James McCourt - Mawrdew Czgowchwz

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 Delanceys 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 Queens 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

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

O NE THING I love about James McCourts 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 titles 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 operaperforce devoted to the oralpresents 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 novels 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 centurys 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 Divinas 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 Angeless 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 anyones: 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 ( 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, Cgeste, Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh, Achille Plonque, Contessa Cassia Verde-Dov), the name, like an escutcheon, encapsulating a persona. However, Firbank is but one fey pole of McCourts 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 Firbanks Valmouth. Additionally, preoccupied with le temps, McCourt slims down Prousts 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 McCourts 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 Metthe old Met, McCourt would hasten to add. (The old Mets 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 surrenderdaily duties subordinated to the quest for operatic attendance. McCourts readers, too, have learned to be patientbecause 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-Haights beige boudoir, having interviewed Thalia Bridgewood...

While Tangent Percase wound up his meditations...

While James OMaurigan, 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 namesthe inner circle granted post-performance accessthat a singer leaves with the backstage door attendant. Hospitality grounds the listmaking mania of McCourts 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. Mawrdews 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 Vidals Myra Breckinridge and Andy Warhols a: a novel. Warhols a, not a novel in McCourts 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. Warhols and Vidals novels tried (with less finesse than McCourts) to capture the sound of pre-Stonewall urban gay argot, a lingua franca of dropped hairpins and insider references to film and operaa weft of arcane allusions that turned the simple sociable act of