Written by Terry Castle. $25.99; HarperCollins Books; 352 pages
Maybe a journalist is not the kind of writer who should review Terry Castle's new collection of essays, The Professor and Other Writings. After all, as the saying goes, newspaper content is written to be accessible by those with lower education levels. And The Professor would take someone with a few graduate degrees to break it all down.
But that is only if the big words, foreign phrases, and obscure ( to this reporter ) names from literature, music and film actually matter to the essays. They really don't. The essays are enjoyable and sometimes interesting, and of course very well written, without having to know every word. I stopped looking up words and references early on, and just allowed the language itself to serve as background noise to the actual stories.
Castle is an openly lesbian Stanford professor, and author of seven books of criticism including The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. Her anthology The Literature of Lesbianism, won the Lambda Award in 2003. She's a brilliant writer, to be sure.
The book's first half has shorter essays, some previously published and well known. The pieces are on a range of topics, from "Courage, Mon Amie" about her search for the grave of her great uncle, who died in the First World War, to "My Heroin Christmas," about her passion for drug-addicted jazz musician Art Pepper. Most of the pieces deal with travel or movement of some kind: time away to seek the past, the present or a potential future.
Of the previously published works, "Desperately Seeking Susan" is perhaps the best known. It originally appeared in The London Review of Books in 2005, and it is about her friendship with Susan Sontag.
"In those early days, I felt like an intellectual autodidact facing the greatest challenge of her career: The Autodidact of all Autodidacts," Castle writes of Susan Sontag. Uhmm, ditto here, Terry Castle. As with the other essays, it is at times quite uncomfortable to read, with humor and bitterness making an odd concoction. Revenge being best served cold and after the subject is dead, I guess: "Yes: Susan Sontag was sibylline and hokey and often a great bore. She was a troubled and brilliant American and never as good a friend as I wanted her to be."
I felt so often irritated while reading this book that I had to keep questioning why that was happening. Was it because I felt at turns that I was being laughed at by the writer, then laughing with her, and then laughing at her? I can't remember a ( non-political ) book that has made me feel all these emotions, even from one sentence to the next. There was so much highfalutin going on that I had to read some passages out loud to my girlfriend just to relieve the stress of feeling like an idiot. I could pretty much pick a sentence at random.
Again, though, I must emphasize: I ultimately enjoyed the effort, and learned some interesting tidbits along the way. Kind of like kitschy collectibles you may not need, but fascinating nonetheless.
The meat of the book is "The Professor," a new and lengthy piece about Castle's long-ago and brief affair ( as a graduate student ) with an older woman ( a professor of course ) . The mental anguish caused by the tumult is clear, and Castle's mixed emotions are raw and revealing. She starts out the essay with her by-now clear bitter streak, aimed in part at the lesbian movement of the 1970s, even targeting singer Alix Dobkin. But she soon brings it around and realizes her spite is misdirected, and that those early years were formative in both good and bad ways.
And how did those years shape her? She writes: "And thus my donnée, the question that now haunts me: What happened to that other T-Ball ( Castle's nickname ) ? The kinder, gentler T-Ball? The acoustic T-Ball, so to speak? Where did she go? … How did I become the japing, nay-saying, emotionally stunted creature I now felt myself to be? A veritable devil when it came to making fun of people but, oh, so much harder on myself?"
That passage is at the heart of this book and of "The Professor" essay itself. In this closing piece, we move from the music and politics of the 1970s lesbian community to the more personal life of Castle as a graduate student in the Midwest, falling in love with The Professor, never named, and dealing with her mind-games, betrayal and cruelty. But even after Castle has painfully revealed the details, she brings us back to the brink as she tries to justify it, thinking that same-sex cross-generational teacher-student affairs may not be as bad as heterosexual ones. She herself had such a relationship early on in her own career ( though similar in age to the person ) . But the evidence of the damage done, in Castle's case, is quite clear.
The mind-fuck of it all continues, with no easy answers to Castle's own fortunes and misfortunes. That makes this book closer to reality than most similar essay projects. Which is probably why it left me uncomfortable yet stimulated mentally. I may not agree with Castle's making fun of parts of the lesbian world, but she certainly knows how to debate and make her points. The Professor, the book? Witty and disturbing, funny and bitter, and as Melissa Etheridge would say, brave and crazy.
