Jerome Charyn is the author of the new novel Maria La Divina: A Novel of Maria Callas. His many other books include the novel Ravage & Son. He lives in Manhattan.
Q: Why did you decide to write a novel based on the life of singer Maria Callas (1923-1977)?
A: About three or four years ago, I happened to see a documentary called Maria by Callas. Maria Callas was part of my life when I was a lot younger, there were all sorts of stories about her and her love affairs, but when I saw this documentary, her story felt in some way familiar to me and I said: this woman is me.
She had a kind of power that was overwhelming. She grew up poor, she remade herself – like I did - she didn’t have a language; she had to invent a language and hers was opera.
And I was moved by her. I fell in love with her. I turned to my wife and said that I wanted to marry Maria; to divorce her and marry a dead woman. My wife knew I was serious, but she laughed it off saying as she was a lawyer herself, she knew it couldn’t be legal.
The thing is that there was something about Maria Callas that touched me, and I was willing to devote the rest of my life to study her and to study opera - which I knew little about - and to write a novel about her.
Because I don’t see that much difference between men and women, both sexes are blended in a strange way. There’s something both masculine and feminine about her.
She was a very powerful, disturbed and vulnerable woman and I wanted to inhabit, I wanted to live in her world for a while. It moved me, it touched me and that made me feel good.
Q: What would you say are some of the most common perceptions and misconceptions about her?
A: Let’s start with the misconceptions. When we see images of Maria Callas, she looks like a female pharaoh. She’s very tall, very beautiful, even though she hated her long nose, there’s something striking about her, but what we don’t see are the earlier photographs of her when she was over 200 pounds. In those, she isn’t very attractive at all, but those photographs have all but disappeared.
Then, in 1953, Maria happened to see Roman Holiday, a film starring Audrey Hepburn, and she said: I want to look like Hepburn. So she went on a very strange, crazy diet and within a year she lost 80 pounds.
People told her she would lose her voice because her rib cage was going to shrink – she didn’t lose her voice at all, she was stylishly beautiful now and designers wanted her to wear their clothes and jewels, etc. etc. and she became a much-photographed fashion icon.
But still, what is most important about her is that she was devoted to music. Music was her language. Music is the way she spoke. She was not educated past the 8th grade. She read comic books. She read fashion magazines. She read all sorts of trash and yet somehow she was able to sing with a voice that was touched by both touched by both the devil and angels.
Q: How did you research Maria Callas’s life, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: I read and viewed everything I could about Maria, biographies, novels, documentaries.
I wanted to learn. I’m basically a student and I wanted to learn her language, the operas she sang. So I did all the research, studied the operas, I listened to all of them, especially Norma, with the aria "Casta Diva," which is magical. It is her ode to a lost god.
What startled me the most was that she was a very, very strong woman, a very powerful woman who could slap you in the face if you bothered her. She once had a fight with Rudolph Bing, who ran the Metropolitan Opera - they never got along. He threw $1,000 worth of pennies at her and she tossed the pennies back and hit him in the face. So she was a very tough woman.
What surprised me the most was that she had a wonderful relationship with Aristotle Onassis; she gladly gave up her career to devote herself to him, but schmuck that he was, he married Jackie Kennedy, who devoured him and he turned into a mousy, stupid man.
Q: What do you see as Callas’s legacy today?
A: Well, legacy is a strange word because fame, whatever it is, comes, and it goes and it disappears and reappears. There was recently a film about Maria, which should have sort of brought her back to us, but it didn’t; it was a terrible film.
The legacy of Maria Callas is that she was the diva of divas. And particularly when she sang "Casta Diva," in Norma; it breaks your heart. It’s an opera about a people who are imprisoned by Romans and she’s in love with the Roman consul and she sings this prayer to the gods which is basically a lie, but it’s a wonderful, wonderful aria and there’s no one else who can sing it. I encourage you to listen to it even on YouTube.
Rudolph Bing had to admit that once Maria Callas sings a role she defines it as no one else can. And so she became La Divina, the divine one, because she was all opera. There was nothing else in her life. She had no other interest other than to lie in bed reading gossip columns, waiting to sing and perform.
In Anna Bolena she was asked to play a queen; the director began to tell her about Anna Bolena and she put up her hand and said, “I know how to play a queen.”
So she was a woman whose life was opera and I don’t think there’s any other diva who had the same intensity and really broke your heart - which she did, and I loved her.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: When I first began writing, about a thousand years ago, I wrote Once Upon a Droshky, a surprisingly popular novel about an old man, and somehow managed to bring him and the Yiddish theater back to life.
It was because when I was a kid, my parents would take me to visit my grandparents on the Lower East Side and I couldn’t stand being around them, so I walked the streets. I would pass the Yiddish theater and I didn’t know what it was, but it seemed very mysterious, and so my first novel was about an old Yiddish actor who’s thrown out of his home in Washington Heights.
And now I am writing about a 13-year-old kid who becomes the head of the mob and lives in the Bronx and I’m going to skip from him at 13 to his being a 90-year-old billionaire looking back at his days in the Bronx and particularly a hotel called The Concourse Plaza, which is now a terrifying old home which is filled with rats, but in its time was the epitome of Bronx living.
It was the first co-op in the Bronx and it had magnificent apartments. The little boy lives there since his mother killed herself - she hung herself there when he was three and so he lives alone in this hotel. And I want to bring back that world of my childhood.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’m always writing because I’m really not much interested in anything else and so I sort of move between novels and stories and I was asked to do a mystery story inspired by a Hitchcock film for an anthology coming out at the same time as my Maria Callas novel.
I chose Vertigo, my favorite Hitchcock film. There was always one moment in Vertigo that fascinated me – it’s when James Stewart’s character speaks about having been a lawyer who became a police detective.
That’s very strange because I know that when police detectives retire, many of them go to law school since they know so much about criminal law and then they become lawyers. This was the first time I ever heard of a lawyer becoming a policeman.
And so I wrote a story about why he went from one to the other for this collection, Birds, Strangers and Psychos.
I’ve also finished a stage play on Toots Shor, who was the great New York impresario of the ‘50s and ‘60s – he had his own Tavern where his favorite was Joe DiMaggio. It started off as a one-person show - we have a famous actor attached who has always wanted to play Toots - but I also added a few other characters so that it will be dynamic.
I’ve also completed my very first young adult novel, called Silver Wolves, which will be published next March. And I’ve got a story about Wittgenstein – just because he fascinates me. I mean, I don’t understand a word of his philosophy, but I love his very strange perverse life.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Jerome Charyn.
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