our wonderful lives
by Douglas Messerli
Harry Mathews My Life in CIA (Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005)
I have long felt that Harry
Mathews is one of the best American fiction writers who came of age in the
mid-twentieth century, and his newest fiction confirms my opinion. Mathews’
2005 work, My Life in CIA, might be said to represent a late-career
shift in style and subject, imbuing his work with a new accessibility not
unlike that of Gertrude Stein, whose late-life The Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas has generally been represented by critics (including myself) as a
simplification of her previous bravura techniques. Like Stein, Mathews appears
in this work to be writing an autobiography, strange as that lived experience
may seem, a work very different, for example, from his earlier convoluted tale
of an obsessive journalist hero of The Journalist who uncovers
shockingly “secret” information about his family and friends.
For one personally acquainted with Mathews
as I am, the facts of this seemingly experiential recounting of his illusionary
life as a CIA agent at first seem almost plausible. The tall and trim, often
behatted Mathews—whom many individuals also mistakenly perceived as being gay,
(although he openly admits to bisexuality) in part because he had several gay
friends, John Ashbery among them, and as a man of “independent means” (even I
presumed this, since he had, it appeared, two addresses in France, a Key West
abode and an apartment in New York)—seemed almost to match the image one might
conjure up of a CIA operative—although one must admit Mathews dressed, when I
met him, far too foppishly to fit the mold. In Paris of the early 1970s,
accordingly, friends and strangers alike suspected that he was an agent, and
the more he attempted to deny it the firmer they grew in their beliefs. The
fact that he had a diplomat friend who became ambassador to Laos in the midst
of the Viet Nam War and that Mathews visited him in Laos in 1965—information
leaked, unknown to him, by real agents and perhaps members of the French
Communist Party—gave credence to the gossip.
Understandably, Mathews—in reality an
experimental author sympathetic with several liberal and leftist causes and the
only American member of the French-based group of writers, mathematicians, and
scientists called the Oulipo (Ouvrior de literature potentielle) who employ a
wide range of formal constraints in their literary endeavors—grew increasingly
distressed by these rumors. In 1972 Mathews met two Chileans, Silvia Uribe and
Enrique Cabót, who encouraged him, along with other French friends, to enjoy
his unwanted celebrity by embracing it, to pretend he was an agent, a game
which might also give him entry to different elements of French society and, if
nothing else, provide him with an entertaining avocation.
Part of the great fun of this “fiction” is
Mathews’ recounting of how he goes about—often unwittingly—to establish his CIA
identity, reasserting the rumors with more concrete evidence. Since most agents
hide their activities behind fabricated employers, Mathews creates a mythical
travel agency (named after his real avant-garde journal of Locus Solus),
listing himself among other non-existent directors. The company, amazingly,
attracts the interest of some who ask him to lecture and, others, ultimately, who
hire him for covert deliveries of documents. Most of his efforts to establish
his “CIA connection” are ridiculously ineffective: observing that someone
appears to be following his footsteps, the author takes absurdly convoluted
walks, marking his tracks in chalk upon certain buildings along the way, even
renting a car to stage an imaginary “drop.” But when he meets a supposed
businessman, Patrick Burton-Cheyne—a new acquaintance whose employment involves
him in activities seemingly in synch with that of an undercover agent—Mathews
is educated in new ruses which grow increasingly complex, ending in attempts to
make contact with the French Communist Party and other organizations.
At this point, the reader also begins to
realize that the seemingly plausible “adventures” of the author begin to move
into the realm of marvelous fabulation, as Mathews describes various escapades,
including several sexually unconsummated encounters with a beautiful woman and
an interrupted sexual episode with a weaver of Turkish rugs, which ends
with him being rolled up in the rug and
his accidental delivery to a party of right-wing conspirators who, after a
lavish dinner, play an Oulipean-like game of Squat in which he is forced to
improvise lyrics rhymed with words such as swastika, haddock, jonquil,
plectrum, gardenia, and farthing while he and others dance.
As the story moves forward,
Mathews—without completely perceiving the extent of his involvement—is caught
up in a vortex of coincidental assumptions and events inevitably leading to his
attempted assassination by individuals from both the political right and left.
His advisor and friend Patrick disappears, and after failing to gain access to
the Communists, he is warned for his own safety to leave France. His final
escape reminds one of something out of a James Bond movie, as he seemingly
kills one of his adversaries and apparently eludes his enemies by joining up
with a family of sheep-herders.
Just as the author-narrator finds himself
moving from what might be a very real dilemma to a fantastically absurd series
of events, so too do we, as readers, experience a shift from a very plausible
autobiographical tale to an entertaining invention. By book’s end we no longer
can separate the “real” (his life in Paris, his friendship with the noted
author Georges Perec, his involvement with Oulipo, etc.) from completely
fabricated situations. Just as Stein weaves real events into a fictional
autobiographical story with herself as the center of grand adulation, so too
does Mathews present himself within the context of a great adventure worthy of
being filmed by a major American studio. Even the author believes what he
overhears in an East German café, that he has been “terminated with extreme
prejudice”; for the prejudice emanates, perhaps, not only from some unknown
outsider, but from the author himself.
Like Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas, Mathews represents his life through the voice of a being that is as
fictional as any reader’s representation of his or her self. While it may be
wonderful if others could perceive how exciting each of our lives has been, we
might also find ourselves, like the hero of Mathews’s fiction, in great danger.
For, if nothing else, our lies and selfishly coincidental participation in
villainous acts would turn everyone against us, perhaps even our own consciences.
Are not all Americans, for example, covert agents behind the war in Iraq? Were
we not all, as political activists argued, somehow involved in the atrocities
of Viet Nam? Perhaps that’s why so many Americans resist all attempts to
describe and reveal the events of our own lives; for only those who remain
ignorant of their involvement in the world can pretend to the innocence to
which most of our countrymen seem to aspire.
Los
Angeles, August 1, 2006
Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, No. 5 (November 2006).
