRAM I was playing in a jazz band at the time, and one evening we were invited to a party at this huge château. We began
playing, and there were all of these society people, and they expected us to play dance music. Instead, we began to play our great Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker music, and our own free-improvised music, and managed to clear out the entire garden. I was so upset that I went behind a hedge to calm myself down by taking a little smoke—when suddenly from behind, I saw George Plimpton peeking through the hedge, taking in the whole scene. I said, “George, what are you doing here?” “I’m a guest,” he said, “but I’m doing a little reportage.”

  PATI HILL George sometimes said things that sounded simple enough but followed you around afterward. One that comes to mind now was about Sadri Khan and it was the result of a slight altercation. George had asked me for the second or third time to some event with Sadri, and I had refused, saying I thought it would be just boring, and George said—sharply—that he would imagine it would be rather hard to be bored by an evening with somebody who was in line to be the absolute leader of millions of Muslims, and from my point of view, that was puzzling. However, George did manage to make me see that he didn’t live in the same world I did. And maybe not in the world most writers live in. I mean that whereas in general writers are trying to keep the door shut so we can get on with counting our bedbugs or whatever we hold dear at the moment, George saw everything out there as one huge old swimming hole to plunge seriously into and come up with a fish in his mouth.

  RICHARD SEAVER The Paris Review wasn’t the only English-language literary magazine founded in Paris in 1952. Alex Trocchi, Austryn Wainhouse, Patrick Bowles, Christopher Logue, and myself—a Scot of Italian origin, an Englishman, a South African, and two Americans—started a magazine called Merlin. Merlin’s raison d’être was to discover new writers, to publish serious fiction and poetry and critical essays—on French existentialism, for example, and on Samuel Beckett, both of these the first in English. Thereafter we published a lot of Beckett. I said to Alex Trocchi, “You know, if we go down in history as the organ of propaganda of Samuel Beckett, that ain’t so bad.”