Of Mawrdew Czgowchwz
La Cieca is delighted to throw out the first ball or lift her baton or whatever it is one does to launch a discussion, which in this case is on the topic of that most quintessential of all opera novels, Mawrdew Czgowchwz—though she does insist on prefacing anything she says with the caveat that she’s never presided over a book club before, so she asks your indulgence as she continues so as not to disappoint her public.
Your doyenne recalls that when she first picked up this novel all those years ago in the Synthetic Seventies, she was more than a little disoriented by the simultaneously discursive and elliptical style adopted by James McCourt in relating his yarn. In particular she found daunting the plethora of characters, whose chatter is very much in the foreground, and the relatively scant attention given over to plot.
Of course, this choice of emphasis is very much organic to the meaning of the work, La Cieca has come to realize over the decades, but in the meantime she thought it might be helpful to the first-time reader to single out certain milestone events in the Czgowchwz saga.
Spoilers lie ahead, so if you’re still in mid-read and desirous of being surprised, you might want to skip over this next section.
Mawrdew Czgowchwz unfolds between March 1955 and September 1956, set almost completely in “Gotham as it was, when it was truly fabulous.”
In Chapter 1 (March 17, 1955) diva Mawrdew Czgowchwz returns to the Metropolitan Opera after the resolution of some unspecified disagreement with the company’s new general manager. So devoted were her fans that they staged a hunger strike and chained themselves to the outside walls of the Old Met in protest of her unjust firing. On this crucial night Czgowchwz will sing her role debut in La Traviata, marking a change of fach from mezzo-soprano to “Oltrano,” a protean vocal category spanning over three octaves in working range. In a flashback to 1948, we learn of the diva’s “discovery” by the fan Ralph and the other members of the Secret Seven, her defection from Czechoslovakia to the West and her meteoric ascent at the Met following a controversial debut as Amneris opposite established diva Morgana Neri. The performance of Traviata surpasses all expectations on both sides of the footlights, and the reign of Czgowchwz as absolute diva commences.
Chapter 2: Having sung 40 prima donna roles in celebration of her approaching 40th birthday, Czgowchwz has announced her first Isolde in a new production at the Met, opposite the Brangaene of her protégée, the Falcon soprano and erstwhile standee Laverne Zuckerman. The oltrano’s conquest of the soprano repertoire has forced La Neri to announce her farewell for Christmas Eve, 1955, as Norma.
Chapter 3: On December 21, the faithful gather at the Upper East Side townhouse of Countess Madge for dinner, Winter Solstice rites, and opera-themed tomfoolery climaxing in the reading of Ralph’s mock-epic poem “The Nericon.”
Chapter 4: As news of Ralph’s scurrilous opus spreads beyond the standing room line, Czgowchwz faithfuls prepare for the evening’s performance of Tristan und Isolde. Meanwhile, a Neri fanatic, half-mad Old Mary Cedrioli, steals a lock of hair from Czgowchwz and casts a hex on the diva. Poet Jameson O’Maurigan, overwhelmed by the first act, leaves the opera house with a casual pickup. During the third act, Czgowchwz, “as if possessed” bolts onstage and delivers an “oracular” performance of the “Liebestod” – in Gaelic – before collapsing into a coma.
Chapter 5: The winter of 1956. The amnesiac diva’s friends determine that restoring her to health will require expert psychoanalysis and delving into the “missing” years before her fateful flight to Paris. Sleuthing in Dublin and Prague reveals the truth:
Chapter 6: Czgowchwz is the love child of martyred Irish patriot Maeve Cohalen and Czech poet/activist Jan Motivyk. Her memory restored, the diva makes a first public reappearance at the 1956 St. Patrick’s Day parade, then announces a return to the stage on April 30. Once more she surpasses herself by performing a matinee at the Met of Pelléas et Mélisande, followed by a marathon song recital that evening at Carnegie Hall.
Chapter 7: Czgowchwz finds both professional and personal happiness. She meets and falls in love with her male equivalent, countertenor (later oltrano) Jacob Beltane. They headline an esoteric music festival including the world premiere of an avant-garde opera by genius composer Merovig Creplaczx. After a celebratory gala in Central Park on the last day of summer 1956, Mawrdew and Jabob sail away to Europe and new adventures.
And now, cher public, your impressions?
La Cieca, thanks for the Cliff Notes, it finally makes sense, well sort of makes sense.
You are as divine a bookclub hostess as you are a doyenne. Oprah ain’t got nothin’ on you, honeybun.
I’ll try einmal to get past Chapter One. Maybe St. Dymphna will come to aid me.
After having criticized others for finding this book unreadable based on a few pages from the 1st chapter, sadly, I have to concur. It is unreadable. I struggled through the first chapter and then gave up. Please, please, please pick a more approachable book next time.
Someone suggested a chat format for the book discussion group. I think that’s a great idea. Hopefully, next time for me.
Well, I have to say this isn’t the reaction I was looking for. “Unreadable,” I think, is not accurate, but so far anyway it doesn’t look like much of anybody has anything to say about the book, other than “I don’t like it.” That’s not, as I understand it anyway, the point of a book discussion, so I apologize for choosing a subject so few seem interested in. All I can say is, I love this book, I return to this book frequently, and obviously I don’t at all think it’s “unreadable.” Tricky, perhaps, and maybe the sort of thing that is helped along if you ask questions or otherwise, you know, discuss.
Or not: maybe it’s just me.
I like this book a lot, liebe Cieca, I’ve just been too busy to sit down with it right now and give it the attention it deserves. I’ll just quote one of my favorite lines:
“Here I come through a holocaust to offer you on a silver cocktail tray the kickiest toy idea since Bevenuto Cellini. And you treat me like–like Scribe!”
Having just read about the origins of Benvenuto Cellini and Scribe that was the one line I got. Still working on the rest.
McCourt is an ultimate moralist. Certain things count- they rule our lives.
In Mawrdew’s day it was ‘the snakes’ and ‘the line’. Now it’s Parterre Box.
The management in THAT cafeteria across the street – the essence of patience.
The closest we had at Lincoln Center was O’Neals’s and THAT’s gone.
What are we going to do?
More about Mawrdew: JJ’s interview with author James McCourt (and he was a terrific talker!) is available here: [PDF]
I once had a talk with Fran Lebowitz about McCourt. She thought him to be in the Pantheon of humorists which bewildered me since she had not even the slightest liking of opera.’What’s for the likes of you to get?’ She said his brilliance was essentially situational wit with opera merely a tangent, rather like what Ring Lardner
would do with a baseball story. His prose style – heavenly, with narrative the frailest of hooks. She was just as enthusiastic about ‘Time Remaining’ which deals with the transport of Mawrdew’s ashes. I have read and re-read all his work with the greatest of pleasure.
It’s been pointed out to me that the the redoubtable Harold Bloom included
‘Time Remaining’ in his assemblage Great Books from the Western Canon.
I have no-one other than our Doyenne to thank for showing me the light of Mawrdew, oh-so-many moons ago, when she, at the start of a Ciecacast, delighted her cher public with a sprightly reading of the novel’s opening paragraphs. I then read Chapter 1 on the amazon web site and was transfixed.
Effervescent gushings aside, I must confess that my first attempt at reading the book stalled almost immediately, but once I picked it a second time and let it wash over me, I was swept away.
There are far too many fabulous descriptions and dialogues to mention here, but to me the best passage in the book is the practically note-by-note account of Mawrdew’s watershed Traviata. I finally understood why so many hets are entranced by dreary, bone-dry accounts of allegedly great baseball games or fights of yore: in the right hands, I discovered, an opera performance can be just as thrilling as a communal shower in the US Soccer Team changeroom. I’ve reread those pages many times, and each time they sound as fresh as ever.
How is the discussion going to be organized: by chunks of pages or themes?
My GOD, Il Guarany, how can you expect anybody to get a day’s work done after a post like that !
I do hope you are safely ensconced on your veranda, and not on public transit again, dear Bets.
Well, perhaps we can begin with something relatively simple, such as pointing out our favorite “a clef” characters and moments? The first chapter, detailing the Czgowchwz return, is obviously inspired by two great events in the Callas mythology, the 1958 firing by Bing and the 1965 “comeback” — at which time standees did indeed tough out a blizzard for several days and nights, and some fans journeyed out to Ildewild to welcome the diva’s inbound plane.
Dear St. Dymphna, please lead the misguided back to Mawrdew and their salvation!
O please, pretty please, Dearest La Cieca, Abbi Pieta di Noi Disgraziati! I am logging on just to beg pardon for not having sufficient time and concentration to finish reading. May we please do this in installments, by chapter, by topic?? If there was EVER any group that should read this book, it’s I Parterriani, the cyber Secret Seven, by Gawd and by St. Dymphna! I give an example:
“Thus the imaginative gathering of these principals, supporting players, featured players, and selected extras in the dream play that is the Czgowchwz tale was best described as ‘a brilliant procession of the willing elect, boarding a fantasy ark of wild delight–its own discrete realm, perfectly constructed to achieve buoyant salvation from space-time’s torrent deluge’.”
If Parterre Box is not a ‘fantasy ark of wild delight’ and a ‘buoyant salvation’ for we opera peeps, shucks, I just dunno. Please, let’s persevere, peeps. La Cieca has not chosen this oeuvre capriciously nor arbitrarily but for damn good reasons.
Wouldn’t this just be a too, too divine opera for Dufus Wainwright to write?
It would be too, too sumpting!
Yes, Sanford the mot opératif being too – it really is too divine an œuvre for Rufus’s prosaic, pedestrian mettle, so do not give him silly ideas. Sometimes Well is like Garbo: it just wants to be left alone.
The book is unreadable only by the illiterate (he hissed). I (by contrast) read it when I was in high school. Fabulous, oddly life-affirming stuff.
I am eagerly awaiting my copy from Amazon. I’ve read the first chapter on the online preview and I am sooo riveted and anxious to see what’s next!! (I must admit I’ve learned a few juicy new words too.) I think it’s beautifully written and so hysterical and on point in so many ways. Most of all, it’s fantastic because it is so REAL – the little jabs at Callas and Bing and the critics and all – the best description of the defenestration of Prague EVER – the general INSANITY of the opera world — ohhh…. I’ve loosed many a “venereal sigh” at the opera house over some heavenly note or other – and I am simultaneously enjoying laughing at such an apt reflection of the fan side of my own personality – and loving the validating, and so eloquent, reminder that so many others experience opera in such a ridiculously sublime way……..
At the risk of being cursed by La Cieca, I have to admit that I never read ‘Mawrdew Czgowchwz’.
I do like light reading just for fun, and I remember in that general period when I heard talk of this book, I was reading all I could find of Mordden and Maupin. A friend had Mawrdew and some friends liked it and I had the book in my hands, but browsing through it I did not come up by chance to a phrase that intrigued me enough to motivate me to read the whole thing. When I was told of the general subject, I thought it was enough to browse ‘Opera News’ for absurd tales of singers with unpronounceable names. I was also turned off by the name Czgowchwz. It seemed a little forced, recherché, trying too hard to be funny with the use of just a vowel and eight consonants. I tend not to find amusing that sort of exaggerated attempt at humor. So I made a mental note to check the book in the future, and it turned out I never got a copy.
After reading this thread I conclude that perhaps I should have made the effort to read this book. I think I will, but I will not get a copy. Someone I see infrequently has offered to lend me his copy, and so I will borrow it sometime, and then I’ll apply myself to read it. This thread has been useful to me, anyway, because I now know what to look for and what not to look for in the book. I don’t rule out becoming an ardent fan of the book after I read it, but maybe not.
I’m totally at a loss. While I was reading, my reaction was “Mmm, Page One is like a scoop of Baskin-Robbins’ Rum Raisin.” “Mmm, Page Two is like another scoop of Baskin-Robbins’ Rum Raisin.” “Page Three, more rum raisin.” “Rum raisin.” “Who do you have to fuck to get some horseradish around here?” Like many great novelists, McCourt has the gift of distilling his characters to their essence, but here the distilling process reveals that there IS no essence. Like the inhabitants of Jonestown, all these people are consumed by their adoration of a common object. I really need the moor, the anchor of having at least one person for whom the author feels some sympathy.
I take it the book both is and is not a roman a clef, but because I lived in that time but not in that place, I can’t play “I spy with my little eye,” which takes some of the relish out of it.
Sorry, dear doyenne, I’m not a convert. Even the prose, which sometimes frolics and dances, more often galumphs and thonks as though he were hammering the words out of twisted Pepsi-Cola cans. Ironic, I guess, that a slice of society that views itself as painstakingly au courant should be encapsulated as a gew-gaw.
It has been a very long time since I tried to read it, but I think I completely agree with Miss. B.
Much love and kisses, Alto, but I really hate to be agreed with. If I ever discovered I was depriving someone of a jolly good read because of my psychotic ravings, I’d have to become sane, and that would break my old bobolink-y heart.
I really need the moor, the anchor of having at least one person for whom the author feels some sympathy.
Well, it’s not as if there’s a protagonist here (Czgowchwz herself is so remote until she has her couple of rather formal love scenes with Jacob) but the person for whom the author feels some sympathy is to my mind the observer. Not the narrator (who is the most gratingly, effortfully “brilliant” of the whole phalanx of mot-droppers) but rather the listener, i.e., the reader, the novice who is hearing all this wild stuff and doing his best to understand what the hell all these people are yammering about.
I identify with that “listener” in two ways, as a very young gay man listening to an older generations of queers holding forth on the traditional areas of “gay” expertise (musical theater, fashion, obscure Bette Davis pictures and forgotten MGM epics — plus of course the mysteries of unlikely anonymous sexual adventures) and, in a less literal sense, my early virtual conversations about opera. Since as a youth I was completely alone in this interest (there was no one within geographical reach who shared it) my “older generations” were my reading of reviews and liner notes, augmented by the experts on the Texaco Opera Quiz.
The point is that as a kid I didn’t follow most of what was being talked about in any of these “conversations,” but certain words and phrases did stick in my ear (I use some of them to this day) and I even found delight in the (from my point of view) abstruseness of the language. That there were people who talked in such esoteric terms validated for me the esoteric things I was thinking but couldn’t put into words.
So both the extravagance of the language and the sheer improbability of the action of Mawrdew Czgowchwz resonate with me, evoking the glorious folly of being fascinated by the performative aspect of opera.
This is how I found an emotional connection with this work, and now that I am older (as older people will do) I can regard that same emotion ironically. The Winter Solstice celebration at the Countess Madge’s would almost certainly be pretty much a bore as an experienced event, but it attains a kind of glamour as a reported event, and finally the ridiculousness of the thing is, to me, endearing.
Gee, La Cieca, I would sure love to go ahead with this as I really need some support with this work and I deeply appreciate your comments and especially the fact that you were “as a youth” alone in your interest. Moi aussi. It wasn’t fun, either!
Could you get out that Hermes riding crop I know you must have hidden underneath your bed, and whump some behinds here on the Box, as we really need to examine this work — whether someone likes it or finds it heavy sledding, well, that’s just beside the point. It’s a kind of important and unique work and if McCourt is okay by Lady Fran L, well that’s all I gotta know. I mean, Lena Geyer is fun, too, but not brilliant and written by a lady journalist, I do believe. You have to take it seriously and I don’t think anyone could anymore. There is also “Rainbow Bridge” by the amanuensis of the immortal Olive Fremstad — if it is even available; probably not.
Could we take it more slowly and go da capo with M.C.?? It would seem a missed opportunity.