by Terry Castle
My Irish lit professor, one Larson by name, was another jolly old dog—white-haired and goofy, though in an even more infantile way than Hooley. He was fond of silly jokes and bawling out Clancy Brothers songs during lectures. He was Scandinavian, stereotypically so in looks, yet nonetheless affected a loud and insistent Irish brogue: your typical Boorish-Swedish-Stage-Irishman. He’d enjoyed my final paper, he said—on satire and magic and Celtic poetry—and thought I should try to get it published. I was amused by his propensity to burst into “Kevin Barry” at any provocation but viewed him, too, with mild superciliousness. (He would later prove a mentor both singular and kind.) In class Professor Larson habitually referred to Ireland’s ancestral enemies—i.e., one’s own cutthroat kinsmen and kinswomen—as “Brits.” Not having heard the term before, I wondered if I should consider it an ethnic slur and reprimand him for it. I didn’t, though, and that was probably a good thing. History, public and private, has its moral tangles. Little did I know that at that very moment, my long-lost cousin Bridget—whom I would meet again in 1987 after thirty years of noncontact—was a sergeant in the Women’s Royal Army in Belfast, performing, among other duties, strip searches on Catholic women suspected of smuggling contraband to IRA men held in the Maze prison. Somewhat recklessly, too, given the British Army’s position then on homosexuality, she was also involved in a clandestine love affair with a fellow soldier—a tough lady in the Military Police named Roni. Roni later got slung out during one of her unit’s periodic witch-hunts.
Elsbet was around too, of course—a new friend to be valued—though much preoccupied with her M.F.A. program and family doings. I felt I couldn’t impose on her too much. She invited me home with her that Thanksgiving and I met her parents and siblings, which was nice, though I felt sorely abashed around the aged and imposing Norwegian aunties. (My ordinary social skills remained pretty abysmal.) For the holiday meal, the whole family, young and old, all put on boiled-wool hats and skirts and reindeer jackets and toasted one another with aquavit and alcoholic punch. The table centerpiece of holly and pine cones was topped with a festive little Norwegian paper flag.
But in other ways I still felt lost. The scene in Eau Claire might as well have taken place on Pluto, so foreign, at bottom, did it seem to me. (Family life to me still meant one mother, one sister, no money, palm trees and crabgrass and canned-soup meals at a folding card table.) True, my sex life was momentarily quickened: I actually went out on a couple of dates that December with a scrawny, sallow-faced, thirtyish woman I had met at the Lesbian Resource Center. Celeste was half-Scottish and half-Sinhalese—not a particularly attractive combination in her case—and worked as a freelance German translator. She followed a fanatical macrobiotic diet and lived in a dark and dirty one-room basement apartment near one of the lakes. The walls were decorated with photos of Dietrich, Conrad Veidt, and other louche celebrities of the Weimar era; the floors were cold bare linoleum. Celeste nurtured a number of paranoid theories: that heavy metals in deodorant went straight up from your armpits into your brain within seconds; also, that if you stirred anything you were cooking on the top of the stove in the wrong direction (clockwise? counterclockwise?) the resulting meal would give you cancer.
We slept together a couple of times—once, nightmarishly enough, after she’d dragged me to see Rainer Fassbinder’s lesbian-psycho film, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. As Celeste’s cinematic tastes might have hinted, our love trysts were neither romantic nor particularly wholesome. True, I was pleased, in a statistical sense, to have had the experience: Celeste was still only the third woman I’d gone to bed with, and I was definitely counting. Three seemed to make it official, Sapphic love–wise. I could now say I was an old hand at the business—almost like Colette or Janet Flanner or somebody. I attempted to cultivate what I took to be a cynical, devil-may-care attitude: one didn’t have to “fall in love” to have sex with someone; one just did it. That was what being grown-up and sophisticated was all about.
Yet however detached I tried to be, my brief affairette left me feeling empty. The Bitter Tears of Terence von T-Ball. The first time we embraced I had been shocked to discover that not only was Celeste’s body bonier and pimplier than any I had encountered before, she also seemed to have a sort of gingery red fuzz all over her. To move a hand up her knobbly spine was to brush this curious she-pelt in the wrong direction—almost as if one were caressing an orangutan. (Something I’ve never done, I hasten to add—but believe myself capable of imagining.) The touch thing was there but nowhere close to being right. In combination with Celeste’s unusually wet, self-involved, and aggressive way of kissing, the overall erotic package was in fact fairly sick-making. (Who knew that sex might be revolting?) You could see why some people took vows of celibacy.
But I was also frightened by Celeste’s somewhat dank personality. After our first sexual encounter—and despite the fact that we were in my bed, in my apartment—she had insisted that I get out of bed and sleep in the front room like an errant hubby. She couldn’t tolerate anybody next to her at night, she declared, couldn’t bear to feel someone else’s arm or foot. Not even a king-sized bed could satisfy this need for Lebensraum. No explanation. I had no real couch to speak of, just a sort of truncated love seat thingy that had come with the apartment, so I ended up sleeping on the floor that night, on a small remnant of olive green shag carpeting about three feet by three feet that I had found on the street one day and used as a primitive living room “rug.” I immediately convinced myself that being ejected thus from my own bed was fine—possibly even kind of cool. When it came to meeting the demands of mixed-up women, I was as eager to please as ever—Nora Flood in Nightwood, carrying her betrayal money “in her own pocket.”
As it happened, the Irish Lit course led me to the Professor. Just after Thanksgiving, during the last week of the term, one of my classmates, a tall, blonde, somewhat suburban-looking woman in her thirties named Alice, a local community college instructor who had come back to school to finish a Ph.D. on Burns, approached me with an invitation. She had overheard me saying to someone in the class I would be staying in town over the Christmas holiday. Would I like to come to her house on Christmas Eve and spend the evening with her and her husband and a very good friend of theirs? There would be roast beef and mulled wine, said Alice; she was also going to put together little Christmas stockings for everybody.
Now, I had never really spoken to Alice, except in the fitful artificial way one does while sitting at one’s desk in the front row, waiting for the teacher to arrive. She was older and very straight-looking—neat and ladylike in an Our-Miss-Brooks way. Not my style at all, I’d judged, but nonetheless I’d been curious about her. She was from a devout if chilly Presbyterian family—she told me later—but had lost her faith as a result of reading Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. (She must have been the last person on whom the work had had that devastating effect since 1858.) This weird Victorian spiritual crisis—for such it had been—had not, however, divested her of an intensely serious, indeed Christian, sense of moral duty. Kind to a fault, she had the ability to make one suddenly aware, without spite or voyeurism, of the gaping emotional gulf that existed between oneself and others. Awfully enough, when I realized what it was she was offering, a little cache of tears—hot, involuntary, and no doubt stored up behind my eyeballs for several months—started up in my eyes. I accepted at once with an embarrassing mixture of gratitude and self-pity.
But I must I confess: I felt slightly uncomfortable, too. Alice was obviously a Very Good Person but had not, it seemed, picked up on the Fact of all Facts—that I was G-A-Y. (I was preoccupied, in those days, of course, with who knew and who didn’t. Paradoxically enough, being a “radical lesbian” and dressing like a Special Forces commando did not necessarily mean you wanted anyone from the Real World ever to twig on the fact. That would have been too scary by far.) I assumed the knowledge would repel someone as straitlaced as Alice. I determined therefore to be circumspect. I was ri
ght about her naïveté nor would I be candid myself until circumstances later made it painfully necessary.
The Professor, perhaps needless to say, was the “very good friend.” Now, this was exciting news indeed. The relation between linguistics (the Professor’s subject) and literature was one of the areas I was hoping to pursue in my Ph.D. work. Having taken, among other ultra-nerdy things, a History of the English Language course as an undergraduate, I was eager to hear more about labio-dental fricatives, glottal stops, and the Great Vowel Shift. Who knew? Despite a vague plan to study Cruelly Oppressed Women Writers, maybe I would do some linguistics too. I’d noticed the Professor’s classes in the course catalogue (Poetry and Phonetics, The History of Slang) and heard she was a big shot in the field. And when Alice came to pick me up late in the afternoon that snowy Christmas Eve, she confirmed it: yes, the Professor was a renowned scholar of regional dialects. A major contributor to the Linguistic Atlas of the United States. She traveled high and low across the United States collecting folk idioms, samples of local speech, regional pronunciation patterns. She had even—very famously—found some of those putative vestiges of Elizabethan English in Southern Appalachia.
But equally dazzling (and not entirely unrelated): while doing her Ph.D. research at Columbia in the early sixties, she’d also had another life—a brief yet glamorous career as a folk singer in Greenwich Village. (Amazing.) She had even made a few records. (Records!) Alice sounded a bit starstruck—wait till you hear the Professor sing. She had known the Professor, it seemed, for three or four years; Alice’s husband, Tom—a handsome, mustachioed fellow who taught in the medical school—had served with the Professor on some faculty council a while back. Now not only was the Professor one of Alice’s dissertation advisors—she knew a lot about Burns’s dialect poems, it turned out—she’d become a good friend. She and Alice went to the movies, played tennis several times a month. (Astounding how quick on the court the Professor could be, even with her bad leg. Yes, she had polio as a kid.) The Professor, I would see, was fantastic. So witty and down-to-earth. Not snobbish or pedantic at all. Always had students for friends. So charismatic and fun.
Yet though clearly so wonderful (and still only in her early forties)—and here Alice’s brow furrowed slightly—the Professor, alas, remained unmarried. Alice hoped her friend wasn’t going to end up a lonely spinster. She and Tom were trying to find the Professor a nice boyfriend; it must be so awful being single over the holidays. Given that the Professor was also Jewish, Alice had concluded, she no doubt felt doubly isolated around Christmas time.
I listened to this intriguing description raptly—especially the folk singer part. (I would ponder the spinster part a bit later.) Back in my teens, folk music had been a hobby and an escape for me—yet another of my private dream worlds. It was partly the era, of course: the Great Post-Sixties Aftermath. I’d imbibed any number of songs, second-hand, from old Joan Baez and Judy Collins albums, and even taught myself to play (however crudely) several Child ballads on the guitar. And as with all of my solitary enthusiasms, I got pretty studious about the whole business.
Folk melodies delighted me—the modal harmonies, the minor chords, the raw, archaic, stripped-down simplicity of it all. The Ye-Olde-England aspect added a pleasantly narcissistic element: however far the old songs and ballads had migrated over the centuries (to every part of North America and beyond), they nonetheless alluded to the world of my own family forebears. Lord Bateman, Fair Annie, the Wife of Usher’s Well: they pointed one back to some fabled yet familiar “English” past—magical, medieval, even premedieval at times. (My feudal-sounding name, Castle, had also no doubt disposed me to Green Men and elf-knights and maidens on milk white steeds.) Something oddly English, too, in the strange emotional reticence in folk performance: the way traditional songs so often turned on the grisliest events and situations—murders, drownings, hangings, children dropped down wells, girls smothered in their beds or whose breast bones had been made into harps—yet the mode of delivery was typically impassive, deadpan (almost comically so at times), as if the singer were entirely disconnected from the frightening mayhem he or she described.
There was the American side of things too, of course, and yet more musical romance to conjure with—the world of blues, gospel, work songs, and mountain music, and the heroic, ever-present link, by way of Dylan, Baez, and Woody Guthrie, between folk music and social protest. (Alix Dobkin and “women’s music” were simply the latest twist, one realized, in a long-unfolding story.) Thanks again to early imprinting, I was instantly agog to hear about the Professor’s sixties singing career in Greenwich Village. Back when I was a kid, in far-off San Diego, the little music store at our local shopping center, weirdly enough, had not only stocked the usual goods—guitar strings and harmonicas and cheap instruction books such as Teach Yourself the Ukulele—but also occasional back issues of Sing Out!, the legendary magazine of the 1960s East Coast folk music scene. There they were, discreetly tucked away in the sheet music section, next to chord charts for “I Get Around” and Jan and Dean’s “Little Old Lady from Pasadena,” and a plethora of surf guitar fake-it-books.
These intriguing little booklets—the same size and format as TV Guide, but published, it seemed, in some other universe—had captivated me at once. They too seemed to allude to a seductive alternate world—one more contemporary, perhaps, than that of Lord Bateman and his ilk, but one chock-full nonetheless of music, passion, and partisanship. The politics of Sing Out! were decidedly leftwing, if not flagrantly Commie-Pinko, so along with the sea shanties and logging songs, one couldn’t help learning a great deal also about Trotskyism, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and any number of brave and illustrious Wobblies. Marooned in a right-wing navy town, with a bigoted stepfather to boot, 1 was in love with the subversiveness of it all. Yet it was precisely this legendary world—that of bohemian New-York-Jewish-Leftie intellectual culture no less—in which the Professor, it seemed, had come of age. Thus was one primed to adore. The ardent life intimated in Sing Out! had cast its spell over me and I was ready to be enchanted with anyone who’d lived it.
And enchant she did. For despite Alice’s concern about the Professor’s encroaching lonely-spinsterdom, the lady in question—first glimpsed from ten or twelve feet away in Alice and Tom’s dining room—hardly seemed in need of emotional rescue. On the contrary: she looked radiant—almost theatrically so. The radiance was in one sense actual. Comfortably perched on a tall breakfast stool, the Professor sat bathed in a sort of halo of hot unnatural light. I had walked in on a photo shoot, I realized: chairs and tables had been pushed aside and with the aid of tripod, lamps, and light umbrellas, Tom—an expert amateur photographer—was taking a set of what turned out to be publicity shots of her. The Professor cracked jokes and smiled happily at the camera while Tom clicked away.
My overheated brain, meanwhile, was taking its own pictures—trying to absorb all the luminous details. Handsome Older Woman. No, make that Stunning Older Woman. Amazing Silver-Grey Hair. (Gorgeous in this light!) Red Cashmere Sweater. Dark Tailored Slacks. Butch? (One would think.) A Few Small Beads of Sweat Glinting on Her Upper Lip. (From heat of lights, no doubt.) Acoustic Guitar Cocked Upward in Jaunty Fashion. (Comical and lovely!) A Certain (Virile) Sensuousness. (Understated, but there.) Tanned Wrists. (So beautiful.) Warmth. Glowing Smiles. That Joy in Being Looked At. All the brightness made of her a numen; one could not tum away.
And indeed, as soon as introductions were made, one heard all about it: the Professor’s life in the Village in the glory days of Baez, Mimi Farina, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Judy and Bob. (All old friends, of course.) And yes, she had made one or two records then, now long out of print, but still, there they were: a part of American history. Her specialty had been grisly Appalachian murder ballads—the lyrics, she quipped, were always good for a laugh. She strummed brightly, then sang a snatch of “Silver Dagger” in a bold and resonant contralto. Lately, it seemed, she had begun performing
again on a modest scale, at the University and around town. The local paper was going to do a little feature on her—the Folk-Singing College Professor. She chortled gleefully and fairly basked in the glow of the soft box. I’ve still got one of the wallet-sized black-and-white head shots taken at this historic session. The Professor looks beatific, free.
In the flesh the Professor was at once seductive and bizarre. She wore her hair, striking and lustrous, swept back severely and away from her face above her ears—so much so that if one saw her only from the front, one might mistake her for a man, thin-faced and beautiful, albeit with a strange pompadour hairstyle. In the back the long strands of hair were gathered together into a single thick rope-braid, nearly two feet in length. She later told me that in the Village, circa 1958, all the beatnik gals wore such braids, but I’ve never seen anybody—in pictures from that time or any other—sporting this peculiar Elvis-Crossed-with-Pippi-Longstocking look. The voice, as before: thrillingly low and unfeminine. As Alice and I approached, the Professor’s eyes lit up with pleasure. I felt myself being thoroughly vetted. I guess I passed muster because she kept a light sardonic gaze trained on me for most of the evening. Even more than Alice or Tom, I seemed to be her beneficiary, the one designated to receive the stored-up prize of her attention. I was a new and appreciative audience of one for whom she might demonstrate, like a series of card tricks, her various winning (and subtly flirtatious) ways. Neither Alice nor Tom seemed to notice what she was up to. She had registered their myopia—their obliviousness to the wordless greeting that had taken place between us—and on some level I must have, too.