Cigarettes: A novel - Hardcover

Mathews, Harry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1555840922 ISBN 13: 9781555840921

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987

Synopsis

Cigarettes is a novel about the rich and powerful, tracing their complicated relationships from the 1930s to the 1960s, from New York City to Upper New York State. Though nothing is as simple as it might appear to be, we could describe this as a story about Allen, who is married to Maud but having an affair with Elizabeth, who lives with Maud. Or say it is a story about fraud in the art world, horse racing, and sexual intrigues. Or, as one critic did, compare it to a Jane Austen creation, or to an Aldous Huxley novel - and be right and wrong on both counts.

About this title

About the Author

Born in New York in 1930, Harry Mathews settled in Europe in 1952 and has since then lived in Spain, Germany, Italy, and (chiefly) France. When Mathews published his first poems in 1956, he was associated with the so-called New York School of poets, with three of whom (John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler) he founded the review Locus Solus in 1961. Through his friendship with Georges Perec, he became a member of the Oulipo in 1972. The author of six novels and several collections of poetry, recent publications are THE NEW TOURISM (Sand Paper Press, 2010), Sainte Catherine, a novella written in French (Editions P.O.L, 2000), The Human Country: the Collected Short Stories (Dalkey Archive Press, 2002), The Case of the Persevering Maltese: Collected Essays (Dalkey Archive Press, 2003), OULIPO COMPENDIUM (co-edited with Alastair Brotchie; Atlas Press and Make Now Press, 2005), and My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From Allan and Elizabeth: "What's he mean, 'I suppose you want an explanation'? He doesn't explain anything."

The gabled house loomed over us like a buzzard stuffed in mid flight. People were still arriving. Through the lilac hedge came the rustle of gravel smoothly compressed, and swinging streaks of light that flashed beyond us along a pale bank of Japanese dogwood, where a man in a white dinner jacket stood inspecting Allan's letter with a penlight.

He passed the letter around. When it was my turn I read, in another revolution of headlights, ". . . the state I was in--barely seeing you when they were taking me away . . . Darkness, blinding light . . . I couldn't manage a squeak." I too was confused. Even dazzled by Elizabeth, could this be Allan?

I wanted to understand. I planned someday to write a book about these people. I wanted the whole story.

After an absence of many years Elizabeth that day had come back to town. A little after midnight she went to the "casino," as the last private gambling club was called. Allan was leaving. Having drunk too much and started a noisy argument, he was being politely bounced. He passed Elizabeth in the glare of the lobby. At the door he was told, "Next time, Mr. Ludlam, please keep it down. And watch yourself on the road."

"Thank you. Who is she?"

"Beats me."

Outside, the night was hot and starry. Allan started driving home, stopping on the way at the Spa City Diner. Maud would have long been asleep.

He had two cups of coffee, chatting with late-night customers. He wished he could visualize Elizabeth exactly. (He remembered the sparse whiteness of her clothes, the flurry of her red-gold hair.) He knew she had seen him; her ready acceptance of him in those circumstances made him wince.

Allan had cleverness, if not wisdom, and he prized it. He held the world and himself in contempt. Recently he had shown kindness to me when few others had. My best friend had died, and gossips had cruelly blamed me for it. "You're lucky," Allan told me, "learning young what bastards people are. 'People,'" he added, "includes me." He meant that befriending me made him no better than the others, only smarter. He mistrusted his own decency.

On his way home, passing the Adelphi, he saw a red-haired figure in white crossing the faintly lighted porch. He braked. Perhaps a minute passed while he recollected that he was a local worthy, that he had already demeaned himself, that he was still drunk. He parked his car and went into the hotel. On night duty he found Wally, who had know him for thirty years. Allan asked if it was too late for a nightcap. Wally said, hold the fort, he wouldn't be a minute.

The lobby looked empty. Allan stepped behind the front desk to examine in the open register the arrivals on this first day of July. He stopped at a familiar name: Elizabeth H., the woman in the portrait Maud had just bought. He had met her once or twice, long ago. She might have been the one at the casino. Perhaps he had unconsciously recognized her--that would explain her effect on him. Hearing Wally returning, he noted her room number.

After a minute spent sipping his high ball, Allan said he was going to the john. Out of sight, he entered the honeyed glow of the carpeted stair. On the third floor he turned right. He had no plans. Behind one wall a pipe produced a spasmodic whine. Unless, Allan thought, a chipmunk was trapped in the old timbers; the sound struck him as animal. He counted door numbers until he reached Elizabeth's.

The whine was coming through that door. He pressed his ear to the wood. The voice sang waveringly on, needling Allan like a stuck car horn. He tried the doors of the adjacent rooms. The one on the right opened, and he entered a dark bedroom where light from the street revealed an empty bed. Crossing the room, Allan raised a window and leaned out. A ledge a foot wide ran across the building at floor level. From the window at his left faint light was shining. Gripping the window frame, Allan lowered both feet onto the ledge and slid along it. Reaching the light, he was confronted by backlighted blue shepherdesses strutting in a monotony of willows. The curtains allowed his sight no chink. Again, he heard the voice sustaining its reedy cantillation. In the lobby, when the woman had looked at him and then looked away, from the unbuttoned top of her dress one unhaltered breast had slipped and been tucked back smoothly into place. He had conceived her nakedness under the white cotton and the cinched belt buckled with golden snakes.

He looked down at the street--anyone there could see him--and began retracing his path. Downstairs, Wally waved him out into the fervent night. Allan was so astonished that if Maud had woken up when he came home, he might have told her everything that he had done.

In his letter, Allan wrote Elizabeth, "I kept wondering, was it really your room? Your voice? Who was with you? What exactly was he or she or they doing to you? I didn't want answers--I wanted you. I felt deprived."

Edition details

• Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
• Publication date: 1987
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1555840922
• ISBN 13: 9781555840921
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 292