Harry Mathews

If you've not yet checked out the new issue of the Quarterly Conversation, by all means do so. In addition to the usual spate of strong reviews (including one from the always-worthwhile Patrick Kurp), the issue features a symposium on one of the most interesting living American writers, Harry Mathews.

I've written about Mathews and his strange, funny, linguistically and structurally experimental fiction before. If you've not read those posts, you should at least go check out the one that draws on his Paris Review interview and features a perplexed Bennett Cerf saying, about Mathews's novel The Conversions, "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!"

In the TQC symposium, Dan Visel takes a crack at explaining the book that baffled Cerf. Jeremy Davies writes about Mathews's most conventional novel, the surprisingly moving Cigarettes, as does A. D. Jameson, who focuses on the novel's complicated plot. Laird Hunt writes about another of my favorite Mathews novels, the dryly funny and playful My Life in CIA, John Beer addresses the poetry, and Daniel Levin Becker writes about Mathews's book of fractured proverbs, Selected Declarations of Dependence. Sadly, no one attends to Matthews's Singular Pleasures, a goofy book of microfictions that are all about masturbation. I guess that one's less appropriate for group analysis than for solo study.

And on top of all that there's my favorite piece, a memoir of discovering Mathews by none other than my fellow Invisible Librarian, Ed Park. After reading a few of these essays, you'll have a pretty good idea, I suspect, whether Mathews is for you--and if so, you'll be incredibly grateful, for he's a truly singular writer, one whose work, despite an often rebarbative surface, stays with you for a long time after reading.

Harry Mathews and the productive pleasures of constraints

Last week I urged you to go read the interview with Harry Mathews that the Paris Review published in 2007. A week later, I find I'm still carrying it around in my shoulder bag, flipping through it and thinking about it--especially about this exchange:

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 eight-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.

I happened to read that passage at what seemed to be the perfect moment: for the first time since grade school,* I was trying to write a song. I've been taking piano lessons lately, the most recent step in a process of re-learning that began eighteen months ago after twenty-five years away from the instrument. I can read music, and I can handle the keyboard tolerably well, but I've never really understood how music works, why I'm playing the notes I'm playing. So that's what I'm asking of my teacher: to simultaneously help me improve my technique and my understanding of music itself.

Which led him, two weeks ago, to give me the assignment of writing a new melody to the chords of "Amazing Grace." I spent hours on it . . . hours of sheer joy. And, to bring this back to Mathews, what it reminded me of most was attempting to write poetry back in my undergraduate days. The presiding spirit of the poetry program, Mary Kinzie, was a formalist at heart, and her approach to teaching poetry was to combine extensive reading with boot-camp-style immersion in formal structures. Whitman was verboten; Shakespeare's sonnets were to be gnawed to the marrow.

And it was effective. Form, for a beginning poet, forces attention, innovation, and persistence--and that's what I felt as I was struggling with my nascent melody: I had, essentially, a steeplechase course of chords through which I had to run it, and while my instincts would have led me to simpler formulations, to a quick resolution of the tension inherent in the first couple of chord changes, being forced to hew to the number of changes and measures I'd been given was oddly liberating. Mathews is startlingly right: when I discovered a way to handle it, it was like nothing so much as coming unexpectedly into a beautiful clearing.

Which makes me understand Mathews's desire to impose structure and limitations on the novel. Good god, why doesn't everyone want to do that? To deal with the illimitable, wholly protean form that we call the novel . . . how can anyone do that and not go insane?

{If you want to hear my song, I think this link should allow you to download a poor performance of it. I make no claims for it other than that it was a lot of fun to work on--and that I find myself whistling it sometimes.}

More Harry Mathews (fewer numbers this time, I promise)

I’m not the only one with Harry Mathews on the brain lately: Chris Kieran of Dreamers Rise put up a post over the weekend about his years of reading Mathews—and he pointed out a great line from the cover copy for an old omnibus paperback of The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, Tlooth, and The Conversions:

For several years Harry Mathews has enjoyed a growing following among college students, artists, other poets and writers, and fans of the obscure who have never been able to buy his books.

As Chris points out, that is a pretty good description of Mathews’s small but devoted fanbase.

In addition, Chris pointed to an interview with Mathews that Susannah Hunnewell (a Mathewsian name if I’ve ever read one) conducted for the Paris Review in 2007. The interview is so full of interesting material that I could quote from it on this blog for weeks. Instead, I’ll share some pieces and urge you to go read it in full. As I mentioned last week, the one time I met him, Mathews was a remarkably good performer, charismatic and natural-seeming even as he told what were surely polished anecdotes; the interview has the same feel, of a few hours spent with a great conversationalist.

Here’s Mathews’s response to the question of whether he has an audience in mind when he’s writing:

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.

Which is fun, and, in its way, not wholly unserious—but Mathews follows it up with a more direct answer:

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.

Much of the early part of the interview deals with Mathews’s relationship to his parents, and how that played into the way he took his first steps as a writer. His parents, as parents will do, had wanted him to establish himself in an ordinary, stable career and an ordinary, stable (if upper-class) social life, but Mathews had other plans:

Then I got a depressing letter from my father. I had written him at great length explaining why I’d switched from music to writing, and his response was, You’ve gone from bad to worse. When I think of him reading my first novel, The Conversions . . . . Fortunately there were some reviews—in America, two that I saw. One was in Time magazine, if you can imagine such a thing, and the other was an exuberant article by Terry Southern in The Nation. But the English edition was reviewed glowingly in almost every major paper. And because my father was a snobbish Anglophile, he said, If the English like it, it must be good. At that point, he relaxed. I hadn’t totally screwed up my life.

I tell myself again and again that the book reviewing world was different back then . . . but Harry Mathews got reviewed in Time!

His father wasn’t the only person who found The Conversions perplexing:

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!

That story is even better if you’re familiar with Cerf’s cultured New York accent and slight air of fuddlement from in his many appearances on What’s My Line?

From there, the interview gets into some really interesting questions about the Oulipo, restrictive or programmatic writing, and favorite writers—with Mathews revealing himself to be an unexpected fan of a book I particularly like, Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. It’s all well worth your time—and, might I suggest, a place in The Paris Review Interviews, Volume V?

An Oulipo question

Since this has inadvertently become “Ask the Readers Questions Week,” I’ve got one more to wrap up with—but it’s on a completely different topic.

Back when I was a bookseller, my store held an event to celebrate the release of The Oulipo Compendium, a compilation of and reference work to the members of the Oulipo and their many creations. The volume’s editor, Harry Mathews, came to the store and gave a talk about the book and the Oulipo in general, and he was wonderful—funny, polished, abstracted, an intellectual showman (and good company at dinner, to boot). It was by far the best bookstore event I’ve ever been involved in: we had great attendance and even sold a lot of books.

I’ve had the Oulipo on my mind lately, because Scott Esposito is leading a group read of Georges Perec’s Life A Users Manual (which you’re welcome to join). If you’re a fan of the Oulipo, the Compendium is indispensable, chock full of sublime and ridiculous ideas for new ways to approach literary creation. And it’s one of those ideas that leads to my question for you today: the N+7 constraint.

N+7 is simple. You replace every non-proper noun in a piece of text with the noun found seven nouns after it in the dictionary. So the first line of Mathews’s pleasantly odd book My Life in CIA,

That she was the natural child of an Orsini could not be proved or disproved; but those dark flashing eyes, that dusky complexion betrayed the Italian blood in her veins.

--when run through Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1977), becomes:

That shearwater was the natural childishness of an Orsini could not be proved or disproved; but those dark flashing eye-catchers, that dusky complicacy betrayed the Italian bloodfin in her veldt.

As the Compendium points out, this exercise is more entertaining the weaker the dictionary you use: smaller dictionaries allow you to travel much farther from your root word—no “eyes” to “eye-catchers” if you deploy a pocket phrasebook—but you get the idea. (And of course, there are those people who don’t think this sounds like fun at all. I disagree, but I understand. Those people should probably stop reading now; we’ll return to normal business on Monday.)

Anyway, way back when the Compendium was published, I spent quite a bit of time thinking about N+7, and then one day it occurred to me that it had another, unremarked quality that seems perfectly designed to appeal to Oulipians: It's an Ouroboros! If you perform this operation enough times on the same sentence with the same dictionary—each time moving seven nouns down from the most recent result—you’ll eventually get back to your starting point!

Think about it: if your dictionary has a number of nouns that’s evenly divisible by seven, you’ll get back to your starting points after one trip through. If it’s not divisible by seven, when you get to the end of the dictionary you just carry over your remainder: the dictionary ends four nouns short of the seven you need, so you start your new trip through on the third noun. If my math is correct, you get back home, no matter the dictionary . . . on your seventh time through.

But when I mentioned that to Harry Mathews all those years ago, he replied that he thought I was wrong. So I turn to you, readers: who’s right, me or Mathews?

Harry Mathews on George Plimpton

The pleasures of the new group oral history of George Plimpton, George, Being George come as much from the unexpected appearance of old favorites as from the multiple perspectives they offer on Plimpton himself.

So far, in my flipping through the book, the best of those has been Harry Mathews, who relates two instances when Plimpton took a gamble on some of Mathews's famously obscure (and essentially unsellable) early books. First, from 1966, this account of an aborted promotional plan for Mathews's second novel, Tlooth:

George created the first Paris Review Editions--another moneymaker, he hoped. And the first book they published was James Salter's wonderful A Sport and a Pastime, which was cover-to-cover sex and did well. The second was my second novel, Tlooth (1966), which was a totally weird book, but I worked on every sentence. The story that George always used to love to tell is that on pub day, they would hire a plane to inscribe the letters TLOOTH in the sky above New York to create wonder and bewilderment in the populace; but the winds weren't right, and it was too expensive anyway. Of course, the book--well, it didn't go nowhere, but it didn't do very well.

Bewilderment would have been the right tone to aim for in marketing Tlooth. It's hard to imagine following A Sport and a Pastime with Tlooth, a novel so odd that even its current publisher, the wonderful Dalkey Archive, is only willing to say that it has a plot, "of sorts." It opens with a baseball game in a Russian prison camp between the Defective Baptists, "whose love of baseball signified gentleness," and the Fideists, for whom the same signalled cruelty"; it gets stranger from there.

If anything, though, the novel that marked the next time Mathews's path intersected with the Paris Review was even more difficult. The Maxine to whom Mathews refers in this anecdote is Maxien Groffsky, with whom he'd run off to Paris in 1962:

It was fine, Maxine working for George, because they never had anything to do with one another. George had the final say on everything that went into the Review, but then Maxine took extraordinary initiatives on her own and confronted George with them. For instance, in once issue, I wrote a poem that incorporated lines from all the poems in that issue. I told her about this. I don't think George ever noticed, but one reader did notice, and wrote to the magazine. Her boldest initiative was--I had written The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, which was just unsellable, and Maxine, out of the goodness of her heart, published it in four issues of the Paris Review. I don't think that George minded at all her putting in the first installment, but I don't think he realized there were going to be three more installments. In George's memoir of those years, which he published several years ago in the Paris Review itself, the question around the New York office was "Is that shit still going down?"

Mathews's novel begins mid-sentence--

. . . confidence in words, Twang. I suck my tongue for your chervil-and-lavender flavor.

--then on page six begins its second section with

Pan persns knwo base bal. The giappan-like trade-for mishn play wit it in our capatal any times. To morrow to work be gin. It's cleen eccepts for the talk. The in-habits live in draems.

It's easy to undertand Plimpton's bemusement. I'll admit that The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium is the only Mathews novel I've never been able to read; if any partisans want to make a case for me to give it another go, though, I'm willing to listen.

Mathews also offers a glimpse of why he, Oulipean and literary joker, would have found Plimpton congenial:

George had a funny reputation in Society. He was from a distinguished family on both sides, but he was too glitzy for those people, even before he became a celebrity. He was still a prankster, as he had been at St. Bernard's and Exeter. Rules, traditions, conventions were excellent things in his view, but never to be taken too seriously. Others might never know what they could get away with, but he did, and he did get away with it. He may have felt that the strictures of Society--what was left of it--were pour encourager les autres, not him. But I doubt it. He didn't have that sort of arrogance. Still, Society sensed something mischievous and anarchic about him and vaguely disapproved.

In honor of the joyous friendship so many people seem to have felt for George Plimpton, I'll close with a passage from Mathews's Twenty Lines a Day (1983). Though he's writing about a different friend, his words would by all accounts seem suitable for Plimpton:

With certain friends comes a euphoria that dissolves my doubts and reticences, so that I "give myself" unstintingly; and I give myself as much to me as to the others. The love that makes my giving possible is their gift to me.

Twenty Lines a Day

{Photo by rocketlass.}

One of the inspirations for this blog was Harry Mathews's Twenty Lines a Day (1988), a brief book that Mathews wrote following an instruction Stendhal gave himself in the course of working on a novel:

Twenty lines a day, genius or not.

Mathews explains his intentions in his introduction:

Like many writers, I often find starting the working day a discouraging prospect, one that I spend much energy avoiding. . . . I deliberately mistook [Stendhal's] words as a method for overcoming the anxiety of the blank page. Even for a dubious, wary writer, twenty lines seemed a reassuring obtainable objective, especially if they had no connection with a "serious" project like a novel or an essay.

When I began this blog, I wasn't doing any writing regularly outside of work. I've never been one to keep a journal, and while I would regularly find myself--especially while running--thinking at length about, or even arguing with, the books I had been reading, absent any outside pressure I would eventually just open up a new book and move on. So with Harry Mathews in mind, I decided that I would commit to writing at least a couple of times per week about books and see if I could turn it into a habit--a concept that Michel Tournier explains, cryptically yet unforgettably, in The Mirror of Ideas (1994), with reference to the brain:

The role of the brain is precisely to elaborate the past for the needs of present life. It keeps only the learned movement, eliminating the date and circumstances that surrounded its acquisition.

We cultivate a habit, and eventually it becomes so ingrained, so natural, that we don't even remember quite how we developed it in the first place. So I signed up for a blog and got to work.

While I set myself a specific writing task, Harry Mathews seemingly let his mind work through whatever topic floated to the top when he sat down. Twenty Lines a Day includes entries that essentially take the form of a journal, some that border on automatic writing, a few that are fable-like, and others that resemble Oulipean experiments. Not all of them are interesting or successful on any terms other than that of the original impulse to write something; the entry for December 13, 1983, for example, begins:

I have nothing to write in particular. I'm writing these lines because of my rule that I must write them.

Though I know that some days my posts are better or more inspired than others, it's got to be a good sign that I haven't yet had a day when I felt that I was writing solely out of obligation. (To be fair, Mathews had a good excuse for being empty of ideas that day: he was in the middle of writing his masterpiece, Cigarettes.)

Mathews's good entries, on the other hand, are so varied that it's hard to pick a favorite. Twenty Lines a Day is a book that's best read a bit at a time, here and there, a book to keep next to the chair in which you drink your coffee of a morning. My favorite today, I think, is this one, from just a few days after the uninspired entry above, December 17, 1983:

The fun about things, as about thoughts, is getting them, not having them. They become obvious once you have them, just another part of a familiar landscape. Two days ago I came across my course notes about the imaginary reader--the one the writer invents to listen to his imaginary narrator, and on whom the actual reader eavesdrops--and because I'd forgotten the notion I enjoyed a moment of mild excitement reunderstanding it. But after a moment it was back on its rack among the dusty bottles. This has also happened with what I bought myself yesterday (a day mainly devoted to the purchase of Christmas presents): a tape deck, a cassette rack, an outdoor winter country jacket. I nailed the rack into place last night; the tape deck, having been adequately studied in the instruction manual, has been installed in its definitive place; the jacket hangs on a peg by the front door as if it had been there for years. All three will certainly provide convenience or pleasure in coming days as they are used, but the wonder disappeared from them as soon as they were unwrapped and their price tags removed. The wonder grew from the expectation that they would change something in life (how nifty having one's cassettes so handily arrayed, how delicious acceding to glorious music by slipping cassettes into the deck, how warmly glamorous walking outdoors in a bronze-colored, ring-necked, thigh-long jacket). But "of course" I know that expectation is the stupidest kind of lure. . . . What I know too is that the pleasure of buying the things was a real and sufficient one: the pleasure of giving presents and of allowing oneself to be their worthy recipient.

I think of bringing home a couple of lovely, well-designed books from the bookstore, and of how as I stack them on the windowsill or precariously wedge them atop a row of books in the bookcase, it will seem essential that I read them right away--as soon, that is, as I'm done with what I'm in the middle of reading at that moment. A few days pass, my time and attention are lured away by other books, and soon those books are buried under a newer, fresher layer, becoming an indistinguishable part of the never-diminishing mass of unread words that fills our house. The urgency--that "lure of expectation"--is gone.

But books, unlike cassette decks and cassette racks and jackets, are capable of storing that urgency, unsullied, to surprise you with it some Saturday morning when you're wandering your bookshelves, looking for a novel. You're in the mood for a particular tone, a specific feel, and you just can't identify it . . .

February 22, 1984:

Choosing the next book to read resembles choosing a restaurant or the next Italian town to visit: none ever seems quite right. You want something that corresponds perfectly to your desire, and you can't identify that desire until you find what arouses it. . . . What do you want from a book? No: what do you want from choosing a book? To stand on the threshold of the unfamiliar, the inevitably familiar viewed unfamiliarly, the known capabilities of language yielding opportunities for you to react to them (to reinvent them yourself) with breathtaking, with breathgiving wonder.

Finally you spot it, just the book you needed, and you remember how excited you were when you brought it home. How could you have left that sitting on your shelf, unread, for a year?

And then there are the books we re-read, discovering that they, too, have retained that power, that a single reading hasn't come close to exhausting their possibilities. That's where my wander through my bookshelves took me last Sunday night, to an old favorite, and all week I've been wrapped up once more in Proust--who, incidentally, also had something to say about the blank page.

From The Guermantes Way (1920), translated by Mark Treharne

If only I had been able to start writing! But, however I set about it (all to similarly, alas, to the resolve to give up alcohol, to go to bed early, to get enough sleep and to keep fit), whether it was in a spurt of activity, with method, with pleasure, in depriving myself of a walk, or postponing it and reserving it as a reward, taking advantage of an hour of feeling well, making use of the inaction forced upon me by a day's illness, the inevitable result of my efforts was a blank page, untouched by writing, as predestined as the forced card that you inevitably end up drawing in certain tricks, however thoroughly you have first shuffled the pack. I was merely the instrument of habits of not working, of not going to bed, of not sleeping, which had to fulfil themselves at any cost; if I offered no resistance, if I made do with the pretext they drew from the first opportunity that arose for them to act as they chose, I escaped without serious harm, I still slept for a few hours towards morning, I managed to read a little, I did not over-exert myself; but if I tried to resist them, by deciding to go to bed early, to drink only water, to work, they became annoyed, they resorted to strong measures, they made me really ill, I was obliged to double my dose of alcohol, I did not go to bed for two days, I could not even read, and I would vow to be more reasonable in future, that is to say less wise, like the victim who allows himself to be robbed for fear of being murdered if he puts up resistance.

And with that, because I am, after all, decidedly a creature of habit, I'm off to bed before the hour gets too unreasonable.