Wine, Roses and Ekmek
HOFSTADTER, DAN
Wine, Roses and Ekmek Mawrdew Czgowchwz By James McCourt Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 230 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by Dan Hofstadter Free-lance translator, critic If you are one of those people who...
...Yet the manner works, and the reason for this is that there is something dreamy about opera, something sadly bygone that often makes all its fans seem like phantoms...
...McCourt's fancy prose reminded me of what Chekhov said about a writer's vanity leading to colorlessness...
...That voice gets better and better, until Mawrdew dethrones Neri, the reigning New York songstress, and dons her coronet...
...Wow, how apt...
...Actually, like a well-yeasted cake, Mawrdew can do nothing but rise and eventually she grows into the greatest interpreter of the "Liebestodt" the world has ever heard...
...There is also something comical about people suddenly bursting into song...
...he leaves no room at all for what is solemn or grisly in Verdi or Wagner, for what reaches out to grab you in the pit of your stomach...
...Mawrdew is as inevitable as the rising sun, and she will have her day...
...Luigi, the cheese freak-he carves statues of prima donnas out of provolone...
...It happens in a midcentury Gotham that he beglamors with relentless cuteness...
...I had the feeling, too, that McCourt must keep a notebook of shabby-genteel Victorianisms: "Gay ornament of every sort beggared description...
...This provides James McCourt, himself something of a coloratura at the typewriter, with an occasion to indulge in what operamanes are always leading up to—the Great Prose Music Description: " the optional E flat hung fire...
...That rarest of refugees, a Czech-Irish mongrel, she flees the Prague coup in a one-seater plane that crash-lands on the Champs-Elysees and is spirited to New York by a group of American opera devotees called the Secret Seven...
...I say "no room" advisedly because McCourt has chosen to unfold his narrative in a sort of dream-time, not in the orderly sequence of real time where opera-and everything else-deals its most powerful blows...
...But it is not just New York he is patronizing, it is opera itself...
...Such flotsam botches the rhythm of a comic dream that otherwise would be-well, pure ekmek...
...Indeed, it is his very burlesquing of opera that allows him his most "cherished" stylistic effects, for his writing is nothing if not stylized, or more precisely, mannered...
...Not content merely to demonstrate her libidinal commitment, she even sings Isolde's words in the original Irish, thus reawakening the memory of her own half-Irish past...
...Of course it is meant to be, but it can get as heavy and indigestible as old schlag...
...As you may have guessed, central casting was an equal opportunity employer, and before long multitudes of ethnics leap onstage-stage being Manhattan circa 1948-in a desperate effort to retard the plot...
...So McCourt's dreamy-comic mode is by no means unsuited to his subject...
...On the whole, though, the writing is overrich...
...And, oh, those "hushed pauses" and "hushed whispers," those Gallicisms dragged in by the hair, those sentence-commandeering pet words: "A contretemps absolute in its severity beset I Neriani...
...For example: "When asked for preview hints of the performance to come, she seemed to gape into the middle distance, there seeming to see something perfectly clearly, but because of the rigorous attention demanded in seeing it, to be quite unable to detail it...
...She is supported by an enormous cast of soubrettes and intriguers, including Dolly Farouche, the "chanteuse with the notions...
...Baron Shmendrick, the diamond peddler...
...But to no avail...
...This fable is what the author would call a "cherished mythic fantasy...
...Capitulate...
...As her English improves, they discover that she has lost her memory-though not, thank God, her voice...
...and Arpenik, the Armenian cook who caters to them all with her delectable ekmek...
...The characters even talk in balloonspeak...
...they say, or "Kiss me...
...or even " !" Sometimes these little outbursts are complemented by genuine wit in the narration, as when the hostess of a dinner-party becomes "her own most brilliant guest" or serves "rechauffe 'flashback' courses" to late arrivers...
...She rose higher and wider by turns," and so forth...
...It's about the rise and further rise of a mythic diva of the postwar Met, Mawrdew Czgowchwz (pronounced: Mardu Gorgeous), originator of a singing style whose essence is "libidinal commitment...
...Reviewed by Dan Hofstadter Free-lance translator, critic If you are one of those people who walks around wearing an opera power button, you will probably be utterly captivated by this story...
...In fact, this book is grand opera's answer to horror comics: an opera comic...
...The copyright dates in the front matter indicate that the author worked on it for over five years, which would place its conception at the tail end of the "camp" years when the comics were the archetype for everything...
...Mawrdew's first great triumph is a coloratura job, the "Sempre Libera" from La Traviata...
...Thereafter, it's all wine and roses and ekmek...
Vol. 58 • April 1975 • No. 8
