Harry Mathews
Harry Mathews (
February
14,
1930 - ) is an American author of
various novels, volumes of poetry and short fiction, and
essays.
Life
Born in
New York City to an upper middle class family, Mathews was educated
at private schools there and at the Groton
School in Massachusetts before enrolling at Princeton
University
in 1947. He left Princeton in his sophomore
year for a tour in the US Navy, during the course of which (in
1949) he eloped with the artist
Niki de Saint Phalle, a childhood
friend.
His military service completed, Mathews
transferred to Harvard
University
in 1950; the couple's first child, a daughter, was born the following
year. After Mathews graduated in 1952 with a B.A. in music,
the family moved to Europe; a second child, a son, was born in
1955. Mathews and de Saint Phalle later divorced. De Saint Phalle
was later married to Swiss artist
Jean
Tinguely.
Together with
John Ashbery,
James Schuyler, and
Kenneth Koch, Mathews founded and edited the
short-lived but influential literary journal
Locus Solus (named after a novel
by
Raymond Roussel, one of Mathews's
chief early influences).
Harry Mathews was the second American chosen for membership in the
French literary society known as the
Oulipo,
which is dedicated to exploring new possibilities in literature, in
particular through the use of various constraints and algorithms.
The late French writer
Georges Perec,
likewise a member, was a good friend, and the two translated some
of each other's writings. Mathews considers many of his works to be
Oulipian in nature, but even before he encountered the society he
was working in a parallel direction.
Mathews is currently married to the writer
Marie Chaix and divides his time between Paris,
Key West, and New York.
The novels
Mathews's first three novels share a common approach, though their
stories and characters are not connected. Originally published as
separate works (the third in serialization in
The Paris Review), they were gathered
in one omnibus volume in 1975 as
The Sinking of the Odradek
Stadium and Other Novels, but have since been reprinted as
individual volumes. Each novel displays the author's knack for
wildly improbable narrative invention, his gift for deadpan humor,
and his delight in leading the reader down obscure (and often
imaginary) avenues of learning.
At the outset of his first novel,
The Conversions, the
narrator is invited to an evening's social gathering at the home of
a wealthy and powerful eccentric named Grent Wayl. During the
course of the evening he is invited to take part in an elaborately
staged party game, involving, among other things, a race between
several small worms. The race having apparently been rigged by
Wayl, the narrator is declared the victor and takes home his prize,
an
adze with curious designs, apparently of a
ritual nature, engraved on it. Not long after the party, Wayl dies,
and the bulk of his vast estate is left to whosoever possesses the
adze, providing that he or she can answer three riddling questions
relating to its nature. The balance of the book is concerned with
the narrator's attempts to answer the three questions, attempts
that lead him through a series of digressions and
stories-within-a-story, many of them quite diverting in themselves.
The book has some superficial affinities with
Pynchon's
The
Crying of Lot 49, but Mathews is at once easier to read
(he is frequently quite funny) and harder to pin down; the reader,
like the narrator, is never sure to what extent he has fallen
victim to a hoax. Much of the material dealing with the ritual
adze, and the underground cult that it is related to, borrows from
Robert Graves's
The White Goddess. The book concludes
with two appendices, one in German.
His next novel,
Tlooth, begins in a bizarre Siberian
prison camp, where the inmates are divided according to their
affiliation with obscure religious denominations (Americanist,
Darbyist, Defective Baptist, and so on), and where baseball,
dentistry, and plotting revenge against other inmates are the chief
pastimes. A small group of inmates, including the narrator, plot
their escape, which they carry out by constructing an ingenious
getaway vehicle. After fleeing south and over the Himalayas, they
split up; the later sections of the novel, which take place in
various locales (chiefly Italy), are concerned with the narrator's
attempts to track down and do away with another inmate, Evelyn
Roak, who had been responsible for mutilating the narrator's
fingers. Most of the major characters have gender-ambivalent names,
and it is only towards the end of the book that we are given some
indication of whether they are actually male or female. As in
The Conversions, there are numerous engaging subplots that
advance the main action only minimally but which provide
considerable amusement.
The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, like
The
Conversions, is the story of a hunt for treasure, this time
told through a series of letters between a Southeast Asian woman
named Twang and her American husband, Zachary McCaltex. The couple
are researching the fate of a vanished cargo of gold that once
belonged to the Medici family. As in the earlier novels, there are
various odd occurrences and ambiguous conspiracies; many of the
book's more interesting set-pieces revolve around a secret society
(The Knights of the Spindle), which Zachary is invited to join.
Reflecting the author's interest in different languages, one
pivotal letter in the book is written in the (fictitious) idiom of
Twang's (fictitious) homeland, and to translate it the reader must
refer back to earlier chapters to find the meanings of the words.
In a typical Mathews conceit, the title of the novel is apparently
meaningless until the reader reaches the final pages, at which
point it reveals an important twist in the story that is nowhere
revealed in the text of the book itself. The novel is provided with
an index, which may be deliberately unreliable.
David Maurer's
The
Big Con provided Mathews with a number of slang terms, and
possibly some plot elements as well. Another apparent source was
The Rise and Decline of the Medici
Bank: 1397-1494 by Raymond de Roover; Mathews implicitly
acknowledged his debt by introducing de Roover and his wife in the
text as minor characters.
Mathews's next novel,
Cigarettes, marked a change in his
work. Less whimsical but no less technically sophisticated than his
first three novels, it consists of an interlocking series of
narratives revolving around a small group of interconnected
characters. The book's manner is generally quite realistic, and
Cigarettes is ultimately quite moving in a way that none
of his previous books attempted to be.
My Life in CIA, his most recent novel (if it is indeed
fiction) is purportedly Mathews's memoir of a period in his life in
which he was mistaken for a CIA agent and decided to play along and
pretend that he in fact was one, with
unintended consequences.
Other works
Mathews's shorter writings frequently cross or deliberately confuse
genres. A case in point is the piece entitled "Country Cooking from
Central France: Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce
Double)." Originally included in an issue of the literary magazine
Antaeus devoted to
travel essays, it is ostensibly a recipe with extended commentary,
but was later used as the title story for a collection of the
author's short fiction. Another example is the title section of
Armenian Papers: Poems 1954 - 1984: actually prose, this
purports to be (but evidently is not) a translation from a
fragmentary medieval manuscript.
Among the more important collections of his miscellaneous works are
Immeasurable Distances, a gathering of his essays;
The
Human Country: New and Collected Stories; and
The Way
Home: Selected Longer Prose. Other works of interest include
Twenty Lines a Day, a journal; and
The Orchard, a
brief memoir of his friendship with
Georges Perec.
Mathews is the inventor of "
Mathews'
Algorithm," a method for producing literary works by
transmuting elements (for instance, a starting text) according to a
predetermined set of rules.
Appearances in fiction
Harry Mathews, along with Marie Chaix, appears as a minor character
in the novel
What I Have Written by
John A. Scott.
Bibliography
Partial list of works:
- (1997 reprint) (novel)
- (novel)
- The Ring: Poems 1956-1969 (1970)
- The Planisphere (poetry) (1974)
- (novel)
- Le Savoir des rois (poetry) (1976)
- Trial Impressions (poetry) (1977)
- Selected Declarations of Dependence (poems and short
fiction) (1977)
- Country Cooking and Other Stories (fiction) (1980)
ISBN 0-930900-82-0
- La cantatrice sauve (fiction) (1981)
- Plaisirs singuliers (fiction, in French) (1983) (later
published in English as
- La Verger (memoir, in French) (1986) (in English 1988
as The Orchard: A Remembrance of Georges Perec)
- (novel)
- Armenian Papers: Poems 1954-1984 (Princeton University
Press) (1987) ISBN 0-691-01440-X
- (journal)
- Out of Bounds (poetry) (Burning Deck,1989) ISBN
0-930901-61-4
- Écrits français (1990)
- Immeasurable Distances: The Collected Essays (1991)
ISBN 0-932499-43-0
- A Mid-Season Sky: Poems 1954-1991 (poetry) (1992)
- Giandomenico Tiepolo (1993) ISBN 2-908958-65-1
- (novel)
- Epithalamium for Judith Kazantzis and Irving Weinman
(poem, with collages by Marie Chaix) (Grenfell Press, 1998)
(private edition)
- Alphabet Gourmand (English text) (Seuil Jeunesse)
(1998) ISBN 2-02-030409-0
- The Way Home: Selected Longer Prose (1999) ISBN
1-900565-05-6
- Sainte Catherine (fiction, in French) (2000)
- The Human Country (short stories) (Dalkey Archive,
2002) ISBN 1-56478-321-9
- (essays)
- My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973 (memoir/novel)
(Dalkey Archive Press, 2005) ISBN 1-56478-392-8
Collaborations
References
- Leamon, Warren Harry Mathews (1993) ISBN
0-8057-4008-2
- McPherson, William "Harry Mathews: A Checklist" The Review
of Contemporary Fiction: Harry Mathews Number (1987)
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