{"id":137850,"date":"2019-07-08T13:00:12","date_gmt":"2019-07-08T17:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=137850"},"modified":"2019-07-08T12:58:10","modified_gmt":"2019-07-08T16:58:10","slug":"a-circus-of-mallarmean-delights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/07\/08\/a-circus-of-mallarmean-delights\/","title":{"rendered":"A Circus of Mallarm\u00e9an Delights"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Wayne Koestenbaum. Photo: Ebru Yildiz.<\/p><\/div>\n

Wayne Koestenbaum has written many books, and even recorded an album. I\u2019ve seen him psychoanalyzed before a large, rapt audience. He does a lounge act, of spoken word and Scriabin. He paints. Among his glittering and varied oeuvre (and for Koestenbaum, oeuvre<\/em> can be the only word used here), there is only one novel: Circus<\/em>, or, as it was previously known, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The first time I met Wayne Koestenbaum was just after this novel initially appeared, almost fifteen years ago. He was reading from it at a bookstore. He wore, for his reading, a white pleather caf\u00e9 racer\u2019s jacket. It was raining that night. His jacket looked worthy to repel water but featured no hood, its semi-rain-worthiness a mere symptom of its primary function, which was to throw light<\/em>. Koestenbaum and this book seemed like vessels containing an unusual combination of erudition, elegance, irreverence, and, in welcome measure, a touch of sleaze.<\/p>\n

Later, I recall people comparing Moira Orfei<\/em> to Nabokov\u2019s Pale Fire<\/em> and the novels of Genet. I believe that means they approved. I approve, too, but I find those comparisons useless. Koestenbaum\u2019s unique aesthetic orbit, his humor and thematic range, cannot really be understood by such refractions, although if I had to compare it I\u2019d say his humor is like Bataille\u2019s. \u201cDon\u2019t get your hopes up,\u201d Theo Mangrove, the narrator of Circus<\/em>, implores. \u201cThe object in your hands is not a novel.\u201d But don\u2019t believe Theo, either. The object in your hands really is a novel. But it retains the force of its language even when its words are pulled apart, left to sweat, in Mallarm\u00e9an marmalade:<\/p>\n

the flawed
\nthe almost
\nthe
\n…..<\/span>not
\n……..<\/span>quite<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

…………..<\/span>No one loves \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Baked Alaska
\n…………..<\/span>Heartlessness is a symbol<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

……………..<\/span>Soiled time
\nPink sweater set
\n…………………………………………………………………..<\/span>Primary ruin<\/p>\n

………………………………………………………<\/span>Immortality clause<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

……………………………………………………<\/span>Jerking off, I canceled reality<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>a) Describe
\n \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0….. <\/span>b) Disappear<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Here is the basic design: resident of scruffy East Kill, New York, and diarist filling notebooks with \u201cEast Kill persiflage,\u201d Theo Mangrove is either a former renowned concert pianist or a pianist who never had any renown, a patient who may or may not be getting electroconvulsive therapy, a scribbler who may or may not be writing in direct address to his absent mother, Alma, herself either a world-renowned pianist or not. Regardless of things the reader cannot verify, Theo is<\/em> plotting a return to the stage, with Moira Orfei, the internationally celebrated Italian circus diva, in Aigues-Mortes, a small town in the Camargue.<\/p>\n

Theo writes to Orfei, awaits her reply, cruises \u201cthe water district\u201d (chance encounters, declining property values), adjusts his Aigues-Mortes concert program, shops for the clothes in which he will mark his return to the stage (a velvet suit purchased at Jacob\u2019s Ladder, East Kill\u2019s finest purveyor of men\u2019s clothes). His home, a primal scene he shares with his mother, his sister, who never leaves the house, and his wife, seems something like a Grey Gardens, but a lot smaller, and with no Kennedy, and instead, a dreamer\u2014Theo\u2014with a Kissinger-size death drive, who lives in a dimension called the comeback<\/em>.<\/p>\n

What is a comeback? A future shaped and steered by fantasy, ego, and erotics. A mad plot to redeem reality, correct the record, save face, and fix fate. In Theo\u2019s case, his impending comeback, in the form of a piano concert and circus performance with Moira Orfei, is the leading edge of time\u2019s three-part clock (past, present, future). It hovers, like a mirage on the road, eternally in front<\/em>. And as you will learn when you reach the incredible end of this novel\u2014a conclusion of suddenly classical and crushing effect\u2014Moira sees the free-floating status of the future as if she were a god.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Will Theo play Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, or Liszt? Will he apologize to his sister for defiling her when they were young? Will he secure a phone number for Moira Orfei?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to give too much away. But I will warn and excite the easily offended that nothing here is sacred except art and language. Theo has HIV, and spreads it. Of Matilda, his aunt, with whom he has a sexual relationship, Theo says: \u201cShe told me about the time she threw an infant across the room. Babysitting \u2026 Years later she apologized to him, a stockbroker.\u201d He brags that his new piano student is only mildly retarded.<\/em> (\u201cStart her with Hanon,\u201d he muses.) Complains that his sister, Tanaquil, once again played the incest card<\/em>. Amid the more sordid features of his life, and mental life, Moira flaunts triumph. Aigues-Mortes, with its salt, its ramparts, its arcades, waives redemption. \u201cWhat is Tanaquil\u2019s Aigues-Mortes?\u201d Theo wonders, in a moment of unusually tender interest in his sister.<\/p>\n

Moira\u2019s own letters, interspersed throughout the book, read as if in the voice of the Subject Supposed to Know. \u201cIf you think I don\u2019t exist,\u201d she tells Theo, \u201cthink twice.\u201d That the circus diva Moira Orfei is<\/em> real (lived to eighty-three, is buried in the Veneto) and is also, for Koestenbaum, a coded transposition of someone else\u2014the opera singer Anna Moffo, Koestenbaum\u2019s own chosen diva\u2014is perhaps the most mysterious feature of this novel. Orfei, the real Orfei, was still alive when this book was published. She died in 2015. The following is from her obituary in the Telegraph<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Known for her over-the-top use of garish cosmetics, her bouffant hair and extravagant outfits, in later years she became something of a gay icon, much imitated by Italian drag queens. She even featured in a novel, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes<\/em> (2004), by Wayne Koestenbaum, as the object of obsession of a homosexual concert pianist.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let us bracket homophobia for a moment to correct the obituary as to Theo: he\u2019s more than \u201ca homosexual.\u201d He\u2019s a son. A brother. The heir to a modest dairy fortune. A husband. Roamer of East Kill\u2019s water district. A devotee and dreamer.<\/p>\n

Back to the obit:<\/p>\n

A likeable, motherly woman, who was particularly fond of her troupe of dwarfs, Moira Orfei remained hugely popular with circus audiences and towards the end of her life would enter the ring in a large chauffeur-driven car, to wild cheers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let\u2019s bracket the sizeism of this obituary to think of Theo as one of Moira\u2019s dwarfs. Or perhaps he is the chauffeur, and in that imagining, let\u2019s assume the car was\u2014naturally\u2014a Duesenberg, gleaming and klaxoning its way into the circus tent, Theo in his driver\u2019s gloves, hands on the wheel, with Moira in the rear, waving out the window.<\/p>\n

In the wake of that image, I start to regard this novel itself as an obituary, although it was written more than ten years before Moira Orfei died. But then whose obituary is it? Is it the obituary of Theo\u2019s fantasy, which will never align with the real? Theo himself seems an imperishable object, a sustaining note. His family contract, he tells us, has \u201can immortality clause.\u201d If desire is immortal, so is Theo immortal, as he waits, and hopes, for metaphor and music to take shape, give expiation.<\/p>\n

In that sense, this book is his prayer.<\/p>\n

And though he doesn\u2019t know it, since he can\u2019t escape its pages, the book itself is that same prayer of his, answered.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Rachel Kushner is the best-selling author of <\/em>The Flamethrowers, a finalist for the National Book Award and a <\/em>New York Times Top Ten Book of 2013; <\/em>Telex from Cuba, a finalist for the National Book Award; and <\/em>The Mars Room, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize. She lives in Los Angeles.<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2019 from the introduction to Circus or, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes: A Novel<\/a>. Reprinted by permission of Soft Skull Press.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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