Country Cooking & Other Stories.
Providence, RI: Burning Deck, 1980.
Mathews' first wife was French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle. Poet John Ashbery, who met Mathews in 1956, remained a friend and correspondent throughout the decades (fig 1). Author and editor Maxine Groffsky, to whom Mathews dedicated "Country Cooking from Central France," met in the 1960s; later she was Mathew's literary agent. In 1992 Mathews married French writer Marie Chaix, whose first novel, The Laurels of Lake Constance, he had translated.
(Fig 2) Mathews’ first wife was Catherine Marie-Agnès de Saint Phalle (1930-2002), known as Niki since her childhood. She and Mathews were childhood friends. They met again in their late teens. In June 1949, when Saint Phalle was 18 and Mathews 19, they eloped. Both took up the careers that would make them famous around 1953, while they were living in France: Saint Phalle, who had wanted to become an actress before, turned to art, while Mathews, who had trained as a musician and sought to become a conductor, devoted himself to writing. They had two children, Laura and Philip. At the end of 1960s they separated; Laura and Philip went to live with Mathews in Paris.
Maxine Groffsky, the Paris editor of the Paris Review from 1965 until January 1974, lived with Mathews for eleven years. Mathews writes that during that time he “learned to edit my own writing ... I discovered at least some of the lively things that were happening in American painting and sculpture; and, in general, I was cheerfully obliged to recognize the world around me as a place for discovery and communication.” Mathews dedicated the hilarious “Country Cooking from Central France; Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double)” to her—hear Isaiah Sheffer's wonderful reading of it during the first part of this episode of NPR's Selected Shorts. Groffsky moved back to New York in 1974.
In 2004 Mathew's had this to say about translating Maire Chaix's The Laurels of Lake Constance (New York, 1977):
The translation led to my meeting her and living with her for the past 28 years (12 of them married)
—a not insignificant effect of literature on personal life.
