A short life of the author
Harry Mathews (14 February 1930 – 25 January 2017) was an American novelist, poet, essayist, and translator who spent most of his life in Paris and was the first — and for decades the only — American member of the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle), the French literary group founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais in 1960 and devoted to the exploration of constrained writing — literature produced according to formal rules, mathematical structures, and procedural constraints. Mathews’s novels, which include The Conversions (1962), Tlooth (1966), The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium (1975), and Cigarettes (1987), are among the most intellectually ambitious and genuinely original works of American fiction written in the second half of the twentieth century. Almost nobody has read them.
Life
Mathews was born in New York City into a wealthy family. He was educated at Harvard, where he studied music, and at the École Normale de Musique in Paris. He originally intended to be a composer but turned to writing in his late twenties. He married the artist Niki de Saint Phalle (they later divorced) and settled permanently in Paris, where he lived for most of his adult life, writing in English in a French literary milieu.
In 1961, he co-founded the literary magazine Locus Solus (named after Raymond Roussel’s novel) with John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler — the core poets of the New York School — and the magazine published some of the most important experimental American writing of the early 1960s. His friendship with these poets, and with Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, and other Oulipians, placed Mathews at the centre of two literary worlds that rarely overlapped.
He was inducted into the Oulipo in 1973, invited by Perec, and remained an active member for the rest of his life, contributing constrained texts, algorithms, and theoretical writings to the group’s collective project.
The Novels
The Conversions (1962) — Mathews’s first novel — is a quest narrative in which the protagonist must solve three riddles to inherit a fortune. The quest takes him through an increasingly bewildering series of adventures — involving worm races, eccentric scholars, and obscure mythologies — and the riddles are never solved. The novel is a parody of the adventure novel that is also a genuine adventure, written in lucid, elegant prose that makes its labyrinthine plot seem almost reasonable.
Tlooth (1966) is set partly in a Soviet prison camp and partly in various exotic locations around the world. The narrator — whose gender is never specified — plots revenge against a camp surgeon. The novel is structured around a series of constrained patterns (hidden from the reader) and is simultaneously a thriller, a comedy, and a meditation on the nature of narrative itself.
The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium (1975) is an epistolary novel composed of letters between an Italian wife and her American husband, both of whom are searching for a hidden treasure in Southeast Asia. The novel’s structure — two interleaved sets of letters — produces a narrative of escalating confusion and comedy.
Cigarettes (1987) is generally considered Mathews’s masterpiece — a multi-character novel set among the moneyed classes of New York and the Hamptons, structured around an elaborate system of formal constraints derived from permutation mathematics. Each chapter focuses on a pair of characters, and the overall structure maps a mathematical pattern that the reader need not perceive but that gives the novel its distinctive shape. The subject matter — love, jealousy, money, art, and the social cruelties of the American upper class — is surprisingly conventional for a writer associated with formal experimentation, and the result is Mathews’s most emotionally engaging and most accessible work.
Poetry and Other Work
Mathews published several collections of poetry, including Armenian Papers (1987) and A Mid-Season Sky (1992), which employ Oulipian constraints — including the “mathews algorithm,” a method for generating new texts from existing ones that he contributed to the group’s repertoire.
The Journalist (1994) is a novel structured as the diary of an unnamed narrator who becomes obsessed with recording every detail of his life — an obsession that eventually consumes the life it attempts to document.
My Life in CIA (2005) is a memoir-novel about the period in Paris when Mathews was widely rumoured — incorrectly — to be a CIA agent, a rumour fuelled by his wealth, his American identity, and his association with secretive literary groups.
Critical Standing
Mathews is one of the great unread American novelists — a writer whose work is admired by virtually everyone who encounters it and encountered by almost nobody. His novels are published by small presses, are rarely reviewed in major publications, and are absent from most accounts of American fiction. This is a failure of the literary marketplace, not of the work itself. Cigarettes is a major American novel.
Collecting Mathews
The Conversions (1962, Random House) in first edition brings $100–$300 — the print run was small. Tlooth (1966, Doubleday) brings $50–$150. Cigarettes (1987, Weidenfeld & Nicolson) brings $40–$100. Mathews’s books are genuinely scarce in first edition — a reflection of their small print runs — and are increasingly collected by specialists in experimental fiction.