Art & Creativity Quote by Harry Mathews

Admiration is the polite mask ambition wears until it gets hungry. Harry Mathews begins with the kind of apprenticeship every writer recognizes: John Cheever as north star, “magnificent” as both praise and permission. The first sentence is deliberately modest, almost dutiful. “If I could write like him” frames influence as a craft problem: learn the moves, earn the style, join the lineage. It’s also a trap. Cheever’s particular genius - suburban lyricism, moral weather, the ache beneath American prosperity - is so complete it can make imitation feel like the highest reachable peak.

Then Mathews snaps the hinge. “And then I realized” is the quiet violence of self-knowledge, the moment the disciple becomes a rival to his own fantasies. The turn isn’t a rejection of Cheever’s talent; it’s a rejection of the false bargain that reverence demands: become a lesser version of a master, or risk becoming yourself. Mathews, associated with Oulipo and procedural experimentation, is hinting at a deeper incompatibility: Cheever’s realism and Mathews’ appetite for constraint, play, and conceptual mischief don’t just differ in style; they obey different theories of what fiction is for.

The subtext is about taste as destiny. Influence is often framed as inheritance, but Mathews frames it as misrecognition corrected. The best writing life isn’t achieved by perfecting someone else’s instrument; it’s found by admitting the music you actually hear doesn’t match the score you were taught to worship.