Circus
Page 1
PRAISE FOR Circus
(previously published as Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes)
“Wayne Koestenbaum’s dazzling new novel chronicles a dying polysexual pianist’s obsession with Moira Orfei, a stunningly beautiful circus artiste who may not exist. If Debussy and Robert Walser had collaborated on an opera, it would sound like this.”
—JOHN ASHBERY
“A mordant, exquisite ode to ‘the authentic and paralyzing distance between us.’ Insignificance is transformed into magnificence, inspiration is disfiguring, and desire is desecration: rapture becomes indistinguishable from rapture. I especially love how the book takes the stargazing of The Queen’s Throat and Jackie Under My Skin and poeticizes it, dramatizes it, darkens it, mortalizes it. A deep aesthetic and intellectual pleasure, Wayne Koestenbaum’s first novel is one of my absolutely favorite works of his (than which, in my lexicon, there’s scarcely higher praise).”
—DAVID SHIELDS
“Wayne Koestenbaum, a writer of mature and accountable linguistic genius, has . . . taken up the fabulist form and mastered it absolutely . . . In every way a match for its most illustrious precedent, the hallucination recorded in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Here is authentic magic from the wellspring of the magical: delusion transformed into revelation. A triumph.”
—JAMES McCOURT
“Written in the style of a surreal fever dream, Wayne Koestenbaum’s first novel records in brilliant poetic vernacular the swan song of Theo Mangrove, a dissipated concert pianist and debauched sexual adventurer obsessed with Italian circus star Moira Orfei. Elucidated across twenty-five notebooks, Theo’s desire to perform with Orfei for a final entertainment extravaganza in the southern French village of Aigues-Mortes (the ‘town of dead water’) is both dazzlingly seductive and undisguisedly unhinged . . . Koestenbaum, a cultural critic and poet, experiments with the deranged aesthetics of literary artifice practiced by such luminary predecessors as Baudelaire, Nerval, Artaud, Rimbaud, and Huysmans to tantalizing effect. The story of Koestenbaum’s freaks of nature is delivered in willfully, at times hilariously debauched deadpan and makes for irresistibly twisted magic. How could a reader not delight in the fiercely rendered hallucination of it all?”
—Bookforum
“The mad genius of Pale Fire with the florid outlaw sexuality of Jean Genet.”
—Kirkus Reviews
PRAISE FOR Wayne Koestenbaum
“Wayne Koestenbaum is one of the most original and relentlessly obsessed cultural spies writing today. His alarmingly focused attention to detail goes beyond lunacy into hilarious and brilliant clarity.”
—JOHN WATERS
“I’ll go wherever putto, poet, painter, and—little did you know—lounge crooner and ivory tinkler Wayne Koestenbaum wants to take me.”
—RACHEL KUSHNER
“[Wayne Koestenbaum] is a figure of this time, but he also is a writer and thinker for all time. His career streaks above this genre-obsessed, professionalized-writer moment, and corresponds instead to the history of the polymath, the public intellectual, the drifter, the infinite conversationalist.”
—MAGGIE NELSON
“Like an impossible love child from a late-night, drunken three-way between Joan Didion, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag, Wayne Koestenbaum inherited all their stylistic wonder and laser-beam smarts, but with the added point-blank jolt of sex.”
—BRUCE HAINLEY, Bidoun
“There’s always a sense in Koestenbaum’s writing that indulgence and risk are countered by extreme care at the level of the line or sentence . . . If you haven’t noticed by now: Here is one of the most flirtatious writers around.”
—BRIAN DILLON, Artforum
“What Koestenbaum has achieved, perhaps better than any other contemporary poet, is linguistic fecundity combined with hyper-fastidiousness. Words seem to fall out of his mind and through his pen at breakneck speed without undermining the deeper aesthetic experience . . . The psyche is dangerous terrain, and Koestenbaum is, among all his other accolades, an exceptionally brave explorer.”
—CODY DELISTRATY, Poetry Foundation
“For a quarter century, since the publication of the seminal queer theory text The Queen’s Throat, Wayne Koestenbaum has been one of our leading gay cultural critics. Alongside his parallel careers in poetry and the visual arts, Koestenbaum has been responsible for some of the most penetrating and haunting literature on queer identity, subcultures, and fixations.”
—Out
“Koestenbaum’s reflexivity is uncanny and gathers pathos from the very task of writing, which for him is tantamount to assembling a self. As Foucault put it, being gay ‘is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual, but to try to define and develop a way of life.’”
—FELIX BERNSTEIN, Bookforum
“Wayne’s work—his poems, his essays, his criticism—obliterates any vestigial divide we might hold on to between play and thought. It revels in and broadcasts the risks and joys (the risky joys and joyful risks) inherent in both.”
—STEFANIA HEIM, Boston Review
“[Wayne Koestenbaum’s] writing is pungent, replete, intoxicating, infectious. I read it and I want to make it my own, to steal his precision and lyricism and immaculate means of evoking the spectacularly specific.”
—ANNE HELEN PETERSEN, The Hairpin
“There’s anxiety in Koestenbaum’s work. There’s wonder here, too, and the combination of the two gives me a critic that I not only want to read but a critic I want to get to know. It’s human to worry, and writing about these worries is a perfect bonding agent.”
—Bookslut
“This scholar of excess is off the cuff, over the top, and always on the money!”
—ELAINE EQUI
“Impassioned insight . . . By turns comic and elegaic, respectful and blasphemous . . . Little or nothing escapes [Koestenbaum’s] gaze.”
—Newsday
“Whether referencing La Bohème, Donald Winnicott, bondage gear, Brooke Shields, or a haunting dream of massaging a baby, Koestenbaum’s work entices in all its sui generis, subconscious musing.”
—Publishers Weekly
or,
Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes
(MOY-ra or-FAY in Egg Mort)
ALSO BY WAYNE KOESTENBAUM
Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration
Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems
The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire
Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender
Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon
The Milk of Inquiry
Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars, and Aesthetics
Andy Warhol
Model Homes
Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films
Hotel Theory
Humiliation
The Anatomy of Harpo Marx
Blue Stranger with Mosaic Background
My 1980s & Other Essays
The Pink Trance Notebooks
Notes on Glaze: 18 Photographic Investigations
Camp Marmalade
This is a work of fiction; all events and people depicted in it are fictional. Actual public figures appear not as themselves but as products of the author’s imagination.
Copyright © 2004 by Wayne Koestenbaum
Introduction copyright © 2019 by Rachel Kushner
All rights reserved
First Soft Skull edition: 2004
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Koestenbaum, Wayne, author.
Title: Circus : or, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes : a novel / Wayne Koestenbaum.
Other titles: Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes
Description: New York : Soft Skull Press, 2019
.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019000248| ISBN 9781593764869 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781593765637 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Pianists—Fiction. | Sex addicts—Fiction. | Bisexual men—Fiction. | Americans—France—Fiction. | GSAFD: Erotic fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3561.O349 M65 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019000248
Cover design & art direction by salu.io
Book design by Wah-Ming Chang
Published by Soft Skull Press
1140 Broadway, Suite 704
New York, NY 10001
www.softskull.com
Soft Skull titles are distributed to the trade by
Publishers Group West
Phone: 866-400-5351
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
For Steven Marchetti
Contents
Introduction
Part One: The Situation
Notebook One
Notebook Two
Notebook Three
Notebook Four
Notebook Five
Notebook Six
Notebook Seven
Notebook Eight
Notebook Nine
Notebook Ten
Notebook Eleven
Notebook Twelve
Notebook Thirteen
Notebook Fourteen
Part Two: Dispersion
Notebook Fifteen
Notebook Sixteen
Notebook Seventeen
Notebook Eighteen
Part Three: Retrenchment
Notebook Nineteen
Notebook Twenty
Notebook Twenty-One
Notebook Twenty-Two
Notebook Twenty-Three
Notebook Twenty-Four
Notebook Twenty-Five
Introduction
Wayne Koestenbaum has written many books, and even recorded an album. I’ve 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 can be the only word used here), there is only one novel: Circus, or, as it was previously known, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes.
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 café racer’s 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. Koestenbaum and this book seemed like vessels containing an unusual combination of erudition, elegance, irreverence, and, in welcome measure, a touch of sleaze.
Later, I recall people comparing Moira Orfei to Nabokov’s Pale Fire and the novels of Genet. I believe that means they approved. I approve too, but I find those comparisons useless. Koestenbaum’s unique aesthetic orbit, his humor and thematic range, cannot really be understood by such refractions, although if I had to compare it I’d say his humor is like Bataille’s. “Don’t get your hopes up,” Theo Mangrove, narrator of Circus, implores. “The object in your hands is not a novel.” But don’t 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 Mallarméan marmalade:
the flawed
the almost
the
not
quite
No one lovesBaked Alaska
Heartlessness is a symbol
Soiled time
Pink sweater set
Primary ruin
Immortality clause
Jerking off, I canceled reality
a) Describe
b) Disappear
Here is the basic design: resident of scruffy East Kill, New York, and diarist filling notebooks with “East Kill persiflage,” 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 plotting a return to the stage, with Moira Orfei, internationally celebrated Italian circus diva, in Aigues-Mortes, a small town in the Camargue.
Theo writes to Orfei, awaits her reply, cruises “the water district” (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’s Ladder, East Kill’s finest purveyor of men’s 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—Theo—with a Kissinger-size death drive, who lives in a dimension called the comeback.
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’s case, his impending comeback, in the form of a piano concert and circus performance with Moira Orfei, is the leading edge of time’s three-part clock (past, present, future). It hovers, like a mirage on the road, eternally in front. And as you will learn when you reach the incredible end of this novel—a conclusion of suddenly classical and crushing effect—Moira sees the free-floating status of the future as if she were a god.
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?
I don’t 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, “She told me about the time she threw an infant across the room. Babysitting. . . . Years later she apologized to him, a stockbroker.” He brags that his new piano student is only mildly retarded. (“Start her with Hanon,” he muses.) Complains that his sister, Tanaquil, once again played the incest card. Amid the more sordid features of his life, and mental life, Moira flaunts triumph. Aigues-Mortes, with its salt, its ramparts, its arcades, waves redemption. “What is Tanaquil’s Aigues-Mortes?” Theo wonders, in a moment of unusually tender interest in his sister.
Moira’s own letters, interspersed throughout the book, read as if in the voice of the Subject Supposed to Know. “If you think I don’t exist,” she tells Theo, “think twice.” That the circus diva Moira Orfei is real (lived to eighty-three, is buried in the Veneto) and is also, for Koestenbaum, a coded transposition of someone else—the opera singer Anna Moffo, Koestenbaum’s own chosen diva—is 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:
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 (2004), by Wayne Koestenbaum, as the object of obsession of a homosexual concert pianist.
Let us bracket homophobia for a moment to correct the obituary as to Theo: he’s more than “a homosexual.” He’s a son. A brother. The heir to a modest dairy fortune. A husband. Roamer of East Kill’s water district. A devotee and dreamer.
Back to the obit:
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.
Let us bracket the sizeism of this obituary to think of Theo as one of Moira’s dwarfs. Or perhaps he is the chauffeur, and in that imagining, let’s assume the car was—naturally—a Duesenberg, gleaming and klaxoni
ng its way into the circus tent, Theo in his driver’s gloves, hands on the wheel, with Moira in the rear, waving out the window.
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’s fantasy, which will never align with the real? Theo himself seems an imperishable object, a sustaining note. His family contract, he tells us, has “an immortality clause.” If desire is immortal, so is Theo immortal, as he waits, and hopes, for metaphor and music to take shape, give expiation.
In that sense, this book is his prayer.
And though he doesn’t know it, since he can’t escape its pages, the book itself is that same prayer of his, answered.
RACHEL KUSHNER
2018
Part One
THE SITUATION
Notebook One
Thirty-five years ago I lost my red beanie cap. I accidentally left it in the unheated third-grade classroom. The fickle hat never reappeared. Pigeons alighting on a dung-splattered Roman Catholic church (I see it out my bedroom window) are more important than my cheap cap, worn once.
I live in East Kill, a tiny, insignificant, unlovely, never-discussed town to the north of the Heraclite River, and divided by a tributary known as East Kill. In New York State parlance, a “kill” is a stream. The word comes from the Dutch kil. I learned in first grade from gray-haired Mrs. Spence (who tied my hands behind my back because I sucked my thumb) that kill can also mean a hermit’s cell. East Kill takes pride in having neither proximity nor relation to overvisited West Kill. A pesticide factory, hidden in the foothills, clouds our air with chemical screens, producing lurid sunsets. Because of our flexible penal code (according to my mother, who follows crime), we have more artistic types per capita than any other small town in New York State, though we lack tourist appeal. We may never be an international music center, a Siena, an Aix-en-Provence, but our reputation is growing. We have surpassed Elmira, Troy, and Ancram—our nearest rivals.