‘Maria La Divina: A Novel of Maria Callas’
By Jerome Charyn
Bellevue Literary Press, 336 Pages

A two-fisted Greek American from the Washington Heights section of upper Manhattan, Maria Callas first wowed Italian opera lovers, singing with such power and otherworldly intensity that she made them cry. Callas, it seems, made everyone cry, including her “sailor,” as she called Aristotle Onassis, the shipping magnate and world-class lover who became the husband of Jackie O, as the press called her.

In Washington Heights or in Verona, where the considerably overweight Callas first won fame, she would fight anyone who disparaged her, got in her way, or taunted her. The reckless diva, as Jerome Charyn depicts her, went on a dangerous diet that transformed her into the romantic and dangerous female figure that film director Pier Paolo Pasolini pestered until she agreed to appear as Medea in his uncompromising attack on bourgeois society. He rightly saw in her the very embodiment of his radical politics. That Callas was not a political person hardly mattered to the director because in her person she was the very soul of rebellion, an outsider wherever she went. 

Callas drove herself mercilessly, not taking care of her voice or pacing herself. She thus had a relatively brief, if stellar, career before retreating to the recording studio, where she could fix the wobble in her voice.

One of the most moving episodes of Mr. Charyn’s book is also the moment when the conventions of biography and of the novel collide. Callas consents to teach master classes at Julliard. Her voice shot, allowing her to perform only brief solos for the students, she suddenly shuns their applause and gives herself over entirely to instructing them.

As only a novel can do, the scene is seductively intimate, the envy of biographers, but then Mr. Charyn becomes a biographer, and then again a novelist:

“The stage was barren except for Maria’s chair, a tiny table, and a microphone on a stand. The first three students were disappointing; the best of the best, she had chosen them herself. They must have been terrified by that sea of faces in the audience. Their voices didn’t project, even with a microphone in front of them. They seemed to stutter as they sang. 

“Maria sat with her feet wide apart, like a Cossack general. She clapped her hands with each student’s swallowed note. ‘Legato, legato,’ she said. ‘Sing with an open throat. I do not want to feel a chipping at the notes. The sound must be liquid … like oil. Study every note, please. The soul of an opera is born into that one single note.’ 

“She began to accompany her own students as she sat in her chair. Maria’s voice reverberated across the auditorium like a continuum of soft rifle shots.”

What leaps out, at least to a biographer, is the phrase, “They must have been  terrified.” This is a novel, which means the narrator doesn’t have to speculate — except that in order to preserve the novel Mr. Charyn has to paradoxically adopt the typical biographer’s resort to “must have been,” which can be seen as Callas’s phrase as well as the narrator’s. 

The scene seems real, in other words, precisely because he has the exquisite awareness that he should not tell too much: So the students “seemed to stutter” — a phrase well within the biographer’s remit — which then gives way to the dialogue expected of fiction as we hear Callas speak as a character in a novel must, situating us in the room’s reverberations. This is imaginable to a biographer; he or she does not, however, dare to write that concluding simile: “like a continuum of soft rifle shots.”

What distinguishes the greatest biographical novelists is not only the judicious liberties taken with the biographical record, and the profound respect accorded to what cannot be known, but also the devotion to fiction itself that reverberates in the reader’s imagination just like “a continuum of soft rifle shots.” 

We tremble with Callas later in her career, when she no longer can maintain breath control, when audiences terrify her, when she is going nearly blind, when Onassis deserts her, returns, and then deserts her again and again for Jackie O, and when the world watches her and wonders about what “must have been.”

Mr. Rollyson’s writing about biographical fiction is included in “Reading Biography” and “Biography: A User’s Guide.”