Mathews has lived in France most of his life, although he spends some of the year in the United States and has lived in other countries. He does literary translation from French and has written original works in French, including the recent novella Sainte-Catherine. His close friend Georges Perec (1936-1982) was perhaps the most innovative and eclectic French writer of the last century. In 1972 Mathews joined a playful group of French writers and mathematicians, the Oulipo. He was the first American member of this influential workshop for potential literature.
The Oulipo has empowered me to reach what I was already struggling towards;
by clarifying and expanding my awareness of what I was doing,
it has enabled me to move towards what I had not yet done.
—Harry Mathews
At left (fig 1) is the Mathews Corpus, a list of words that Mathews compiled. Each word is spelled the same in French and English but has different meanings. It was reprinted in February 1977 in Martin Gardner’s “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American.
Cigarettes, Mathews’ fourth novel, is dedicated to the memory of Georges Perec who died of lung cancer. Marie Chaix’s French translation of the novel in 1988 was well-received. Jean-Louis Ezine review “L’Amérique à tabac” in Le Nouvel Observateur (fig 2) includes a photo of Mathews and Perec on Ile de Ré.
