The Professor and Other Writings

by Terry Castle

  All this changed in college, as if someone had flipped a switch. Within a day or two of arriving at my new dormitory, I’d already met the aforementioned Phoebe, whose bare feet, Joni Mitchell LPs, elaborately macraméd jeans bottoms, and well-thumbed volumes of Anaïs Nin’s diary proclaimed her—thrillingly—a Free Spirit. She was a sort of apprentice-Earth Mother in fact: a Northern California hippy-girl of a kind altogether unknown in right-wing San Diego, home of gray steel battleships and the myrmidons of the Pacific Fleet. Her dorm room, a short trek from mine, was a little temple to dreamy Marin County bohemianism. On her dresser, for example, next to a weird yet intriguing arrangement of pine cones, dandelion fluff, and dried seedpods, she had placed an ancient-looking copy of Leaves of Grass, several poetry books by Gary Snyder, and Kenneth Rexroth’s translations from the Chinese. Her clothes were rustic, homespun, hand-sewn, nothing like the matching stretchy-polyester top-and-pants outfit, hideously enlivened by orange and white stripes, that my mother had bought me—along with a towel set and a little study lamp—at the Fed-Mart just before I left for college. (My mother cannot be blamed for this eye-slitting ensemble: I’d coveted the stripey top especially and had implored her to buy it for me. Didn’t realize it then, of course, but the whole look was distinctly baby-butch jock avant la lettre: the perfect thing—in another world—for the annual “Dyke-A Shore” ladies’ golf tournament in Palm Springs.) Phoebe was the first person I’d ever met who’d been to the People’s Park in Berkeley, had sat on the grass there in fact, and wore huarache sandals made out of old tires.

  I was mesmerized, and Phoebe in turn took a pensive, if ponderous, interest in me. We bonded at once over our snobbish disdain for our female dorm-mates, especially the idiotic Pi Phi’s, a giggly, geese-like set of sorority sisters who occupied one wing of the dorm and constantly ran shrieking up and down the hall with large plastic curlers in their hair. We preferred deeper mysteries—things shamanistic. We became inseparable: P. took me on long spontaneous nocturnal walks in the rain, showed me how to do the I Ching (the slow, old-fashioned way with yarrow stalks) and gave me one of her precious embroidered shirts from Guatemala. Proud of our outsider status, we ate every meal alone together at a little table upstairs from the main college dining room, even as hordes of our uncouth classmates happily stuffed themselves on industrial meatloaf and mashed potatoes under a large WPA-style mural featuring Paul Bunyan and his comely pet ox, Blue Babe.

  As it happened we were in the same introductory humanities course that fall: a weird class on myth and religion in which we read Jung, Bachofen, Malinowski, and a truly dispiriting pile of “existential theology” tomes, including Rudolf Bultmann’s less-than-scintillating Kerygma and Myth. I know I described my college curriculum earlier as somewhat less than rigorous, but in the light of this scary Tübingen-style booklist I should perhaps amend that slightly. Having originated as a Christian teaching college, the school had still a number of professors who were ordained Protestant ministers, mostly of a severe, if not Ingmar Bergman–ish, intellectual stripe. Our religion professor was one of these men of the cloth: blond, handsome, and chillingly ascetical in steel-rimmed glasses. Seated at the end of a seminar table, he looked just like the young Max von Sydow.

  Now Phoebe was a rebel—or fancied herself one—and I, in turn, viewed her as my oracle in all things. One dank night that term, having scornfully agreed that Bultmann was too irksome to be endured a moment longer, we decided to renounce him forever and so tossed our paperback copies of Kerygma, etc. into the thick undergrowth beneath the dripping Douglas fir trees near the dorm. We were cackling away like a pair of Macbeth witches after this unholy sacrifice when suddenly Phoebe turned, embraced me, and kissed me—thoroughly, warmly, wet raincoat and all—and said she loved me. That was the first time that that had happened. I declared in turn, somewhat squeakily, that I would throw myself under a truck for her. Would in fact be eager to do so. I guess I meant it—at least to the extent that an emotionally retarded eighteen-year-old can mean such a declaration. In any case, my heart leapt up in the event: the bolts-in-the-neck Frankenstein-loneliness of teenagerhood was now presumably at an end. I went to bed that night in ecstasy and although I crept out early the next morning, I confess, to retrieve poor Rudolf, soggy and grubby and limp with the dew, from the bushes (I had started to worry about needing him to study for the final exam), the feeling of dizzy exaltation lasted for some time.

  It lasted for almost three years, in fact; but three years also imbued with so much angst and frustration, one could hardly have called the relationship—my first coup de foudre—a particularly wholesome one. For all her moody artist charm Phoebe turned out to be a coquette—a veritable Zuleika Dobson of the Pacific Northwest—and ultimately heterosexual in a curiously leaden way. She excelled at a sort of dreamy, noncommittal, D.T. Suzuki–Zen-and-the-Artof-Archery seductiveness. The first year I knew her, for example, she would often tut-tut, with a long-drawn-out sigh, over the fact that her middle-aged high school English teacher, a shy misfit bachelor named Mr. Smith, had been besotted with her all through her school days and indeed still was. (He was the person, I later learned, responsible for her interest in Eastern religions; along with the I Ching, she was always going on about saddhus and bodhisattvas.) It was true: occasionally she would even let me see some of his plaintive letters. These were often accompanied by sad little koan-like love poems executed in black ink with Chinese brushes on homemade brown paper scrolls. One of Mr. Smith’s more lugubrious poetic efforts, I recall, was an effusion entitled “Handicappèdness”:

  HANDICAPPÈD!

  Yes, I am HANDICAPPÈD!

  HANDICAPPÈD!

  HANDICAPPÈD!

  The Buddha laughs—

  By the cold snow-stream in the mountains!

  Liberally blotted with odd accent marks, ink splotches, and jokey Zen-master exclamation points, these little poem-scrolls seemed to me to indicate a woefully unbalanced mind. Yet they struck a chord, too, somehow. Pleased by his attentions, Phoebe kept the hapless Mr. Smith dangling on the line by writing back to him, long poetic missives in which she made a point of never once acknowledging his lovestruck appeals. She’d expatiate for pages instead on rain forests, the beauty of the Sound, mysterious bearded men she’d met while hitchhiking (possibly bodhisattvas in disguise?), peyote visions she had read about, or whatever other West Coast woo-woo was preoccupying her that week. (Sweat lodges? Carlos Castaneda? The Book of Thoth?) Like the cryptic notes she would leave for me in my dorm room when I wasn’t there—one consisted of the whole of Matthew Arnold’s “The Buried Life,” transcribed without explanation—P.’s sibylline messages were typically embellished, Art Nouveau–style, with luxuriant, strangely accomplished doodles: alchemical signs, vines with curly tendrils, elongated damsels, star-forms, and the like. I was ravished by it all.

  But though ultimately consummated (farcically) the relationship was hardly a joyous initiation into Sapphic life. Over the three years of our folie à deux, I had become ever more self-conscious and chatty about what I called my “inversion.” (I’d discovered The Well of Loneliness by this point—not to mention D. H. Lawrence and the kinky early novels of Iris Murdoch. It was perversion full speed ahead.) Meanwhile Phoebe became ever more the not-so-unconscious tease. With what seemed to me distressing calculation she lost her virginity during our freshman year to a rail-thin boy in a neighboring dorm who wore a Pendleton jacket and was seven feet tall. I was distraught and promptly followed suit, losing mine a month or two later to a nerdy youth in my poetry class who still lived at home with his parents and while hardly seven feet tall—more like five-eight—had a ten-inch-long penis. I was too ill-informed at the time to know there was anything out of the ordinary about this astonishing pink saber, or the explosive clumsiness with which its inexperienced owner wielded it. (A similar cluelessness would beset me again, many years later, when friends tried to teach me to play bridge. Through some freak of cosmic probability—similar no doubt to
the one said to have produced the Big Bang—I drew all thirteen clubs on my first hand.) Yes, I now felt “experienced,” but the act itself—nerve-wracking, pointless, and seriously yucky-poo—also seemed inconsequential. My ardor for Phoebe raged unabated.

  She, in turn, played the role of Isadora Duncan will-o-the-wisp. At her urging—I was somewhat frightened by the idea—we went hiking and camping in British Columbia one spring break, not long after the virginity-breaching business. Unbelievably to me now, we walked and hitchhiked all the way, hundreds of miles, with towering backpacks replete with dangling metal cups, tent stakes, plastic bags of granola, and paperback copies of Chuang Tze and Basho. We had virtually no money. When a heavy rainstorm forced us to stay overnight in a rat-trap little motel in Port Angeles, Phoebe, clutching a blanket and with nary a word, shuffled in at one point from the other room in which she had supposedly settled for the night and crawled into my puffy mummy bag with me. She was stark naked. I too was starkers, except for a pair of echt-utilitarian underpants, now admittedly somewhat grotty after the day’s hike. Apparently at her ease, P. fell at once into a deep and complacent slumber. I was a ravaged, silent wreck the next morning—a bit like the goggle-eyed creature from Munch’s The Scream—and desperate to leave Port Angeles.

  Later, for about a year and a half, we shared an off-campus apartment—and again, a bed. As before it was utterly chaste: indeed, Phoebe often lamented that she could never reciprocate my yearnings, of which she was quite aware. I was “unconventional,” she declared, whereas she was perfectly normal. Given that she was often in bed with her arms draped around me when she said such things, it was all perfectly agonizing, too. And the end, when it came, was outlandish. She’d suddenly acquired a second boyfriend and demanded that I move out of our apartment, presumably so she could sleep with him without me glooming around in the background. (As Blakey would say—no doubt with a cruel snort—harshin’ on everybody’s buzz.) Though mortified, as Phoebe’s official slave for life, I complied at once and rented a flea-infested studio apartment a few blocks away for $65 a month.

  Yet no sooner had I vacated the premises than she abruptly canned the boyfriend and dropped out of school—for good, as it happened—and moved back to California. Shocked and bewildered by these ructions, I was even more astounded a month or two later when she began sending me odd, rambling, but unmistakably erotic letters from her parents’ trailer camp in the Sierra Nevada, the rustic redoubt to which she had retreated. She regretted our untried intimacy, she said, and wanted to see me again. Might we meet at my mother and Turk’s house over the upcoming spring break? Mavis, she said, was all for it. (P. had met my mother once and, both being artistic, they’d hit it off famously.) Needless to say, I flew to San Diego two days later, heart in mouth, and in a whirl of demented lust Phoebe and I had sex five nights in a row—incompetently enough, I see now, but also at such a flailing and histrionic pitch it was bizarre that my mother and Turk (asleep in the big room downstairs) remained, like characters put under a sorceress’s spell in some medieval romance, oblivious to the activity above them.

  This brief bacchanal, it must be said, had its imperfections, including one spectacularly ill-starred evening when P. and I went to visit Gus—a nice, hippy-dippy, none-too-bright acquaintance of mine from high school whom we’d run into at the beach—and got colossally stoned on his waterbed. Whether due to the waterbed or to Puff the Magic Dragon, the scene—to my horror—suddenly took an all too intimate turn. Emergency measures were called for. In a state of some panic I hurriedly frog-marched Phoebe—now mumbling and near-comatose but clearly loath to leave—out the door and into Turk’s old Pinto, which I’d borrowed for the evening. Brain on fire, I then leadfooted it at once back to my mother’s house. (I shudder now to recall this deranged freeway flight, my own faculties having likewise been considerably impaired by our debauch.) When we pulled up outside the house, Phoebe—who was very drunk as well as stoned—promptly vomited up her Spaghetti Factory dinner all over the floor of the Pinto, then flopped about flirtatiously on the front seat, slurpy and slurry and simpering like Dean Martin after six or ten double Scotches.

  As we struggled into the house and up the stairs—me cursing inside, trying not to wake anyone up (it was around 2:00 a.m.) and grimly fretting over what on earth I would use to clean up Turk’s car—Phoebe was amiably burbling away to herself, the drunken gist being (as I heard with some dismay) that despite my sincerest amorous efforts I would never be able to give her what Gus could. Now Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime, I guess. Or is it that People Who Need People Are the Luckiest People in the World? Either way, Phoebe’s blunt assessment was not exactly a confidence booster. I absorbed it as best I could under the circumstances and by the time we bade our sober, shy farewells at the airport a day or two later—neither one of us really wanting to look the other in the eye—I had in my own mind transformed the whole evening (of which P. seemed to have no recollection) into something Wild and Fun and Oh-So Grown-Up. I returned to college in a state of maudlin tristesse—proud of every fleeting, fumbled caress, brimful still with dumb-beast adoration, and with all my half-slaked desires of three years morbidly intensified. They had nowhere to go. I often wonder what extraordinary dismay I might have felt had I known there and then that thanks to the capricious turns of Fate (a complex myriad of them, in fact) I would neither see nor hear from Phoebe again for almost twenty-nine years, until I ran into her by accident, along with her fourteen-year-old daughter, at a crafts fair in San Francisco when we were both too old to care.

  But onward to the Bambi-event. With Phoebe gone, my last year as an undergraduate began dolefully enough: I studied, rode my bike in the rain, and wallowed in my romantic solitude. I had a little job working nights in the school library. This last activity, though dull in many respects, nonetheless played a substantial role in my ongoing sex education. Even as I whiled away the hours every Friday and Saturday evening in the morgue-like precincts of the reserve desk, I would explore the library’s X-rated holdings, all of which were kept off-limits to the general student body in a nearby locked cupboard to which I had a key. Erotic Art from Around the World was a favorite, likewise Tropic of Cancer, and an old illustrated edition of Casanova published, I think, by the Fortune Press in the 1920s. But I also found things pertinent to my own case: Diana: A Strange Autobiography, a dated but illuminating anonymous memoir from the 1950s (full of curious facts about the hothouse life in women’s colleges and secret lesbian bars in Paris); Dr. George Weinberg’s Society and the Healthy Homosexual (1972), one of the first books to argue (successfully) that the American Psychiatric Association drop its classification of homosexuality as a mental illness; and—most exciting of all—a near-pristine copy of Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love’s recently published Sappho Was a Right-On Woman! (1972), a moral and political defense of lesbian civil rights far more tough, judicious, and emotionally à propos than the goofy title might suggest. Along with the Village Voice, whose back issues I now burned through over the course of several weeks (not that I had ever been to New York), these books were to jumpstart my radical-dyke phase. With roaring girls such as Jill Johnston, Robin Morgan, Kate Millett, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Mary Daly, and Monique Wittig for inspiration, could Alix Dobkin [annunciatory flute trill] be far behind?

  And even as I ruminated endlessly over how and when Phoebe would be restored to me, I fell into a handful of relationships, as if by accident, that served to pass the time till graduation. One was with a classmate and fellow oddball named Davy, from Pocatello, whose curly brown hair and Peter Pan–like company appealed to me. (I somehow excluded him from my general indictment of the male sex.) He’d made a suicide attempt the previous year, he told me, but was now over his depression. He played chess competitively (not a Master but near it); and idolized Nijinsky. We rode around town on his puttering Honda 90 while he regaled me with strange or touching facts he’d absorbed from his reading. He’d just read the memoirs of Dorothy Caruso and been much st
ruck by her declaration that she loved Caruso because “he had a great soul.” (Was this true of all great artists? We debated the question at length.) The reason the faun-god Nijinsky was able to leap so high in the air, he explained on another occasion, was because the bones in his feet, freakishly, were those of a bird, not a man. Davy often made me laugh by reciting, wide-eyed, his favorite sentence from Ulysses: “For him, for Raoul!” (a quote from the trashy romance novel Molly Bloom is reading on the day of Bloom’s wanderings). The line became a comic catch-phrase for us, to be uttered at any incongruous moment. With Davy’s assistance I made a second half-hearted attempt at normal sexual intercourse, but to no very pleasing end. He later went on to live in a series of unlikely places (Tonga, Japan, Montana, Caracas) and would write me scribbly letters with big, odd-looking postage stamps, but never settled anywhere or found a vocation. Maybe he has now but we’ve lost touch.

  Engaging me further was also a more complex friendship: with a blonde woman who sat behind me in my 9:00 a.m. class on the History of Literary Criticism. My private nickname for her was the Daring Divorcée: she was an intelligent, petite, extremely attractive woman named Karen. She was in her early thirties, had two small children, lived in the suburbs in a sixties ranch house with a carport, was a firm and vocal ex-Catholic. Having recently divorced an Irish-American Weyerhauser exec, she had come back to school to get an M.A. in Comparative Literature. She was intrigued by me, she later explained, because in class my hair, seen from behind, was always confused, a regular topological tangle. I guess it looked as if I had gone to bed with it wet, lain on it in some untoward fashion, and then—like a female Strewelpeter—neglected to smooth it down before I left the house. Unfortunately, Karen was correct: I’m afraid I still sometimes do this.