Tom Lutz was inspired to write “Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers and Bums in America” by an encounter with his 18-year-old son, Cody. Recently graduated from high school, Cody was planning to take a year or two off before beginning college, so he moved out of his mother’s house and into his father’s “with uncertain plans.”
Before we arrive at the sad and already predictable conclusion of this tale, we must bear in mind that Lutz himself was hardly a model of Calvinist rectitude. “Finishing high school in 1971 without the vaguest clue as to where my life was headed, I was saved from the Vietnam draft by a high lottery number,” he writes. He then spent the better part of 10 years wandering around, taking drugs, playing in bands, living in a semi-commune, riding a motorbike through Montenegro, and working as everything from carpenter to factory hand to gymnastics instructor. Lutz eventually settled down to become a teacher and writer, but is unrepentant about his youthful escapades. His adventures, he writes, were worth it for their own sake.
So, unlike many parents, Lutz welcomed Cody’s arrival. “Whatever else, I was glad that I could give him a base from which to chase a dream or two,” he writes. “I was pleased that Cody, instead of just following the crowd into college, was taking a more adventurous path.”
But after arriving — and here is the foreordained conclusion — Cody took up what seemed to be a permanent position on Lutz’s couch. As Cody continued to maintain his horizontality day after day, declining even to pick up his bass and go jam with the old man’s bar band, Lutz was shocked to realize that he was angry at his son — a heart-pounding, adrenaline-pumping anger.
“I started to write this book at least in part to understand my ire as I watched my son do what I had seen him (and myself) do many times before: He was doing nothing,” Lutz writes. “In my forties, I necessarily had a more acute sense of the shortness of life, but why should he? He was still husbanding the proceeds of his summer job on an organic farm in Massachusetts, not hitting me up for spending money. He was the one at the classically hormonal age, so why were mine firing?”
If the genesis of “Doing Nothing” was Lutz’s attempt to answer that question, the book itself goes much deeper. Rather than focus exclusively on what we think of as the modern slacker - for example, Cody, or the 30-something goatee with no visible means of support — he delves into the rich history of slackers past, while exploring his own and society’s complex attitudes toward work and leisure. Like Lutz’s brilliant study of weeping, “Crying: A Natural and Cultural History of Tears,” it’s a highly intelligent, stimulatingly eclectic and impressively learned book.
Slacking is one of those subjects that is seductive but tricky to explore. It’s simultaneously too broad and too narrow — too broad because writing about laziness is like writing about life or love; too narrow because the literature of triumphant laziness turns out to be a niche form, and is somewhat self-canceling. But if the subject is too slippery and multifaceted for him to completely control, Lutz is fast enough on his feet that “Doing Nothing” is a consistently entertaining and informative read — even if at the end we’re not entirely sure what holds all these loafers, slobs, bohos and loungers together.
Although he limits himself to the last 250 years, Lutz covers an enormous amount of historical ground. After opening with a chapter titled “Cody on the Couch,” a thoughtful introduction to the central issues involving slackerism, the work ethic and their related discontents, he turns next to two paradigmatic figures, Ben Franklin and Samuel Johnson. Lutz shows how in complex ways, and at the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution that inaugurated alienated labor, these two opposing figures embody the paradoxes built into our attitudes toward work and leisure.
He then embarks on a fascinating social history of the changing face of work and the wildly varying rebellious responses to it, pausing to look at the 18th century “lounger,” the successor to Johnson’s “Idler,” and the inspiring figure of Joseph Dennie, Harvard dropout, drinker, dandy, half-assed lawyer and the unjustly forgotten father of sophisticated slothdom in America. Successive chapters offer a veritable all-star team of unproductive members of society — “Loafers, Communists, Drinkers and Bohemians,” “Nerve Cases, Saunterers, Tramps and Flaneurs,” “Sports, Flappers, Babbitts and Bums,” “Beats, Nonconformists, Playboys and Delinquents,” “Draft Dodgers, Surfers, TV Beatniks, and Hippie Communards,” and finally “Slackers” — taking us, if the book has not already fallen from our listless and neurasthenic hands, up to the present day.
So back to that original question: Why was Lutz so angry at Cody? The answer, Lutz says, “had to do with my own twisted relation to work, a pathology I share with many people of both my own and my father’s and son’s generations.” Lutz’s central quandary is that he can never decide if he is working too hard or not hard enough. Of course, this is really a question about what work itself is, and what it should be. “I, for one, see myself in completely contradictory ways: insufficiently socialized into good work habits and attitudes and, at the same time, overly socialized, overly concerned with my work, my success, my status, my accomplishments or lack thereof. I am convinced, and not without good evidence, that I am astoundingly lazy.”
In one of the most penetrating discussions in the book, Lutz examines the contradictions of his work life, which as a college professor and writer lacks clear boundaries between working and not working. He watches “The Sopranos” and March Madness to keep up with pop culture; he finds himself waking up in the middle of the night thinking about a transition in a piece he’s writing; he’s always working and always playing. “And so my life of sloth blends imperceptibly into my pathological flip side, my workaholism, and this is the odd thing: I can just as easily argue and believe that I work, not too little, but entirely too much. My sense of my own laziness may simply be the perverse guilt engendered by a work ethic that digs its dominatrix heel into my back and rarely lets up.”
Lutz writes that his paradoxical, deeply split attitude toward work is shared by his peers. “Everyone I know is in the same boat. We are all lazy impostors, and we are all workaholic slaves. We work too hard and not nearly enough. What can this possibly mean? Is slackerism somehow as much a part of our lives at this point in history as our vaunted work ethic? Are the two simply two sides of the very same coin?”
Lutz argues that they are. In his view, today’s work ethic, and perhaps the work ethic throughout modern history, is always haunted by slackerism, and vice versa. This is the “twisted” and “pathological” relation he decries in himself, the one that won’t let him off the hook. “None of the work, the quasi-work or the semi-work I do seems to lessen my slacker guilt, if for no other reason than the simple fact that I aspire to be a complete slacker … In seeing my son on the couch, I suppose, I saw my ego, my alter ego, my alter alter ego, and on and on, in a hall of opposing mirrors.”
Lutz implies, though he does not come right out and say it, that he aspires to be a complete slacker for societally induced reasons. Slackerism is an irresistible cultural meme. Moreover, Lutz is an American, and as he points out, America is especially hung up about work. Meditating on his anger at Cody, Lutz writes, “Marxist cultural critics would have an easy explanation for my anger: they would say that my body was simply showing itself to be an unwitting agent of ideology, my anger literally an embodiment of mainstream cultural values. And they might be right. At least since Tocqueville, foreigners have noted the intensity of the American work ethic, and perhaps I was just mindlessly, bodily enforcing community standards.” Lutz cites an extraordinary passage in which Tocqueville observes that the American obsession with industriousness could lead to exhaustion: “a kind of virtuous materialism may ultimately be established in the world, which would not corrupt, but enervate, the soul and noiselessly unbend its springs of action.” This aristocratic critique of labor recalls Nietzsche’s nightmarish vision of the flea-like “last man” for whom all ideals have been erased by ease, routine and sensuality.
It is Lutz’s “twisted relation to work” that prevents him from going one way or the other — either embracing work like a Japanese salaryman or rejecting it as a curse. The latter attitude, Lutz points out, has held sway for most of history. The immortal words of George Sanders, the blackmailing slacker in “Rebecca,” “I’d like to have your advice on how to live comfortably without hard work,” seem to be imprinted on mankind’s shared DNA. Throughout the classical and medieval ages and the Renaissance, labor was regarded as a lowly activity: man’s highest occupation was disinterested contemplation of religious or philosophical subjects. This belief was made possible by an aristocratic, pre-capitalist organization of labor, in which the vast majority of humankind labored so that the enlightened few might indulge in Aristotelian theoria or the vita contemplative of the Middle Ages. (Presumably those nameless peasants would have been happy to retire even if they did not use their leisure time to contemplate the mysteries of the Unmoved Mover. In fact, we don’t know one way or the other: As Lutz points out, one of the great lacunas in human history is what people think about work.)
Lutz dispels the notion that the Judeo-Christian tradition is the source of the modern work ethic. “Antipathy toward labor, we might even say, has been the norm since the beginning of time: in Genesis, when God expels Adam and Eve from Paradise, he does so with a host of curses, damning Eve to experience pain in childbirth and subjugation to her husband, and he damns both of them to a life of labor, saying ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.’ The necessity to work for survival is thus, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the original curse, the punishment for the original sin.”
Indeed, Lutz reminds us that, contrary to the pious homilies of conservative Bible-thumpers, neither the Old nor the New Testament contain the “internalized work ethic counseled by later sermonizers”; in the Bible work is “primarily a diminishment rather than an expression of human being.” (In this light, George W. Bush — whose lifelong aversion to work Lutz describes in rigorous detail, and whom he lists as a prototypical draft-dodging slacker of his era — may be seen as embodying the deepest precepts of that Christianity he so piously avows.)
But this venerable disdain for work, Lutz argues, is not slackerdom. Until very recently, he writes, “Everyone, we might say, was a slacker” — which means that no one was. What, then, is a slacker? Lutz gives several different definitions — a necessary move, considering the bewildering variety of shuffling and recalcitrant ne’er-do-wells he must try to whip into some kind of conceptual shape. Obviously, slackers are people who deride or avoid work and sing the praises of idleness. But that definition would cover everyone from Cro-Magnon man to Bertie Wooster to Sgt. Bilko. Lutz narrows the field down by starting slackerdom at the outset of the Industrial Revolution, about 250 years ago — the age when “work” acquired its modern meaning.
The slacker takes the stage, Lutz says, whenever the “world of work undergoes serious structural change. The change from an economy of manual farming and manufacturing to one of mechanized farming and factories in the eighteenth century, the change from a manufacturing economy to a service economy in the middle of the twentieth century, and the change in the 1980s from a world of paper to a world of bytes are in many ways very different, but they have had a number of comparable effects.”
The key factor, Lutz notes, is insecurity: Generations who feel that they may not be as well off as their parents tend to produce slackers. “There may be ethnic or racial slurs about laziness in the lower classes, but slackers are almost entirely middle-class or already on their way down to meet it.” However, Lutz refuses to define the slacker in strictly economic terms. “Many of my academic colleagues want me to say that it is ‘just the economy, stupid,’ that the slacker is a class phenomenon, but it is not that easy,” he writes.
For Lutz, then, slackers are members of the modern (starting circa 1750) middle class who are spurred into their manifestoes or stances of rejection when their class undergoes a structural change. They are also people who not only did nothing but who also wrote about doing nothing. Since no one wrote slacker manifestoes before 1750 or so, this makes Lutz’s definition feel airtight.
By narrowing his focus, Lutz keeps the concept of the slacker from becoming unwieldy. But there are obvious objections to his historical definition. What’s so magic, for example, about 1750? Or capitalism? One could argue that certain pre-capitalist social movements contained elements of slackerism. Take the Ranters, that heretical anarcho-mystical group that sprung up during and after the English Civil War. As Norman Cohn points out in “The Pursuit of the Millennium,” the Ranters and similar millenarian groups attracted members of threatened and marginalized social groups — “peasants without land or with too little land even for subsistence; journeymen and unskilled workers living under the continuous threat of unemployment” — groups analogous, making due allowance for the difference in historical context, to the threatened manufacturing workers or paper-pushers cited by Lutz.
And the Ranters shared other traits with slackers. Cohn notes that many of the Ranters basically dropped out of the work world: They shared property (as well as each other’s wives), refused to repay debts, and lived on charity. A contemporary text called “The Ranters Religion” notes, “That idlenesse is the mother of all mischiefe was never so evidently proved, as by the … Ranters, a people so dronish, that the whole course of their lives is but one continued Scene of Sottishness…” Millenarian kooks? Totally! But hard-partying slackers, too!
Of course the Ranters, and the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the medieval eschatological gnostics from whom they descended, were religious movements. But theirs was a religious age, and one could argue that economic dislocations — and perhaps beneath those, the universal human desire not to work — were the real driving force behind them. John Ball, who led the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, famously preached, “When Adam delved and Eve span,/Who was then a gentleman?” From here to revolutionary movements like Marxism is but a short step. But Lutz will not go there: He confers slackerdom upon Karl Marx’s son-in-law, who in a priceless bit of historical irony wrote a screed titled “The Right to Be Lazy” before he and his equally aged wife committed dual suicide, but he denies that honor to the old workaholic communist himself.
Lutz would doubtless argue that revolutionary movements, being goal-oriented, communitarian, and celebratory or at least exhortatory, are fundamentally different from slackerism, which he sees as predominantly individualistic, reactive and melancholy. In one sense this is a fair distinction: None of the slacker groups or movements he discusses really have much of a program. It’s difficult to imagine an army of 19th century “nerve cases” storming the Bastille, or a horde of ascot-wearing, pipe-smoking “Playboys” rising up to demand greater libidinal satisfaction in their daily lives. (Although Greil Marcus, in his wildly sui generis book “Lipstick Traces,” makes a provocative case that punks — whom Lutz welcomes as anomic slackers — tried to do just that. Marcus even links the Sex Pistols to the Brethren of the Free Spirit.) Still, Lutz’s refusal to reduce the slacker to a strictly class phenomenon, and the heterogeneous groups he includes under the slacker rubric, make this distinction difficult to maintain. Revolutionary groups, too, are driven by hedonism and laziness and frustration with shitty jobs, not just by theory and fervor. The fact is that work is such a universal human preoccupation, and the modes of rebelling against it or simply trying to get out of it are so various, that just about any social movement that aspires to fundamentally change the conditions of work could be considered a version of slackerdom.
Lutz rejects this. For him slackers are conflicted middle-class rebels like himself, whose maverick sensibilities cannot untangle the coils that keep them trapped in conflicting attitudes toward work. Formed by the tension between work and leisure, the slacker is incapable of escaping it. He is a self-deconstructing entity. In its most rigorous form, then, Lutz’s definition rules out not just revolutionaries and pre-1750 slackers, but anyone in any era who has successfully checked out.
It’s a sophisticated, but disconcertingly dark and historically deterministic definition. Lutz is well aware of the constructed nature of the work ethic, of the “iron cage” of alienated, inescapable labor decried by Max Weber. But that awareness brings no liberation. We are all locked in Calvin’s Geneva, waiting for the spiritual police — into which we have turned ourselves — to burst in and discover that we are not working hard enough. For Lutz, the inability to either completely embrace or reject work is characteristic of the modern era, and slackerdom itself cannot escape it.
Lutz does acknowledge that joyousness, glee and wit are integral to the slacker ideal. A true child of the ’60s, Lutz would accept his son lying on the couch, as long as he did it in a sufficiently Dionysian way. When pondering his overheated reaction to Cody, he notes that “[m]y anger at my loafing son, however much it might have been directed by my own internalized work ethic, was also a desire that he experience some kind of Whitmanian loafing exuberance.” But Lutz is less interested in that exuberance than in the slacker’s duality, his uncertain relation to his own do-nothing program — the melancholy, irony and confusion that haunt his dreams of pure idleness, pleasurable vacancy, fulfilled indolence.
Lutz explores this duality brilliantly in a chapter contrasting Benjamin Franklin, apostle of hard work, and Samuel Johnson, author of “The Idler” and a famous proselytizer for slackerdom. In fact, Lutz points out, each man simultaneously played the opposite role. The nose-to-the-grindstone Franklin couldn’t keep his nose out of the décolleté of French ladies, and idling Johnson was a depressive who was extremely hardworking. Johnson, “the busy idler,” and Franklin, the “industrious dilettante,” created a series of complex and contradictory images about work and idlers, images “that may seem, at one level, like a call for converts, like an invitation to identity, but which are in fact riven with self-doubt … The slacker has rarely been the advertisement for himself he advertises himself to be.”
Lutz is surely right to deflate the sentimental vision of the slacker as staging a permanent successful getaway, like one of those nauseating advertising images of “relaxation” — beautiful man and beautiful woman on a deserted beach, holding drinks with little umbrellas in them — that now wander about unbidden in our ids, turning everything they touch to plastic. Still, there is something depressing about his definition. It is one thing to acknowledge that the “invitation to identity” held out by the slacker, which is at bottom the dream of productive and pleasurable leisure, is not easy to realize. But it is quite another to insist that try as we may, none of us — ulcer-ridden salarymen and stoned slackers alike — can ever escape the siren song of the work ethic.
Much of this can be explained by the fact that his subjects are by definition flawed slackers: If they weren’t, we wouldn’t know about them. As he points out, “The famous or almost famous idlers, loafers, loungers, and slackers throughout history had to produce work about not working in order for us to know them. And many of them, it turns out, were closet workaholics or reformed slackers. Anything even approaching uncorrupted firsthand testimony is impossible to find.” Discussing Richard Linklater’s film “Slackers,” he observes that Linklater himself is not a slacker — at 45, he has made 15 movies. “What can he really know of it? Real slackers would be, logically, too slack to write their own history.”
This may be true, but it raises a fundamental question: Is Lutz’s enterprise even possible? Finding a slacker, as Lutz defines him, is beginning to seem akin to the famous philosophical conundrum known as the “Cretan paradox.” (Epimenides the Cretan says “All Cretans are liars.” Is he lying or telling the truth? If he is telling the truth, he is lying; if he’s lying, he’s telling the truth.) But these kind of sterile conundrums only trap those who are locked into a priori definitions, and Lutz isn’t that dogmatic. He’s a historian of slacking, not a theorist of it, and he’s wise enough to let his characters take center stage. Lutz’s definition of the slacker may hint at a dark and claustrophobic conclusion, but when he actually engages with his subjects a happier portrait emerges.
Throughout his stimulating tour of slackers through the years, Lutz does not rule out the possibility that some of them succeeded in their quest for the cosmic Barcalounger. There are depressives and lost souls here, but also lords of misrule, kings of the permanent spiritual vacation, happy outlaws who could and sometimes did succeed in thumbing their nose at the system or simply in walking away with enough swag to live life on their own terms.
That some lucky souls succeed in slacking to their heart’s content seems irrefutable. Take retirement and wealth, two subjects Lutz somewhat inexplicably ignores. People retire at all ages; some retire never having worked at all. People are born rich, inherit money, make a killing at 30, win the lottery. For some of them, instant retirement is challenging; guilt, nihilism, the difficulty of constructing a meaningful world without external constraints, loom. But many of them are quite happy — and surely some of this group, too, can be defined as slackers. There is, after all, no law that says that one can only receive a get-out-of-Calvinist-guilt pass when one hits 65. (In this light, the ultimate slacker may be that tough 60ish businessman in the ad who boasts to a youthful underling that he subscribes to some phone service or other because it’s “my way of sticking it to the man.” When the underling says, “But you are the man. Does that mean you’re sticking it to yourself?” he says, “Maybe” — thus simultaneously enjoying the rewards of being a slacker and the boss.)
Lutz does not investigate these familiar (and admittedly banal) examples of “successful” slackers, but he does acknowledge that the slacker has a legitimate goal. “Slackers are precisely those who argue that the good life is better than the good job. We don’t have to quit our jobs to feel the full force of the argument … The demand made by those who attack the work ethic is that we ask: Are the goals we are working toward worthy? Do we believe our own rationales? Does our work deliver the implied promise of our work ethic? Are we wasting our lives?” In different ways, some of them ludicrous, some profound, most some combination of the two, Lutz’s loafers posed these questions.
And did more than pose them. “Doing Nothing” provides a fascinating account of the actual working conditions that formed a backdrop to slacking, or in some cases actually constituted it. In his chapter on “Loafers, Communists, Drinkers and Bohemians,” for example, Lutz points out that American laborers in the 19th century “were loath to accept the new, excessively regimented work schedule that factories attempted to impose.” In practice, this often meant a workday so bibulous that it made the martini-drenched afternoons supposedly enjoyed by ad executives in the ’50s look like models of ascetic restraint. “An owner of a New Jersey iron manufactory made the following notations in his diary over the course of a week:
All hands drunk.
Jacob Ventling hunting.
Molders all agree to quit work and went to the beach.
Peter Cox very drunk.
Edward Rutter off a-drinking.
“At the shipyards, the same tendency to stop working at irregular intervals and drink was the rule. One ship’s carpenter at mid-century described a daily round of breaks for cakes and candy at least every two hours, a whiskey-soaked lunch, and regular trips to the ‘convenient grog-shops.’ Although some never went drinking, he said, others ‘sailed out pretty regularly ten times a day on the average’ for whiskey. Management attempts to stop such midday drinking breaks were routinely met with strikes and sometimes resulted in riots.” Compared with this workers’ paradise, the dot-com office of alleged yore with its Aeron chairs, nap room, espresso cart and foosball table resembles a work gang in Auschwitz.
Beyond the social history of slacking, Lutz is interested in that ambiguous moment when the motives that drive it — revulsion at meaningless work and personal and spiritual ideals — collide with reality. Once he breaks out of the 9 to 5, the slacker still has to engage with himself, has to use his time in a world unstructured by The Man, by the clock or by guilt. If the most entertaining parts of “Doing Nothing” are Lutz’s sketches of slackers throughout history, the most thoughtful are his attempts to describe the slacker’s positive goals — and why they are both worthwhile and difficult to achieve.
His analysis takes him to the insightful analyst Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who argues that the key to gratification is completely absorbing work — he calls it “flow.” The concept of play, upheld by the Beats and other artistic renegades and slackers, offers another path. Nietzsche united the concepts of work and play when he wrote, “A man’s maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child at play.” This could stand as every artist’s credo, and indeed, one could argue that the slacker’s dream of a full life is really the dream — alluring, but not easy to achieve — of living like an artist.
Lutz does not directly make this connection, but he touches on a similar theme. In the course of realizing he needn’t have been so worried about Cody, he invokes Buddhism. “As the Beats — who rediscovered in Buddhism a do-nothing philosophy — argued, doing nothing is far from easy. It is a discipline, a practice. ‘To do nothing is the most difficult thing in the world,’ Oscar Wilde wrote a half-century before them, ‘the most difficult and the most intellectual.’ The Way of the Loafer is steep and hard. Sometimes one needs to hunker down and work to relieve the pressure. ‘I have achieved satori,’ the Zen monk said to his master in a famous koan. ‘Now what do I do?’ ‘You could sweep the floor,’ the master replied. After doing nothing, doing something is the only next move.”
In 1958, the Paris Review’s George Plimpton wrote his Paris editor with a grand proposal. The Russian author Boris Pasternak had just been awarded the Nobel Prize. But under pressure from the Soviets — humiliated that “Dr. Zhivago” had to be smuggled out of the country — he refused it. “The Pasternak affair has caused such a stir here,” writes Plimpton from the journal’s New York office, “and is in itself an event of such importance in lit’r’y history that we feel the Review somehow should chronicle what has happened…” Writing to Nelson Aldrich, the Paris editor, Plimpton suggests short statements by a “variety of authors asked to comment. What does Sartre have to say on this matter … Aragon, Neruda, Waugh? Here [in New York] we have Niccolo Tucci … digging up statements, mostly from writers who (as he is himself) are refugees from tyranny…” Plimpton goes on to suggest that the Congress for Cultural Freedom, largely and covertly funded by the CIA, might fund brochures to help publicize the issue.
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.
- – - – - – - – - – - – - -
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.
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – -
“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.
- – - – - – - – - – - – - -
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.
- – - – - – - – - – - – -
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?”
- – - – - – - – - – - – - -
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.
Lucie Blackman, 21, went out for the afternoon in 2000, phoning her roommate and best friend Louise to arrange a meeting later that night. Lucie never showed up, and within a few days she’d become one of those vanished blondes whose fates fuel headlines and hours of speculative media coverage. She was British, a former flight attendant, and she and Louise were living in Tokyo. They were also bar hostesses, a profession with a very specific meaning in Japan, difficult to explain to foreigners and not entirely clear to the Japanese themselves. Lucie both did and didn’t match the classic Missing Blonde profile, and for a while the mystery of what happened to her threatened to lapse into permanent obscurity.
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.
(Credit: Salon) 
(Credit: iStockphoto/caracterdesign) 
Andrew Blum 
(Credit: Salon) 
Joji Obara and Lucie Blackman (Credit: Estate of Lucie Jane Blackman) 
