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
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

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Authors

Introduction

MAWRDEW CZGOWCHWZ

The Order of the Angels

The List

1
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2
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3
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4
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5
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6
  
7

Copyright and More Information

O
NE 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:

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
artistic 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,

Then: