From the New Introduction to Harry Mathews Tlooth

By Nicholas Delbanco

"I should think that the purpose of my life as a writer would be to give ‘Ode to the Nightingale’ the qualities of Action Comics or vice versa." —Harry Mathews

Harry Mathews was one of a kind. Yet he was also—and the contradiction feels appropriate—a member of a group. Formed in France by such eminent experimental authors as Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, and Raymond Roussel, “Oulipo” became a group devoted to arcana and arithmetic, the puzzle-making and puzzle-solving pleasures of composition, a verbal salade composée. The name itself is a contraction of Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, roughly translated as “workshop of potential literature.” Mathews was the first American elected (in 1972) to this irreverent “Académie Française,” and he proved himself a player in the game. Born in New York in 1930, and having lived much of his life abroad, he died in Key West in 2017.

The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium is perhaps his best-known novel. And My Life in CIA is perhaps his most widely read. But to my mind the representative text, and the point of entry into the remarkable range of Mathews’s work, is Tlooth. In The Oulipo Compendium, he announces that this book is at least in part composed according to the organization’s rules. (Perec, for example, wrote an entire novel without the letter e.) Impossible to categorize or compare to work by any other author, Tlooth includes diagrams, mazes, anagrams, mirror writing, pidgin English, Latin, German, and a pretty fair imitation of James Joyce as pornographer:

Dhats it baibee yoohr ruyt on it, yoohr terin mee in haf its soh goohd, Uym gohing tooh kum in too sekins, oh dahrling, koohd yoo pleez pooht yoohr hand dhair, wait till Uy get uhold uv yoo Uyl fuk yoo too deth, baibee, baibee mierda de Dios! Ccuccuccuccuuccucuucucuccccu . . .

The novel begins with a baseball game played in a Russian prison camp; the opposing teams are the Fideists and the Defective Baptists. Our “hero” belongs to the first of the two sides. There’s a cold wind blowing across a northern steppe, and cruelty defines the Baptists, as we “Consider their bloodthirsty team.” Its shortstop is “Evelyn Roak, surgeon, [who] supplied human fragments to a delicatessen and was arrested for scandalous amputations.” In a footnote the narrator elaborates: “For example, removing, together with a troublesome spur of bone, the index and ring finger of my left hand. I was then a violinist.”

In some sense the story that follows is a story of revenge. Our tale-teller escapes the prison camp in order to pursue the “scandalous” doctor, and his travels take him to Afghanistan, Morocco, India, Venice, and elsewhere. He moves from poverty to luxury, from celibacy to extravagant orgies, from the (mistaken) diagnosis of syphilis to a cure for yaws. It’s bootless, fruitless to summarize the action here, since the rules and donnée of the game keep changing, as does the writer’s rhetoric. What interests Mathews is language, the several modes of description and not the action described.

The narrator trains as a dental assistant, and Chapter Two is titled “My Dental Apprenticeship.” Imagine that the title, Tlooth, is uttered by a patient with an open mouth, whose molar or bicuspid is being prepared for extraction: the mishmash of language is telling, and anyone who’s gone through any such procedure in a dentist’s chair knows the compromised nature of speech. The word itself appears once in the novel as an enigmatic prophecy, when “out of the ooze, as if a capacious ball of sound had forced its passage to the air, a voice distinctly gasped ‘Tlooth.’” That is our titular sound. But what it means as title and why it should assume oracular importance remains a problem to be solved—a way of showing, possibly, that conversation has its limits and communication quasi-comically fails. There’s no evidence, for instance, that the narrator speaks to his dentist, but the inference is everywhere: a garbled arrangement of discourse that, in Ezra Pound’s formulation, attempts to “Make it New.”

A principle component of Western art has long been mimesis, the notion that we imitate “reality,” and the more convincingly the better. But members of the Oulipo would argue otherwise; art is surrealistic, not realistic, and the rearrangement of language profits from serious play. The mathematicians who ordained the rules of Oulipo-performance believed constraint was freedom, and the more strictly confining the better. Wildness must be tamed.

I met Harry Mathews in Vermont, in the mid-1970s. His reputation had preceded him: the owner of expensive cars, the ex-husband of Niki de Saint Phalle, the bon vivant and scamp. I was teaching at Bennington College when he joined the faculty, and we became good friends. He and his second wife, Marie Chaix, joined me and my wife Elena for meals and walks and talks. Though “our revels now are ended,” to quote the Shakespeare he cites below—they were “such stuff as dreams are made on.” He spoke and wrote and taught with acrobatic ease.

From The Oulipo Compendium, of which he was co-editor with Alastair Brotchie, here is one of Harry’s sonnets, “The Maoist’s Regrets”:

Shall I compare thee, China, to Peru?
That is no country! Amid the alien corn,
The woods’ decay, the yielding place to new,
The old order changeth: blow his wreathed horn!
They that have power to (men, lend me your ears!)
Could to my sight that plods his weary way
Rage, rage against the lie too deep for tears,
The feathered glory of an April day,
That’s my last Duchess dying of the light—
Put out the light and gaze toward paradise,
A thing of beauty loved not at first sight
(The uncertain glory from her loosening thighs . . .) 
Something there is that is a joy forever.
Friends, “Romans”, country? Never, never, never.

There’s a wide-ranging allusiveness to this pastiche, a tongue- in-cheek set of quotations and paraphrases starting and ending with Shakespeare, but with a sideways glance and nod at Yeats, Keats, Browning, Frost, Dylan Thomas, and others. The range of reference in this writer’s work is large, and humor is never far off. (Indeed, the single funniest short fiction I know is Mathews’s “Country Cooking”—a farce double, or treble, quadruple, quin- tuple, about the method of collective preparation for a rural feast.) Place-names are invented; people have such sobriquets as Dhaversac and Zuckerkandl, Countess Mur del Marsa and Claude Morora and Dr. D. There are diagrams to be deciphered, poems to be parsed, tongues to translate and riddles to resolve. This—what shall we call it? Idiosyncrasy? Quirkiness? Backassward brilliance—is Mathews’s hallmark everywhere and seems to be bred in the bone. He wrote as a shapeshifter: as novelist, short story writer, and poet; as critic and conceptual artist; in both English and French . . .