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In 1962 Random House published a first novel by a thirty-two-year-old American living in Paris named Harry Mathews. The Conversions is an adventure story about a man trying to decipher the meaning of carvings on an ancient weapon, and it unfolds in a succession of bizarre anecdotes and obscure quotations, with an appendix in German. One particularly trying passage is written in a language once popular with schoolchildren that involves adding arag before most vowels. Furthermore is faragurtharagger-maragore and indulgences is araggindaragulgearaggencearagges.
The book was considered groundbreaking by a certain literary set. Terry Southern called it a “startling piece of work,” and George Plimpton published a seventy-page excerpt in The Paris Review. Mathews’s agent Maxine Groffsky, then in her first job after college in the editorial department at Random House, says that reading The Conversions was like “seeing Merce Cunningham for the first time.” But it baffled most of the reading public, including the poor Time critic who complained that the symbolism “spreads through the novel like crab grass.”
Mathews is one of American literature’s great idiosyncratic figures. His friend Georges Perec, who once wrote a novel without using the letter e, has accused him of following “rules from another planet.” He is usually identified as the sole American member of the Oulipo, a French writers’ group whose stated purpose is to devise mathematical structures that can be used to create literature. He has also been associated with the New York School of avant-garde writers, which included his friends John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch. After forty-five years of congenital allergy to convention, he rightfully belongs to the experimentalist tradition of Kafka, Beckett, and Joyce, even though his classical, witty style has won him comparisons to Nabokov, Jane Austen, and Evelyn Waugh. Yet while he enjoys the attention of thousands of cultishly enthusiastic French readers, Mathews remains relatively unknown in his native land and language. “When I go into an English bookstore, I always ask the same question,” a Frenchman told me with the sly smile that infects all Mathews fans. “‘Do you have Tlooth?’”
Tlooth, Mathews’s second novel, came out in 1966. It begins with a baseball game at a Siberian prison camp. His next book, The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium (1975), is considered by many to be his masterpiece. Twenty-five publishers rejected it, which isn’t entirely surprising given that half of it is written in an invented pidgin English. Mathews used an Oulipian mathematical scheme to create the plot of his fourth novel, Cigarettes (1987). His last two novels are deceptively straightforward. The Journalist (1994) is the diary of a man obsessed by his diary. My Life in CIA (2005), an “autobiographical novel,” begins reassuringly as a memoir only to devolve into the preposterous, ending with the protagonist Harry Mathews tending sheep in the Alps after attempting murder by ski pole.
In reality, the self-described refugee from the Upper East Side has lived in Paris on and off since the fifties, though he does spend summers in the Alps and he says “there are sheep nearby.” Mathews was born in Manhattan in 1930, the only child of an architect and a cold-water-flats heiress. After dutifully attending Princeton for two years, he dropped out and joined the navy, then eloped at nineteen with the artist Niki de Saint Phalle. He finished his studies at Harvard, majoring in music, and in 1952 moved to Paris where he briefly studied conducting before deciding to write poetry full time. In 1956 Mathews met Ashbery, who was in France on a Fulbright scholarship. The poet introduced him to the works of Raymond Roussel, the early-twentieth-century French avant-gardist. After reading Roussel, Mathews turned to prose.
A novelist, poet, essayist, and translator, Mathews is also the author of many short works, including Twenty Lines a Day (1988), the result of more than a year spent following Stendhal’s dictum to write “twenty lines a day, genius or not,” and Singular Pleasures (1983), a series of sixty-one vignettes describing masturbation scenes. A volume of his collected short stories, The Human Country, was published in 2002.
Mathews and his second wife, the French writer Marie Chaix, split their time between France, New York City, and Key West, Florida. This interview took place over several afternoons in the pleasantly worn living room of Mathews’s apartment on the rue de Grenelle in Paris. A ceramic sculpture by Saint Phalle sat on the mantelpiece next to smoky mirrored walls. Tall, courteous, cigar-smoking, Mathews wore an unusual vest, faintly Indian. A long silver chain hung from his velvet pants, suggesting a pocket watch, though it was later revealed to be an enormous key ring. Mathews speaks with the nearly extinct mid-Atlantic accent that can carry off rather and alas. Then again, as an adult of the seventies, he will occasionally talk about sex (“fucking”) in a casual way that might surprise younger generations.
At one point we were interrupted by deafening honks. Mathews chuckled and said, “I can tell you exactly what that’s about.” He pointed out the window to a bus that was unable to make the turn onto the narrow street because of an illegally parked car. “See the no-parking sign in front of the car? It says ZONE DE GIRATION DE BUS. Where they came up with that, I have no idea. Bus gyration zone. Never has that formulation been used on earth before!”
—Susannah Hunnewell
INTERVIEWER
Do you have an audience in mind when you’re writing?
HARRY MATHEWS
I’ve always said that my ideal reader would be someone who after finishing one of my novels would throw it out the window, presumably from an upper floor of an apartment building in New York, and by the time it had landed would be taking the elevator down to retrieve it.
I suppose I must have had dreams of greater recognition, but I’ve always had the audience I wanted, and that was the audience that reads poetry. What I want is enthusiasm among friends and their friends, people who I know are serious readers.
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INTERVIEWER
You met John Ashbery in Paris. What was his influence on you?
MATHEWS
What I think of as my writing life began when I met him. He had already published his first book. But he never spoke much about poetry. He was very proper, though he led another life at night, when he drank and carried on. He told me about modern French poets like Pierre Reverdy and Henri Michaux. I hadn’t read any of them. A couple of weeks later, I gave him a poem. He read it and said, I see you read all those poets that I recommended to you. But I hadn’t. His mentioning them and briefly describing them were enough to transform my writing. That’s the way things work. I’ve always said that I was greatly influenced by Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, although I’ve never read them.
There was another very important thing he did. When I asked him, Is it OK to do this or that in a poem, he told me I could do anything I wanted. And that was bye-bye New Yorker models—or any other models, for that matter. In my life, that was a radical shift. I’d always been anxious about getting things right.
INTERVIEWER
Did Ashbery introduce you to any writers whose work you did read?
MATHEWS
Yes, thanks to John I began reading Raymond Roussel. Roussel had methodical approaches to writing fiction that completely excluded psychology. In the American novel, what else is there? If you don’t have psychology, people don’t see the words on the page. What was really holding me up was this idea that you had to have character development, relationships, and that this was the substance of the novel. Indeed, it is the substance of many novels, including extraordinary ones. But I had tried writing works involving psychology and characters and all that, and the results were terrible. In Roussel I discovered you could write prose the way you do poetry. You don’t approach it from the idea that what you have to say is inside you. It’s a materialist approach, for want of a better word. You make something. You give up expressing and start inventing.
INTERVIEWER
Which of Roussel’s methods interested you?
MATHEWS
One method he used for short stories involved making the first and last sentence identical except for one letter. Each word has one meaning in the first sentence and a different one in the last. A word like train might be a choo-choo to start with and a trailing skirt-end afterward. In the longer works, he would take fragments of nursery rhymes and parrot them phonetically and then use the new words to construct a story. For instance, the song “J’ai du bon tabac” becomes “Jade tube onde aubade.”
INTERVIEWER
What is the point of such a method? What does it achieve?
MATHEWS
It’s very liberating. It allows you to make up something that you never would have if you didn’t have this nasty problem to solve. For example, in Selected Declarations of Dependence I gave myself the task of writing a story using the one hundred and eighty-five words that were found in forty-six proverbs. This is a forbiddingly small vocabulary. It was hard to know what to do with them. Then I started putting words together and a few words would lead to a sentence and then eventually it became this sweet love story. It was as though you were wandering through a jungle and suddenly you came into a clearing that is a beautifully composed garden. It’s extraordinary, the feeling it gives you.
INTERVIEWER
So Roussel provided a model for The Conversions?
MATHEWS
I didn’t use his methods specifically, but mine were similar in that they were based on relationships between words, often puns. The whole thing is based on misunderstanding language. Arriving at a party, the narrator is told that a song being sung is “The Sheik of Araby,” but what he hears is “the cheek of our Bea,” Bea being the daughter of the house. That kind of thing goes on throughout the book.
INTERVIEWER
How did people react to it?
MATHEWS
Kenneth Koch had put the manuscript in Jason Epstein’s hands at Random House, and his reaction was, Well, I can’t not publish it. But when it came out, except for a handful of readers, nobody could see what was there. They kept trying to read through the text rather than just reading it. When Dwight Macdonald saw me, he said, I didn’t imagine you looked like that. I think he was expecting a gnome. I had a surprising encounter with Bennett Cerf, who was head of Random House at the time. This was the man who published Ulysses. One day I was called in to his office. He said, Mr. Mathews, I don’t know what the hell you’re up to and I think you owe it to Random House readers to explain!
INTERVIEWER
What did you say?
MATHEWS
I hope I had the sense to say I hadn’t the faintest idea.
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