Reading Mathews

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, January 5, 2009

NOTED WHILE READING The Way Home, by Harry Mathews (London: Atlas, 1999). Perhaps because a temporary indisposition has put me off my feed, I identify with the elegiac note running through the collection; even the entertaining lead piece, "Country Cooking," a pseudo-anthropologist's detailed and superbly annotated recipe for double-stuffed lamb shoulder, manages to pass a few clouds over the face of its Auvergnat sun.

There's a lovely cycle of short reminiscences of Georges Perec, in "The Orchard": 123 paragraphs of memories, some significant, some fleeting, all of them tender, none inconsequential — an elegy for modernist fiction, perhaps, as much as for the late maître of restricted writing (it's Perec who wrote La disparition, a very substantial novel lacking any presence of the letter "e").

"Translation and the Oulipo: the Case of the Persevering Maltese" is a talk given in London in 1996, at the French Institute, as one of the St. Jerome series of lectures on translation. It's remarkable, funny, accurate, far-ranging, and provocative. Mathews manages in his famously indirect way to present a solution to the problem of life and death by investigating the relationship of a work and its translation. One need never again complain of a book impossible to classify as fact or fiction. He writes

Facts are the score, not the game. Facts are lies. Not because they are false, but because facts belong to the past — to what was, never to what is. We love them, bacause once reality is safely lodged in the past, it becomes reassuring, reasonable, and easy to manage… There is no escaping this. It is not a Bad Thing. However, a reality we can call the truth must be looked for elsewhere.

This resonates with a line I noted in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice: Elizabeth says

We all look to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing

and, later

Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure

and while the lack of a comma after "past" is telling it is by inserting one that we mediate Austen and Mathews and, who knows, Jane Austen may have begun the ambiguation of fact and fiction, as if she were deliberately looking at an other, subtler, more fecund version of fictional reality than Daniel Defoe's.

Anyhow. What I sat down to give you are two quote from the long autobiographical piece ending The Way Home. First, on books,

Through [his wife Marie] I have been able to see that my parents, my children, my cousins and my cousins' cousins, and friends long unseen and those freshly made, are the substance of my life: that my life is what I have and what I can make of that, not some wishful hope of what may (and doesn't) happen. She has demonstrated what happiness is without ever telling me what it should be.

And then on books:

Just as a glutton desires more food than he needs, and eats more food than he desires, I heaped my life with books. Not only books to read but to own. Each new volume on my shelves added a brick to my defence works, the culture castle in which some day I hoped to live safely and alone…Eventually I came to realise that the prospect I was creating for my future (a lifetime of reading or of not reading, since one lifetime would hardly suffice) was more depressing than reassuring, and I gave up buying books systematically.

That last word is significant: he continues, of course, to buy books, as do we all.