The Second Coming

The legendary Hollywood star Kaye Wayfaring made her fictional debut in James McCourt’s “Kaye Wayfaring in ‘Avenged’ “--”Avenged” being the title of the Hollywood star’s first comeback movie in the early 1980s. In the sequel, “Wayfaring at Waverly in Silver Lake” (like the earlier book, a series of linked stories or episodes), she emerges from her Waverly Drive hideaway for a repeat performance 10 years later in “The Undertow,” director Orphrey Whither’s “most uncompromising foray into auteur sadism.” The movie industry thinks Wayfaring is over the hill at 50, and she’s overweight as well, but as Astarte (“fuchsia-haired Beverly Hills astrologer, industry scold, civic activist”) tells her: “Your career has always been one long embrace of your obstacles, which you have always realized as your material.”

The idea of transmuting personal obstacles into art has a universal resonance, and it’s an idea that recurs throughout McCourt’s fiction, beginning with his first novel “Mawrdew Czgowchwz” (just reissued by New York Review Books), about a Czech-Irish opera singer who undergoes a severe identity crisis while singing Isolde at the Met. Another kind of diva appeared in “Time Remaining,” with the former transvestite ballerina Odette O’Doyle, once described as “the woman Toumanova is trying to be,” carrying out the wishes of several friends and peers, all casualties of AIDS, by scattering their ashes over various European locations. Odette suffers from “survivor guilt” when (s)he returns, then realizes that by writing the stories of the dead, “there will be in the telling a point at which they will not yet have been dead.”

Wayfaring is in the process of resurrection or, more accurately, a second coming. “She is walking the tightrope to greatness. There has been nothing like it since Jeanne Eagels in ‘The Letter,’ ” a friend remarks after seeing “Avenged.” There was Oscar buzz then but no nomination. This time, after “The Undertow,” there is Oscar buzz and a nomination. “Do I want the thing?” she wonders. “What’s not to want? Don’t ask.”

Like many of McCourt’s characters, she has moods that swing from dark to brilliant, with an intervening pause at darkly brilliant. She’s haunted by the memory of her mother’s suicide and of two Hollywood casualties, Marilyn Monroe, whom she knew and liked, and Peg Entwistle, whom she never met. (Entwistle was the out-of-work bit player who jumped to her death from the Hollywoodland sign in 1932, and Wayfaring finds it “surprising” that when the sign was repaired and abbreviated to Hollywood, “they didn’t bother to create a mechanical Peg Entwistle replica that would jump off the H once a day, at noon, accompanied by civil defense sirens.”)

Wayfaring’s adolescent son Tristan also haunts her interior monologues, especially after he flees in panic to a remote Pacific beach after realizing that he’s gay. He is befriended by a group of young druggies as terrifyingly well-read as Tristan himself and nearly dies after they inject seawater into his veins. When he recovers, he looks back on the episode with a mixture of introspection and detachment as “a self-contained exploration of personal experience that hopefully also dramatizes the sense of life as an elusive process whose depths resist interpretation.”

The episode is also one of the most ironically imagined yet devastating accounts of homosexual panic ever written, because its victim is otherwise so super-cool, beautiful and articulate. Tristan shares a very personal gift of the gab with his mother and her friends, notably the producer Leland de Longpre, who describes contemporary movie stars as “twentysomething freeze-dried-sock-puppet airheads untempted by any articulated form of knowledge, who in deep-stall idiot bliss make pizza-boy eyes into the Steadicam lens and whisper ‘Eat me.’ ” Did any Hollywood producer ever talk like that? Unfortunately not.

Did any Hollywood star sit alone, like Wayfaring, in a downtown coffee shop on Halloween, “fingering the cubes in the sugar bowl and remembering the sugar skulls in Mexico on the Day of the Dead”? Or have the audacity to remain in her car outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Oscar night while the Best Actress award is announced?

“Has it ever occurred to you one may be artificial by nature?” Tristan’s cry from the heart is also a cry from the author’s heart, for McCourt is a brilliant practitioner of what Cyril Connolly called the Mandarin style. Its aim, according to Connolly (who cited the later novels of Henry James as avatar of the style) was “to make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one.” But, as Oscar Wilde anticipated, its other equally important, aim was to turn the comedy of manners into a medium for subverting manners and morals.

Wilde’s most direct descendant, Ronald Firbank, did the same thing in his novels of the 1920s, “The Flower Beneath the Foot” and “Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli.” (The cardinal’s eccentricities, by the way, appear uncannily topical today, like Odette O’Doyle’s remark: “No lady except a cardinal in the Roman Catholic church--wears ermine in the morning.”)

McCourt is Firbank’s most direct (and more robust) descendant, even more unafraid to extend the boundaries of what is permissible to laugh at and to reject conventional narrative. In terms of direct action, not much happens, but a lot goes on in terms of dialogue (including reported action) and interior monologue. These characters live from private moment to private moment and from one epiphany to another, sudden revelations of happiness, absurdity, hope, pain. And their points of reference (like their author’s) define the word “eclectic,” ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Barbara Stanwyck in “Double Indemnity,” William James to Marlon Brando’s dislike of publicity (“it interfered with his self-absorption”).

“Wayfaring at Waverly in Silver Lake” is too idiosyncratic to file under “Los Angeles” or “Hollywood.” Its world is “an exaggeration of the possible,” as Raymond Chandler once defined melodrama, a definition that does equally well for a style of comedy whose sense of the absurd is as unexpected (and politically incorrect) as its sense of mortality.

Wayfaring is especially prone to mortal daydreams, whether in a downtown coffee shop or on her terrace while Santa Ana winds whip the palm trees: “Some broken palm fronds lay on the terrace amid swirls of leaves off deciduous trees, blown all the way to Silver Lake from the New England section of Forest Lawn (where Bette Davis lay).”

In a story by James Purdy, America’s senior Mandarin writer, a wife remarks to her husband: “I wonder how I will get out of here.”

“Out of where?” he asks.

“Out of where I seem to have got into,” she replies.

The “where” in Purdy’s story is the institution of marriage, but in a larger sense it applies to the situations in which Purdy’s characters, like McCourt’s, find themselves. In a similar moment, Wayfaring is reminded by “the zesty voice” of KBYZ’s Radio-Gaga, “Remember, how you got there says who you are today!” By taking an unfamiliar route to familiar problems (of love, death, identity), McCourt is also saying who he is by how he gets there; and in his case, both the journey and the arrival matter, because both are equally startling.