Harry Mathews
Encyclopedia
Harry Mathews is an American author of various novels, volumes of poetry and short fiction, and essays.
in Massachusetts before enrolling at Princeton University
in 1947. He left Princeton in his sophomore year for a tour in the United States 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 separated in 1960.
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) from 1961 to 1962.
Harry Mathews was the first 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.
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 consequence
s.
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.
.
He also appears as a minor character in the novel The Correspondence Artist by Barbara Browning
.
Life
Born in New York City to an upper class family, Mathews was educated at private schools there and at the Groton SchoolGroton School
Groton School is a private, Episcopal, college preparatory boarding school located in Groton, Massachusetts, U.S. It enrolls approximately 375 boys and girls, from the eighth through twelfth grades...
in Massachusetts before enrolling at Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
in 1947. He left Princeton in his sophomore year for a tour in the United States Navy
United States Navy
The United States Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the seven uniformed services of the United States. The U.S. Navy is the largest in the world; its battle fleet tonnage is greater than that of the next 13 largest navies combined. The U.S...
, during the course of which (in 1949) he eloped with the artist Niki de Saint Phalle
Niki de Saint Phalle
Niki de Saint Phalle, born Catherine-Marie-Agnès-Brandon Fal de Saint Phalle was a French sculptor, painter, and film maker.-The early years:...
, a childhood friend. His military service completed, Mathews transferred to Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
in 1950; the couple's first child, a daughter
Laura Duke Condominas
Laura Duke Condominas, also known as Laura Duke, born Boston April 1951, is the daughter of French artist and film-maker Niki de Saint-Phalle and American novelist Harry Mathews. As an actress she is most notable for her portrayal of Guinevere in Robert Bresson's film Lancelot du lac of 1974.She...
, 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 separated in 1960.
Together with John Ashbery
John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...
, James Schuyler
James Schuyler
James Marcus Schuyler was an American poet whose awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1980 collection The Morning of the Poem...
, and Kenneth Koch
Kenneth Koch
Kenneth Koch was an American poet, playwright, and professor, active from the 1950s until his death at age 77...
, Mathews founded and edited the short-lived but influential literary journal Locus Solus
Locus Solus (journal)
Locus Solus was a journal of experimental poetry and prose that published five issues in 1961 and 1962. Locus Solus was edited by the novelist Harry Mathews and poets John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Jimmy Schuyler, all of whom contributed content. The journal was named after the novel Locus Solus...
(named after a novel by Raymond Roussel
Raymond Roussel
Raymond Roussel was a French poet, novelist, playwright, musician, and chess enthusiast. Through his novels, poems, and plays he exerted a profound influence on certain groups within 20th century French literature, including the Surrealists, Oulipo, and the authors of the nouveau...
, one of Mathews's chief early influences) from 1961 to 1962.
Harry Mathews was the first American chosen for membership in the French literary society known as the Oulipo
Oulipo
Oulipo is a loose gathering of French-speaking writers and mathematicians which seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais...
, 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
Georges Perec
Georges Perec was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist and essayist. He is a member of the Oulipo group...
, 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
Adze
An adze is a tool used for smoothing or carving rough-cut wood in hand woodworking. Generally, the user stands astride a board or log and swings the adze downwards towards his feet, chipping off pieces of wood, moving backwards as they go and leaving a relatively smooth surface behind...
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
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
's The Crying of Lot 49
The Crying of Lot 49
The Crying of Lot 49 is a novel by Thomas Pynchon, first published in 1966. The shortest of Pynchon's novels, it is about a woman, Oedipa Maas, possibly unearthing the centuries-old conflict between two mail distribution companies, Thurn und Taxis and the Trystero...
, 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
Robert Graves
Robert von Ranke Graves 24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985 was an English poet, translator and novelist. During his long life he produced more than 140 works...
's The White Goddess
The White Goddess
The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth is a book-length essay on the nature of poetic myth-making by author and poet Robert Graves. First published in 1948, based on earlier articles published in Wales magazine, corrected, revised and enlarged editions appeared in 1948, 1952 and 1961...
. 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
David Maurer
David Warren Maurer was a professor of linguistics at the University of Louisville from 1937 to 1972, and an author of numerous studies of the language of the American underworld....
'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
Medici bank
The Medici Bank was a financial institution created by the Medici family in Italy during the 15th century. It was the largest and most respected bank in Europe during its prime. There are some estimates that the Medici family was, for a period of time, the wealthiest family in Europe...
: 1397-1494 by Raymond de Roover
Raymond de Roover
Raymond Adrien de Roover , was a noted economic historian of medieval Europe, whose scholarship explained why Scholastic economic thought is best understood as a precursor of, and wholly compatible with, Classical economic thought. In his day, many economists such as R.H. Tawney taught that Karl...
; 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 consequence
Unintended consequence
In the social sciences, unintended consequences are outcomes that are not the outcomes intended by a purposeful action. The concept has long existed but was named and popularised in the 20th century by American sociologist Robert K. Merton...
s.
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 AntaeusAntaeus (magazine)
Antaeus was a literary quarterly founded by Daniel Halpern and Paul Bowles and edited by Daniel Halpern. It was originally published in Tangier, Morocco, but operations were later shifted to New York City. The first number appeared in the summer of 1970, the final issue in 1994...
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
Georges Perec
Georges Perec was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist and essayist. He is a member of the Oulipo group...
.
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. ScottJohn A. Scott
John Alan Scott is an English-Australian poet, novelist and academic....
.
He also appears as a minor character in the novel The Correspondence Artist by Barbara Browning
Barbara Browning
Barbara Browning is an American academic, novelist, dancer, and cultural critic.Browning received her B.A. in comparative literature from Yale University in 1983, spent a year in Brazil on a Fulbright fellowship, where she studied dance, and then returned to Yale to complete her Ph.D. in 1989...
.
Collaborations
- S: Semaines de Suzanne (1997), with Jean EchenozJean EchenozJean Echenoz is a French writer.Son of a psychiatrist, Echenoz studied in Rodez, Digne-les-Bains, Lyon, Aix-en-Provence, Marseille and Paris, where he lives since 1970. He published his first book, Le méridien de Greenwich in 1979...
, Mark Polizzotti, Florence DelayFlorence DelayFlorence Delay is a French academician and actress.-Biography:The daughter of Marie-Madeleine Carrez and Jean Delay, Delay studied at the Lycée Jean de La Fontaine and then the Sorbonne....
, Olivier RolinOlivier RolinOlivier Rolin is a French writer.He won the Prix Femina in 1994, for his novel Port-Soudan.His brother Jean is also a writer and journalist.-External links:*...
, Sonja Greenlee, & Patrick Deville - Oulipo Compendium (1998), as editor, with Alastair Brotchie. ISBN 0-947757-96-1
External links
- Digital version of Mathews' Epithalamium for Judith Kazantzis and Irving Weinman, with introductory note
- Beer, John Reading Harry Mathews
- Mathews, Harry Translation and the Oulipo: The Case of the Persevering Maltese
- An Interview with John Ashbery
- An Interview with John Ash
- Composing: Harry Mathews' Words & Worlds
- Harry Mathews / bibliographie
- Oulipo (official site; French)
- Podcast of "Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double)" as read by Isaiah Sheffer
- "Observations of a Crab," a short story by Harry Mathews on UpRightDown
- Living with Niki: Harry Mathews on Niki de Saint Phalle
- Review of "My Life in CIA" from nthposition.com