The Professor and Other Writings

by Terry Castle

  All easy enough to lampoon, of course, and I hadn’t even gotten yet to the album’s blockbuster final number—one that I fully expected, based on what I could remember of it, to reveal itself definitively, now and for the ages, as The Worst Song Ever Written. To borrow a canny phrase from a hipster colleague: seemed like Alix was about to rip Nana Mouskouri a new one. Indeed, when the ditty in question, the unfortunately named “View from Gay Head,” started coming in over the ’phones, I was already tittering quietly in cynical forepleasure.

  As the first couple of verses unfurled I felt a malicious urge to share the merriment. Blakey, it’s true, was about ten or twelve paces ahead of me, but I’d been managing quite nicely (I thought) cardio-wise, and had even surmounted my bête noire, the infarction-inducing Sanchez Hill, in fairly good time. Surely Blakey wouldn’t object to stopping the onerous Power Walk for just a sec to exchange headphones and exult in the ludicrousness of it all? Nor did she. After I had explained who Alix Dobkin was—B. having been maybe six or seven, I guess, when the original Lavender Jane Loves Women album came out—she listened in wide-eyed horror and disbelief, then began emitting great girlish war-whoops of laughter. These eructations became so insistent that she was soon quite breathless with guffawing and had to bend over at the waist, hands on hips, gasping all the while, like someone who had just finished running the 400-meter high hurdles at the Olympics.

  Reasons for mirth—as I well knew myself—were not hard to find. According to Dobkin’s liner notes, the song had apparently had a kind of mystical, magical, jubilant birthing, its chorus having come to its creator, “Ode to Joy”–like, while she was driving with her girlfriend to Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard in the summer of 1973. (Wow, 1973! They could have seen Lillian Hellman! Maybe even’ve run her over!) Pretty great, too, some of the other compositional details. “After we arrived,” Dobkin explained, “I wrote the verses and very carefully lifted the tune from the Balkan song, ‘Savo Vodo,’ which I had recently learned at my Balkan singing class.” Ah, yes: how well we remember rocking out to “Savo Vodo”—not to mention those air-guitar favorites “Pobjednicki Cocek” and “Vai, Ce Rau Ma Simi Acuma.”

  And from one angle, the lyrics of “View from Gay Head” no doubt offered glorious satiric fodder. Each verse was a potted parable of sorts, designed to expose the vileness with which the greedy patriarchal brutes who ruled the world (men) drove women, shrieking and tremulous, into the arms of their own sex. Luckily for the poor battered gals, though, this abrupt exit from the not-so Edenic Garden of Heterosexuality was really a Fortunate Fall: once one lady-refugee met up with another, awesome dyke-dacious ecstasy ensued, accompanied by huge bursts of shared cleansing revolutionary anger. Thus in the song’s opening verses—oddly ornamented with wobbly little eighteenth-century trills by the flute-cello backup team—Alix sang of one “Cheryl” and new squeeze “Molly,” the blissful beneficiaries of just such an eroto-political awakening. “There are two kinds of people in the world today,” the pair had realized:

  One or the other, a Person must be;

  The Men are Them and the Women are WEEE—EEEE!

  This key insight, laid bare with the analytic clarity of Marx and Engels, led ineluctably to boogie-oogie-oogie Woman-Love. Now “both agree-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee,” crowed Alix, “It’s a pleasure to bee-ee a LES-BEE-ENNE!”

  Cue loud and lusty chorus, sung by Dobkin and ragtag but euphoric female choir, several of whose members sounded as if they might be age six or under:

  LES-BEE-ENNE! LES-BEE-ENNE!

  LES-BEE-ENNE in No Man’s Land!

  LES-BEE-ENNE! LES-BEE-ENNE!

  ANY WOMAN CAN BE A LES-BEE-ENNE!

  [dainty flourish by flute player]

  And so it went: the incendiary Cheryl and Molly succeeded by literary-lez “Liza,” who “wishes the librar-eee/Had men and women placed separate-leee” —all the way to “Louise” (grousing at “a million second places in the Master’s Games”) and right-on Alix herself, who in the course of decrying the sexual warfare waged on women by men, absolutely nails my favorite internal rhyme in all of English poetry:

  I’ll return to the bosom,

  Where my journey ends—

  Where there’s no penis

  Between us friends!

  I feel faint just typing it.

  But faint—whether with joy, pleasure, or involuntary glandular stimulation—was hardly the state in which I found myself as I continued to observe the rippling laugh-bomb “View from Gay Head” had set off in Blakey. Quite the opposite: I suddenly felt uneasy, a little spooked, as if I’d had a scary dream the night before—some grisly vision crowded with frights—but now couldn’t remember anything about it. A chill passed over me and I smiled wanly even as B. launched into some of her cherished satiric themes: the idiocies of the old hard-line feminism, the embarrassing travesty that Women’s Studies had become in American universities, the aggravating failure of our lesbian friends to acknowledge the sheer hottitude of Daniel Craig, Cristiano Ronaldo, or various other brawny baby-daddies now gracing the covers of People magazine and the National Enquirer.

  Ordinarily I would have been seconding these delightful sentiments, even suggesting other neglected hotties from history. (I know Rupert Brooke is dead, but—o-h-h, what a studmuffin…Did you know that he and Virginia Woolf went nude swimming in a Sussex duck pond in 1913?) But today something was different. Suddenly conscious—somewhat painfully—of the age difference between myself and my boisterous bride-to-be, I felt a stab of pure seventies-nostalgia, at once perverse, plaintive, and self-righteous. You have no idea what it was like to be gay then. Nobody ever talked about it. There weren’t any other lesbians. At least where I was. It wasn’t like being at Yale with Maia and Sylvia and Jodie Foster in 1987. Did I actually say such dreary things? Something along these lines, I confess, even as B. pulled a droopy-sad Pagliaccio-face—her usual gambit during my more pathetic sermons—and pretended to play an invisible two-inch violin, holding it delicately between thumb and forefinger and mooning tragically as she did so.

  But I was increasingly piqued, too, by less comfortable feelings: a certain shamefacedness, above all. Who was I to make fun of Alix Dobkin? I worried I had been unjust, even disloyal—not only to the spunky songsmith, who by now is probably an entirely inoffensive lesbian grandmother and fully paid-up member of the AARP, but also to my confused, somewhat impressionable twenty-year-old self. Yes, granted: even thirty years ago, I found some of the numbers on Lavender Jane Loves Women wanting. (Warning from the U.S. Surgeon General: Do Not Play “Hug-Ee-Boo Song” While Operating Heavy Machinery.) But on the whole, hadn’t I been right in there with Alix from the start? An admirer? An acolyte? Maybe even the Biggest Fan She Ever Had?

  With the rap of a gavel, the Judge Judy tribunal in my brain, permanently empowered, was at once in session and I found myself under harsh DIY cross-examination. The first time I heard “The Woman in Your Life,” three decades ago, the court wished to know, had I not become desperately eager to find a recording of it? (Yes, your Honor. It was the theme song on a feminist talk show on the Seattle public-access radio station to which I had become fanatically devoted.) Had I not also adored Alix’s superb cover version of Dusty Springfield’s “I Only Want to Be with You”—so far unmentioned in this all-too-strategic and shifty prologue? (Um…er…yes, your Honor.) Was it not a million billion tons better than the one Annie Lennox did when she was in The Tourists? (Uh…yes…) And indeed all the more poignant, given Springfield’s own long-unacknowledged lesbianism? (Slight catch in voice: Um, well, um…yes, your Honor. I guess…. ) And what about that “View from Gay Head”? Hadn’t every line of the lyrics come rushing back as soon as I heard it again? Hadn’t I found myself humming along, even mouthing the words of the chorus with a certain bemused if not rakish enjoyment? (Head bent in mortification, quiet sniffling sounds: yeah, um…your Honor…I…uhhh…snuffle snuffle… )

  Finally, and most damningly, was it not the case—or perhaps
one should say is it not the case—that I have been playing Dobkin’s songs nonstop since I retrieved them online? That they make me feel strangely happy-go-lucky, as if—despite much evidence to the contrary—all were right with the world? That sometimes, amid the inanity, Alix hits the thirty-year-old emotional love-spot with such warmth and precision, reaches back so deeply and surely to the lonely, naïve, damaged-yet-hopeful young listener I once was, she makes me want to cry? That her singing is beautiful? That she makes me reflect, with gratitude, on the great kindness and understanding that I have received from people, gay and straight, over the course of my life? That when you get right down to it, a certain Terry Castle loves Alix Dobkin?

  Guilty as charged, your Honor.

  And thus my donnée, the question that now haunts me: What happened to that other T-Ball? The kinder, gentler T-Ball? The acoustic T-Ball, so to speak? Where did she go? She who was once, in illo tempore, as soft and pattable as a much-loved old flannel shirt or the consoling suede puppy-skin on the tummy of Wally? Putting it more bluntly: How had 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?

  The Dobkin rencontre suggested, obviously, that I had not, in fact, always been “that way”—that there had been a time of illusions and (relative) simplicity, a Bambi-time. How then had I morphed from doe-eyed little forest creature into the Thersites of Noe Valley? That my long-ago relationship with the Professor might be involved seemed most likely—a personally tailored Intro to Savage Irony 101—but beyond that, mental confusion reigned. How, precisely, had the rot set in? What did it have to do with my sexual orientation? And perhaps most important, what attitude to adopt toward it now? For even as I wallowed in wistful compassion for my younger self, I could also see in retrospect that some tempering—a certain steeling—had been necessary. Little T-Ball, poor shatter-brained mite, had had it coming, after all. The Bambi lifestyle is a dangerous one: one moment of baby-deer myopia, one dainty-hoofed gambol into freeway traffic, and you’re road kill. What I saw now as the ineluctable corrosion of my character, in other words, might have been adaptive: a way of surviving.

  But was that the good news or the bad news? Or was it just what it was? Did the concepts of good and bad even apply? Here indeed was a mystery worth plumbing: I was fat; I was mean; but I was alive.

  The Gods Tried to Warn Me

  SO WHO EXACTLY WAS Terry Castle—now Spoiled Avocado Professor of English at Silicon Valley University—way back in 1975? An embarrassing incident in the spring of my senior year in college will demonstrate just how deep the baby-fawn syndrome went, and how troublesome it would turn out to be, even as I was about to launch myself, purblind and gullible, into graduate school, a new life, and the cold Professorial embrace. Precocious one was, but also foolishly unguarded.

  The kindest way of explaining it? Put it this way: I was so avid a Student in those days—so ardently devoted to the intellectualization of my world, so confident about my fledgling powers of analysis, so scholastic in my aspirations, so serious and chaste and idealistic—such a twatty little Simone Weil wannabe in fact—that I had somehow managed mostly to avoid acknowledging the real world and its inhabitants. Emotionally speaking, I was dim and unschooled, a sort of very low-grade idiot savant. (As—at a far more exalted level, I now realize—was Simone herself.) My undergraduate years, spent at a tiny then-barely accredited private school in the Pacific Northwest, had been a somewhat soggy, inconclusive affair, but apart from having to endure a plethora of fir trees, dark precipitation-filled days, and the sulfurous smells that wafted up from the lumber mills down by the Sound, I had not found my sojourn there particularly challenging. In some of my literature classes I was better informed than my professors. It was easy to be snobbish about the place, to feel superior. Compared with the apocalyptic urgency and difficulty of my high school years—during which I had been compelled by such frenzied longing to get away from San Diego and the worsening emotional chaos associated with the Mavis-Turk ménage (not to mention the crew of new and piratical stepsiblings) that I frequently ended up weeping at the dinner table over my chemistry homework, fearful I wouldn’t win a scholarship…ack ack ack…—well, after all that, college was a pretty much bound to be a cinch. It was easy to do well and I nailed it.

  Adding to the general hubris: my social life, though still sheltered, had likewise improved somewhat over the course of my undergraduate career. In high school I had been almost freakishly solitary and skittish, with no idea how to comport myself in ordinary-teenager fashion. A certain embryonic yet disabling class discomfort was involved: I was mortified by the fact that my parents were divorced (something still fairly unusual in the middle sixties) and that “home” during my adolescence was a tiny flat in the Buena Vista Garden Apartments, the somewhat rackety low-rent complex where we lived for the eight years before my mother finally married Turk. Bizarre as it sounds, by the time I left for college I had never once called anyone on the telephone or invited a classmate over after school. Nor had I myself been so called or invited. Not once had I sat on the bedroom floor with a set of girl-chums, gossiping about boys and teachers, “ratting” our hair Shirelles-style (still a preferred SoCal mode as late as 1970), listening to the radio, or having long metaphysical conversations about Jesus Christ Superstar. On the contrary: I’d been reclusive, a regular Secret-Garden-Frances-Hodgson-Burnett-Girl-Hysteric-in-Training. At seventeen, I remained passionately (if uneasily) mother devoted; frighteningly watchful, in school and out; abnormally well read in Dumas novels, G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, H.P. Lovecraft, and the lives of the poets (Keats being the huge sentimental favorite); but in all other respects mostly shy, quiet, lumpish, and dead.

  In contrast, by the time I was a senior in college I felt I had “lived”—especially in what I imagined to be an erotic sense. Not that I’d been completely in the dark earlier: again, several achy-yet-pleasurable crushes on female teachers in high school had suggested the direction things were tending. In fact, if only abstractly, I was already half-cognizant even then of my budding sexual orientation and took a precocious scholarly interest in it. Various “grown-up” literary discoveries helped to shape it. With a forwardness and frankness rare at the time, for example, my tenth-grade French teacher had been inspired one day to tell us the checkered story of Rimbaud and Verlaine—the tumult, the buggery, the absinthe, all of it—and I had been riveted. Not a surprise, I suppose, that said French teacher, a gamine yet severe young woman we addressed as “Madame Moller,” was one of the main crushes. Though hailing from Omaha, she refused to speak English, played Brel and Juliette Greco songs for us, and seemed unimaginably cosmopolitan, having once been an exchange student in Nice. Her Navy ensign husband was on a river boat in Vietnam.

  I began devouring certain louche modern authors in secret: Gide, Wilde, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, even Yukio Mishima, then at the height of his celebrity in the West. Sexual deviance, or at least what I conceived it to be, began to exert a certain unhallowed, even gothic allure—a glamorous, decayed, half-Satanic romance. (Hesse’s Demian, one of the now-forgotten cult books of the era, was for some time my dark anti-Bible.) Not least among the attractions that such literary homosexuality proffered: some drastic psychic deliverance from familial dreariness and the general SoCal strip-mall stupor. In Death in Venice, after all, Aschenbach never had to go out to eat at a Carl’s Jr. with Turk and the squalling stepsibs, let alone shout his fries-and-shake order through the tinny speaker at the drive-through window.

  As for “homosexual practices”—and I confess I wasn’t exactly sure, mechanically speaking, what they were—they sounded sterile and demonic but also madly titillating. Well I remember when Mishima, in uniform and at the head of a crazy little band of gay right-wing militarists, had himself decapitated by his homosexual lover on the balcony of the Japanese Defense Command in Tokyo in 1970: I’d read all about it—bug-
eyed and agog—in my mother’s Time magazine. Anything could happen, it seemed, in the fascinating world of sexual inverts. Lesbianism didn’t figure much, if at all, in these early reveries: one of the oddest parts of the fantasy, I guess, was that I was male, dandified, and in some sort of filial relationship to various 1890s Decadents. I knew more about green carnations, the Brompton Oratory, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and the curious charms of Italian gondoliers than I did about Willa Cather or Gertrude Stein—not to mention Garbo or Stanwyck or Dusty Springfield. Some of the obliviousness was due to the times: lesbianism was seldom mentioned—ever—in those days and the sparse information one did come across left more questions than it answered. I was vaguely conscious of The Killing of Sister George, the notorious lesbian stage play made into an X-rated film starring Beryl Reid and Susannah York in 1968, but also bewildered by what I read about it (again in Time magazine); it didn’t seem to involve pining surreptitiously after a blond fellow schoolboy in some oppressive yet romantic Prussian military academy. Even today after repeated viewings—requisite because I suffer, alas, from a never-to-be-requited crush on the deceased but still superhot Coral Browne—I’m still not entirely sure I understand the bit with the cigar.

  Needless to say, all this inward high-school posturing went undisclosed: as noted, I kept no journal then, nor had I any confidante or sidekick. I wouldn’t have dreamed of bringing up intimate subjects with my somewhat addled and uncomprehending mother. Though we never discussed it, I know that she was already worried—when she had the time to think about it, that was—by my balky ungirlish demeanor and the fact that for some reason my period hadn’t started. Nor would it, mortifyingly, until I was almost eighteen. (One’s hormones were plainly on strike: talking tough to management and holding out for a better deal.) At the time I left for college I had never slept with anybody or even kissed anyone; nor, when you got right down to it, could I really imagine doing so. The idea of sex with a woman, of “having a lesbian lover,” was simply unthinkable, like living alone at the North Pole or deciding to become a lycanthrope. If the thought existed at all, it was as a mote, a sweet nothing—a little “feather on the breath of God,” barely sensed now and then, but mostly hidden away (pace Donald Rumsfeld) in some dastardly psychic dossier labeled “Unknown Unknowns.” I was innocent—gruesomely so—or that was how it seemed.