LT: How many people are in the OuLiPo?
HM: We never exclude our dead members, who include not only Queneau and Perec but Calvino. But without our dead members, I think, if you counted everyone, we have about 15 or 16, and there are 12 who are active. We meet once a month for dinner.
LT: In Paris?
HM: Yes, it’s a working lunch or dinner, and we’d better get the work done before the dinner starts. It gets rather too delirious to get serious business conducted after the meal starts. Why don’t we have lunch?
After Lunch
HM: I remember earlier in the interview saying that for me rewriting was writing. And I’ve had two experiences in which that was not the case. The first was the title poem sequence of Armenian Papers which I wrote at the end of working days right off and hardly corrected at all, and the other was this book which has just come out called 20 Lines A Day. It’s a collection of my warm-up exercises in which I overcame the terrors that we know of the blank page by giving myself something very short to do: writing at least 20 lines, no less than 20 lines, about anything that happened to come into my head. And the writing turned out to be very interesting even though there was practically no rewriting involved. I just wanted to say that because it’s not what I usually do and it never the less seems to have worked.
LT: Was doing the 20 lines like automatic writing?
HM: No, it wasn’t. I only did one set of automatic writing and I discussed it in one of the 20 line pieces. It was like automatic writing only in that I set myself a limited task, but it was quite different in that I had a subject which I stuck to. Or several subjects. But the writing was as they say, “off the top of my head.”
LT: Certain themes return in your work, one of them, the journey. Which reminds me of Barrett Watten’s designation of you in his essay in the Harry Mathews Number of The Review of Contemporary Fiction: “Harry Mathews, having chosen exile. ” I wondered how you felt about that. You’ve been living in Europe since 1952?
HM: That’s right.
LT: How did you see that move then and how do you see it now?
HM: When I first left America I was very happy to leave the country and what I have to immediately add to that is that I didn’t know the country and I didn’t even know New York City, what I knew was the life of the well-to-do Upper East Side and that life seemed very discouraging to me in terms of what I wanted to do. I was talking to Larry Rivers the other day about that and how, when I went down to what later became my stamping grounds, Greenwich Village, among painters, I felt so out of my element, I felt even worse there than I did among the Upper East Side crowd which was not particularly appealing to me (although of course, there are good friends to be found in all places), so then I went to Europe. It was like a kind of going into exile or might have been interpreted as that, although what it really felt like was going back to a place which was very familiar and which had been sort of mysteriously familiar. I didn’t come back to the United States at all for six years and then I came back a little bit, I didn’t like it and then I came a little bit more and liked it a little bit more, and of course by then I’d met John Ashbery and through him many other friends here and I was discovering a whole other aspect of New York City and the country. I don’t know America very well, I haven’t traveled it nearly as much as I’d like to, but that original aversion to it vanished. And in any case, even if my departure might have been a kind of expatriation at the beginning, it never amounted to a separation from my identity as an American. I’ve never been anything else, I’ve never thought of myself as being anything else. It always astonishes me when people ask me, “Oh, you live in France, well, do you write in French or are you a French citizen?” First of all, that doesn’t happen all that easily in France, it’s not the way it is here where people come, move here and do become citizens. I may have had a desire to reinvent myself in terms of being, if not a Frenchman, a person living in France, a person living in Italy, a person living in Spain; I very quickly learned that you never leave home. And I think the great advantage of having gone to Europe and having lived there is that it allowed me to become more aware of my American-ness than I would have if I had stayed here.
LT: How did Locus Solus, the magazine that you did with other Americans in Paris, come about?
HM: Only John Ashbery was in Paris. Jimmy Schuyler and Kenneth Koch were living in New York at the time. And it came about because we, all of us, wanted to be published more. We did this sort of self-centered thing, we published ourselves and our friends. I hadn’t yet found a publisher for The Conversions, my first book. I’d published a few poems here and there, John had published his first book, Kenneth had published one or two books, and Jimmy had published, I think, a novel and a book of poems. But we were all anxious to see more of what we wanted, not only in terms of publishing ourselves, but of seeing writing we liked published. Although this is much truer of them than of me. I was much less in touch with what was going on in America than they were because of the fact I’d been living in France, I hadn’t kept up, and I didn’t have the contacts.
LT: So you didn’t meet Georges Perec until much later?
HM: Yes. In 1970.
LT: Cigarettes is dedicated to him, and it felt especially right because of the ending, with its meditation on death.
HM: A lot of people died in my life, in a very short time. Between 1980 and 1986 both my parents died, Georges Perec died, several other friends died. So as I was writing Cigarettes, I had experiences of death which are probably reflected in the book. Historically I dedicated it to Perec because when we met we were both going through fallow periods and then he really climbed out of his pit and wrote this fantastic book, Life, A User’s Manual, which Cigarettes didn’t pretend to rival. But the fact that he did it and with such panache and such exuberant diligence, got me out of my reluctance to start a novel again. I was reluctant because of the great difficulty I’d had in publishing The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium. I didn’t want to go through that again. It had been a lot of work and it ended with a lot of disappointment in years of waiting for it to be published. I said, Georges had a lot of excuses not to write if he didn’t want to and he came up with this extraordinary novel, so I should, too. Cigarettes has nothing to do with Life, A User’s Manual, but his having done the book did inspire me.
LT: Cigarettes’ last pages are very moving.
HM: Did I tell you that the pages about the actor in the railroad station (near the end of the last chapter) were the first pages of the book I wrote and the ones that immediately follow — the concluding pages — were the last? There’s the description of this impeccably dressed actor who is hired to be an extra man at social functions, but he’s also an extra like an extra in the movies. I cared about him. I really cared about that passage, with the book ending with that description. Let me just read it.