An Interview with Harry Mathews
by Alexander Laurence
Alexander
Laurence: You have spent most of your life in Europe, mostly in Paris and in
France, and a few years in Spain and Italy too. Paris has been your real base
since 1952. Do you think about the United States a lot, and the fact that you
are an American living abroad? Do you think about your “American-ness?”
Harry
Mathews: I do not think that I expected to become anything else besides an
American. I did, I think, have some misguided expectations about changing my
spots and fitting into the European communities where I have lived. After
stubbing my toes trying to do that, I gave it up, and accepted the fact that
I’ll always be an American wherever I live, and no matter how well I know the
language. I very much enjoy the life that I have lived in Europe. I enjoy
equally being an American, more and more so. I had really no problem with
America except in the very beginning when I didn’t know much about it. I
thought Amerca was the milieu that I had grown up in, which was just a tiny
part of it. I started coming back to America in the late fifties. I visited the
West Coast several times, the South a little bit, and Texas, of which I’m
particularly fond. I enjoy very much having two places to live, to feel that I
could live happily in either Europe or America, to be at home in either place.
But I have no illusions;I have no desire to be anything but an American. It’s
not something that I think about except in terms of language. In that respect,
living abroad is useful. When you’re living in a country and you’re surrounded
by people that are not speaking your language, and especially in my case, where
your wife and your step-children are all speaking in a foreign langauge, you’re
obliged to become aware day after day of what your langauge is.
AL:
You never thought of writing a novel directly in French?
HM:
No. I’ve written shorter things, at most three or four pages. That will be
about it because it’s only rarely that what I want to do when I write will
correspond to my limitations in French. Learning written French proficiently as
an adult takes a lot of work, and although it has been done by a few people,
they still have a different relationship to the language than someone who has
grown up speaking that language. Those people will never write French as well
as someone who has gone to school and high school in France.
AL:
Why do you suppose that is?
HM:
That’s a good question. I would suggest that the answer is this: one’s
relatioship to the language is a dramatic and possibly traumatic one. The
experience of learning to read and write, first in terms of just letters and
words, then in terms of syntax, is a dramatic and possibly traumatic
experience. The writer who has not undergone that kind of drama, which is
perhaps only available to people who are between the ages of five and fifteen,
will never be able to write as well as someone who has. The theory of language
which most appeals to me is one that says the trauma of the absense of the
mother’s breast is replaced by words. That is to say the mouth is filled up
with words that take place of the breast, beginning with the cry, then
articulations of that cry. I think that the teaching of language by the mother
to the child, or the family which centers on the mother, is post-traumatic. I
think that the trauma has preceded it, and that language can be, on the
contrary, a consoling substitute and one that is not alienating. For me, the
drama began with finding out that language was not only a link between my body
and my parent’s bodies, that in fact the link between me and my family’s
surroundings could be alienated by written language. This is just a concept and
not a record of what I felt at the time. But something happened then which I
think probably happens to other people. There is also the fact that learning is
painful.
AL:
You are part of the Oulipo. Do you think that if you stayed in New York, there
would have been that sort of community available? Paris has a history of
groups, literary movements,and communities.
HM:
I had a group in New York long before the Oulipo. The Locus Solus group was my
first and most important literary environment.
AL:
Which was related to the book that came out in 1971: An Anthology of New York
Poets?
HM:
Yes. It was the whole New York that I hadn’t known, that I got to know through
Kohn Ashbery. I wouldn’t want to limit it to the people who were on or in Locus
Solus, because through them I discovered a community that I could be a part of
any time that I wanted to. I wasn’t here in New York very much, so I wasn’t a
working member of the so-called New York School. But I was an honorary member.
It was something that I knew that I could count on for support and acceptance.
The Oulipo plays a very different role. First of all, it’s not a writing group.
AL:
You meet once a month?
HM:
Sure. It’s great. It’s wonderful. It’s a sort of a family, no doubt about it.
It makes living in Paris much easier.
AL:
Do you think that such a group like the Oulipo, could have been in New York or
San Francisco?
HM:
Well, in San Francisco you have the Language Poets, but again, that’s a writing
movement. The Oulipo is not a writing movement.
AL:
I was thinking of a group or a community that consciously creates an
association of ideas. It seems that in the past American writers have worked
independently, but in retrospect, they are thrown together in groups or
movements by critics.
HM:
That’s true in France as well, and it’s certainly true of the writers in the
Oulipo. We don’t work together as writers at all. You’re right that it is a
group, you’re right that it’s a nice substitute family to belong to, but it’s
not a group of writers. In fact, many members are not writers. And those who
are writers write in many different ways. We do not necessarily agree with each
other about each other’s writing. What we share is an interest in exploring the
possibilities of constrictive forms. People in San Francisco, like the
Langiuage Poets, Carla Harryman and Richard Silliman for instance, discuss each
other’s work; and that’s fine. Theirs is a real literary movement. It’s like
Braque and Picasso trying things out with each other and testing their ideas.
On the other hand, the Nouveau Roman, for all its fame, was not a true literary
group or movement. It was a publishing gimmick, one that worked.
AL:
When did you first meet Raymond Queneau, and when did you first become aware of
his work?
HM:
I first became aware of his work in 1956. That was before the Oulipo existed. I
admired him and actually met him and read many of his books before my or even
his Oulipo days. I heard of the Oulipo in 1968. It didn’t interest me at all. I
didn’t know what was going on because the people who told me about it, as most
people do, got it wrong and presented it in an inaccurate way. Later Georges
Perec told me more about it and invited me to one of the lunches. That led to
my being elected to the group.
AL:
So you first met Perec soon afterwards?
HM:
I met Perec in 1970.
AL:
How did you meet him? Do you remember?
HM:
Yes, I remember very well. My first novel, The Conversions, was about to come
out in French, and I had left some proofs with a friend who gave them to an
editor who worked with Georges Perec’s publishers, and she gave them to him. He
wrote me an enthusiastic letter, and I wrote him back. Then we called each
other up and met for drinks one afternoon.
AL:
What did you think of Perec’s writing?
HM:
When I met Perec, I hadn’t read anything by him. After we became friends I read
his books as they came out. I thought of him primarily as a friend: I was
interested in his books because they were his. I was neither surprised nor not
surprised when he wrote La Vie Mode D’Emploi.
AL:
You were elected to the Oulipo in 1973, the same year as Italo Calvino. How did
this happen?
HM:
What happens is there are guests of honor who may or may not become members of
the Oulipo. I went there and we got along fine. (They used to have lunches, now
we have dinners.) I talked a litle about my work.
AL:
Did they know you at the time?
HM:
Some of them did. Queneau did. Most didn’t. I do know that I went and had a
good time, and they seemed to enjoy my company. Later I received a letter that
told me I had been elected as a member to the Oulipo. There was no ceremony. It
was totally informal.
AL:
Did you feel that being elected was a transformation for you, that you and your
writing changed somehow, or was the change not significant at all?
HM:
I was very pleased. It was marvelous to be elected to this group and being
accpeted by them. I got involved little by little, and learned more about their
ideas. I didn’t know much about them, about the theoretical aspect of it. I had
done Oulipian things on my own, but I hadn't thought in general terms about
constrictive form. In fact, I guess that you're right to ask that question
because one big difference it made was reassuring me about what seemed to be
almost an aberration in having written this way. I hadn't known anything about
Oulipian procedures. So what before I had felt uneasy about now was given a
blessing. That was very comforting.
AL:
Could you talk about some of the recent Oulipian activity? What have you done
as a group and not individually?
HM:
The work inside the group has led to publications of specifically Oulipian
research. Two volumes published by Gallimard, and a whole series of smaller
pamphlets which were eventually collected. A third volume of them will be out
fairly soon. That's one ongoing part of our activity. Then there are the uses
to which individual writers put the Oulipian idea such as Perec, Calvino,
myself, Jacques Roubaud, Queneau, and so forth. What happens in the Oulipo is
we invent or rediscover or analyze constrictive forms. The books happen
outside, independently. The books are our own business as individual writers.
AL: So when you write a new novel, does it ever happen
that someone like Jacques Roubaud will come up to you and say how he admires
your work?
HM: Never. At a meeting of the Oulipo, we might say,
in parenthesis, to one another "You've written a masterpiece." But we
never discuss each other's work except in its explicitly Oulipian aspects.
That's not the point. The Oulipo is not about written works. It's about
procedures.
AL: Is it about production?
HM: It's about structure and procedure. Production in
the sense of potential production, but not the product. I can give you an
example of what happens which is much more interesting for all of us. I've just
started a novel last month, and at the last meeting I presented one of the
structures that's going into the novel and explained how it will work. But that
has nothing to do with what the book is going to be like as a whole, or whether
it will be good or bad. I'm glad you asked that because it's important to get
that clear.
AL: One way the Oulipo has progressed is that it has
invented some structural ideas, and then essays about them have been collected
into a volume.
HM: We have ideas all the time! We have both practical
ideas and theoretical ideas. I'm strong in the practical realm. I mean that I'm
good at devising things to do. Jacques Roubaud is not only good at devising
things to do, he's also a meticulous theoretician. He's very good at defining
and working out the theoretical consequences of the general thinking that's
going on.
AL: Are there some structural ideas that do not get
carried out?
HM: That's not the point. The point is not the
carrying out, but developing the structure. The only carryings out that are
important are what we call "record setting." That's what Georges
Perec did with the palindrome and the lipogram. He demonstrated that you could
write a very long, beautiful palindrome. This had never been done before. He
also demonstrated that you could write an extraordinary interesting,
entertaining, and fascinating novel without using the letter e. That had never been done before. In
that sense, those are actual Oulipian acts because they demonstrate an
unrevealed potentiality of a form like the palindrome. There are many natural
palindromes. There's no big deal about a palindromic word, for instance. But to
do what he did is a true Oulipian activity. Perec demonstrated that the
palindrome exists as an extensive form.
AL: What are the meetings of the Oulipo like Today?
Can you describe one to me?
HM: Sure. They all resemble each other very much.
There's one on November 16, 1989. A dinner. We'll go to Paul Fournel's, a very
good writer, who also runs a publishing house in Paris. He and his wife will
welcome us at seven o'clock, and we'll have drinks for an hour or so, then have
dinner together. We'll work through the evening. We have an invariable sequence
of categories that we work through: first comes "creation," then
"erudition,"
"action," and "lesser proposals," which is a sort of
odds and ends. At the beginning of the meal, one of us is picked to preside
over the meeting, and someone else picked to be the secretary takes notes on
it. We are initially asked if we have contributions to make. If I have
something to say in the category of "creation" I'll say "yes, I do."
After a few minutes, we have a schedule for the evening. The meetings end about
ten-thirty or eleven. There is a slight tendency to rowdiness as the hours
pass.
AL: So, each meeting ends with a good feeling?
HM: Yes, usually.
AL: Or is there a lot of arguing?
HM: Oh, sometimes there is some violent arguing, but
the argument is mostly about getting definitions accurate. Sometimes there will
be a procedure that is presented which may or may not be Oulipian, and the
discussion or argument will be "Is this Oulipian?" Does it correspond
to Oulipian principles: if not, why not? If so, why? So there can be some
lively discussion. Rarely does someone leave in a state of upset.
AL: Your fourth and latest novel, Cigarettes, was popular? Or not?
HM: It was more popular than the others. It certainly
didn't get to a lot of readers.
AL: It was translated into French soon after its
publication here, in the States, in late 1987. When did you start this novel,
and when did you finish it?
HM: Ah, that took me forever to write. I think that I
began it in 1978, and it took me eight or nine years to write it all. A lot was
going on at the time. I did work on it more or less continuously. It was very
hard formally to handle, and I gave myself a lot of strict rules. I was doing
things that I had never done before. That was one of the rules: not to do
anything I had done before.
AL: To me at least, one of things that I noticed about
Cigarettes is that it seems like was written by a female
writer, if you don't look at the cover. Surely the texture of the language is
more feminine.
HM: Oh, that's nice to hear. I agree with that. I hope
it's true.
AL: Female writers, especially female writers who
write popular or romance novels, usually write in forms familiar to everyone
though.
HM: The form of Cigarettes isn't familiar to anyone, but the language
is. Although a lot of people found it difficult. I was astounded at the number
of people. To me, it was utterly transparent. Many people found it difficult,
especially the beginning, and that totally baffled me.
AL: Yes, I think that I had some difficulty with the
first part of the book originally. But soon as I became more accustomed to the
book, it became more fascinating as it unfolded. It worked. I think that the
reader must rely on memory more with this book than with others.
HM: But that applies to any detective novel, sometimes
far more so.
AL: Your most recent books, 20 Lines A Day and The
Orchard, are much different. One is a journal and the other is a memoir.
Can you talk about how these works came about.
HM: They were very important to me, as was The Armenian Papers, all three. 20 Lines A Day and The
Armenian Papers were written without
any idea of what was going to happen. They were written off the top of my head.
It was a surprise to me how they came out. Jacques Roubaud said that after
working as an Oulipian for twenty years, my instincts were geared to intuitive
forms. Or at least I had enough intuitive formal sense to be able to wing it
without a structural procedure in mind. I was interested in 20 Lines A Day particularly, because of the processes
expressed in that book. I don't mean formal processes or writing processes, but
the psychological process of writing each day. That was something that I didn't
know. That seems to be what the book is about. It is coming to terms with
myself when faced with a blank page each day.
AL: Other than that process, is it that you don't like
to repeat yourself in following the same approach to writing, and if so, is it
due to boredom that you avoid writerly habit?
HM: Every book is different in the way it is written.
I do not think it's a question of being bored. I think I’m drawn to trying
different things.
AL: I wanted you to comment on the phrase "The
wealthy amateur," the first words of
The Conversions.
HM: Grent Wayl.
AL: And this phrase also shows up in Perec's book.
HM: About Bartlebooth?
AL: Yes. And another character. He is described this
way. I'm not sure that I understand this phrase. It sounds like something out
of a novel by Jules Verne. Is there some special significance behind it?
HM: No. Grent Wayl is like the protagonist in Impressions of Africa. He's like the
people in the novels of Raymond Roussel generally. He's like Roussel himself.
Roussel as a writer was really an amateur. He was an amateur in other fields. I
don't understand the question. The opening of The Conversions is a very
loaded sentence. There isn't an explanation. There's no hidden meaning.
AL: I thought that there was a problem here, that this
phrase was some known designation of the past.
HM: It's sort of like a 19th century figure. There's
nothing realistic about it, in The
Conversions
AL: The Way Home
is a book published by The Grenfell
Press (Leslie Miller). You collaborated on this book with the artist, Trevor
Winkfield. Your short story is there next to photoengravings by Winkfield. More
and more recently I have seen these editions coming out with artists and
writers collaborating.
HM: They have been doing this for a long time. It's
become profitable now. Speculators have now entered the market, so there is a
market for it. More than there was at one time, thirty years ago. Then, even
poets like John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O'Hara were doing books with
painters.
AL: What is an average day like for you now?
HM: I get up around eight, and have breakfast. I
usually read part of The Economist, or if I've finished that, I usually read
part of a book of contemporary history. I work from about nine till one in the
afternoon, till lunch. That is my goal. And after lunch, I may work again.
There's usually a lot of things that arrive in the mail that need attending to.
This week I've been spending an half an hour in the afternoon proofreading the
copyedited text of a bunch of critical essays. There are things like that. I
schedule myself, but I don't always keep to the schedule. That is the only way
I get anything done. When the work is all done I usually play the piano for an
hour. It's fun and games from then on. In Paris, I'm usually with my wife. We
talk, read, or go out. It depends. It's the social part of the day. My days are
pretty much alone, except for lunch with Marie.
AL: So you've been married to Marie Chaix, also a
writer, for quite
a while now.
HM: For thirteen years.
AL: And she stays in Paris when you come to New York?
HM: She comes with me when she can, but she has a
daughter who is still in high school.
AL: You have a new novel on the way?
HM:
It's called The Journalist. Immeasurable Distances, a book of
critical essays will come out in December 1991, published by The Lapis Press.
November
1989
