The Many False Floors of Harry Mathews

Highlights from the wide-ranging body of work of one of the all time great provocateurs of the novel form

This article originally appeared in abbreviated form at Vice on 10/16/13. Harry Mathews passed away in 2017.

Since 1962, Harry Mathews has published more than thirty works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, many of which blur the lines between the three so concretely its difficult to say what exactly Mathews actually writes. Born and raised in New York City, Mathews attended Princeton before leaving for the Navy and later receiving a B.A. in music. He spent several years associating with other future literary icons like John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, Mathews became the first American author to be admitted as a member of France’s influential Oulipo movement, with which he has been fundamentally associated since.

In general, those who work in the school of Oulipo are well known for their method of applying constraints to guide their work, such as the N+7 method, where one would replace a word in a sentence that they’d written with whatever other word appeared seven entries later in the dictionary. Like many Oulipians, Mathews’s sentences are surely totally enigmatic, often so unusual in their syntax that you could stop and read most any of them over and again in search of what they seem to want to mean. And yet, there is something living and breathing at the center of Mathews’s concepts, maybe even more so than most of his contemporaries; each work seems so distinct in approach from the rest that you are left constantly updating your expectation of what might appear, while at the same time finding in every book a syntax so assuredly composed in its own image alone, that it could really be no one else.

Below are some of the highlights of Harry Mathews long career.

The Conversions (1962)

One of the storytelling tactics Mathews seems most adept at is to provide the appearance of a noir-like narrative, which he employs more as a cover to pull the reader through a much more bizarre and shifting world than they might have expected. Expository premises in Mathews novels very rarely end up playing out the way they pretend to be, even within the span of a few pages. His scenes, then, often work as a series of rooms each with a false floor, underneath which is another set of rooms each possibly falling into another, kind of like how dreams continue to spill away from what they appear to be up to. Part of this, I think, comes from Mathews’s love of games, and games within game: it feels like beneath the sheen of his sentences there is another sentence waiting to be solved, as if you could turn the letters over and see what is really being said. Even the names of his characters seem like mirages, codes for something else. The Conversions, his first novel, might be the most confounding of this sort: the book begins with the gift of a piece of jewelry to a woman at a dinner party, who then is told if she can solve the mystery of the relic’s place in history, she will inherit a fortune. As the narrative piles on, with Mathews bringing in all sorts of cryptic lyrics, language puzzles, books within books, each question opens into even more complicated questions, social histories, unsolvable maps. The whole book is a puzzle in itself, one the longer you spend trying to solve, the more there is.

Opening sentence: The wealthy amateur Grent Wayl invited me to his New York house for an evening’s diversion.

Tlooth (1966)

Mathews’s second novel picks up somewhat in the blood of where The Conversions left off, beginning again with an event that quickly opens into an unstoppable chain of bottomless happenings. As the title might imply, though—Tlooth is a stand-in for the word “truth,” if it were being pronounced by someone on nitrous oxide—the settings and operations within those setting in this sophomore effort are more clearly wild, surreal. The book opens in a prison camp designated for religious heretics, where our narrator is coerced into joining a baseball league on a team of ex-Baptists. The narrator is an ex-violinist, forced to quit his instrument after a prison doctor accidentally removed his fingers during surgery, for which the narrator is now bent on his revenge. When the doctor is released from confine, the narrator escapes to go after him, opening again a sort of chase on which the book shifts through a wide array of strange locales. If it sounds convoluted, that’s because it is: the story itself is only a puppet through which Matthews spins his tricks of form and language. And again, the plot has countless collapsing floors: each chapter piles together an even more arcane-seeming series of wordplay, plot holes, maze images and jury-rigged genre-expectations assembled into a narrative that never stops shifting its feet. Sometimes the sentences seem to have had to have written themselves, as the logic forced into them is so unfailingly alien. Tlooth, perhaps more than any of Mathews’s other novels that I’ve read, demonstrates the author’s ability to pull the weight from almost any style or formal device, and accumulate it into the never-ending hole of his own imagination. It begins to sort of make Borges look like algebra against Mathews calculus.

Opening sentence: Mannish Madame Nevtaya slowly cried ‘Fur bowls!’ and the Fideist batter, alert to the sense behind the sound of her words, jogged toward first base.

Cigarettes (1987)

Following all the previous bizarre timelines and orchestrations, Cigarettes manages to come in completely from left field. Immediately the enigmatic style and formal constructions of previous novels appear to have taken by the wayside, in favor of what feels like a more traditional, almost Elizabethan mode of style. Cigarettes, more than any of Mathews’s other works, is about characters and their relations, how the networks of people knit together over a life. But again, just under the surface here, it becomes clear the author is up to something rather different than it appears: the characters are presented almost like icons in a chess set, played out in Mathews’s imagination in a series of formal integrations. Each of the novel’s fifteen chapters—titled, simply, Allan and Elizabeth, Oliver and Elizabeth, Oliver and Pauline, etc.—explores the connection between two recurring characters over a stretch of 40 years. Slowly the manias, evils, desperations, illnesses, and all other sort of hidden human arena manifest themselves and combine, over the framework again of something larger, about death and money and fraud and art. While Mathews is again masterful at mimicking the serial manner of 19^th century novels, he constantly manages to inject his little puzzles, small sticky scenes and knobs of language that throw the balance off of itself over and again. Something like a Pride and Prejudice with Pynchon, Cigarettes secretly stands out somehow as one of Mathews most bizarre creations.

Opening sentence: “What’s he mean, ‘I suppose you want an explanation?’”

20 Lines a Day (1988)

Written concurrently over a year while working on Cigarettes, 20 Lines a Day is something an exercise journal for the author, wherein he warms up or catalogs his thoughts or linguistic energy into a series of paragraphs, following his life. The book takes its title and format from a writing rule proposed by Stendhal designed to get his work done: “Twenty lines a day, genius or not.” Mathews employs the idea more as a dump bucket for his brain, which given its source is reliably by turns practical, bizarre, quotidian, comforting, inspiring. Because at the same time Mathews is working on Cigarettes, often he writes about his progress, and what’s on his mind along the way, providing a rare look into the innerworkings of his process, and his daily life. “Mastery is not knowing what you’re going to do next,” he quotes himself at one point, from a public lecture he had given. “No accumulation of knowledge can guarantee you’re not a fool.” Other pages are Oulipian formulas, philosophical digressions, descriptions of food and company, dreams paraded on paper, stream-of-consciousness brain dumps, raw ideas. Like all the rest of Mathews writing, the vast catalog of logic, styles, playfulness, and intuition is a great source for those interested in seeing a master at work, perhaps at the height of his career.

Opening sentence: The cats, the women, and the lizards have elongated heads.

The Journalist (1994)

Still easily my favorite of all of Mathews, and probably of all I’ve read from the Oulipo, The Journalist might be the most concretely formulaic of his narrative concepts, but also his most expansive. Almost like a mirror to the practice found in 20 Lines a Day, the narrator of The Journalist begins writing down his thoughts about what happens to him every day. The act is meant as a system of relief for having just come out of a nervous breakdown, and yet as the book goes on, the narrator’s mania for his recording project, and for the meticulousness of it, grows and grows. Soon he’s not only just notating where we went and who he saw, but every minor action he remembers, such as the minor gestures used to make an omelet: “beating—high heat—stir in pan; beating—high heat—let set then jiggle—beating—high heat—stir in pan.” With each notation in the journal comes an appending set of paranoias and desperations over the narrator’s increasing anxiety about to being about to get everything down before he forgets it, and in a system he can make the most efficient to his cause. Eventually, the novel begins to break down into more and more maniacal threads and fragments, somehow building under Mathews’s careful hand into a portrait of anxiety and mental illness so exacting it’s almost terrifying to even read. In the cause of trying to write an exciting book about contemporary boredom, for me The Journalist conquers all.

Opening sentence: The rain had stopped.

My Life in CIA (2005)

Again returning to the feeling of collapsing noir goose-chases as in his earliest novels, the very premise of My Life in CIA seems like a trick: a supposedly ongoing rumor among Mathews’s friends that he was a secret member of the CIA becomes so common among his social circles, and so hard to defend against, that he starts telling people he really is in the CIA. What begins as a private joke between Mathews-the narrator and himself then quickly turns into another chain of mysterious incidents and red herrings. Soon playing the part of his own joke turns into a situation where it becomes even more impossible to remove himself from the repercussions of being involved in a massive international crime agency; suddenly there are people who seem to want him dead. Is he being followed, or is playing the part of being followed with the reader? Is his developing fear that what he’s gotten involved in might be more than he can handle an actual situation, or are we being fucked with again? These questions, and the oddly thriller-like narrative beads that string together as the narrator flees and investigates his own mirage, together come together into another package where we’re never sure who there is to trust; even as the scenes play out in the author’s by-now signature style of hybridity, every line seem ready to turn back on itself, to change the book from some baffling story into a window between fiction and reality itself.

Opening sentence: 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.