Our man in Oulipo.

The erudite and steely James Jesus Angleton, creator of the sinister HONETEL secret counterintelligence investigation unit within the CIA, routinely recited a passage from T. S. Eliot's "East Coker," which his friend and Yale roommate, the poet Reed Whittemore, read at the small memorial service for Angleton I attended with Jimmy Merrill, Joe Brainard, and David Kalstone in May 1987, at Rock Spring Congregational Church, in Arlington, Virginia:

    Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
    The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
    Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
    Isolated, with no before and after,
    But a lifetime burning in every moment
    And not the lifetime of one man only
    But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

Many of the mourners, you sensed, had come to corroborate for themselves that the terrifying Angleton, infamous for his ruthless and destructive mole hunts, was indeed dead.

Eliotic intimations of multiple, parallel lives and fiery but elusive knowledge radiate from Harry Mathews's new memoir--or is it a novel?--My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973 (Dalkey Archive). The only American elected to the experimental Oulipo (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, or "Workshop for Potential Literature") group, and incidentally a close friend of Kalstone, Brainard, and Merrill, Mathews puts the intelligence back in counterintelligence.

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Consider this. The year is 1973, Mathews is residing in Paris, and he finds himself in the dining room of a Napoleonic mansion adjacent to the Church of Les Six Saints Jean. Among those gathered are Florence and Harald--Eurasian "twins," perhaps forty inches tall--and a gruff, boxy man named Zendol, who emerges as a bullyboy in the fascist Ordre Nouveau, "a dangerous lunatic." Mathews arrived at Zendol's on a dolly, rolled inside a carpet. He had been interrupted while making love to a woman in the storeroom of a rug shop and crawled inside to hide before being whisked away. The woman, Rkia, aka Jo, has just woven a shawl for him in a pattern known as a "false-color map," and Mathews hopes to sell it to some American clients as a guide to the clandestine Soviet atomic energy complex in Siberia, furnished to him by the dissident scientist Plishkin.

I probably should explain that Mathews is also scheming to convince everyone but a few intimate friends, such as Oulipo novelist Georges Perec, that he works for the CIA--or just "CIA," since, as he learns, "nobody connected with the Agency calls it the CIA." His ruse originated in a mistake. What Mathews styles his own "social prattle"--Firbankian convivial embellishments at a party in Laos, where he was visiting his friend the British ambassador--led to the CIA rumors. As an American writer of esoteric poetry and fiction living abroad with no evident sources of support, he prompts gossip: Despite a past marriage and many girlfriends, he is often thought gay; a small inheritance from his grandmother convinces people he is wealthy.

My Life in CIA opens as Mathews hears again, this time from a married lover, that he is obviously CIA. His alternately violent and clever denials only seem to confirm the charge, so, against his own leftist political convictions, Mathews decides to embrace his CIA identity. Spurred by mischievous Chilean supporters of Salvador Allende and later assisted by Patrick Burton-Cheyne, a genial former John Ashbery scholar turned international businessman, he starts to act, well, suspect. He exits and enters his apartment as though shedding a tail. He marks random walls with pink chalk. He conspicuously delivers packages. As his CIA "cover," Mathews opens a travel advisory agency he calls Locus Solus, after the literary journal he edited with Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler in the early 1960s. The Plishkin map, or shawl, will be, as he writes, an "irresistible" prize.

But inside Zendol's dining room, as he flirts with the diminutive Florence, he must now spin in reverse. He needs to convince the assembled fascists he is merely a poet, not a spy. The scoffing Zendol tosses him some rhyme words, and Mathews is off, dancing as he improvises lyrics to music from the latest dance rage, "Watergate Squat":

   Not bitch fascist (squat!) with swastika
   And bumper (squat!) double-cross sticker
   Let's anagram (squat!) and acrostic her
   Let's lock her in a paddock
   In six feet of rotten haddock
   Sing high (squat!), speak low (squat!)
   Ho heigh (squat!), heigh ho (squat!)
   Then we'll go play chess (squat!) life-size in Marostica!
   Squat squat squat.
   Squat squat

The rounds and inversions of My Life in CIA suggest a shell game. There is little that is impossible inside these pages and lots that is readily verified; but still those peas are somewhere else every time you lift the walnut. As he loops along his delirious spirals of facts, names, dates, and places, Mathews pauses for snapshots of French intellectuals and celebrities, from Philippe Sollers to Jacques Brel, and manages fresh, astute takes on 1968 Paris. Finally shamed by the CIA-sponsored coup in Chile, he decides to quit his one-man covert operation, only to discover his "game" is already sour, and deadly: The fascist thugs he's inadvertently courted arrange to pin the assassination of a fugitive Baader-Meinhof member on Mathews, and an East German professional killer is after him.

Sometimes Mathews indicates that spying is a shadow for his erotic life--Jo, Florence, or a tantalizing Marie-Claude Quintelpreaux, who transports him in a tantric charade of almost-sex. "I'd learned that the biggest excitement of subterfuge is getting other people involved," he writes. "Other people brought an almost carnal scratch to the itch of my inflamed imagination." Still, whenever Mathews imagines that the situation is sexual, the affair winds up espionage. He also casually anticipates objections and caveats. Dismissing some spy novels he consulted early on for help with CIA habits, he asks, "And who can trust a novelist?" He watches a young writer on a French talk show called "Apprendre a mentir"--"Learning to Lie." And as the hit man closes in, Mathews confesses his worst fear is that the whole convoluted racket might be an Oulipo hoax.

My Life in CIA may not proceed strictly from Oulipo principles--like Perec's infamous e-less novel, La Disparition (translated into English as A Void)--yet there are convulsive Oulipian flourishes. In his Locus Solus advisory guise, Mathews offers a lecture for victims of "travel-stress dyslexia." His solution? "Rule one: they should only take trains and buses whose departure times read the same right to left as they did left to right." He prepares an alphabetical tour of the French countryside for an American couple and in interviews with potential clients answers questions with other questions. The Mathews of this memoir emanates as at once ingenious and clueless--he executes recondite ploys with panache yet is recurrently gulled by the blandishments of his elusive friend Patrick, a likely author of his elaborate doom.

If counterintelligence is a cover for the making of art, then My Life in CIA restores to writing the secret whispers of play, put-on, delirium, and madness, never forgetting the game is also hazardous, maybe even sinister. A reading of Allan Hepburn's elegant Intrigue: Espionage and Culture (Yale University Press) discloses just how resourcefully Mathews overturns classic spy "tropes": the agent's visibility versus his invisibility, his desire to know against his desire to baffle, the "riddles of political identity," and the conundrums of conduct and action as a Baedeker for character. Hepburn diagrams espionage rhetoric and codes, and probes both American and European models, from Greene and le Carre to Didion and Barth. Yet tracked alongside the giddy dramatization of these same notions in My Life in CIA, Intrigue inevitably sounds ordinary, predictable. Perhaps the only words from Intrigue that Mathews might have been tempted to use are those of the dedication: "This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Audrey Hepburn, 1932-2002."

Robert Polito's most recent book is The Selected Poems of Kenneth Fearing (Library of America, 2004). He directs the Graduate Writing Program at the New School in New York.

Shooting the Piano Player looks at noir literature, crime writing, and the fiction and film underworld.