M AW R D EW
C ZG OWC H W Z
J A M E S M C C O U RT
INTRODUCTION BY
WAYNE KOESTENBAUM
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
CLASSICS
MAWRDEW CZGOWCHWZ
JAMES M C COURT 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
W AY N E KO E S T E N B A U M
new york review books
nyrb
N e w Yo r k
This Is a New York Review Book
Published by The New York Review of Books
1755 Broadway, New York, NY 10019
Copyright © 1971, 1973, 1975 by James McCourt
Introduction copyright © 2002 by Wayne Koestenbaum
Grateful acknowledgment is made for the use of Artemis, Acrobats, Divas,
and Dancers (detail of Diva), an original mosaic artwork © by Nancy Spero,
commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority/Arts for Transit
and owned by MTA New York City Transit.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
McCourt, James, 1941–
Mawrdew Czgowchwz / James Mccourt ; introduction by Wayne
Koestenbaum.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-940322-97-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Women singers—Fiction. 2. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 3.
Metropolitan Opera (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. 4. Contraltos—Fiction.
5. Opera—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.A266 M38 2002
813'.54—dc21
2001008126
ISBN 0-940322-97-8
Cover illustration: Nancy Spero, Artemis, Acrobats, Divas, and Dancers
(detail of Diva), 1998–2001, glass mosaic, 66th St.–Lincoln Center subway
station, New York City
Cover design: Katy Homans
Book design by Lizzie Scott
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
February 2002
www.nybooks.com
INTRODUCTION
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,
v
Introduction
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 VerdeDov’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
vi
Introduction
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 JacksonHaight’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 . . .
vii
Introduction
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 twentyfour 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
viii
Introduction
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 loudmouths. 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
ix
Introduction
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,
x
Introduction
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.
— WAY N E K O E S T E N B A U M
xi