Harry Mathews
Experimental novelist whose ‘constrained’ writing techniques brought him a cult following
HARRY MATHEWS, who has died aged 86, was an American novelist whose works were so impenetrable they divided critics into those who regarded them as “groundbreaking” and those who threw up their hands in despair.
He was also, for many decades, the sole American member of Oulipo, a Parisian collective dedicated to creating literary works using predetermined “constrained” techniques such as mathematical formulas and limited vocabularies in the writing process, subverting the romantic notion of authorship as being about inspiration.
Mathews was living in Paris when he published his first book, The Conversions (1962), ostensibly an adventure story about a man trying to decipher mysterious carvings on an ancient ritual axe. It consisted of a succession of bizarre anecdotes, quotations and linguistic acrobatics, such as a passage in which the four letters “arag” are inserted before most vowels, so “furthermore” is “faragurtharaggermaragore” and so on. To add to the confusion, the appendix was in German.
The Paris Review was so impressed it printed a 70-page excerpt and Mathews became a cult figure among a certain type of mainly French literary connoisseur. But even his friend and fellow Oulipian, Georges Perec, the author of a novel written without the use of the letter “e”, accused him of following “rules from another planet”. Mathews would recall being summoned by Bennett Cerf, head of the book’s publishers Random House: “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’ … I hope I had the sense to say I hadn’t the faintest idea.” Yet Cerf, Mathews observed, had published Joyce’s Ulysses.
Tlooth (1966), Mathews’s second novel, a work of even wilder narrative invention, opens with a baseball game in a Siberian prison camp, “established during the Holy Alliance for the internment of heretics”, features escapees on a five-person bicycle, a tavern in Afghanistan that sells only sandwiches and drinks made of mustard, Arabs shading themselves with lavender-coloured parasols, and a nomad who carries a box labelled
The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium (1975), structured round an exchange of letters between a husband and wife in search of a vanished medieval cargo of gold, was half written in an invented pidgin English and was rejected by 25 publishers before it was accepted by Harper & Row. Yet fans considered it a masterpiece and cultists were equally delighted by Cigarettes (1987), in which Mathews used an Oulipian mathematical scheme to create the plot – a structure, he claimed confidently, that no one would ever figure out, “including me”.
Yet Mathews was perfectly capable of pleasing those who prefer literature of a more conventional narrative strain. Among the linguistic riffs in his short story collection, The Human Country, was a hilarious parody of a festschrift, a send-up of music scholarship, and Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double), a “recipe” in which the reader is exhorted to make tripe-skin pouches filled with quenelles, procure wild boar fat, dig a cooking pit and, to be truly authentic, sing an elaborate folk song: “It demands some patience, but you will be abundantly rewarded for your pains.”
Also accessible was My Life in CIA (2005), described as a “true” recollection of a year in 1970s Paris when Mathews was rumoured to be a CIA agent and, according to him, took up a friend’s suggestion that he should act the part.
The eponymous protagonist invents a fictitious “travel agency” and takes meandering walks through Paris, conspicuously picking up and dropping off mysterious-looking packages. As a result intelligence agencies queue up to hire his services and the plot becomes increasingly preposterous. In one scene Mathews is rolled up in a Persian rug and carried off to a party of strangers, whom he amuses by improvising verses while doing a dance called the Squat. Finally he ends up tending sheep in the Alps after attempting murder by ski pole.
“When I’m asked about the CIA book,” Mathews explained, “my answer is that it’s all true and it’s all false, like any book.”
Harry Burchell Mathews was born in Manhattan on St Valentine’s Day 1930. His father was an architect, his mother a wealthy heiress and patron of the arts. He was educated at the Groton School in Massachusetts, where he became “addicted” to poetry and literature and experienced an epiphany after reading Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.
He attended Princeton for two years before dropping out to join the navy, then eloped at 19 with the artist Niki de Saint Phalle, whom he married in 1949. The fact that the Saint Phalles were Catholic did not go down well with his Protestant family, who all but cut him off financially. The newlyweds took to shoplifting books and food.
They had a daughter, Laura, and, with family funds partially restored, Mathews, determined to keep his love of literature “unsullied by academia”, took a degree in Music at Harvard. The couple had a second child, Philip, although their parenting skills left a lot to be desired. Philip would recall that he and his sister were often left alone while their parents went out. On one occasion the children were left at a farm where the two-year-old Philip was run over by an ox cart, leaving him in a coma for several weeks.
In the early 1950s Mathews took his family to Paris, where he was supposed to study conducting at the École Normale de Musique but dropped out after three months. For most of the next decade they lived in Europe as itinerant bohemians.
At Saint-Germain-des-Prés they befriended the poet John Ashbery, who introduced Mathews to the works of Raymond Roussel, the French proto-surrealist, whose use of arbitrary rules and punning wordplay to create narrative would remain a huge influence on his work.
Later they followed some musician friends to a small town outside Nice, where, as Mathews recalled, “it was as if we had been possessed by the demons of the Mediterranean ... everything [seemed] to be encouraging sex.” Mathews began an affair with the French wife of an English lord, while his wife retaliated by having an affair with her husband. One night, however, Mathews’s mistress came to their home, and Niki de Saint Phalle attacked her, then swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. Soon afterwards she was dispatched to a psychiatric clinic. The couple separated in 1960 and divorced in 1964.
In the early 1960s, with John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, Mathews founded a literary magazine called Locus Solus, which lasted only four issues. He was elected a member of Oulipo in 1973 after rewriting Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci using the vocabulary from a Julia Child recipe for a cauliflower dish (and vice versa).
Mathews’s other works include The Journalist (1994), a novel in which the protagonist’s desire for realism in his diary gradually takes over the character’s life, books of poems, and Singular Pleasures (1983), a series of 61 vignettes describing masturbation, six of which, he claimed, had been dictated to him by an angel.
In later life Mathews and his second wife, the French writer Marie Chaix, divided their time between homes in France and the United States.
She survives him with the two children of his first marriage and two stepdaughters. Harry Mathews, born February 14 1930, died January 25 2017