"After the navy, I transferred to Harvard and finished there. I was there the spring term of 1951 and I stayed through the summer term and a whole other year, so I was able to do two years in a little less than a year and a half.""And I finished college because I thought how much it would upset my parents if I didn't.""And then, when I left Princeton in the middle of my sophomore year, I went into the navy.""I also had this mistaken dream, fantasy really - perhaps because I'm good at languages - of being able in both Italy and France to become someone else through my fluency in the language.""I graduated in 1952 and went to Europe, with Niki and our first child Laura, who was then a year old.""I left Princeton, but I graduated Harvard, in 1952.""I love teaching.""I think situations are more important than plot and character.""I thought Cheever was magnificent and that if I could write like him that would be the best I could do. And then I realized that what I really wanted to write had nothing to do with what he was doing.""I was immediately smitten with an attraction to this culture, not in the sense of high culture but of the basic way people behaved towards one another.""I was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, for a while, about which the less said the better, and then I was in the Mediterranean, about which the more said the better.""I'd been brought up on the Upper East Side in a WASP society, which was death on crutches.""It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step.""It's true, I had an extremely delicious life, but that was my life at home, and perhaps because I was only a child, or for whatever reasons, I found the company of others, especially other boys, quite terrifying and upsetting.""Music had been my first love among the arts, and I was fascinated by it, as I still am.""My dream, I remember, when I went to boarding school, was to have a study all my own, a little nook someplace where nobody could get at me - nobody, like the football coach.""My idea was to go to Vienna to study conducting and perhaps play in an orchestra first, so I thought before I got to Vienna I could do with a little training in Paris.""My Life in CIA is the first time that I've ever written a story in my own name.""My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.""Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence.""Well, my relationship to America at the time I left was very limited.""Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.""What I said about John was that he liberated me from my anxieties about writing in a correct, acceptable way.""What I wanted to do and what I needed to do was something entirely different, and through reading Roussel I learned that I could do what I wanted all on my own and that I didn't have to rely on what had actually happened in my somewhat limited life and reading.""When Niki and I moved to Paris, there was also the challenge of Paris, an extremely daunting city."
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 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 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.
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.
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.
Selected Declarations of Dependence. Z Press, Calais, Vt., 1977. With Alex Katz. Repr.: Sun & Moon, 1996. (poems and short fiction)
Country Cooking and Other Stories. Burning Deck, Providence, R.I., 1980. ISBN 0-930900-82-0
La cantatrice sauve. 1981. (fiction)
Plaisirs singuliers. P.O.L., Paris 1983. (fiction, in French). Singular Pleasures. The Grenfell Press, New York 1988. With Francesco Clemente. Dalkey Archive, 1999. [1] ISBN 9781564782335
La Verger. P.O.L., Paris 1986. (memoir, in French). The Orchard: A Remembrance of Georges Perec.
Armenian Papers: Poems 1954-1984. Princeton University Press, 1987. ISBN 0-691-01440-X
The Orchard: A Rememberance of Georges Perec. Bamberger Books, 1988. (rememberance)
20 Lines a Day. Dalkey Archive, Normal, Il., 1988. ISBN 0-916583-41-4. [3] (journal)
The Way Home: Collected Longer Prose. Grenfell Press, New York 1988. With Trevor Winkfield. ISBN 1-900565-05-6. (includes The Orchard, 1988, and Autobiography, from: Contemporary Authors, Autobiography Series. Gale, Detroit 1988)
Out of Bounds Burning Deck, Providence, R. I., 1989. ISBN 0-930901-61-4. (poetry)
Écrits français. Oulipo, Paris 1990.
Immeasurable Distances: The Collected Essays. 1991. ISBN 0-932499-43-0
A Mid-Season Sky: Poems 1954-1991. Carcanet, Manchester 1992.
Giandomenico Tiepolo. Editions Flohic, Charenton 1993. ISBN 2-908958-65-1 (essay)
The Journalist. David R. Godine Books, Boston 1994. Repr.: Dalkey Archive, 1997. [4] ISBN 9781564781659. (fiction)
Epithalamium for Judith Kazantzis and Irving Weinman. Grenfell Press, 1998. (poem). With collages by Marie Chaix.
Stefano Baroni, Paul Fournel, Harry Mathews, Boris Tissot: Alphabet Gourmand. Seuil Jeunesse, 1998. ISBN 2-02-030409-0
Sainte Catherine. Editions P.O.L., 2000. (fiction, in French).
The Human Country: New and Collected Stories. Dalkey Archive, 2002. ISBN 1-56478-321-9
The Case of the Persevering Maltese Dalkey Archive, 2003. ISBN 9781564782885 [5] (essays)
Day Shifts. Editions de la Mule de Cristal, Brussels 2004. (poetry). With Jean-Marc Scanreigh.
My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973. Dalkey Archive Press, 2005. ISBN 1-56478-392-8 (memoir or fiction)
The New Tourism. Sand Paper Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-9843312-3-9 (poems)
Collaborations
S: Semaines de Suzanne (1997), with Jean Echenoz, Mark Polizzotti, Florence Delay, Olivier Rolin, Sonja Greenlee, & Patrick Deville
Oulipo Compendium (1998), as editor, with Alastair Brotchie. ISBN 0-947757-96-1
