Mawrdew Czgowchwz

To read Mawrdew Czgowchwz ('Mardu Gorgeous'), the 1971 novel by James McCourt, is to look through a window, or perhaps a peephole, into a past -- perhaps fictional, perhaps not, the question is beside the point -- in which opera still ruled the world. Set in the late 1940s/early 1950s, the book traces the trajectory of an astonishing opera singer from unknown to diva extraordinaire at the (old) Metropolitan Opera, the type of star who inspires hunger strikes and riots and scandals and weeping (and dying) and whose life is recorded in the kind of minute detail that would have been unimaginable before the internet. 

She gave them dramatic soprano vocalism in extremis: passion, obsession, anguish, terror.*

The book can be considered satirical to the extent that it exaggerates not only the power of the diva, who at the beginning of the story opens announces her intention to sing forty roles in a single year (The Times in turn lists all 40 roles) but the obsessive quality of her fans and entourage (and enemies), who hang on her ever phrase, whether spoken or sung.

Mawrdew Czgowchwz declined to rehearse the Liebestod, with a shadowy statement: "It must not be practiced, but perfect."

McCourt's language is lush and dense, filled with theatrical in-jokes, allusions and asides in French, German, Italian and Latin; much is emphasized to further exaggerate the tone, which veers wildly (but subtly) from the campy to the dramatic and even melancholic, mixing high culture with a certain winking obscenity familiar to anyone even remotely versed in the old code of non-heterosexual relations. For someone like myself, a relative latecomer to the operatic (and non-heterosexual) fold, it's probably fair to say that I missed at least fifty to eighty percent of these references, which in no way curtailed my appreciation for the learned hilarity on display. The character names struck me as being as much Pynchonesque -- The Secret Seven (Mawrdew's most devoted admirers), Halcyon Q. Paranoy (the music critic), the Dame Sybill Farewell-Tarnysh -- as Firbankian, while the tone of the book seemed to effortlessly walk a fine line that on the whole felt less frivolous than Firbank and less soulless than Pynchon (if equally dazzling in terms of the crystalline prose).

Max Crux, the Metropolitan Opera radio network announcer...[i]n his familiar charming hushed New Yorkese whisper announced: "This audience, ladies and gentlemen, is so overcome, they are weak. Men are weeping openly sitting next to women. A precious moment in artistic time is arching. Its falling -- let us not say its dying -- phase is upon us now. We are wrapt in history!" It was perhaps only in Paris that they fully understood. "Elle est maintenant la silence. C'est ca," they reasoned, flawlessly.

Although there is nothing explicitly gay about the book (unlike McCourt, who has long been out), it feels exceedingly gay, to the extent it works as a kind of obsessively nostalgic ode to a past implicitly better than the tedious, small-minded present in which we are currently trapped. What's more explicitly (or typically) gay about the book is how it -- like so many from the post-war era -- has been relegated to the status of a 'cult classic'  (it was out of print for years, until the New York Review of Books republished it in 2002), ignored by many who consider themselves serious students of literature but have no clue about the non-heterosexual tradition of the novelistic form.

There was no disputation. Mawrdew Czgowchwz that night sang the most oracular Liebestod the world has ever heard.

In McCourt's vision of the past, it's possible to imagine grand things still happening, not in the name of money or political power or even sex, but for the sake of being carried away (or perhaps driven insane) by the power of an aria sung in a way it will certainly never be sung again. We -- or 99.9 percent of us -- could all use a little more opera queen in the new millennium: read Mawrdew Czgowchwz and you will find out exactly how and why.  

Paranoy himself decreed: "The end of the Old Met marked the decisive end of Gotham as it was, when it was truly fabulous."

'Will u miss me when I'm gone?'

--The George Washington Bridge

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*Italicized quotes from the NYRB edition of the book.

Comments

[Maury D'Annato]

Safe to say most of the in-jokes are lost on all but the most hardcore reader. I'm an almost intolerable opera queen and am certain I missed plenty.

Much is fiction; some is semi-fiction. Some of the singers mentioned are clearly based on real singers, but of course Mawrdew is an amalgamation of the collective fantasies of opera queens as a whole. (In some interview McCourt I think mentioned that Zinka Milanov was a healthy part of the archetype, but obviously there is the spectre of Callas and plenty of others, really whoever the reader thinks of in that way that is a mix of reverence and madness.)

I do think Mawrdew has been relegated to cult status not wholly because of its thorough-going gayness, though. Verily, it is in places discursive to the point of incoherence, and of course there is not an enormous audience for books that make a flourish of basing a briefly mentioned character on Frida Leider...

[Matthew Gallaway]

Thanks for the comment, Maury. I was just struck by the Pynchonesque feel of the book and the fact the Gravitys Rainbow, which to me is in some ways even more arcane and impenetrable, won every award under the sun in 1974, whereas this has languished in some obscurity. Which is not to take anything away from Pynchon, or suggest that Mawrdew should be on every list of the most important books of the post-war period, but I do think that it should be cited as part of the canon more frequently than it currently is (or at least as far as I can tell). My sense is that if McCourt were writing a similarly obsessive book about say, motorcycles or a rock star or something not so clearly associated with the non-heterosexual world of opera, he would be closer to a household name (in the narrow literary sense, of course). 

[Maury D'Annato]

I see your point, Matthew, but I guess my thought is: opera is non-canonical even among gays the last few decades, so I'm not wholly convinced marginalization of gay topics is the real culprit. Not a huge Pynchon fan here, either, but I wonder if there are things in Pynchon that make up for the difficulties, whereas at times, for long stretches, McCourt just seems opaque and little more. I'm not sure which of us is right about this. You've probably put more thought into it, so quite possibly you.

[Matthew Gallaway]

I dont think its a question of right or wrong, Maury -- I will say that I think homophobia has a lot to do (or at least something to do) with the marginalization of opera in the post-war era (even among gays), but thats a lonnnnnnng discussion! Thanks again for reading/commenting!