The literary journal co-founder who came in from the cold
The New York Times reports on a new documentary about Harold L. Humes, a novelist who co-founded The Paris Review and who wrote two admired novels in the 1950s before he “succumbed to a mental illness that left him paranoid and peripatetic.”
The film, Doc, was made by Humes’ daughter, Immy. And as the Times notes, it contains one startling little tangent about another Paris Review co-founder, Peter Matthiessen.
But also intriguing to many is the documentary’s revelation of a C.I.A. connection to the history of The Paris Review. In the film, Mr. Matthiessen, best known as a novelist, environmental activist and advocate of American Indian rights, admits publicly for the first time that he was a young C.I.A. recruit at the time he helped start the magazine, and used it as his cover.
Meanwhile, persistent rumours that Q&Q is in fact a front for CSIS remain unsubstantiated. Seriously, people, there’s nothing there, let it go. (If you know what’s good for you.)
