By David Brizer
Discussed in this essay:
Niki, a film directed by Celine Salette, 2024
Harry et Moi: Les Années en Famille 1950 -1960, Gallimard, 2006
The Solitary Twin, Harry Mathews, New Directions, 2018
The Conversions, Harry Mathews, Dalkey Archive, 1997
Niki de Saint-Phalle, a French-American artist, made “light-hearted, whimsical, colorful, large-scale sculptures of animals, monsters, and female figures” (thank you, Wikipedia), planted Tarot cards in a garden, fired live ammunition at canvases, and raised two children with writer Harry Mathews in the middle decade of the twentieth century. By today’s standards she would qualify as both a conceptual and a performance artist. Playful as her oeuvre may seem to the casual observer, it was nonetheless informed by life exigencies of the most baleful order, including sexual abuse by her father, bouts of suicidal behavior, psychiatric hospitalizations, and marital cauchemars.
The young couple had a tough row to hoe. Mathews, whose surrealist bagatelles earned him a place as editor of The Paris Review and membership in Oulipo, was also a womanizer and a hollow-legged fancier of distilled spirits. Niki, originally a top model at Vogue and similar venues, had profoundly disturbing issues with both her parents. The young couple fled to France to escape family drama and the repressive ululations of 1950’s McCarthy-dominated America. Niki the film opens to Niki at a modeling shoot, Niki at home with baby Laura, Niki as The Sphinx in a production of Oedipus Rex (foreshadowing the collusion of blindness and disavowal she later encounters when she tries to out her child molester father.)
In the Louvre, visited by a horrific vision of serpents, she wonders, “What is wrong with me?” Flashbacks include teenage Niki coloring the genitals of statues with lipstick; taking knives from the dining table to hide beneath her bed. (Mother insists she gets professional help.) When she repeats the act, not with one knife but with cutlery and weapon-utensils of every stripe, as a married woman and mother, Harry takes her to the doctor, who tells them she must stay. Thus begins Niki’s sometime career as mental patient. She undergoes insulin and electroshock treatment, gradually returning to the land of the living because she can create. She takes tentative steps toward reassembling herself, using objet-trouvés from the asylum to create assemblages.
Niki reinvents herself, makes decisions that work for her. She turns down a role in a Bresson film. She befriends, and later beds, Jean Tinguely, a fellow artist who turns out to be a boon companion for life. Harry’s extra-marital adventures foment another suicidal crisis for Niki, who finally divests herself of the unholy mess by picking up and moving out, this time on her own, to Paris. This is the germinal event – she blossoms as an artist, and finds her voice: “I shoot at the painting,” she exults, “it cries, it bleeds, it dies.” Niki de Saint-Phalle’s family life in the film is an impossible dream. In almost every scene, husband Harry appears as a doting, long-suffering perfect partner who must field his wife’s depressions and manias with saint-like aplomb. Impossible, because in real life Harry Mathews was the silver-tongued devil who conversations and novels 
reeked of other-worldly barbs and innuendo. In The Conversions, party guests compete by running champion “zephyr-worms” on a racecourse of elaborate design. The winner receives a ritual adze whose scabbard is encrusted with oneiric engravings. The art and utter hilarity of the book derives from Mathews’ preoccupation with the word ‘adze’. (Not dissimilar from some of Mathew’s other narrative jaunts: his novel Tlooth launches in a Siberian prison camp where lifers are sorted by obscure religious denominations. The word play is rampant here, too. Baseball and dentistry are the main occupations of the inmates.)
If you know and treasure Mathews’ books, you will positively rankle at actor John Robinson’s Harry: a mild-mannered husband for all seasons, much put upon but weathering it all. Director Salette reduces the affairs and extra-marital excesses of husband and wife to what amounts to a passing mention. Which, when all is said and done, may be the better part of directorial valor, since a more complex, sophisticated portrayal might leave audiences gape-mouthed, overdosed on the surfeit of tragedy in this couple’s life. Charlotte LeBon was brilliant casting: she looks a lot like Niki. (Except she is too expensively coiffed in every shot, even in the throes of agony.) Another problem is the camera’s almost deliberate avoidance of Niki’s actual sculptures and paintings: what was all the fuss about, anyway? (Or is this a kind of repetition compulsion, the cinematographer avoiding their subject much like Niki’s psychiatrist burning the confession letter from her dad?) But two viewings and a crammed notepad later, the film comes off as otherwise brilliantly visioned, written tight as a drum, Voltairean in its capture of the complex lives and work of Niki and Harry. I quote our most trusted source, Google AI: ” Harry Mathews was not a good husband to Niki de Saint Phalle; their marriage was marked by personal difficulties, infidelity, and Saint Phalle’s struggles with mental and physical health, which ultimately led to their separation.” Finally, in the film, Mathews describing his work cites his meeting with surrealist paterfamilias Raymond Roussel as foundational. Oops: Harry would have been 3 years old at the time of Roussel’s death in 1930.
Years later, following his departure from Niki, from the relative serenity of Key West, Harry Mathews penned The Solitary Twin, his last but not his best book. Twins John and Paul, identical at birth but otherwise wholly dissimilar, fascinate the townspeople of a well-run close-knit village by strictly avoiding each other at every opportunity. This mutual exclusion goes on for decades. In the telling, Mathews weaves a boatload of other stories, sandwiched and nested Purloined Letter-style like you wouldn’t believe — shades of Oulipian craft and narrative intrigue! The key to the mystery — I’m not spoiling the story, the story is the audacious writing itself – is that one of the brothers was horrendously abused, to the point where murder, murder of the abuse, becomes his only recourse. Ourobouros, serpent with tail in mouth: Niki’s wound was never really lost on Harry. But Harry’s madness, unlike Niki’s, was confined to the page.
About the author: David Brizer is a Bronx, NY-based fiction writer and book critic. His most recent novel, The Secret Life of V.H. Rand, was published by Fomite in 2024. His work appears in AGNI, Word Riot, failbetter.com, Exquisite Corpse, Calliope, Exacting Clam, Rain Taxi, Compulsive Reader, TYPO, Vol 1 Brooklyn.