THE INTERIOR LANDSCAPE OF JAMES McCOURT : THE DARLING OF THE LITERARY SET REVEALS THE MEANING OF LIFE--ACCORDING TO DRAG QUEENS

The Blessed Mother was sitting backward,� the nun had said to the Pakistani gentleman opposite me on the train from Dublin to Ballina. I didn’t understand what the sister meant until James McCourt explained that she must have been referring to the miraculous visitation of the Virgin at Knock, in western Ireland, in 1879. “I know,� McCourt said coyly, “because I myself once saw her sitting backward, between St. Joseph and John the Evangelist. They were all looking at the Lamb of God--not that I usually go in for that kind of thing.�

Sitting in McCourt’s living room in Crossmolina, County Mayo, just 28 miles from Knock, while the prehistoric smell of a peat fire filled the room and the sun set over the mists of the nearby mountain Nephin (Gaelic for “holy�), talk of divine visitations was perfectly in order.

It also seemed natural that the New York-born author of the tales in “Time Remaining,� published a few months ago by Knopf, would be living in Ireland for at least three months a year. Where else could an Irish-American cross between James Joyce and Bette Midler have found the spiritual nourishment to plumb his unconscious for a monumental vision of drag queens and opera divas from the ‘40s to the age of AIDS?

And for whom else would I have Aer Lingused across the ocean and spent six hours on the slowest train this side of Toonerville during the Emerald Isle’s monsoon season? Only for James McCourt. For years, writers, editors and a steadfast core of followers have indulged in his extravagant maximalist style, luxuriating in the bizarre architecture of McCourt’s constructions. In “Time Remaining,� a mere mention of the Bristol Hotel in Vienna is transmogrified into: “What a magnificent hotel the Bristol is. Louis Quatorze is supposed to have said--at Versailles--that the mark of a man of quality is his indifference to cold, heat, hunger, and thirst--and if that weren’t enough to make any man decide to be a woman, a night--with or without love--in the Bristol in Vienna would. And I spent two nights there. Of course, reflecting, there has never been anyone on earth as far out as Louis Quatorze, except Mae West, and just as surely as she was never a man, he somehow, irregardless, as the girl said, was always a woman.�

McCourt’s densely packed prose, like James Joyce’s, unlike much contemporary avant-garde fiction, actually means something. Meaning less ness, the rage of the recherche literati, gets short shrift in McCourt novels. The flutter of a drag queen’s eyelash can change the course of history. McCourt is a writer’s writer, a favorite of the literary elites of both coasts because he has never commercialized his interior life. For an author of maximalist style, he is a personage of minimalist pretensions. He shies away from sensational publicity and has spent most of his life in total concentration on his work. He is not, however, everyone’s cup of tea. One of Americas’s foremost poets, Richard Howard, says of McCourt’s work that “the brilliance of such baroque assemblages has not been readily assimilated by the post-Hemingway crowd, though gradually, I think, his mastery of a poetics of pleasure (from allusion to alliteration, every device buzzing and blinking, wheeling and whirring) has gained him the stature that is his.�

McCourt has always been fearlessly himself, mocking left, right and center. His characters are often politically incorrect, infuriating some members of the gay and feminist communities. In “Time Remaining� the protagonist, discussing the AIDS epidemic, insists that “everybody knew all along . . . it was kamikaze sex. We knew it was dangerous work when we took the job. That’s why we went about it the way we did, in bomber jackets and headsets and stoned to the hair roots; to suggest anything else now in the evening is a lie.�

Tired as I was from the long train trip, I perked up over a cup of Barry’s Mauve Label tea. I asked about the brazen Odette O’Doyle, the semi-transvestite-prima-ballerina, World War II-vet protagonist of “Time Remaining.�

“Was Odette a backward Virgin, too?�

“I didn’t see Odette in a vision,� McCourt replied, pouring more tea with the simplicity of a Zen master. “She had her origins on the standing-room line at the Old Met in the early ‘60s.�

Not a baseball team, and not an art museum, the “Old Met� is New York’s original Metropolitan Opera, on 39th and Broadway. This shrine was torn down in 1966 and replaced by its present, more mundane, incarnation at Lincoln Center. The Old Met was more than a mere theater: It was the Vatican of an international religion of opera, whose principal rite of communion was diva devotion. Opera fans, or worshipers if you like, were beyond fanatical. “It was like the cult of Isis in ancient Egypt,� McCourt plained, brushing back a lock of his Celtic-colored hair from his eyes. He was one of the high priests of the order.

He depicted this voluptuous world in his 1975 tale “Mawrdew Czgowchwz� (pronounced Mardu Gorgeous), copies of which are now as rare as a 1934 Lou Gehrig baseball card. The eponymous heroine was a 3 1/2-octave Czech super-diva, or “oltrano,� of Irish origins. In keeping with McCourt’s practice of linking the characters of his books, Odette is one of her most loyal fans.

“Time Remaining� is set on Aug. 11, 1991, during the midnight train ride of Odette and her old friend Delancey, a performance artist, from Pennsylvania Station, in New York City, to Bridgehampton, on the eastern tip of Long Island. Monopolizing the conversation in more than 200 pages of near-monologue, Odette celebrates her adventures depositing the ashes of eight departed friends--all drag queens, all dead from AIDS--into various European bodies of water.

The cast of characters in “Time Remaining� numbers in the hundreds. Among the more notable are not only Odette, but Vana Sprezza, wife of an Italian condom king, who complains that “my husband had all my male lovers murdered--and all the horses they owned . . . so I’m a lesbian now. Much better for everybody.� Of Cuban emigre/drag queen Mercedes (Benzedrine) Bustamante, Odette reveals that the staff at Bellevue Hospital in New York “let her have her straitjacket as a souvenir, which she took home, cut the sleeve-ends, dyed pink and covered with sequins to wear as a halter to cocktail parties.�

“What is the meaning of all the drag queens in ‘Time Remaining?’ � I ventured, sipping tea, staring longingly at the first of many slices of home-baked cakes, tarts and trifles. The visit was to be one long temptation. McCourt, like most of the other people I met in Ireland, was on the slim side, yet he was always cooking.

“Drag queens are a devout and ritualistic folk,� McCourt said as he moved the enormous manuscript of his new novel from the coffee table. “They can tell us about acceptance. They start by defying convention and end up by accepting it, but on their own terms. Spiritually speaking, they are like Hasidim. In every purse is the Dead Sea Scrolls.� He returned to the stove. “We’ll eat soon.�

McCourt’s range is astronomical. “He assumes his readers are as observant, as amusable, as learned, as exuberant, as generous as he is,� says Susan Sontag, “And . . . he has perfect pitch.� “Time Remaining� moves encyclopedically from world history (Odette has a fling with British spy and traitor Donald MacLean in blitz-torn London; the funeral of Judy Garland on June 26, 1969, sets off the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village and marks the beginning of gay liberation in America), to double-barreled art criticism (“all (Jean) Cocteau did was steal things from people�), to politics (“Tell me . . . how did the idea of yearning to breathe free translate so quickly into the compulsion to freebase?�)

The locations encompass New York, Los Angeles and half of Europe, as well as an obscure gay bar, the Floradora, in Queens. “You’re the only person I’ve ever met who knows about the Floradora,� I remarked to McCourt. “When I was a teen-ager, I used to take the GG train at 63rd Drive to 74th Street and Roosevelt Avenue and sneak in with a fake ID.�

“Remember the sisters who ran it?� he reminisced, pouring more tea.

“They played sax, piano and drums,� I said. “They looked like the three Fates.�

“They were !� said McCourt.

AMayo--it was to continue falling on and off for the next eight days--Vincent Virga set the dinner table. One of America’s foremost photo editors and the author of “Gaywyck,� a gay Gothic novel, he has been McCourt’s lover for the last 28 years. “He cooks, I clean,� Virga joked.

As McCourt sped efficiently around the kitchen preparing salmon, trailing sauces and vegetables wherever he went, he chatted about his background. He was born on the Fourth of July, 1941, in Flushing, N.Y. (Draped over a chair in the living room was a large American flag, which he displayed to his Irish neighbors on Independence Day in an uncharacteristic outburst of patriotism.) He is totally Irish in background and looks it--all that red hair. His mother’s family migrated from the Old Sod in the 1760s and his father’s in the next century. His great-grandfather was a stonemason on St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. “He did the rose tracery over the door,� McCourt said proudly. His grandfather was an ironworker, and his father, who died in 1983, was a timekeeper on the waterfront.

His mother, who lives in a nursing home, is a devout Catholic who used to teach in diocesan elementary schools. McCourt feels he owes his love of opera and theater to his parents, who were sophisticated theatergoers. He was a wildly extroverted child, too astigmatic to play sports. By the time he was 11, he wrote and starred in his own play, which he performed in friends’ kitchens.

He loved dating girls, and went steady for seven years during the ‘50s and early ‘60s. At the time, he attributed the fact that he and his girlfriend weren’t “doing it� to their devout Catholicism. “But I might have been more suspicious. After all, I had read Proust, starting with ‘Sodom and Gomorrah.’ All in all, I was having a pretty rough time, and sometimes I was beat up for being queer by boys who were having sex with each other. They were just like the self-hating Roy Cohn character in Tony Kushner’s ‘Angels in America.’ �

In 1958, McCourt entered Manhattan College, where he leaped head first into the world of the Old Met standing-room section and reveled in its unique combination of profound spirituality and hot sex. “They had a lot of sex during the opera, especially in the Family Circle,� McCourt said, referring to the cheaper seats in the last and darkest balcony of the opera house. “And it was not only gay men. Once a woman was thrown out of the house for abusing herself while Cesare Siepi sang ‘Don Giovanni.’ . . . More often they had sex during the ballet sequences. They never had sex during Wagner!�

Silent for a moment, he opened and slammed shut the wooden cabinets in his small kitchen. He finally found the rice he was looking for. As he washed it, he continued, “The diva with the largest gay following was not, despite what most people might think, the tragic icon Maria Callas. It was the Croatian dramatic soprano Zinka Milanov. She seemed to like the attention of the Family Circle crowd. When she was asked by a horrified publicist if she knew ‘what those boys do,’ she answered, ‘ Zo-vot ? In Zagreb, dey’ve been doink dot for years .’ �

In this heady atmosphere, it seemed inevitable to the young McCourt that he should become an actor and a playwright, and so away he went, saying farewell to his friends at the Met with, “I’m off to the Yale drama school to find a man. I’m oisgetrent. “

“What does oisgetrent mean?� Virga broke in as he searched for napkins.

“It’s Yiddish for ‘screwed out,’ � McCourt replied. “In 1964, I met Vincent onstage in acting class. We’ve been together monogamously ever since,� he said as he pressed the garlic. “Dinner is served.� The salmon was excellent, and the potatoes, dotted with high-score Irish butter, tasted fresh from the earth.

After leaving Yale in 1965, McCourt and Virga moved to London, which was “swinging,� and stayed for two years working in Soho restaurants, selling theater tickets and clerking in a law office. They lived in Bohemian poverty in tiny bed-sits. “It was our honeymoon,� Virga said. McCourt wrote plays occasionally.

He described himself as a “lazy lout� during this period. “One night, Vincent came home from a hard day’s work, wet and cold and said, in effect: ‘I want dinner and sex.’ And I replied: ‘If all you want is dinner and sex, go home and marry an Italian girl.’ �

At the pubs, they were friendly with David Hockney, Rudolf Nureyev and playwright Joe Orton. McCourt returned to New York for his younger brother’s wedding. He intended to go back to London, but somehow found himself teaching at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. Virga got modeling work in New York. They went back to London for two more years, then returned to New York, where they were sucked into the social whirl of the mythical hangout Max’s Kansas City.

It was the late ‘60s: prime time of Andy Warhol, Max’s eminence blanche . McCourt met Lou Reed, Nikko and the legendary drag queens Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis (who appear in “Time Remaining�), and the notorious New Yorker editor Dorothy Dean, who told McCourt: “The tragedy of my life is that I have the soul of a white homosexual man trapped in the body of a black heterosexual woman.�

Almost in spite of these wild times, by 1972 McCourt managed to publish a chapter of “Mawrdew Czgowchwz� in the New American Review, for which Virga had begun to work as a typesetter. There McCourt met Sontag, who became his mentor and close friend. She introduced the material to Farrar Strauss, which published the novel. From the time of its inception as an inside joke on the Met standing-room line to the time of its publication in 1975 was a period of 16 years. McCourt is a guy what takes his time, as Mae West would’ve said.

After dinner, McCourt and Virga took me outside and gazed up at the sky, which was momentarily clear. It was cold. I could smell the heather and the cow manure. “We need this,� he said. “We’ve been coming to Ireland since 1966. We spend part of the year in New York City and part in East Hampton. I guess we need that, too.�

It was utterly still that night in Crossmolina. I dreamt of Dorothy Dean, whom I knew well--she died of cancer about five years ago--and her friend J.J. Mitchell, a muse of many of the East Hampton painters and poets memorialized in “Time Remaining.� We looked alike, everyone said, and were often mistaken for each other. He had AIDS. In the dream, Dorothy and J.J. were chatting in my living room. Of course I would dream of them: “Time Remaining� is their elegy.

ALL DURING HIS CAREER, MCCOURT HAS WRITTEN FOR various magazines, especially Film Comment and the New Yorker. His favorite subject was Bette Davis, who makes odd appearances throughout “Time Remaining.� McCourt considers Davis as much a diva as Maria Callas. “A diva is a woman whose voice and manner drives you nuts,� he explained. “Bette had both, like Callas. Her voice and manner had that ability to transform your inner life. It is a religious feeling that some feel for the Blessed Virgin.�

The next evening, sipping Irish mineral water in front of a blazing fire at Enniscoe House, a grand old Georgian mansion that serves traditional Irish cuisine, McCourt talked about his second book, “Kaye Wayfaring in ‘Avenged,’ � published in 1984. “I pitched the story of Kaye Wayfaring, movie star, to my editor (at the New Yorker) Veronica Geng, modeling the heroine partly on her. I kind of made it up as I went along. Much to my surprise, they bought it.� The magazine published two stories that formed the nucleus of the book. Kaye is an acquaintance of Mawrdew Czgowchwz. McCourt weaves endless interrelated tales throughout the body of his work.

“I don’t write novels,� he said. “The novel is an English middle-class product. It is undeniably wonderful--love Dickens--with plots and all that. Myself, I write tales. They go on and on, then just stop. I belong to the Irish tradition of storytelling. Or as they used to say at the (notorious Manhattan disco) Danceteria: ‘F--- art, let’s dance.’ �

“Which writers influenced you most?� I asked after the hilarity died down.

First on his list, surprisingly, was Herman Melville. “I’ve nicknamed my new book ‘Moby Diva.’ Do you know there was an underground story that Melville was in love with Nathaniel Hawthorne, but Nat spurned him. He was a cold man.�

After we ordered our food, McCourt went on: “I learned a lot from Melville. In ‘Moby Dick,’ he adapted Shakespeare to the American idiom. In ‘Time Remaining,’ I am adapting the medieval troubadour quest stories, like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the legend of Parsifal, to our tradition. You see, Odette is on a quest, too.�

He continued, “Virginia Woolf definitely influenced me--she’s the only great English novelist of this century, But, of course, I will always love James Joyce.� The fire in the grate was almost out and the proprietor handed us the check.

“Why don’t you take Bill on a tour of Joyce’s Dublin?� Virga suggested.

CUT TO:

EXT. THE STRAND, DUBLIN--EARLY MORNING

McCourt, in sweater and sunglasses, walks slowly down an empty beach. Hoffman points a camcorder toward the distant skyline of Dublin. Gulls circle slowly overhead. HOFFMAN

Stephen Dedalus walked from here to Dublin? Go on.

MCCOURT

Which is why “Ulysses� is such a long book.

HOFFMAN

Both “Time Remaining� and “Ulysses� are about journeys, and both end with sleep.

MCCOURT

It’s only natural: I write in bed.

HOFFMAN

And, like Joyce, you take a long time to produce a work. Your average, so far, is nine years.

MCCOURT

When you read my new book, you’ll understand why. I’ve already finished seven chapters. Each one is over 100 pages, and it’s not nearly done.

HOFFMAN

What’s it about?

MCCOURT

It’s a search for the author of “Mawrdew Czgowchwz.�

HOFFMAN

You mean -- you?

McCourt smiles wickedly. INT. OLD DUBLIN FORTRESS--DAY

McCourt and Hoffman are climbing steep stone stairs not much wider than their bodies. HOFFMAN

I’m too fat. I’ll get stuck.

MCCOURT

Imagine doing this drunk? No wonder Joyce couldn’t stay here.

McCourt, reaching the top, pushes open the door and sunlight floods the stairway. EXT. TOP OF TOWER--DAY

They are surveying the panoramic view of the ocean and the suburbs of Dublin. MCCOURT

My new book has more pain than the others. Mawrdew is afraid of losing her children, and her rival Neri dies pathetic, abandoned, in Sicily.

HOFFMAN

Abandonata.

MCCOURT

Exactly: a diva. My life has been influenced by many divas.

CUT TO:

INT. DINING ROOM, DUBLIN--NIGHT

A lively candlelit dinner party. The guests include McCourt, Virga, Hoffman, their hostess , Ann Fuller, who is the administrator of the Dublin International Piano Competition, Irish Times columnist Robert O’Byrne. Fuller is serving a gigantic fruit tart. O’BYRNE

(to Hoffman) You like Los Angeles? I’ve never heard of anyone actually liking it.

HOFFMAN

(defensively) Well, yes. I like it a lot, as a matter of fact . . .

O’Byrne looks skeptical. HOFFMAN (cont’d)

Did I say something wrong?

FULLER

Los Angeles is quite wonderful, actually. Marvelous town.

Fuller is about to serve Hoffman a slice of the tart. HOFFMAN

Sorry, but I’m hypoglycemic.

FULLER

I’ll have no talk of religion at my table.

MCCOURT

(to O’Byrne) I love L.A. I’m hoping to teach there and work on films.

O’BYRNE

I didn’t know you wrote films.

MCCOURT

I wrote one for a young L.A. director, George Haas, called “Romance.� It’s in the can.

FULLER

(to Hoffman) Would you like some strawberries?

HOFFMAN

With whipped cream?

Fuller smiles and nods. O’BYRNE

What’s “Time Remaining� about?

MCCOURT

Oh, it’s like an Irish wake, more laughter than tears. It’s our defense against death. And yes, I’m thinking of a new screenplay--�Cybernoir�--and a movie version of “Time Remaining.� My agent wants me to turn it into a play, but I don’t think so. And I’m writing a biography of Victoria de Los Angeles, the Spanish soprano. As far as I’m concerned, she’s the greatest living diva.

HOFFMAN

If you could speak directly to your readers about “Time Remaining,� what would you say to them?

MCCOURT

One thing?

Hoffman nods. MCCOURT

Hmmm . . . I think you’re going to like these girls.

Ann Fuller brings out a pot of coffee and a large chocolate cake. Hoffman reaches for a slice. McCourt declines.