Mawrdew Czgowchwz Read online

  JAMES McCOURT was born in New York City and attended Manhattan College, NYU, the Yale School of Drama, and the Old Met. He is the author of Kaye Wayfaring in “Avenged,” Time Remaining, and Delancey’s Way and has published stories in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Grand Street, and The Yale Review. He lives in New York City.

  WAYNE KOESTENBAUM has published five books of critical prose, including The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; and three books of poetry, including Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems. He is a Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

  MAWRDEW CZGOWCHWZ

  JAMES MCCOURT

  Introduction by

  WAYNE KOESTENBAUM

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Authors

  Introduction

  MAWRDEW CZGOWCHWZ

  The Order of the Angels

  The List

  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 7

  Copyright and More Information

  INTRODUCTION

  ONE THING I love about James McCourt’s first novel, Mawrdew Czgowchwz (1975), is its formal deviation: it strays from fiction into dithyramb, rant, cavatina, stunt, exercise, letter, self-portrait, manifesto.

  Another thing I love about Mawrdew Czgowchwz is its unpronounceable title’s haughty paradox.

  The title is pronounced “Mardu Gorgeous,” but its spelling, a Slavic clot, proffers difficulty, a task a mouth can never accomplish. Thus, from the obstreperous outset, this novel about opera—perforce devoted to the oral—presents the written as foreign, as obtuse, as a screen. Paradox: this supremely talky novel mines the unspeakable.

  Who is Mawrdew Czgowchwz? Heroine, eye of the novel’s apostrophizing Petrarchan hurricane, she is also the author: Mr. McCourt is the “m.c.,” or emcee, of the text. (At least one friend of Mr. McCourt, in real life, affectionately calls him “Mawrdew.”) Ms. Czgowchwz recalls the twentieth century’s greatest dramatic-lyric M.C., Maria Callas, to whom this book is the complicated Irish valentine. Maria Callas contains multitudes, but, except for an early Isolde, and her mature Lucia and Macbeth, La Divina’s repertoire skimped the British Isles: counteracting, McCourt brings Irish salience to Maria.

  The other diva behind Mawrdew Czgowchwz may be Victoria de los Angeles, whose career McCourt has faithfully tracked, traveling around the globe to hear her performances, befriending her, and profiling her for the old New Yorker (inexplicably, the piece was never published). De los Angeles’s vocal longevity and the variety of her roles mimic Mawrdew Czgowchwz, as if this novel empowered the later years of her endless career.

  Partly Callas, partly de los Angeles, Ms. Czgowchwz is an amalgam of every great singer. After all, her repertoire surpasses anyone’s: Callas, unlike Czgowchwz, never sang Lulu.

  The main literary progenitor haunting Mawrdew Czgowchwz is Ronald Firbank. Like his predecessor, McCourt is a difficult, gnostic writer traveling under comic incognito. His Firbankian touches include ellipses (“...!”); unattributed dialogue (à la Ivy Compton-Burnett); characters captured in stylized cameos (“Throwing out his shapely, manicured right hand...”); static tableaux; and apropos names (Valerio Vortice, La Principessa Oriana Incantevole, Cégeste, Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh, Achille Plonque, Contessa Cassia Verde-Dov’è), the name, like an escutcheon, encapsulating a persona. However, Firbank is but one fey pole of McCourt’s literary genealogy; the other is James Joyce, with whom McCourt shares Irishness and a commitment to verbal condensation, musical language, and myth. McCourt retroactively queers Joyce by crossbreeding Ulysses with such camp novelettes as Firbank’s Valmouth. Additionally, preoccupied with le temps, McCourt slims down Proust’s dreaming corpulence, and demonstrates that, while Proust equates novel and other art forms (sonata, cathedral, photograph), the homology can go a step further: McCourt likens novel to an ephemeral night at the opera. Thus McCourt, immodestly modeling his work on modernist epics, miniaturizes them, or turns them into air.

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz rests on two rhetorical bulwarks: the line, the list.

  A line is a poetic unit of measure, and McCourt’s novel, though ostensibly prose, is actually a poem, as his second novel, Time Remaining, an elegy for the great New York poet James Schuyler, was to prove. A line, however, is also what one waits on, outside the Met—the old Met, McCourt would hasten to add. (The old Met’s death occasioned this elegiac novel, whose first chapter was originally published in 1971 in New American Review, when the disastrous opening of the new house at Lincoln Center was still fresh in memory.) To wait on line requires surrender—daily duties subordinated to the quest for operatic attendance. McCourt’s readers, too, have learned to be patient—because his difficult prose requires slow reading, and because over fifteen years separated the appearance of Mawrdew Czgowchwz and of Time Remaining. From the beginning, his career presupposed comeback.

  The list: the novel begins with an enthralling roster of dramatis personae, and the novel employs listmaking as organizational scheme. Several chapterettes are structured around split-screen lists, various characters’ activities enshrined in parallel dependent clauses:

  While, alone at her faithful Depression Corona, with a bottle of Rock & Rye and a carton of Luckies, Dolores pounded out her column for a tentative tomorrow...

  While Gloria Gotham walked out of Grace Jackson-Haight’s beige boudoir, having interviewed Thalia Bridgewood...

  While Tangent Percase wound up his meditations...

  While James O’Maurigan, chief among those who had followed Mawrdew Czgowchwz out the great doors in the back wall of the Old Met in the dawn following the Traviata triumph, stood in Central Park...

  While Jonathan Stein sat home reading Leibniz...

  While His Scarlet Eminence and Msgr. Finneagle sat playing their esoteric version of Monopoly...

  While Roxanne Sauvage sat home on Staten Island watching The Ways of Life...

  Another list is the roster of names—the inner circle granted post-performance access—that a singer leaves with the backstage door attendant. Hospitality grounds the listmaking mania of McCourt’s recitative: he makes room for backstage visitation, expands the opportunities for divine audience.

  As much as Mawrdew Czgowchwz navigates opera, it negotiates New York City, or Gotham, as McCourt calls it; the old Gotham, whose byways the novel charts, was a place of fast talkers and schmooze artists. Mawrdew’s high-speed scat seems less an imitation of Callas than a memento of gay loudmouth monologists, two of whom acquired textual incarnation in 1968, while Mawrdew Czgowchwz was presumably gestating: Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge and Andy Warhol’s a: a novel. Warhol’s a, not a novel in McCourt’s meticulous tradition, is an error-strewn transcript of twenty-four hours in the life of Ondine, a garrulous speedfreak with a cruel wit and a devotion to Callas; Myra Breckinridge, an homage to Parker Tyler and to camp cinephilia, is the monologue of a film-besotted sadistic transsexual. Warhol’s and Vidal’s novels tried (with less finesse than McCourt’s) to capture the sound of pre-Stonewall urban gay argot, a lingua franca of dropped hairpins and insider references to film and opera—a weft of arcane allusions that turned the simple sociable act of talking nonstop into performance art, though many of these wordy queens did not manage to encase their riffs in any permanent artistic container, whether film or fiction. (Frank O’Hara, however, did: his great long poems, including “Biotherm (For Bill Berkson),” “Second Avenue,” and “In Memory of My Feelings,” share Mawrdew’s lush aversion to termination.) The weird drag persona of Mawrdew Czgowchwz, like Myra Breckinridge, gives voice—and, almost, a body—to a
rtistic preoccupation, or to the sensibility of men, and women, too, who, in the 1960s and earlier, put their considerable mental resources into connoisseurship, aesthetic partisanship, and standing on line. To call Mawrdew Czgowchwz the great novel of the opera queen is less accurate than to call it the great novel of the gay virtuoso gabber—that creature of lists, parentheses, digressions, apostrophes, opinions, and contradictions. Oscar Wilde belongs to this tribe of loud-mouths. So do Dorothy Dean, costar of Warhol’s Afternoon, and Charles Nelson Reilly, game-show stalwart.

  Although McCourt does not hesitate to connect connoisseurship to what a sociologist might call a “gay fan-base,” his novel skimps eroticism, despite its romantic ending, and despite the prose’s nonstop orgasm. Rapture is reserved for the voice of its heroine and its plural narrators (Rodney, Jameson O’Maurigan, Mother Maire Dymphna, and others contribute to the polyphony). Energy’s displacement from eroticism to music has nothing to do with the “closet” or with prudishness, for music is not a code for sexuality: rather, music is a sexuality. (Listen to McCourt: “She sang four Mahler songs so profoundly that the spontaneous quality of the act itself was subsumed in a longing moment that seemed to have been absolutely destined to occur, to be accomplished only and for all time then and there in merely that way.”) Mawrdew Czgowchwz, enacting the adoration that gay (and non-gay) fans have bestowed on the likes of Callas, announces musical performance as the highest form of physical experience—surpassing sex. This pleasure consists equally in listening and singing: the fan’s experience is not a pale simulacrum of the diva’s, but its necessary mirror. Any attempt to look elsewhere (in sex, in economics) for the sources of the worship that La Czgowchwz incites would dilute McCourt’s message, which is that musical performance sacredly blows apart our meager sexual definitions. Mawrdew Czgowchwz preaches the body’s commitment to preposterous idealisms, prime among them lyric time’s divine prison.

  McCourt’s is a cartoon universe in which everyone wants to be (or to be near) the diva. There can be only one Mawrdew Czgowchwz: stardom posits one person’s extraordinariness at the cost of everyone else’s ordinariness. Mawrdew, however, grants magic to anyone in Gotham who joins her cult; thus stardom, democratic, admits all to its list. Despite the novel’s erudite references, it has a utopian class-catholicity, like a dream vision of Manhattan before real-estate inflation ruined it. McCourt’s New York is a zone, now vanished, where the elite may have ruled, but where a host of others gamboled in the high-end froth; his New York conversationally splices downtown and uptown, Rialto showgirl colloquialisms and neo-Victorian ekphrasis (McCourt is a Paterian). The character Rotten Rodney Bergamot commands the widest range of idiolects: for example, in a fit of librettist spleen he says to the composer Merovig Creplaczx,

  “Do me a smart favor, buster! Get me a drink or I’ll get myself another, shall we admit lesser, composer. And a word to the wise, Solange: Hollenius wasn’t plugged in his high smart prime for no smart reason! Here I come through a holocaust to offer you on a silver cocktail tray the kickiest toy idea since Benvenuto Cellini. And you treat me like—like Scribe!”

  Then:

  He slipped a worn recording cut by the late Clichette, supreme diseuse, onto the Victrola, poured a brimful snifter of the most expensive Scotch he thought he recognized, and lay back on the indigo suede couch to brood.... At length he broke off, thick-voiced and Dexamyl-omnipotent, shouting at Merovig, rooms away: “I swear anything you like, Miro, Puvis de Chavannes has the makings of a fucking glorious opera!”

  The coined name Clichette says everything: in Clichette, who exists only for the moment McCourt inscribes her name, cliché (the objet trouvé realm of shopworn snapshots) meets Proust’s Odette. McCourt’s genius lies in his ability to weave the highest styles of twentieth-century literature and music with the gutsy vernacular of men/women (like Candy Darling and Myra Breckinridge) who modeled themselves after Jean Harlow and died in the process.

  McCourt’s subsequent works go even farther into the lunatic fringe, the only place where I feel at home. To the reader who enjoys Mawrdew, I highly recommend McCourt’s other novels, Time Remaining and Delancey’s Way, and also his short-story collection, Kaye Wayfaring in “Avenged.” It is not pejorative to call a work of art “minor.” Deleuze and Guattari, in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, claimed that Kafka himself was a minor writer, and more important for being minor. Robert Walser, too, is subaltern: a writer’s writer, with the melancholy of music’s minor keys. Like other noble practitioners of that strain of modern literature (an elect galaxy including Firbank, Schuyler, Butts, Cavafy, Pessoa, and Rhys), James McCourt has the gift of not assuming that writing is a way of being polite, accommodating, or sociable. Although his novels give comic delight, they also are willing to perplex their readers, and to suggest, in their language’s bejeweled barbed wire, that pleasure is beyond our capacity to understand, and that we turn to literature not to see our desires made lucid, but to see a reflection of our transports at their most difficult.

  —WAYNE KOESTENBAUM

  MAWRDEW CZGOWCHWZ

  The Order of the Angels Who Have Watched over Mawrdew Czgowchwz

  VICTORIA DE LOS ANGELES

  KITTY MOORE

  MARY CURTIS-VERNA

  HARRY BLAIR

  VINCENT VIRGA

  DONALD LYONS

  THEODORE SOLOTAROFF

  ELAINE MARKSON

  SUSAN SONTAG

  MICHAEL DI CAPUA

  LEO LERMAN

  MARIA CALLAS

  LEONTYNE PRICE

  J.D. McCLATCHY

  VICTORIA WILSON

  CHRISTOPHER CAHILL

  EDWIN FRANK

  THE LIST

  MAWRDEW CZGOWCHWZ, the diva of the moment

  *

  The Czgowchwzians

  RALPH, the first to hear Czgowchwz and believe

  ALICE, the first to understand Ralph’s message

  DIXIE, the first to question the transformation

  CARMEN, the first on line

  THE REMAINING

  SECRET

  SEVEN...always there together

  HALCYON Q. PARANOY, the paramount Gotham arbiter

  TANGENT PERCASE, the aesthetic prime mover elect

  THE COUNTESS MADGE O’MEAGHRE GAUTIER, the first fierce friend in New York

  Pèlerin (PIERROT) DESLIEUX, danseur noble

  DAME SYBIL FAREWELL-TARNYSH, the first advisor

  GAIA DELLA GUEZA, the first in fashion

  CONTESSA CASSIA VERDE-DOV’è, a fiscal woman and a good friend

  CONSUELO GILLIGAN, the seeress they all love

  ARPENIK THE WISE AND KIND, the magical woman who fed them

  MEROVIG CREPLACZX, a composer, the apparent Hollenius heir

  JAMESON O’MAURIGAN, poet, nephew to the Countess Madge

  LAVINIA O’MAURIGAN STEIN, Jameson’s twin and confidante

  JONATHAN STEIN, her husband, a publisher and amateur of philosophy

  LAVERNE ZUCKERMAN, protégée of Mawrdew Czgowchwz

  ACHILLE PLONQUE, heroic tenor

  WEDGWOOD, butler to the Countess Madge

  MRS. GRUDGET, of the Plaza staff, attendant on Mawrdew Czgowchwz

  *

  MORGANA NERI, a diva of yesteryear

  *

  The Neriacs (I Neriani)

  LA PRINCIPESSA ORIANA INCANTEVOLE, Neri’s intimate vocal coach

  OLD MARY CEDRIOLI, a wicked woman

  LUIGI MORBOSO, a Fascist from Mott Street

  THE NERIAC ELDERS

  *

  Engineers of / Mediators in the Czgowchwz Restoration

  GENNAIO, the principal restorer

  MOTHER MAIRE DYMPHNA, O.A.O.H., a midwife from the past

  MOTHER ST. MAWRDEW, a former captor

  Cégeste, a perruquier

  FRAMBOISE, a couturier

  HIS SCARLET EMINENCE, the dispenser of graces

  MSGR. FINNEAGLE, his deputy in situ Czgowchwz

  *

>   Citizens of New York and of Elsewhere

  FRANCOBOLLI,

  TOMPKINS,

  Kölnischwasser...critics, champions all

  CHIAVE, the maestro of the Czgowchwz debut

  DOLORES, the biggest snoop in all Gotham

  GLORIA GOTHAM, the upstart snoop with the saber style

  THE TALK OF THE TOWN, always anonymous

  GRACE JACKSON-HAIGHT, the big Society sport

  DOLLY FAROUCHE, the chanteuse with the notions

  TRIXIE GILHOOLEY, the showgirl with the heart

  ROTTEN RODNEY BERGAMOT, a scamp about town

  THALIA BRIDGEWOOD, comedienne, the toast of Broadway

  RHOE, a loyal waitress

  LOIS, the switchboard girl at the Old Met

  ROXANNE SAUVAGE, mezzo-soprano, a game girl

  TURIDDU STAMEGLIO, a gallant tenor

  VALERIO VORTICE, a designer-director of genius

  THE NAMELESS PRESENCE

  THE CAPTAIN OF THE STUDENTS ON LINE

  DOM GESUALDO SVELATO, O.M.F., confessor

  OLD MARY CEDRIOLI’S MOTHER

  DR. ZWISCHEN, an eminent alienist

  LEDA FREITAG, the greatest Isolde in living memory

  FRAU LANGSAM, a Viennese voice teacher

  TATIANA GEHTOPFSKAYA, prima donna assoluta, People’s Artist of the U.S.S.R.

  DAME EVANGELINE TABLOWE, a former diva of Great Britain

  FANDOLE, Britain’s prima ballerina

  ODO BOST, a massive Cornish bass

  PERCIVAL PENPRAZ, director of the Aion Music Consort

  ORPHREY WHITHER, the pantheon director

  THE COMPANY OF NEW YORK’S DIVAS, STARS, MANAGERS, AND AUDIENCES

  THE TOWNSPEOPLE OF NEAPORT, ON THE ISLAND OF MANITOY

  *