Wide open. That’s how Dylan describes the world in front of him as a young singer about to make his name in the last paragraph of the book. And it was the phrase he used to describe America itself when he praised the first volume of Peter Guralnick’s Elvis biography, “Last Train to Memphis”: “Elvis as he walks the path between heaven and nature in an America that was wide open.”

Wide open. It’s not a phrase anyone would think of to describe Bob Dylan — at least the Dylan of legend. The Dylan whose public image was set long ago: Dylan the “protest singer,” Dylan the messiah, Dylan the prophet, Dylan the recluse, the cagey, obscure Dylan, the born-again Dylan, all of the images of Dylan thrown up by obsessive fans, English majors, and rock critics of the sort played by Jeff Bridges in the Dylan movie “Masked and Anonymous”; a pompous, pontificating ass who winds up impaled on Blind Lemon Jefferson’s guitar. Whether or not the images were true, whether Dylan ever tried to be a messiah or a prophet, whether or not, despite his reputation for obscurity, there was an apparent emotional sense to be found in his riddles and metaphors, was beside the point. To think that the popular picture of Dylan might not be true would screw up a perfectly good ready-made image, would mess with the sound bites and the editorial I.D.’s (“Dylan, whose songs of social injustice made him the voice of the ’60s…”).

Wide open. That’s exactly what we are not to any celebrity who publishes a biography. We know what to think of celebrities. They’re all egomaniacs and publicity whores — doesn’t matter if they’re Paris Hilton or Bob Dylan. That’s how all the pomo Hedda Hoppers have told us to think about celebrity. Forget about the work; it’s the image that matters. Irony is the new Jesus. Crucified on Sept. 11, it rose again to sit at the right hand of … well, maybe not God, but at least Maureen Dowd.

Dylan’s work and utterances, even the garbage outside his New York apartment in the ’60s, have been given a ruthless and shallow parsing. There are plenty of people who expect everything that comes out of Dylan’s mouth to be either revelatory or nonsensical. Last year brought an example of the latter expectation when critics who had grown up with the oblique humor and elliptical imagery of Dylan songs reacted, when confronted with the same qualities in “Masked and Anonymous,” as if they were seeing a self-indulgent travesty for which there was no precedent. They killed the movie (one of the most potent and challenging American movies in recent memory) almost out of sheer laziness. Seizing on holes in the narrative or the oddball scenes, the reviews complained in the manner of high school kids assigned poetry who whine about how hard it is to understand.

What may throw some readers about “Chronicles” is how modest and straightforward it is. Neither a hallucination, like Dylan’s “Tarantula,” nor a coffee-table fan’s scrapbook (there are no photos), “Chronicles” starts in without any preamble, any fuss. The opening and closing sections recount Dylan’s memories of being a young singer in Greenwich Village, just signed to Columbia by the legendary John Hammond (who would count Charlie Christian, Billie Holiday and Bruce Springsteen among the talent he got for the label). In between there are sections on his domestic life as a young husband and father in 1960s Woodstock following his near-fatal motorcycle accident, and a long section on the recording of his 1989 album “Oh Mercy.”

Does he tell all? No. First, because it’s none of our damn business. A man who has been scrutinized the way Dylan has, who has had people literally crawling through his windows and pontificating on what his role should be, knows something about the necessity of keeping at least part of it all to himself. Second, because he realizes nothing is more boring and less revealing than the sort of memoir that would’ve included lines like: “And then I met a young Canadian guitarist named Robbie Robertson.”

Dylan holds things in reserve. The motorcycle accident gets one line. He summons the ardor of youth to write of his famous love affair with Suze Rotolo, the young beauty walking through Village slush with him on the cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” (“She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen”), and treats their breakup with the discretion of a true gentleman (“She took one turn in the road and I took another. We just passed out of each other’s lives”).

Dylan is revealing about the things that matter. As a writer he makes the distinction between fond reminiscence and false nostalgia. Without offering any cheap psychological explanation, he gives a pretty good idea of where the sideshow quality of his ’60s songs came from. On the first page, Dylan is introduced to Jack Dempsey in the boxer’s restaurant on 58th Street. Old blues legends and new folk singers, like Dave Van Ronk and Fred Neil, populate the Village. Dylan crashes with the likes of the wandering descendant of Southern generals and his woman, a hatcheck girl and model for Cavalier. And all the time young Dylan is imbibing the mixture of books on the shelves of the apartments where he stayed and the music coming out of the clubs and jukeboxes. It’s “Desolation Row” as a boulevard of promise. You understand why T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound occupied the same song as fishermen, Einstein, Robin Hood, fortune tellers, tightrope walkers — they all shared space in Dylan’s head.

There’s a similar catholicity in his musical taste. Dylan talks about his love for the “old-timey” ballads he was discovering as he scouted out rare folk and blues sides or learned songs from other singers, talks about how he felt divorced from the culture’s preoccupation with the here and now (a preoccupation that’s infinitely worse today). “What was not a mistake,” he writes, “was the ghost of Billy Lyons, rootin’ the mountain down, standing ’round in East Cairo, Black Betty bam de lam. That’s the stuff that was happening. That’s the stuff that could make you question what you’d always accepted, could litter the landscape with broken hearts, had power of spirit.” The old newspapers (from about 1855-1865) on microfilm at the New York Public Library began feeding his ambitions as a composer. “It wasn’t like it was another world,” he writes, “but the same one only with more urgency … The age that I was living in didn’t resemble this age, but yet it did in some mysterious and traditional way.”

But Dylan was no purist. When he is writing about the variety of music he heard as a kid, on the radio and at fairs, and later in New York clubs and coffeehouses and lofts, he calls up the variety of influences on the young Elvis Presley that Guralnick wrote of in “Last Train to Memphis.” Reading “Chronicles,” you also know why Dylan would be reviled in the folk community a few years down the road.

It may not have been hip to say so in the Village in the early ’60s, but hearing “Travelin’ Man” coming out of a jukebox reminds the young Dylan of why he loves Ricky Nelson. It’s the most perceptive tribute that the still-underrated singer could have hoped for: “Nelson had never been a bold innovator like the early singers who sang like they were navigating burning ships. He didn’t sing desperately, do a lot of damage, and you’d never mistake him for a shaman. It didn’t feel like his endurance was ever being tested to the utmost, but it didn’t matter. He sang his songs calm and steady like he was in the middle of a storm, men hurtling past him.”

Elsewhere, he talks about listening to Judy Garland, taking the D train to the Brooklyn Paramount to see his old Minnesota friend Bobby Vee, how Frank Sinatra’s “Ebb Tide” killed him whenever he heard it. Years later, recording an album in New Orleans, he takes notice of a Paula Abdul song blasting out of a passing car. In the same period, he ventures into a strange little Louisiana roadside shop and hears the Beatles’ “Do You Want to Know a Secret” coming over a scratchy radio and captures in simple lines the euphoric community that group offered: “I remembered when they first came out. They offered intimacy and companionship like no other group. Their songs would create an empire.”

There was an underside to that community that Dylan has already spoken of. “Then,” he said, meaning the ’60s, “you didn’t know which end the trouble was coming from. And it could come at any time.” As “Chronicles” is read and reviewed, we can probably expect to hear that Dylan turns out to have hated the ’60s, in the same manner that some reviews of Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” have said of Roth, “Whaddya know? He’s a Jew after all!” “There has been so much talk about ‘The Good War,’ the Justified War, the Necessary War, and the like, that the young and the innocent could get the impression that it was really not such a bad thing after all,” wrote Paul Fussell about World War II. And for all the undeniable sense of possibilities, it is still easy to get the impression that the ’60s were all the Youngbloods singing “Get Together” and none of the Stones singing “Gimme Shelter.”

There’s no romanticism about the ’60s in Dylan’s writing, just an honest reckoning of things as they were. He doesn’t treat his generation as angels who were somehow exempt from promulgating the violence that was in the air. Dylan implicitly addresses the irony that the era preaching individuality had its own version of the stifling conformity it decried. In 1964 Irwin Silber, the editor of the folk magazine Sing Out, published an open letter, Dylan recalls, accusing him of “shirking my duties as the conscience of a generation.” Dylan adds: “I felt like a piece of meat that someone had thrown to the dogs.”

Dylan had seen the noose that came with his role. He heard the individuality of the voices in the folk and blues he was drawn to, where the folk community heard only “the struggle,” the need for the performer to obliterate himself in the service of the masses. That belief had odious manifestations. In his book on minstrelsy, “Where Dead Voices Gather,” Nick Tosches wrote about the white kids turned on by the blues revival of the ’60s who — to experience “authentic” black culture — wanted rediscovered black musicians to affect the roles of poor, illiterate farmhands. Who, Dylan must have thought, could have heard Woody Guthrie or Hank Williams or Bascom Lamar Lunsford and not heard an individual? For that matter, who could have heard “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” and not heard an individual?

“Whatever the counterculture was,” Dylan writes, “I’d seen enough of it.” Dylan is generous in his praise of others in “Chronicles.” But as any good performer should, he has his share of ego. With a touch of humor he notes, of his arrival in New York, “I had a heightened sense of awareness, was set in my ways, impractical and a visionary to boot.”

As Dylan sees it, withdrawing as he did to escape the freaks who besieged him and the ridiculous calls for him to be a leader cost him the ability to observe. He is open about the aimless, uninspired spate of work he produced in the late ’60s and, with the exceptions of his reunion with the Band, “Blood on the Tracks,” and the Rolling Thunder Revue, most of the ’70s. But what distinguishes “Chronicles” is what has distinguished — and upset people throughout — most of Dylan’s career: the inconvenience of his genius.

In the middling, muddled ’70s, we knew how to think about “Bob Dylan” — a former genius putting out records that nobody was very eager to hear, even if we halfheartedly listened to the “Dylan Is Back!” hype that preceded each one. We knew we’d be let down. He would turn up at celebrity benefit concerts and be feted now and then, but otherwise everyone could pretty much relegate Dylan to his glory years, agree that “Highway 61 Revisited” was pretty great and think it was just too bad about “Shot of Love” or “Infidels.”

But Dylan, much as he did to the folk community in the ’60s, screwed up the script, tossed in a new act when most of us were expecting the curtain. Starting with 1992′s “Good as I Been to You,” an album whose ugly, thrown-together cover suggested those endless late-Elvis LPs, Dylan began finding his voice again. Except that nobody was ready for a Dylan comeback that ended with “Froggy Went-a Courtin’.” But he did it by going back, as he did scouring the microfilm of old newspapers as a young man, by returning to the strange old blues songs and ballads he had loved, by putting together a hard, tight young band who toured with him endlessly. Dylan had always kept his songs open to interpretation and new ways of playing. The new versions turned out to be too strange even for some older fans. Like the mean version of “Masters of War” he screamed through on the 1991 Grammy Awards during the Gulf War, a version so fast and hard it took nearly half the song to go by before being recognized.

A performance like that can say to people who had long ago decided they knew how to think of Bob Dylan, “Nothing is settled. Everything is up for grabs.” It wasn’t the young beautiful dandy of the ’60s in gabardine print suits before us. This was a man with a jowly, lined face, a sharpie’s mustache, and an almost formal bearing. The suits and cowboy hat he wears throughout “Masked and Anonymous” make him look like a cross between a gentleman rancher and the ghost of Hank Williams.

But what we see isn’t an aged man as much as a man who has slipped the limits of age. Are those suits a hipster’s look or a link to the past? Why not both? In 1960s New York, the young Dylan had felt something contemporary in stories about reform movements, anti-gambling leagues, slave-wage factories. For a while he made his own contribution to the legacy of those news reports and tall tales and rumors and prophecies. He outran the mantle of “conscience of his generation” as hard and fast as he could, only to wind up being slapped with it when the contemporary state of his career seemed an unworthy coda to that work.

Finally, in the last decade, Dylan seems to be opening up the time portal he always envisioned. Put on “Time out of Mind” or “Love and Theft” or the version of “Dixie” he sings in “Masked and Anonymous,” maybe the most profound piece of American popular music since “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and what you hear is ageless.

In “Chronicles” he writes about what he learned from those ancient news clippings:

“There was a broad spectrum and commonwealth that I was living upon, and the basic psychology of life was every bit a part of it. If you turned the light towards it, you could see the full complexity of human nature. Back there, America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write.”

As good an explanation of any as to why the work Dylan has been doing for the past 10 years feels like the rock of ages — solid and inexplicable and known to us, even if, as the best music always does, it makes you wonder, what was that?

Surely only ignoramuses and resentful students slogging through their required reading feel this way, right? Not according to a new study led by the chair of the mathematics department at Dartmouth College, Professor Daniel Rockmore. In “Quantitative Patterns of Stylistic Influence in the Evolution of Literature,” an article published in the journal The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, even today’s literary writers have little use for the classics. They are, the study asserts, much more influenced by their peers than they are by the most revered authors of earlier centuries. And these researchers, being mathematicians, have the numbers to prove it.

If it strikes you as peculiar to see numbers guys (the article’s authors are all men) weighing in on literary style, then you haven’t been keeping up with the latest developments in humanities research. Crunching data — especially the vast number of texts that have been converted to a digital format by such programs as GoogleBooks — is all the rage in liberal-arts academia these days. Among other interesting recent projects, researchers have graphed the emergence and usage of particular words or phrases by date, looking for insight into how certain ideas developed historically.

The Dartmouth research belongs to the relatively established field of stylometry, the study of linguistic patterns in texts. Digitally-aided stylometry is most familiar as a means of establishing the authorship of contested works: Plays or poems allegedly written by Shakespeare, say, or Christopher Marlowe. This involves comparing a small number of works to each other and looking for internal consistencies and differences. Most authors use detectably distinctive language patterns, even after you eliminate such obvious giveaways as content. In fact, stylometrists often assert that tracking “content-free” words — such as conjunctions, like “and,” and prepositions, like “above” — is the most reliable way to reach what the Dartmouth researchers call a “useful stylistic fingerprint” for any given author.

It’s more unusual, however, to crunch a large body of texts written over a long period of time by many different people. The Dartmouth study analyzed multiple works by 537 authors who wrote English language texts published since 1550. Comparing them to each other, they found, not surprisingly, that authors from a given historical period have more in common with each other stylistically than they do with authors from the past (or future). They also found that the more recent a work is, the more “localized” its stylistic brethren are in time. An author from, say 1850, will have more in common with an author from 1800 than an author from 1950 will have with an author from 1900.

All of this makes sense; language changes over time, and during the 20th century, with the advent of broadcast media and other mass-communications technologies, it changed faster than ever. Today, thanks to the Internet, slang, jokes and new figures of speech seem to disseminate instantaneously. Suddenly, everyone’s talking about frenemies and saying, “Do not want!”

Where the Dartmouth article makes a big leap, however, is in claiming that contemporary authors are less “influenced” by authors of the past than they are by those of their own time. Furthermore, they propose a reason: The explosion in the number of published books in the past century or so. Titles by contemporary authors are in the (vast) majority. By this logic, with “even more authors to choose from and selection dominated by contemporaneous authors,” writers, like everyone else, are less likely to read the classics.

There are so many wobbly assumptions built into these interpretations that they could be used as an illustration of the dangers of empirical hubris: Having a lot of numbers and equations is not the same as knowing what they mean, especially in such a complex and meaning-rich field as literature. The Dartmouth researchers seem somewhat aware of this problem — they suggest that the dramatic decrease in the influence of the past on 20th century literature might be due to the Modernist movement, which advocated just such a break with tradition. (Note: The texts used in the study were taken from the public domain, and so included nothing published after 1952, a time when Modernism still ruled the literary roost. For all we know, postmodernism might cause the math department’s processors to melt down.)

First, there is the assumption that a lack of stylistic similarity is the same thing as a lack of influence. This is manifestly untrue. A stylometric analysis of, say, the prose of John Irving, for example, would probably not show much resemblance to that of Charles Dickens; one author is a contemporary American and the other a Victorian Briton. But Irving worships Dickens and cites him as his master and model in every interview he gives. He writes in the voice of a modern American, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t profoundly influenced by Dickens’s novels. On the pop fiction front, Helen Fielding doesn’t write a bit like Jane Austen in “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” so does that mean the founding text of chicklit simply couldn’t have been influenced by “Pride and Prejudice”? Please: Fielding’s novel is a retelling of the Regency classic in a modern setting.

Also built into that first assumption is the peculiar notion that the only influence on a writer’s style is the work of other authors. Most writers aspire to represent the speech of their own time. They listen to people talking at home, in the street and in the media. If the authors of a particular historical moment tend to sound similar, it is most likely due to this common influence rather than their influence on each other. It would be absurd for, say, Jonathan Franzen to write about 21st century Americans in the prose style of Anthony Trollope, but that doesn’t mean that Trollope’s approach to “the way we live now” (to borrow the much-quoted title of his best-known book) hasn’t infused Franzen’s ambition to write sweeping, often satirical “social” novels set in the present day. In fact, it’s precisely his desire to emulate Trollope that makes it impossible for Franzen to write prose like Trollope’s; the way we live now can’t be described in the language they used then.

Finally, the authors of the Dartmouth study seem to believe that readers choose their books by making a random selection from the pool of potential candidates. If there are more books by contemporary writers, then probability dictates that a reader is more likely to pull a recent title from this grab bag. True, the abundance of choices can be overwhelming, but it can just as easily lead someone to devote their precious reading hours to the tried and true. There is no reason to conclude that because contemporary writers differ stylistically from the authors of the past, they therefore must never have read those authors. I realize that my evidence here is anecdotal, but I’m willing to bet that I know a lot more novelists than the Dartmouth math department does, and as a rule they read far more of the classics than the average civilian. They want to know what people are writing and reading now, of course, but every author also wants to know what kind of books stand the test of time — because most authors want to write one.

As I mentioned earlier, language changes, and authors who aspire to lasting renown are sometimes vexed by these changes. In 1712, Jonathan Swift published a letter to the Earl of Oxford (then Lord Treasurer) urging the establishment of the English equivalent of the Académie Français: a body authorized to dictate the correct form and usage of the language. If “Court-Fops, half-witted Poets, and University-Boys” could be prevented from constantly introducing “affected Phrases, and new, conceited Words,” Swift argued, then there might be found a way to “fix” English forever. If not, “How then shall any Man who hath a Genius for History, equal to the best of the Antients, be able to undertake such a Work with Spirit and Chearfulness, when he considers, that he will be read with Pleasure but a very few Years, and in an Age or two shall hardly be understood without an Interpreter?”

English has no academy, and Swift was both right and wrong. We still read him today, and we have even concocted the “new, conceited” word “Swiftian” to describe the ferocious mode of satire we identify with him (though we now give “conceited” a different definition). But then there are those one-star Amazon reviews for “Gulliver’s Travels”: “I had to give up on this book about 2/3 of the way through,” one reader complains. “I was just getting too tired of looking up ‘Old English’ words as I read.” No doubt this protest would have confirmed Swift’s generally low opinion of the human race. Prose styles come and go, but idiots will always be with us.

Further reading

“Quantitative patterns of stylistic influence in the evolution of literature” by James M. Huges, Nicholas J. Fotia, David C. Krakauer and Daniel N. Rockmore in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (abstract)

“A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue” by Jonathan Swift

Our authors are two people you should be taking to the beach with you this summer. Chris Pavone is the author of “The Expats,” the New York Times best-selling thriller with more satisfying twists than the Pacific Coast Highway. Natalie Bakopoulos is the author of “The Green Shore,” one of 2012′s most anticipated debut novels, a beautiful family drama that is set during another Greek crisis — the 1967 military coup.

To read the stories, just follow the links below:

“Megaphone” by Natalie Bakopoulos

“Almost” by Chris Pavone

The average resident of the developed world uses the Internet constantly, contemplating its impact on contemporary life and exploring its numberless delights, temptations and annoyances on a daily basis. Yet, for most of us, any notion of how all this information arrives in our homes and workplaces is weirdly immaterial. Stevens was ridiculed for his hopelessly old-fashioned reference to the physical world and the movement of palpable objects, while smart kids and late-night comics grasped that the Internet has zipped beyond all that to become the disembodied essence of human communication.

Only it’s not, and “Tubes” is about the actual, physical things — many of them tubes — that make up the pathways of the Internet. For all their significance to contemporary life, governance, commerce and industry, these conduits aren’t an alluring topic. Like a lot of important things, they are superficially dull and trivial: bundles of cables; deserted stations ringed in cyclone fencing beside lonely highways; featureless, windowless buildings in old warehouse districts and, above all, rooms filled with metal boxes, blinking lights and cool, dry processed air. This is not the stuff that dreams are made of — and at the same time it is, because dreams of every sort thrive online.

Fortunately, Blum is a smart, imaginative, evocative writer who embraces the task of making his readers feel the wonder represented by these unprepossessing objects. In the Cornish seaside town of Porthcurno, he’s shown a black cable emerging from the floor, “spooled into steel trays the size of merry-go-rounds, like something stolen from Richard Serra’s storehouse,” and pictures the thousands of miles it extends, through the depths of the Atlantic Ocean, all the way back to Long Island, where, in the form of light shining down strands of glass, it will carry home the email he writes to his wife from his hotel room that night. (Another cable, running from Portugal to Africa is a “nine-thousand-mile path of light… that would transform a continent.”) Swathes of cables lifted from beneath the streets of Manhattan by workmen are likened to “giant squid under the streetlights.”

This book is more than a electrical engineering travelogue, however; in the course of his research Blum interviewed representative examples of the people who make the Internet work and a smattering of those who helped build it in the first place. The computer science professor at UCLA who, in 1969, used a phone line to connect that university’s computer network with Stanford’s shows Blum the IMP (Interface Message Processor) used for the task: a file-cabinet-sized box — the first piece of the Internet! — now shoved into the corner of a shabby conference room. He attends a meeting of network operators, the people who, among other things, negotiate the direct, plug-in, network-to-network connections that are the building blocks of the net, and hears a Dutch woman imitating an old-school street hawker: “I have eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs. For all of you with content, please send me an email.”

So ingeniously beguiling is Blum’s way of conveying all this that, before you know it, you have acquired a sense of the basic structure of Internet — from old-school exchanges to fiber-optic regeneration stations. The Internet turns out to be not quite what Blum (and a lot of other people, including myself) assumed. “I expected to find a loose arrangement of little pieces,” he writes, expressing an idea probably shared by many of his readers. “It was all supposed to be distributed, amorphous, nearly invisible.” True, information can travel via a variety of routes, but most of the time it makes its way along major thoroughfares. While the Internet doesn’t exactly have a center, it certainly has nodes and backbones where most of the connections are made and the data stored. Blum tried to lay eyes on as many of these as he could.

It wasn’t always easy. Having arranged to visit a brand-new Google data center in rural eastern Oregon, Blum never gets closer to the servers than the lunchroom, and his interviews are supervised so oppressively it’s like taking an official tour of North Korea. (Perhaps ironically, a Facebook center in the same region proved much more open.) For months, Cablevision, his own Internet service provider, dodged his requests for an overview of how data got from their network to his home in Brooklyn. While the more secretive of the organizations he contacted often attributed their caution to security concerns, Blum was skeptical. He compares a stopover at the friendly visitor center at nearby Bonneville Dam to the “Orwellian atmosphere” at Google; both are important, strategically sensitive resources, but only one is shut up tighter than Fort Knox. Blum questions whether it’s wise to hand over “so much of ourselves” to corporations that are not obliged to return the trust.

Part of the utopian romance of the Internet is that it has no weight, no friction, no footprint, no smell. The buzzword of the moment — “cloud” — promises ethereality, pure information, a dream with almost supernatural intimations. Yet as one of Blum’s data-center tour guides explains, “This is the cloud. All those buildings like this around planet create the cloud. The cloud is a building. It works like a factory.” It needs power, raw materials and staff. And its roots are in the earth.

The Paris Review has been hailed by Time magazine as the “biggest ‘little magazine’ in history.” At the celebration of its 200th issue this spring, current editors and board members ran down the roster of literary heavyweights it helped launch since its first issue in 1953. Philip Roth, V. S. Naipaul, T.C. Boyle, Edward P. Jones and Rick Moody published their first stories in the Review; Jack Kerouac, Jim Carroll, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides all had important early stories in its pages. But as Peter Matthiessen, the magazine’s founder, has told interviewers — most recently at Penn State — the journal also began as part of his CIA cover.

Plimpton’s letter on Pasternak is essential, however, because for many years a small group of journalists has been trying to pry more information out of Matthiessen on the still-unknown extent of the CIA’s role with the Paris Review — and many in particular have wondered what the legendary Plimpton himself knew of the magazine’s CIA origins. Matthiessen’s story has not changed much since it was first revealed in a 1977 New York Times story. But the Review’s archive at the Morgan Library in Manhattan — until now left mostly out of the debate — shows a number of never-reported CIA ties that bypass Matthiessen or outlive his official tenure at the Agency. In fact, a number of editors, Plimpton included, repeatedly courted ties to the Congress for Cultural Freedom. These ties started modestly — ad exchanges, reprints of Paris Review interviews in the Congress’s official magazines — but grew much more robust, including what one editor described as a “joint emploi” where the Congress and the Review would team up to share an editor’s living expenses in Paris and also to share interviews and other editorial content. In its vast quest to beat the Soviets in cultural achievement and showcase American writing to influential European audiences and intellectuals, the Congress may have even suggested some of the famed Paris Review interviews. All of which means that at the dawn of the CIA’s era of coups and nefarious plots, America’s most celebrated apolitical literary magazine served, in part, as a covert international weapon of soft power.

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The weaponization of culture starts at Yale. Prof. Norman Holmes Pearson is cited on the Paris Review web site as the intelligence officer who recruited Matthiessen (Yale College, 1950) into the CIA. This fact may explain the subtle cultural politics of the supposedly apolitical Paris Review. Pearson’s career is a mashup of literature and spying. A friend of the modernist poet Hilda Doolittle (aka, “H.D.”), he hired H.D.’s daughter as his secretary. She then became that of his assistant, the CIA’s bogeyman, James Jesus Angleton. After an illustrious record during World War II in the Office of Strategic Services alongside CIA founding light William Donovan and CIA director Allen Dulles, Pearson returned to academe to take charge of Yale’s fledgling American Studies program.

How does covert propaganda or intelligence work link up with American Studies? Answer: Monomania and the Cold War. Consider a letter from Yale’s dean at this time to its president:

From such a study we will gain strength, both individually and as a nation … strength, which we need so badly in our time to face the changing, and in part, hostile world  … This is an argument … for the establishment of a strong program of American Studies at Yale, which in many respects is our most native university … In the international scene it is clear that our government has not been too effective in blazoning to Europe and Asia, as a weapon in the “cold war” the merits of our way of thinking and living … Until we put more vigor and conviction into our own cause … it is not likely that we shall be able to convince the wavering peoples of the world that we have something infinitely better than Communism …

Yale’s American studies “would be ‘positive,’” as one academic has written, “not a matter of preaching against communism, but one of advocacy for the American alternative.” Where the CIA would get into the game — call it cultural propaganda or psychological warfare — it would avail itself of both “positive” and “negative” means, celebrating American cultural achievements on one hand while attacking Soviet ideas and policies on the other. So would the literary magazines created in this period, including the Paris Review.

The need for cultural propaganda — a sort of international American Studies — grew out of an American reaction to Soviet cultural programming in post-World War II Western Europe. It was articulated in an unsigned paper attributed to George F. Kennan, widely seen as the founding father of American “containment,” as well as the State Department’s policy planning staff and founders of the CIA. This thinking eventually spurred the creation, under the new CIA, of the Office of Policy Coordination, under which would emerge the Congress for Cultural Freedom. As Frances Stonor Saunders has written in her landmark “The Cultural Cold War”:

At its peak, the Congress for Cultural Freedom had offices in 35 countries, employed dozens of personnel, published over 20 prestige magazines, held art exhibitions, owned a news and feature service, organized high-profile international conferences, and rewarded musicians and artists with prizes and public performances. Its mission was to nudge the intelligentsia of Western Europe away from its lingering Marxism and communism towards a view more accommodating of the American way.

It later expanded to Asia, Africa and Latin America, and — according to one of its boosters — was “the only outfit … making an anti-Communist anti-neutralist dent with intellectuals in Europe and Asia.” The fact of its CIA origin was kept well hidden, but those working within its vast apparatus knew the rumors attached it to its origins, according to one former staffer.

Though these efforts started with conferences, they soon moved to publishing. In his “Proposal for the American Review,” Melvin Lasky argued for the creation of a magazine to “support the general objectives of U.S. policy in Germany and Europe by illustrating the background of ideas, spiritual activity, literary and intellectual achievement from which the American democracy takes its inspiration.” As Saunders wrote, The American Review was born instead as Germany’s Der Monat. Its equivalent in France was Preuves, edited by Francois Bondy. In the U.K., it would be called Encounter, edited by poet Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol (later replaced by Lasky). All, Saunders reported, would be secretly funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Encounter was born in a planning meeting attended by Michael Josselson (who would covertly lead the Congress for Cultural Freedom for the CIA for most of its life), the composer Nicolas Nabokov (Vladimir’s first cousin), and, from the United Kingdom, by Christopher Montague Woodhouse, a British intelligence officer. Encounter finally launched with an initial grant of $40,000, which came via Julius Fleischman. The yeast and gin heir also served as the most important “quiet channel” for the Congress and was used to funnel CIA money to various organizations and assets. And the Paris Review sought out his patronage from inception.

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“Dear Mr. Fleischman,” writes Peter Matthiessen on Paris Review letterhead sometime before the first issue. “Here at last is a prospectus of the fine new literary review I mentioned to you in June. I sincerely believe … it will be the best literary quarterly since the TRANSITION of the Hemingway-Pound-Gertrude Stein era.” He goes on to request funding and, according to Scott Sherman, writing in The Nation, he got $1,000 from Fleischman. When confronted with this donation, Matthiessen told Sherman it indeed “muddies” the picture of the CIA ties being contained within his short service. The following proposal from Matthiessen to Plimpton, found by Salon in the Morgan Archive, may as well.

In the winter of 1953-54, Matthiessen writes to Plimpton — who had since become the magazine’s public face and, in Matthiessen’s words, its “nominal” head. He offers Plimpton funding largesse in the amount of $20,000 by unnamed backers who would need to be convinced the money could be used to put the Review, beset by funding and communication problems, on “an efficient working basis.” Alluding to its most recent issue (No. 4) having arrived late, annoying advertisers, he asks Plimpton to consider the offer carefully; it would probably require putting Matthiessen back in charge since he would be accountable for the money. The sum of $20,000 in 1953 is the equivalent of around $170,000 today.

In the documentary “Doc,” Plimpton admits that Matthiessen founded the Review as a CIA cover. But Plimpton says that none of the other editors knew this until the 1960s. Matthiessen confirmed that in his Penn State interview, and says it would have been illegal for him to tell them of the agency’s involvement.) “This was right after the war. It was when the CIA was starting up. It was not into assassinations and all the ugly stuff yet,” he adds in “Doc,” speaking to documentarian, Immy Humes. “There were so many guys signing up for the CIA. It was kind of the thing to do.” Matthiessen declined several requests to discuss the Paris Review and the CIA with Salon.

But whether or not Plimpton knew of his old friend’s work as a spy, the other editors’ ties to the CIA through the Congress for Cultural Freedom lasted beyond the John F. Kennedy assassination and the buildup to and U.S. entrance into the Vietnam War. Nelson Aldrich, who began as a Review editor in 1958, writes in his oral history of Plimpton, “George, Being George,” that he left the Review to join the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom. From the Morgan letters, it is clear his work for the two organizations brought them closer, and when he left the Review in 1961, he helped ensure it would be working in concert with the Congress.

Robert Silvers — later founder of the New York Review of Books — writes Plimpton in 1956 that he “greedily” sought out the Congress magazines to reprint the Paris Review’s interview with William Faulkner. Silvers points out, though, that he sought out the Congress this once for the widened readership and would have had no knowledge of whether the money the Review got would go to the interviewer, Jean Stein, or the Review. “I should also make it clear that during these Paris years, I had no idea of CIA or U.S. government funding of the Congress,” he added by email.

The Review had already mastered the highly profitable art of selling interviews for reprints in Congress-affiliated magazines by the time of Plimpton’s Ernest Hemingway interview, begun in 1954 but not published until 1958, in issue No. 18. In the years planning it, Plimpton even suggests a whole Hemingway issue, but Matthiessen pushes for their core mission of launching new writers. Nevertheless, before it was out, the Congress’ magazines already had designs on it. “Lasky is coming to Paris any day now,” writes Aldrich, “and I will give him the H. interview as per instructions. If that doesn’t work, I have already heard expressions of interest from magazines in the countries of our Axis allies … In short, I guess we shan’t have much trouble selling Papa.” Melvin Lasky, one of the brainchildren of the Congress’s magazines, would move that year from editing Der Monat to Encounter. These are the CIA’s magazines in Germany and Japan — Der Monat and Jiyu — and their interest in a long-worked interview with a major American author — a “most native” one at that — would have been, of course, for cultural propaganda (what Joseph Nye will later name “soft power”).

Sales were evidently quite good for issue 18. Aldrich writes to Plimpton and Silvers: “What is the run to be on this issue? Here we can use perhaps a thousand, though that may be overly optimistic. The USIS may repeat their largesse and buy another few hundred copies, but I doubt it. (Did I tell you that they have now bought 460 copies of No. 18 and taken out 10 subscriptions?) As far as possible, this information should remain secret; I tremble to think of Congress discovering such a thing.” The U.S. Information Services is the overseas name for the U.S. Information Agency, founded by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953 for propaganda purposes. This letter shows that entities like USIS were recognized by some at the Paris Review as government propaganda fronts. Congress would disapprove because, by funding a magazine with a New York office that was distributed in the U.S., it was engaged in propagandizing to the American public, which was illegal.

Along with his work selling reprint rights for the great Hemingway interview, Aldrich jumps at the grand Pasternak proposal. His enthusiasm matches Plimpton’s sense of the event as a major one in “lit’r’y history.” “[W]hat a marvelous coup that will be! I think of huge international mailing drives, droves of publicity.” In this period, anti-communist writers will increasingly find their way into the editorial letters, as well as into the Paris Review’s pages. And, as in issue 18, Hungarian author Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon,” a critique of Soviet policy and life, was also subsidized by officialdom; 50,000 copies were bought up by Britain’s Foreign Office. Touring with his book, Koestler traveled to the U.S., where he enjoined American radicals to “grow up,” and thus sparked an idea at the CIA that would define its propaganda funding: “Who better to fight communists than former communists?” In the Morgan letters, Aldrich proposes Koestler for an interview as well.

Rewards begin to multiply — direct financial rewards for disseminating American greats like Hemingway and persecuted communists like Pasternak — but also free publicity. Thanks “to the kindness of Francois Bondy of Preuves,” writes Aldrich, “the Review has been raved about at great length in Der Tagesspiegel and a Swiss newspaper … both … as widely read (almost) as the New York Times. Also we had a shorter but just as flattering notice in Preuves. Not surprising since Bondy wrote all three.” What to make of this? Bondy is being secretly paid by the CIA to run Preuves. On top of which he plants stories favoring a CIA-founded and -approved (but not officially funded) magazine. So far, it must be said, the dishonesty is all on the CIA side. The Paris Review is taking fair — and full — advantage.

But this would go further when Aldrich’s plans to return to the States are massaged into a Paris job. He had mentioned a return to his New York bosses, and now — in a letter in his Morgan Archive folder — he writes to Plimpton, “I recently got another job (in the press division) at the HQ of the intellectual Cold War, the Congress of Cultural Freedom. I am happy there, but I don’t know for how long.” He at first holds out hope that he can do both jobs. So does Plimpton. And does “happy there” suggest the jobs have already overlapped?

In July 1960, Plimpton — in another Morgan letter — writes,

I see no reason why it shouldn’t be as possible to collaborate with Blair [Fuller, the next Paris editor and stepson of Allen Dulles’ publisher] as it has been for as many as four or five of us to struggle to agreement here in New York … The financial consideration is trickier. Blair needs and will get that niggardly monthly sum. But if you’re staying on, and you let me know quickly, perhaps I can arrange an additional monthly payment. If you need it, or the remuneration from the Congress isn’t sufficient … then tell me frankly and I’ll see what can be done.

But the Congress apparently has plenty of work for Aldrich. In August he responds, in another Morgan letter, “it is true that I will be working … very busily at the Freedom Fighters Guild.” But whether he does both jobs or not, working for the Congress will be good “for the Review because there is no Congress sponsored magazine in the States, and since I am supposed to see that the various articles and stories published in Encounter, Preuves, Der Monat, etc to 16, there is no reason why any really exceptional fiction should not find its way to us.” With skepticism, he mentions the small salary Plimpton is offering to do double duty, testing the waters — it would seem — and alludes to the contract for the Paris Review’s interview anthology, “Writers at Work.” Plimpton’s early mentoring in monetizing will perhaps inform the Congress as it begins its second decade.

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By January 1961, the Pasternak interview is published with a sprawling introduction mirroring the breathless tone of Aldrich’s “coup,” and Plimpton’s grand proposal. Before it ran, Plimpton had asked Aldrich repeatedly about the “portfolio” to run with it. But lacking the writers’ reactions, a Robert Frost interview runs with the Pasternak instead. Looking closely at this letter, I see an asterisk scrawled on the word “variety” — where Plimpton has suggested a variety of writers’ reactions, including from Neruda and other socialists. And at the bottom, another asterisk, with the note, “Only possible variety would be communists + …” There the note is cut. It does not appear to be in Plimpton’s hand.

Notably, Sartre, a socialist, had been rejected for the interviews before. Though he is ever-present in the editorial letters after his condemnation of the Soviets around 1956, the editors had already held an interview with him in hand, which they apparently killed. Matthiessen and Tom Guinzburg, a New York editor and co-founder, voted to hold it until the “literary content” could balance the political.

By 1961, checks are coming in from the Congress on a regular basis. These are for Paris Review interviews reprinted in numerous official Congress publications, as well as subscriptions for the Congress’s Paris office and its offices around the world. Aldrich also tries to take advantage of Congress-sponsored conferences by leveraging them for interviews, and he hopes to reuse pieces rejected by the Paris Review — namely, Carlisle’s pieces — in the Congress magazines.

With Aldrich’s exit now nearing, a Paris editor was needed. This editor was being conscripted to do double-duty for the two organizations. As several of the Morgan letters, never reported on before, indicate, the CIA would augment the meager literary quarterly pay — and the ways to work together had already become multiply evident. The Review was to coordinate the hiring through “friends of the Congress.” The Paris Review’s candidates were Frederick Seidel, the New York poet, and Roger Klein.

In February, Plimpton writes to Fuller and Aldrich:

Fred Seidel has scribbled in a postcard to say that now he’s very interested in the Review job — a somewhat predictable turnabout I might say. The trouble is that while he sat in his tent another candidate has been suggested — one Roger Klein … a brilliant young editor at Harpers. He’s a linguist, would be an excellent choice … for the Congress job which he would need to supplement his PR salary. Very important, he seems genuinely anxious to do the job for both organizations.

Aldrich writes to the New York office in March:

If … you propose [Roger Klein] for the PR and the CCF, I must have a curriculum vitae to show the people here. The language abilities sound auspicious but we’ve got to have more dope on this fellow … After I have seen the curriculum vitae, the best policy would be for him to meet Dan Bell or some other “friend of the Congress” in New York. Having passed that test I don’t believe there will be any objection on this side either to hiring him or to sharing him with the PR.

Aldrich finally leaves, with the prospects for what he calls “joint emploi” up in the air and the Congress looking at other candidates. In late June, Fuller writes the Congress on behalf of the Paris Review: “Nelson Aldrich, having departed for America, we no longer have a direct link to the Congress.” The Congress replies a week later, “Before leaving, Nelson was trying to find out how many interviews have been reprinted in the Japanese magazine Jiyu.” The letter indicates nine: Faulkner, Sagan, Mauriac, Moravia, Hemingway, Eliot, Pasternak, Georges Simenon and Aldous Huxley. The Congress also stipulates that it will pay three times as much for the Pasternak — which is to say interviews with a higher element of the “negative” propaganda (to put it in Yale American Studies terms). The money has been sent, this staffer writes, adding: “Jiyu requests Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Kingsley Amis, Henry Green, and Arthur Miller.” But there was one small problem.

Seidel’s tenure — insofar as the Morgan letters show — begins with his articulating this problem in the summer of 1961. He writes Jiyu’s editor, Hoki Ishihara: “Mr. Ivan Kats of the Congress for Cultural Freedom here in Paris has listed for us a number of interviews that you would be interested in publishing. The list mentions several writers we have not yet interviewed…” Arthur Miller, for instance, did not appear in the Paris Review’s interviews until 1966. Maugham, another spy writer like Matthiessen, would never appear in the Paris Review interviews at all. Kingsley Amis would not appear for more than a decade. Aside from Maugham, there is nary a mention of Miller or Amis in the editorial correspondence for this period. What to make of this?

It may of course be the case that, through Aldrich, the two organizations were so close they shared editorial calendars and plans. But again, with Miller and Amis not yet nominated for interview, this would not explain this exchange. Perhaps the Congress was guessing which sorts of interviews might come. Or, perhaps, the Congress on occasion exerted some subtle influence over some of the writers  the Review chose to interview. It would seem to complicate, too, the very notion of the Paris Review as apolitical. Here are some of the West’s “most native” writers — to use Yale’s term — sought after as soft-power diplomats for the Congress’s magazines.

By 1962, the question of direct links and joint employment was apparently back on the table. The Congress’s Irving Jaffe invites Seidel to talk about an editorial assistantship with him and John Hunt. By 1964 the same sorts of requests come for interviews to be translated into Hiwar, the Congress’s “Arab Review,” Jiyu in Japan, and reprints for Sameekha in Madras, and on and on. When Seidel leaves abruptly, requests go back and forth between the Congress’s Anne Schlumberger, Irving Jaffe and Ivan Kats, and the Paris Review’s Patrick Bowles, who takes over for Seidel, or Joan Moseley. The Morgan’s Paris Review/Congress for Cultural Freedom archives show that editorial ties continued at least through 1966, probably until the 1967 revelations of CIA covert influence. That year Neil Sheehan, writing in the New York Times, tied CIA funding to student groups in a front-page story followed by a series tying the Agency covertly to various cultural institutions. The series led to the resignation of editors like Stephen Spender, who claimed that although he had heard rumors, he had never been able to confirm that Encounter was indeed funded by the CIA.

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So who were Plimpton and the Paris Review editors aligning themselves with in this attempt at joint emploi?

John Hunt, Seidel’s would-be job interviewer and employer at the Congress, worked on a campaign to send Robert Lowell into Latin America as a CIA-embedded poet. In this disastrously farcical incident, recounted by Saunders in “The Cultural Cold War,” Lowell was sent on a 1962 tour of South America to improve the United States’ cultural image (damaged after the CIA overthrew Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 and invaded Cuba — disastrously — in 1961). Problems came when Lowell’s family made their New England return and he threw away his pills for manic depression. After a battery of martinis, he declared himself “the Caesar of Argentina.” Lowell’s CIA “leash,” Keith Botsford, Lowell declared as his “lieutenant.” “After giving his Hitler speech, in which he extolled the Fuhrer and the superman ideology, Lowell stripped naked and mounted an equestrian statue.” This extended outburst ended with “Lowell … eventually overpowered … wrestled into a straitjacket, and taken to the Clinica Bethlehem, where his legs and arms were bound with leather straps while he was injected with vast doses of thorazine.” (Incidentally, Seidel interviewed Lowell for the Review’s Art of Poetry interviews.) The year after Seidel was invited to meet him in Paris, Hunt would also lead the campaign to deny Pablo Neruda the Nobel Prize.

Daniel Bell was the “friend of the Congress” Aldrich suggested Klein or Seidel meet in New York. He was also a former Fortune editor who used his ties to Henry Luce to ensure friendly media coverage of the Congress, its writers and its arguments. When another unofficial but approved Congress magazine, Partisan Review, was threatened with the removal of its tax-exempt status, Saunders reports that Bell helped secure $10,000 from Luce. Luce thought highly of Partisan Review. “Jason Epstein [of the New York Review of Books] later claimed that ‘what was printed in Partisan Review soon became amplified in Time and Life.’” But Bell also sat on the Congress’s American Committee and voted that the Committee not censure or condemn Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts or his blacklisting of leftists.

Along with Irving Kristol, Bell essentially invented the neoconservative political movement that would inspire George W. Bush in his disastrous invasion of Iraq. In 1965 — with no gap between their stints in the Congress — their new magazine, the Public Interest, began what would amount to its unrelenting assault on affirmative action and multiculturalism and started propagating its structural contradictions about what government power could or could not achieve. “For the next 30 years, they wrote about … the fact that it was fruitless to think that you’re going to deal with crime [here at home] by attacking the deep social roots of crime [that is, poverty and racism],” Francis Fukuyama told me about the neocons in 2006. “But it could have been applied to foreign policy where something like re-engineering the Middle East in order to democratize it and make it safe from terrorism was a task that by that earlier framework should have been judged as quite unrealistic.” Bell left the magazine, to be sure, when Kristol veered too far to the right.

Josselson would have been the shared candidate’s boss on the CIA side. Aldrich describes the effect of Josselson’s visits to the Paris office of the Congress as a little “flutter” that would come over the place. Along with Spender, Nabokov, and Bondy, Josselson set up Encounter in the U.K., it bears repeating, with Christopher Montague Woodhouse, the British intelligence officer. After Encounter was up and running by June 1953, Woodhouse would have then turned his attention to his other project that year, the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected President Mohammed Mossadegh. In August, this coup d’etat — conceived by the British over the ouster of British Petroleum, suggested to the Americans and overseen on the British side by Woodhouse — had been the CIA’s first successful overthrow of a foreign government. Spearheaded on the American side by the CIA’s Kermit Roosevelt, it also involved intensive propaganda mixed with the buying off of the Iranian military.

Of course, you could be unknowingly linked to the Congress, or linked, without quite understanding the scale and scope of projects some of the vast secret hierarchy was spearheading. Many writers in this time undoubtedly were linked to this vast apparatus, and some clearly did not know the Congress was the child of the CIA. By taking money for interviews and sharing staff with the CIA’s cultural propaganda wing, it is not as if Plimpton and Aldrich were knowingly toppling governments in Iran or Guatemala, or — this must be said — responsible for those things the people who paid them money would later say or do. The total 1950 budget for psychological warfare — $320 million or so in today’s dollars—would quadruple over the next two years, writes Saunders. The Paris Review’s share of that — the bits I found recorded in the Morgan letters — were crumbs.

But Matthiessen’s claim that he got out of the CIA before the “ugly stuff” is false, if you consider the CIA’s messy exploits in the late 1940s and early 1950s as ugly. Either way, a secret patronage system, paid for by the taxpayer with no public debate, appears to have existed.

And though the Congress magazines were fairly robust in the diversity of work they contained, in some cases you might not get paid if you went structurally beyond the government’s official view. If you sought to serve as a gadfly, as per the role of the Fourth Estate — and emphasized the transgressions of your own side — you were clearly less likely to tap into the patronage. Aldrich describes the thinking then: “The CIA in those years was in very good odor amongst — everybody. It hadn’t disgraced itself in the Bay of Pigs and all the rest. It was an outgrowth, we all knew, of OSS, and it was now arrayed against the Communist menace and it was palpably real in Paris at that time. There was all this talk of tanks on the Vistula ready to conquer Europe, which turned out to be a bunch of bullshit. [But] the powers that be believed it.”

Paul Berman, for one, would see nothing to be ashamed of in the Congress’s role during these times. “I think the CCF did a great thing,” he wrote in an email. “The CIA was stupid to offer secret subsidies —  everything should have been funded openly. Private money could have done it. I don’t think the magazines did anything sinister — on the contrary. They played a noble role in Europe.” In another email he adds, “I find it surprising that anyone still objects to the CCF. Isn’t it obvious that the cause of anti-communism, in its liberal and social-democratic versions, was a very good cause?”

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Nevertheless, while the Paris Review was planning a joint emploi with the Congress, other little magazines operating in the 1960s, such as Ramparts and Evergreen Review, alongside their high-caliber literary publishing, were also courageous in their criticism of the surveillance bureaucracy and its ties to the American proposition and the Cold War. Both were surveilled as a result. Evergreen, published out of Grove Press’s offices, was even bombed. Barney Rosset, its editor, suspected the CIA (or Cuban exiles working with the CIA) of the bombing. In the documentary “Obscene,” he said he thought they detested the magazine’s publication of the diaries of Che Guevara, who was caught and murdered by the Agency in 1967.

Did Plimpton know? That question has always been asked with regard to Matthiessen’s CIA service. Immy Humes’s “Doc” makes clear he knew from at least 1966, when Matthiessen told Harold “Doc” Humes, another Paris Review co-founder. But did he know before 1966? Aldrich, for one, thinks he did. “I think he must have known,” he told me. “He and Matthiessen were very tight friends.” To read Matthiessen’s early letter to Plimpton, floating the possibility of unnamed backers, is to ascribe either naïvete or secrecy onto Plimpton.

Yet given the Morgan letters from the early 1960s, the question takes another form: Did Plimpton know the CIA funded the Congress and its magazines, with which he sought ties? Again, he probably did. When Aldrich indicated to Plimpton that he would “tremble” to think what U.S. Congress would do if they found out the U.S.I.S., another foreign propaganda agency, was buying copies of the Paris Review, he demonstrated that he knew the rules of propaganda. Later, in another letter, he calls the Congress for Cultural Freedom the HQ for the intellectual Cold War. From this, he seems to have known, and both letters were written to Plimpton. When I called him, Aldrich said “of course” he [Aldrich] knew the Congress was the CIA. “Everybody knew the rumors.” Then he qualified; he knew “effectively, if not literally.” Why wouldn’t Plimpton?

So by the early 1960s the Paris Review was collaborating with an organization whose covert activities — alongside the overthrow of Mossadegh, which led to the 1979 Islamic Revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini, the hostage crisis and the Rushdie fatwa — had additionally included the fixing of the 1948 Italian elections, propping up the right in Greece the same year (which both might be called soft coups); the ouster of Guatemala’s President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 (which radicalized Ernesto Che Guevara, who watched the coup); and the events that would lead up to the Vietnam War. None of which is fair to attach to the Paris Review, if not for Matthiessen’s claims that the Review’s ties ended before the ugly stuff, or for Plimpton’s failure to disclose the ties that remained.

One thing made a difference: The actions of Lucie’s father, Tim Blackman, who arrived in Tokyo to join his other daughter, Sophie, in publicizing the search and prodding the police. Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo bureau chief for the Times of London, covered the case as it unfolded, first over the course of several months while Lucie’s whereabouts and abductor remained unknown, and finally for the six years it took to try the man accused of killing her, Joji Obara. The book Parry wrote about the case, “People Who Eat Darkness,” is an exceptionally perceptive and nuanced look at a terrible crime, one that put nations, institutions and family members at odds, and often into bitter and toxic conflict.

Unlike Truman Capote, author of “In Cold Blood,” the most celebrated true crime narrative of all, Parry is in essence a reporter; this is no “nonfiction novel.” But like Capote, he’s less interested in dishing the eerie or lurid details than he is in exploring the penumbra of the crime, the complex factors that fed into it and the unpredictable effects it had on an ever-spreading network of people. The true crime genre has a (mostly well-earned) reputation for trashiness, but it fascinates for legitimate reasons, as well. Transgression, justice and punishment speak to the very heart of what a society is, how it holds its people together and how they decide who lies beyond the pale.

Because Lucie Blackman was a foreigner, and one employed in an industry that the Japanese view as disreputable, the Tokyo police were inclined to dismiss her disappearance. Bar hostesses get paid to talk to and flirt with customers, and they are expected to go on (paid) dinner dates with them outside the clubs where they work, but it’s an arrangement that usually stops short of actual sex. Nevertheless, the Japanese think of most foreign hostesses as irresponsible, drug-loving backpackers who might well run off without telling anyone or get mixed up with dangerous people. Whether or not a Westerner would call what bar hostesses do a part of the sex industry, for the Japanese, these women belong to that category of “bad” girl who can expect little help or concern from authorities should she get into serious trouble.

Crime is not what it was in Capote’s day. In addition to finding and building a case against the perpetrator — jobs for law enforcement authorities — there’s handling the media, a task usually left to the victim and his or her relatives. Lucie’s father proved, initially at least, to be a master at this. Tim could detach himself emotionally from the horror of his situation and strategize. He was able to capitalize on a G-8 summit meeting being held in Japan around the same time Lucie vanished and parlay it into the intervention of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair publicly asked Japan’s prime minister to front-burner the investigation, and met with Tim and his younger daughter Sophie while he was in Tokyo.

The police, who had been dragging their heels on Lucie’s disappearance, found this development (which made perfect sense in the political context of Britain) flabbergasting. Still, it worked: Lucie, who might have been written off as one of those “disposable” women of dubious virtue, was conclusively cast as an innocent girl, “naive perhaps, out of her depth,” but an adventurous daughter rather than a reckless slut. Tim was driving the narrative, as an electoral campaign manager might put it, and he was good at it. He liked talking to the press, even the tabloid press, and they liked him.

But if Tim was good at telling Lucie’s story, he was less successful at telling his own. Some of the most penetrating passages in “People Who Eat Darkness” concern what Parry refers to as the “script” expected from bereaved parents. Years later, Parry covered a press conference given by the father of another murdered girl and recognized in him “everything the world expected of a man in his situation: broken, helpless, turned inside out by loss.”

Tim, however, was composed, which aroused a formless popular suspicion regarding his sincerity. In similar cases, this uneasiness frequently takes the form of outside observers suddenly deciding that the parents might be implicated in their child’s disappearance or death. Tim, halfway around the world when Lucie vanished, was immune to that, but when he quarreled with the rich businessman funding the private search for his daughter, accusations of self-interest and even exploitation surfaced.

Lucie’s mother, Jane, on the other hand, behaved exactly as a grief-stricken mother is supposed to. In some respects, the truth about her parents’ failed marriage is as unknowable as the events of Lucie’s final hours. Unamicably divorced, Tim and Jane avoided even being in the same room together throughout the crisis. Was Jane, who seems to fall for every kind of supernatural hokum that crosses her path, pathologically vindictive, or was Tim as big a shit as she claimed? Just when you think you’ve made up your mind on that question, a new development comes along to knock you into the other camp.

As for the perpetrator himself, he remains something of a cipher to Parry, who was never able to interview him. Obsessively camera shy, Obara deftly avoided being properly photographed even after his arrest. He was clearly demented, as a long, self-justifying self-published book (disguised as the work of concerned supporters) amply demonstrates. Resolutely confident and unrepentant, Obara was also utterly unlike the vast majority of Japanese criminal defendants. (Parry explains that the justice system there depends almost completely on the ability of police investigators to shame suspects into confessing.) They simply didn’t know what to do with him. The Japanese blamed Obara’s recalcitrant behavior on his Korean ethnicity.

The Blackmans and Obara, Western-style players, descended on a criminal justice system unprepared to cope with them. “The inadequacy of its police force is one of the mysterious taboos of Japanese society,” Parry writes, “a subject that the media and politicians strain to avoid confronting, or even acknowledging.” The blunders of the police were many, but they could also be dogged investigators. Their real problem, according to Parry, is that they are good at dealing with “conventional Japanese criminals,” but when faced with the unexpected, they’re “sclerotic, unimaginative, prejudiced and procedure-bound.”

Obara behaved like a British or American criminal — taking charge of his defense, actively contesting the prosecutors, formulating a counternarrative to account for Lucie’s death. Watching how Japanese institutions responded to him, as well as to the Blackmans’ efforts to influence the investigation, proves fascinating. Since true crime, at its best, serves as a window on what a society cares about — how it constitutes not only what’s right and wrong but what’s sympathetic, reasonable, acceptable and important — the Obara trial was a most illuminating culture clash.

Parry doesn’t, however, forget what lies at the root of this drama: the death of a young woman who, whatever her doubts or flaws, had every reason to hope for a wonderful life. As the investigation would eventually reveal, this tragedy was eminently preventable. The people who tried to tip off the police about Obara were dismissed as not worth listening to. Let’s hope they’re not the only ones to learn from that mistake.