On "My Life in CIA" by Harry Mathews [by Richard Beard]

From a piece in the TLS shortly after Harry Mathews's death in 2017:

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My Life in CIA (2005), set in 1973, is narrated by a character called Harry Mathews, an American Oulipian leading a comfortable life in Paris. He has no evident source of income, so his friends increasingly believe that he works for the CIA. They can’t believe that anyone would write like Mathews for a living, or possibly even for fun. To discourage these rumours, “Harry Mathews” pretends to be an actual agent, because if he’s genuinely CIA then no one will dare refer to it. He moves around Paris like a spy, until convinced that he’s being followed. He then posts a sealed envelope through the slightly open rear window of a car, a small Peugeot hired in advance for exactly this purpose. Inside the envelope is a cryptic page of text, a mystery without a key: “In the wake of last week’s disappointments . . .”. The fake CIA code settles into a familiar pattern:

Dependable Quesnel had to be replaced by Sévigné. Grignan and Corneille did excellent covering. La Rochefoucauld and La Fayette kept things moving forward and their slick diversions allowed Fénelon to score, finding his range on the third try: Bossuet will no longer be a problem.

This performance gives Port Royal many reasons to be cheerful. Our strength in depth and collective resolve bodes well for next week’s tricky visit to Sainte Chapelle.

Harry may or may not have been CIA (he insisted that genuine agents never used the “the”, under any circumstances), but he was now linguistically committed to an equally exclusive organization located in deepest Somerset:

This performance gives Norton many reasons to be cheerful. The squad’s strength in depth and collective resolve bodes well for next week’s tricky league visit to Yatton.

My original code-like text, hidden weekly in a provincial newspaper, becomes a fictional code in Mathews’s Oulipian novel My Life in CIA.

Registers are often mixed in Mathews’s work, but what can this mean, if anything? The text slipped through the back window of the Peugeot is a ploy, but to anyone tailing Harry the code should appear heavy with potential meaning. An academic researcher, or a spy, might already have set off on a journey of discovery. Who are these mysterious people? True to Mathews’s intent to mystify, his rugby stand-ins are both real and obscure, mostly theological figures from the turn of the eighteenth century. Quesnel is a Jansenist, Fénelon anything but. Beautiful Madame de Sévigné is married to ugly Monsieur de Grignon. The writers Corneille and La Rochefoucauld offer a classic diversion, and the doomed Bossuet is another court theologian. Such research is possible, in dogged doctoral style, but it misrepresents how Oulipian text is generated. The source is usually arbitrary, and surprising. You can only decode the mystery text in My Life in CIA if you know that Madame de Sévigné is in fact Steve Penny, replacement full-back from Norton in Somerset. Until now, only two people knew this: me and Harry Mathews.

About halfway through, My Life in CIA stops for a brief survey of the world in 1973 (Chile, Watergate, Jackie Stewart). There is news of the Oulipo: “At our May meeting, several first generation Oulipians blamed newer members for taking the group too seriously and spoiling their fun”. Not an accusation that could ever be levelled at Mathews. As Dennis Duncan noted in his TLS appreciation after Mathews’s death, Harry is never far from a punchline, but he’s creating “a fictional world that is surreal without being chaotic or arbitrary, one in which a not-quite-discernible order is operating beneath the surface”. Harry Mathews claimed that his early literary experiments were “as Oulipian as can be, but they were in English. Nothing wrong with that, but I knew the Oulipo was much more responsive to work in French”. His redeployment of my rugby report still feels resolutely un-French. It’s as if he intended this Anglo-Saxon conundrum of a source text to muddle the sombre puzzle-solving minds of the new Oulipo. Harry’s fun would not be spoiled. I’ll miss him.
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Richard Beard is the author of six novels and four books of narrative non-fiction. He is a Visiting Professor (2016/17) at the University of Tokyo, and has a Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. For more of this article, click here.

Comments

[Walter Carey]

Fascinating piece. As I understand it, Mathews did have an ideal cover for his CIA work in the 70s, which was apparently connected with the OuLiPo on the theory, then current, that experimental poetry was like abstract expressionism as a valuable cultural export.