Notes on Camp

When scandal breaks, and cameramen set up on the front lawn, the drawing room becomes a kind of command center. In Alan Hollinghurst's Man Booker Prize winning novel, "The Line of Beauty" (2004), the hero Nick Guest has been living, somewhat frivolously, as a graduate student houseguest in the home of a Tory MP. When the MP gets into serious trouble, his aristocratic brother-in-law, a lord, starts giving orders. "A structure of command, long laid away in velvet, had been rapidly assembled." Nick finds the resumption of feudal authority electrifying.

There is a similar moment in James McCourt's debut novel, "Mawrdew Czgowchwz" (1971), which begins as frothy camp but soon turns to myth and legend, investing outwardly frivolous diversions with Yeatsian gravitas. The eponymous heroine, an opera diva of obscure origins from somewhere east of the Iron Curtain whose name is pronounced "Mardu Gorgeous," has suffered a total nervous collapse. The several dozen super-talented dilettantes who always gallop after her like knights after their king, have congregated at Magwyck, an Upper East Side mansion owned by the Countess Madge O'Meaghre Gautier. They are all what Susan Sontag, in her "Notes on 'Camp,'" calls "instant characters."

Mr. McCourt presents his heroine with particular verve, rendering her Metropolitan debut, in "La Traviata," like a critic inspired with the power of his own praise:

The final measures were upon her; the optional E flat hung fire. She rose higher and wider by turns. The voice seared, shooting out of the whirling smoke of her consumptive waltz. "Il mio pensier . . . il mio pensier . . . ah . . . ah . . . ah!" For an instant there was no sound; then something unheard since the creation—a Czgowchwz fortissimo A natural above high C the color of the core of the sun.

Mr. McCourt creates an impossible sound out of written words, and soon goes further, granting Czgowchwz a magical vision while onstage. While performing "Isolde," she suddenly begins to sing in Irish. It's not a language she's supposed to know. Later, secluded upstairs at Magwyck, Czgowchwz has gone into a trance of recovered memory, and soon announces that she's the lost child of one Maev Cohalen, a fictional figure who inspired the Easter Uprising, and whose love child with a Czech philosopher became a ward of the Catholic Church in 1916. Countess Madge leaves that night, "booked outward bound for Shannon Airport on the eleventh-hour, Startlight Stratocruiser, 'St. Brendan' flight." Her son, Jameson, is "left in command." Ancient power structures are coming to life. Eventually, the countess returns, escorting a nun and a chain reaction of Roman Catholic interest, and soon has Mardu Gorgeous singing again.

An Irish Catholic by birth, as a writer Mr. McCourt serves two gods, James Joyce and Ronald Firbank, but in doing so he reveals a broader religiosity. Like Firbank, Mr. McCourt has notably camp tastes, but what these two writers — in concert with Joyce — demonstrate is that a preening, super self-conscious prose often masks, and sometimes reveals, a mystical obsession with the past. Perhaps it's the consequence of a prose so powerful it becomes a kind of invocation. You could almost call it a part of the pagan tradition. Mr. McCourt's new novel, "Now Voyagers: The Night Sea Journey" (Turtle Point Press, 520 pages, $17.95), acts like an arcane commentary on parts of this tradition. What makes prose like this work, as you read, is the sense of a toy realm, such as Mr. Rogers's "Neighborhood of Make-Believe," a collocation of monuments —for McCourt, the Met, Tiffany and Co., the Plaza, the Everard baths — with its own sense of legendary significance. Countess Madge has a druidic dolmen, somehow, in her back yard, just as Mr. Hollinghurst's "Swimming Pool Library" (1988) centers on an excavated Roman bath, perhaps a precursor to the modern baths where his male characters spend much of their time.

Mr. McCourt's new novel makes "Mawrdew Czgowchwz" itself into that kind of antique artifact, imagining that the manuscript was telegraphed, in all caps, to Czgowchwz's departing cruise liner. Rediscovered by Jameson and the former diva in 2004, Mr. McCourt's debut becomes the shuttlecock in an extremely self-conscious metafiction, kept aloft with too-smart dialogues in which another of Mr. McCourt's old characters, Delancey from "Time Remaining" (2000) and "Delancey's Way" (1993), eventually joins. No longer static, the characters have grown — indeed, they seem to take great comfort from the fact that all that miscellany from the past justifies their geriatric erudition among ruins. New York is not what it used to be. Here is Jameson, after revisiting the Everard baths:

Oh, the relief! Every time I leave that place and walk like this into the hosed-down light of a New York morning, I think I'm some survivor of a shipwreck on some long Night Sea Journey.

As an odyssey, "Night Sea Journey" resembles but falls short of Mr. McCourt's 2004 nonfiction magnum opus, "Queer Street," a cultural history of pre-Stonewall New York. More Joycean than Firbankian, these late-career works can be brilliantly illuminating but are more often tantalizing and bewildering, like the late-night confessions of a glamorous speed queen. Sontag suggested that the homosexual affinity for camp is a dodge on being serious, but camp artists such as. Firbank and Mr. McCourt, or fellow-traveler Mr. Hollinghurst, seem, to the contrary, quite interested in seriousness. They toss it around, like handfuls of glitter, coating their own rituals and their own histories. In the end, Mr. McCourt's metaphysical Queer Street takes on a palpable life: He sees through Manhattan as Joyce saw through Dublin.

blytal@nysun.com