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No Admission: Harry Mathews, My Life in CIA (Dalkey Archive, 2005) Harry Mathews possesses many of the qualities that would make a great spy: he is master of literary camouflage, he is prodigiously adept with codes and ciphers, he has the culture and flair of a worldly bon-vivant, but perhaps most crucially, he has a sense of discretion that prevents him from ever revealing his game. Mathews has spent his forty year career writing novels (the first of which, The Conversions, was published in 1962 by the Paris Review), poems, essays and occasional pieces whose only unifying thread is their commitment to a serious – and, in many ways, very European – brand of playfulness. Part of this sensibility can be traced to his milieu: aside from maintaining close ties to the New York school of poets around John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, Mathews is the only American member of the OuLiPo, or Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, a French literary society which at one time counted Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, and Italo Calvino in its ranks. Mathews's productions have ranged from a shockingly convincing forgery of a scholarly work on the writer Raymond Roussel (“Roussel in Venice,” in collaboration with Francois Caradec) to a novel chronicling the adventures of an ex-violinist seeking revenge on a surgeon who severed one of his fingers (Tlooth), from a set of anecdotes on masturbation (Singular Pleasures) to a parody of the elaborate gourmet recipe (“Country Cooking from Central France”). My Life in CIA, his most recent novel, takes the form of a fictional memoir of his years in Paris during the early 1970s. Its premise was a running joke between Mathews and his friends that, aside from being a writer and active member of the OuLiPo, Mathews was also an agent for the CIA. At the height of the Cold War, the obvious explanation for a young American writer living on independent means in Paris was espionage. Confronted with a twisted Epimenides paradox – “No CIA agent admits he is CIA, Harry Mathews insists he is not an agent, therefore Harry Mathews is CIA” – the Harry Mathews of My Life in CIA concludes that the only solution is to act the part. My Life in CIA gives us a glimpse of this hypothetical life, starting from a few basic facts and building into an incredibly entertaining, if thoroughly implausible, adventure. Although the claims to truth made by the memoir have been far from unchallenged over the years, Mathews, as we might expect, uses My Life in CIA to issue his own J'accuse! to the genre. It would be unthinkable for him to follow the tradition of so many other authors who, after a distinguished run, cash in their chips and write a standard “My Life.” Mathews's “Chronicle of 1973,” the subtitle given to My Life in CIA, is as much a formal exercise in the Oulipian tradition as anything with the pretensions of a literary testament. Mathews manages – and this is where My Life in CIA truly shines – to balance the sincere with the evasive, good faith with bad faith, preserving the distinct voice of our beloved Monsieur Matiouze (as his French colleagues called him) while moving it into different registers and unexpected timbres. “I did my best to imagine how a secret life would look,” Mathews writes of his first steps as a would-be spy. “Whenever I went into a place, I'd make a point of checking it out. I always walked along the sidewalk opposite my building before crossing the street to my front door. At parties I sometimes drank nothing but mineral water – that was sure to be noticed.” What makes the Harry Mathews of My Life in CIA such a plausible character is that, at least on the outset, he faces the same trials as the real-life Harry Mathews must have faced while preparing to write a spy book: he must undergo the same rigorous apprenticeship (in the “lingo of the trade,” as he calls it). My Life in CIA is, in fact, full of lingo. The profusion of accents, tropes, turns of phrase and deliberate clichés not only surrounds Mathews, but finds its way into his most intimate thoughts – to the point where it becomes impossible for us, as readers, to pinpoint one genuine voice to lead us through the various layers. Spytalk in My Life in CIA becomes almost like the Pagolak language in “The Dialect of the Tribe,” one of Mathews's most finely-wrought short texts. “The Dialect of the Tribe” is told in the first-person by an anthropologist presenting his research on an obscure Polynesian tongue called Pagolak. By the end of the presentation, he finds himself unable to speak English, instead pronouncing strange incantations in Pagolak. As though similarly entangled in his own rhetoric, the Mathews of My Life in CIA at times parrots a Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe: “I exited the room by a back door that had quietly opened and found a blonde woman waiting for me. A buxom, stony-faced blonde, the kind of blonde a saint wouldn't look at in a stained-glass window.” But Mathews never lets us forget how ultimately uncomfortable he is with this new identity, to the point where his fretting belies his all-too-incredible success. “I thought: this sounds like a movie I'd rather watch than be in.” Of course, the redeeming quality of this malaise is the reassurance that comes with having a fixed set of rules to follow. Gerard Howard touches on this aspect to Mathews in a Bookforum review of The Human Country: “If he [Mathews] can be said to have a preoccupation,” Howard writes, “it is the indefatigable need of human beings to discover a pattern in and impose a meaning on the phenomenal world – and the absurd lengths they'll go to do so.” The rules of espionage are, in fact, not unlike the Oulipian constraints that Mathews began employing in the early 70s – 1973 being the year Georges Perec recommended his election to the Oulipo. One of the arcane meanings of My Life in CIA is, perhaps, a meditation on the pleasure of obeying the law, both in literature and in life. By mimicking a spy, Mathews was able, at least until the protective fourth wall came crashing down, to benefit from both the sense of purpose and the excitement associated with intrigue. “What made the difference was the new confidence I'd acquired. I was playing my own private game, and that made me feel safe.” Smoking cigars, womanizing, arranging fake dead drops, designing elaborate daily itineraries specifically to look suspicious, running the Locus Solus Travel Consulting firm as a business front, infiltrating the French communist party to disseminate made-up information, and so on, were, for Mathews, like so many talismans against boredom. “January, 1973 was a good time to start a new life […] the new game certainly seemed more promising than moping at home in front of my mirror wondering how fast I was losing my hair.” Midway through the novel, Mathews begins to realize that the house of mirrors he had created for himself was fast becoming more serious than he anticipated. In “playing spy,” Mathews had unwittingly been associating with neo-fascist leaders and other radical subversives. Government operatives suspected that he was, in fact, such a major player in the espionage world that he had orchestrated both a bombing and a political assassination. Mathews had succeeded in his impersonation to the point of becoming a bona fide agent, at least in the eyes of those out to use him for their ends. And the startling thing was that they – the ambiguous they of all conspiracy thrillers – had the photographic and written evidence to support their allegations. But Mathews's craftsmanship prevents him from turning this web of half-lies into the fantasy of a paranoiac: the Mathews of My Life in CIA creates his own labyrinth and therefore must take responsibility for escaping from it – he is, in other words, a Theseus whose every step makes the entrapment more and more complete. Jacques Roubaud once described his fellow Oulipians as rats who build the maze from which they seek to escape, and it is no accident that this description applies equally well to the Mathews character in My Life in CIA as to Harry Mathews himself. Mathews's “life in CIA” ends up becoming such a matter of life and death that he is forced to flee Paris, only to narrowly evade an assassin lying in wait for him at his cottage in the mountain town of Lans-en-Vercors. As bleak as his situation becomes, however, Mathews never loses the humor we have come to cherish in him: jokes temper the brewing disaster and, in turn, make this disaster itself into a black comedy. The Harry Mathews of My Life in CIA has a touch of the eccentric fou littéraire, who concludes – perhaps rightly – that the most effective way to deal with a world gone mad is simply to laugh. At one of My Life in CIA's most suspenseful moments, Mathews devotes two pages to deciphering an elaborate encoded note written by Georges Perec: “Urgent. The victor of the nearby computational street summons you to return to the same fishy troop when a first point has been scored by the racket.” The whole book is tempered by these Oulipian diversions which, far from being ornamental, are an integral part of its texture. For all its moments of whimsy and high-adventure, My Life in CIA is very much a memoir, perhaps the only kind of memoir which Mathews would know how to write or feel justified in writing. It remains, somehow, a summation – not a chef-d'oeuvre or final word, but a much more elusive reflection on his own life well lived. Mathews takes the opportunity to pay homage to some of his dearest friends – Georges Perec, the sculptor Jean Tinguely, and his wife Marie Chaix – and also to confront, in a roundabout way, the question of his own mortality. And yet, Mathews strips these themes of the ponderousness and false intimacy we often associate with the memoir. “I longed for her,” he writes of Marie Chaix. “I imagined her among silvery-gray olives and low-pruned vines, or in upper pastures where sheep had been wintering, full of thyme and rosemary and bordered with stands of holm oak. I couldn't go looking for her now; but there would be other times.” This is Mathews at his finest: even his paeans are tinged with a good-natured smirk. In an article entitled “In Quest of the Oulipo,” Mathews describes, as a thinly veiled portrait of himself, what sees as the persona of the playful writer: “The playful writer, probably male, never young (although often juvenile), sauntering nonchalantly down sunny boulevards... Faber ludens — a little ludicrous, too; hardly dangerous; hardly serious. Another image of game-playing: a six-year-old girl playing hopscotch, in dead earnest.” My Life in CIA is the work of such a playful writer, the amateur earnestly playing spy, who teaches us the rules of his game while ever so subtly suggesting that the whole thing might be little more than a practical joke. Ashbery once harped on the “mystery” which Mathews, like his spiritual mentor Roussel, has always cultivated about himself – a mystery which My Life in CIA plays no small part in reinforcing. If My Life in CIA can be classified at all, it would have to be as a tall tale: the kind a son braggingly tells about his father, the reluctant spy, to friends around the campfire. And it is all the more enthralling because its raconteur is a known liar, a trickster who nevertheless shows us the “real” Harry Mathews in a way no one else could.
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