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?
“. . . the ridiculousness of the thing is to me endearing.”
Okay, so I’m not wrong in finding an element of the ridiculous, right? My immediate reaction when confronted with the perversely ridiculous is contempt. I do not like to feel contempt and I have to work really hard to turn my contempt into at least a semblance of compassion. It is a daunting task to dive into a book knowing that I’m going to have to work that hard for that long with no guarantee that I’m going to end up with anything more than a few choice mots I can toss off at the cocktail parties I no longer attend.
Going back to my Baskin-Robbins metaphor, you’re saying that McCourt knew very well he was writing rum raisin, something totally rich and ultimately indigestible, but that the idea is not to eat the ice cream, but moosh it around in the bowl, make some of the raisins into cowboys, others into Indians, with a mound of Fort Calorie in the middle, ANYTHING except eat it.
Okay, with that in mind, I’ll try again.
I realize I might perhaps have suggested a bit of background reading here, just to make sure we were all on the same page: Notes on Camp.
Particularly: Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a “lamp”; not a woman, but a “woman.” To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.
Mawrdew Czgowchwz is not strictly a camp novel (because it is self-conscious about its preciousness and ridiculousness) but it is a great novel on the theme of camp.
This is an interesting article… But she ends up fulfilling the prophecies of her disclaimers! I can’t help but feel it is reductionist at many turns. I want to think that this is part of the point, but I’m not sure I can sell myself on that notion. It seems like a cop-out almost– What would it have been like if she had followed through on the first couple of paragraphs and written an article about the inherent difficulty of creating a set of criterion for “Camp” – maybe with the list of 50 something attempts as a middle section…? Very interesting and worthwhile nonetheless… Raises some excellent questions about sensibilities at the very least…
I can never hear mention of Notes on Camp without experiencing a compulsion to view the entire canon of Scopitones on youtube. Okay, I need to stop before I end up e-mailing videos of Les Souers Kessler to everyone in my address book.
Huh?
I don’t see how anybody intensely interested in opera can ignore the fact it is sometimes (often?)
‘perversely ridiculous’. The gap between what is actually happening and the fiction of what is intended can be immense. The 200 lb tubercular courtesan, the 40-year-old young Norse hero, the high notes that aren’t there anymore, etc, etc. There are too many obvious examples.
More theater is ‘perversely ridiculous’ than otherwise.
The characters in “Mardrew” understand this but are in love with the foolishness anyway. They make enormous allowances at a typical performance to see beyond the gap between reality and intention.
That’s why when an artist like Mardrew comes along and they don’t have to make any allowances, and the reality is the same as intention, they freak the fuck out!!!!111!!!
Word.
RDaggle, I see no disconnect. In opera and theatre, I accept the convention of the suspension of disbelief. My contempt is aroused in life situations such as Radical Creationism or Congress.
Well, okay, how about thinking of the novel this way? It’s an unlikely story told by a great raconteur. So the point of the story-telling is not the sharing of information but rather the thrill of the performance and the obvious delight of the narrator in recalling (or embellishing as necessary) every minute detail.
After all, if you were at a performance at the Met when someone released live doves into the theater during curtain calls, wouldn’t you adore to tell the story again and again? And (this is maybe more of a “perhaps) wouldn’t you love to hear the story from someone who was there, and who has crafted the story for the maximum exquisite frisson?
I like sometimes to hear in my mind’s ear Mawrdew Czgowchwz read in the voice of one of the great elder-statesman queens who were present during the era. The ornate, even tortured flights of verbal fancy make perfect sense when you imagine them rattled off by some half-addled idiot savant of high culture camp.
Oh great, in order to read a book I’ve got to sit on Bowsley Crothers’ knee.
Be grateful it’s just his knee.
I, for one, am most curious as to what “one of our elder-statesmen queens” would look like — could you provide us with a photographic example?
As well, could you set us a new book date? Could you set us some talking points or clefs or some focus points on Marwdew?
Merci, ma Doyenne.
The answer to your first question is easy.
Bella Bets– may I puh-LEEZ have your bowl of Rum Raisin, even all mooshed up??
It’s my fave flava. I’ll buy you a quart of somethin’ you like best–maybe from an Amish dairy, for purity.
Also this, does Baskin Robbins also make Rum Raisin — as I am aware only of Haagen Daaz.
Go to sleep–you always up too late–beauty rest!!!!
Purity is vastly over-rated.
Well, all right, we can share. But I should warn you I’ve sucked several of the raisins.
I likes de RHUM anyhoo! You suck dem raisins, honeychile!
C’mon Bets, let’s help our Cieca out and be sporting.
In virgins, yes.
Not in I SCREAM!!
Ok, it arrived (!) and I could not put it down and I LOVED it. UTTERLY! I found it at once seriously, profoundly beautiful and then totally over-the-top farce-hysterical — but it struck this deepest part of my opera-so-loving heart– and so I was so taken in, and yet the amazing balance with which it was written checked me at every turn – and I was prompted to laugh at myself all the more each time I empathized with the surreal/all-too-real characters. Maybe that sounds SO CORNY but THAT’S how I feel and I’m PROUD OF IT because GOD I had a GREAT TIME! We give ourselves over to the outrageousness of opera so regularly and without pause – to me, this book celebrates the ecstasy of that experience and reminds us that we are such fools for it too! I vocalized on “Oh I see this is easyyy” and I wished I had been at La Traviata – and then I knew it could never surpass what James McCourt built in my mind – and YET… — and I laughed and laughed at myself, and still felt the same way – I mean– I might say to the critics: I think one needs to surrender to this book and have a mighty goddamn sense of humour about oneself as an opera-lover to fully appreciate it. And I think some humility is in order what with how fucking SMART is McCourt – I mean, one has to feel like a child and take it and like it, n’est-ce pas?! I think some of the things I am trying to articulate are things that La Cieca said much more succinctly:
“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.”
And as a singer-in-training – it put into such a gorgeous (!) verbal frame that thing that makes me want/need to sing – and I still don’t quite know how to describe it – maybe a hope that it actually be/do something real for people – I mean, not about adulation, not so much even about one day or month of “oh boy that was great” but something that makes the music envelop and become you, change you, open you, and grow you over time, facilitated by the vehicle of those voices — I feel so validated by this book — all the more because of the wryness which says to me – You’re not crazy. Yes, it IS ridiculous, but it’s true TOO — AND it can be at the same time: GOTT SEI DANK!
I’ve just finished it so I’m in this little manic haze if that’s possible- in awe and relishing the hilarity and beauty and all, and my imagination is super-over-stimulated in the BEST way and I know I am RAVING NOW – SO – IN SHORT: LOVED IT!!! THANKS FOR TURNING ME ON TO THIS BOOK! I will be coming back to it again and again for many years, I am SURE.
Oh fuck, i feel like Morales.
Who dat?? Morales in Carmen?
Chorus Line
Hahaha – I feel the cold, I feel the air!! — Good luck with Santa Maria!
Yet yet yet — Morales was in a minority of one – while it seems you’ve many fellow haters – or shall I say — non-believers? Hahaha….
I’m not sure I should wade in. It won’t change anything.
I first read this book when I was very young, a child, but a child who had been going to the Met for eight or nine years, loving opera and mystified by it and by the fans who felt as intensely as I did but who often disagreed with me about what was going on there, hearing more or seeing more or feeling more than I (or, on occasion, less), and commenting deliriously, and all of this boiled down and made into exquisite (the mot juste) fiction is Mawrdew Czgowchwz and I’m not even looking the spelling up.
And from the first, like einekleine and some others, couldn’t put it down, could hardly pause for feasting on the sumptuous crudité that is Jimmy’s prose when he’s in full fantabulous firbankian cry askew …
Which was just as well because the New York Times Book Review was paying me to review it, and it was brand new, and no one had ever heard of it. The one friend I made when writing book reviews, Jimmy thus became (I’d never met him then). He is indeed one of the great talkers, and though one soon learns not to rely too much on his recollection of matters, the proof is in the reproof. Who has a photographic memory for anything outside his own head, eh?
It was also during the fortnight I was writing that review that I did a personal 180 en pointe and realized I was madly in love with a person of my own sex instead of (as hitherto) (well, that’s not quite true, is it?) the other one. So it was like fucking major.
Nothing quite equals hearing Jimmy read that first chapter aloud. Not even hearing ME read that first chapter aloud, as many have done (sometimes as a prelude to seduction). But I have incorporated many of his phrasings into my own, so that it appears a low-rent seamless cloak. I have two first editions (and the paperback, which quotes me) on my bedside bookshelf. NOTHING (not even Firbank!) (not even 1066 and All That!) is better for soul-enlightening (in the sense of: Lighten Up!) reading on dark nights of the soul.
The plot of course peters out in time, as he flails to adapt Marcia Davenport (I imagine Mawrdew sang Zerlina, when 17, to the soon-to-be-dead Lena Geyer on a brief return to Praha, but that is just my two groschen), but the melodies linger on. I recommend it to everyone.
On NO account should you miss any possible opportunity of hearing Mr. McCourt read from his works.
Perhaps those on this thread who have not liked the book have no sense of humor, or perhaps they are unable to see themselves so wittily caricatured. As when, at Mawrdew’s epic Isolde, and “the tone-controlling Wagnerian wing let it be known in tones neither uncertain nor succinct, that they had come for kunst,” I must stand with Tancred Q. Paranoy and cry, “You dim bitch! Get out of this opera house!”
O mein lieber Herr Hanslick!
Wade in, the water’s fine, as fine as your ever splendid prose.
Camille has so missed your presence on Parterre, so please do not tarry far and away from us here on the Box.
Au revoir, Grand Ecrivain!
Perhaps you started with wading, but you certainly brought us home splashily! Oh, where/when might one have said opportunity to hear James McCourt read??
Hans, putting two and two (and too and too, not to mention tutu or toi, toi, toi) together, I looked up the review on the NY Times website. 1975. I wasn’t yet out, but was figuring it out. I read the McCourt in college in 77 or 78, but, frankly, was paying more attention to Gordon Merrick. And then Patricia Nell Warren.