The Professor and Other Writings (30 page)

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 leg
endary 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.

Did I—in this fatal period—ever
really
read any of the many
books that I claimed, in daily jottings, to be perusing? Only the day before meeting the Professor, I find now, I copied into my journal a florid passage from Colette's 1937 erotic memoir
The Pure and the Impure
—another of my sacred texts at the time. In the excerpt in question Colette is describing the woman who became her lover and patron during her post-Willy, harum-scarum vaudeville days (1905–12): Mathilde de Morny, the rich, eccentric, and perverse Marquise de Belboeuf. Colette's nickname for her girlfriend was Missy; lesbian friends such as Natalie Barney and Liane de Pougy called her Uncle Max. To judge by the surviving photographs, Missy was portly, uxorious, and vulnerable-looking; a stone butch and lifelong cross-dresser, with a sentimental preference for gentlemen's evening dress. (Imagine a somewhat tubbier, even gloomier Radclyffe Hall type—complete with lorgnette, cummerbund, and cigarette holder.) Although Colette, teasingly, never mentions her own liaison with the Marquise in her memoir (she refers to her former lover only as “La Chevalière”), she captures Missy's melancholia—and sexual neurosis—with a certain off-the-cuff yet intimate precision:

Now, were such a passage copied into a journal by a character in a novel—the protagonist, say, in some not-very-good 1970s lesbian bildungsroman, about to fall catastrophically in love with Ms. Wrong, it would no doubt register as “foreshadowing” of a comically pretentious and ham-fisted nature. But there it is, in my own
minuscule, still-adolescent handwriting: a glaring affront to both taste and plausibility.

I guess in the moment of writing I must have felt some emotional identification with the mopey Marquise—or enough of one, at least, to want to preserve Colette's account of her. Yet at the same time I seemed not to want to register what I had written down. Even La Chevalière's rudimentary self-awareness was beyond me. If “vicious” hands existed—and I still very much wished to believe they did not—I was not myself in the business of dropping them. Dropping hands, vicious or otherwise, just
wasn't me
. Abandon the Love Quest? Give over the cherished search for “it”? A psychic nonstarter, I'm afraid. The thing I looked for, I'd persuaded myself—
could
be found by searching. It had to be. If it wasn't—well, I would just have to kill myself. So why bother writing the Colette passage down? I may have done so, it occurs to me now, for some sort of weird
future reference
. For the uncanny benefit of myself
now
—in this instant—a reader some three decades on, a different person, conscious of,
ahem
, life's little ironies. For I was in fact about to fall off the earth.

It took a few weeks, still, to spin into darkness. The evening at Alice's (need one say?) was enthralling. Alice and Tom cosseted and fed me; we drank Bristol Cream sherry and feasted on cheery holiday fare. Alice's Christmas stockings, filled with useful things like Q-Tips and sugarless gum and those little astrology books you get for $1.99 at the supermarket checkout, made us all laugh. We consumed a Yule log of sociopathic deliciousness. An hour or so into the meal, I was flying—enjoying a first-class ride on a magic carpet. It turned out the Professor, like Hooley, my Chaucer prof, had also been on the department graduate admissions committee the previous year, and remembered my application very well indeed. (
I thought, wow—Terry Castle—what a great name! And what fantastic recommendation letters! Who
IS
this woman?
) I blushed in a virginal way, embarrassed but enormously pleased. The Professor was inquisi
tive, and amid smiles, asked a host of delightfully intimate questions. Alice and Tom joined in. I became an object of general interest and concern. I ended up—shyly at first—telling all about my mother and father, their divorce, why I wasn't at home for Christmas, my English background, the situation in San Diego.

Such adult attention was dizzying. I fairly tumbled out of my shell. At one point I even brought out one of my most-cherished pieces of private Terry-lore—that I was somehow distantly related to the late-Victorian actress Ellen Terry. (
Was named after her in fact. Some sort of great-great-great-auntie, my cousin-twelve-times-removed or something.
) Thoughtful wows all round. Alice said something about the John Singer Sargent portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, and hamming it up, I instantly assumed my putative auntie's pose in said picture: arms comically upflung, the glittering crown of Scotland held aloft in my hands, a crazed and maniacal gleam in my eyes. The Professor was enchanted. And not only
that
, I proudly explained: because of various theatrical marriages afterwards, the connection meant I was also related (
gasp
) to both Charlie Chaplin and John Gielgud. By then I was euphoric, as if all three—Ellen T., Gielgud, and the Little Tramp—hovered above me in thespian spirit-form, rapturously applauding. Yes: their tragicomic blood coursed in my veins.