Revenge is the secret muse of comedy: Woody Allen acknowledged this messy truth when he titled a collection of his humor pieces “Getting Even.”
After all, we can catalog the cruelties inflicted upon us by our tormentors, show them up for their self-absorption and hypocrisy, but if we succeed in turning them into figures of fun, only then have we truly achieved our revenge.
In her marvelous collection of autobiographical essays, “The Professor,” Terry Castle gets even with a number of troubling figures from her past. There’s her out-of-it mother; her psychotic brother; a manipulative female professor of linguistics with whom she had an agonized affair in the pre-campus-social- code ’70; and there is Susan Sontag.
“Ours was . . . (a) semi-friendship, constricted by role playing, and shot through in the end with mutual irritation,” Castle writes about her times with Sontag, who died in 2004.
Sontag, world-famous since her early 30s, was the last great literary-intellectual celebrity this country has produced — and Castle, a lowly professor of literature by comparison, played the role of her acolyte, chauffeur and factotum.
Imposingly tall and striking, grand and humorless with a limitless sense of entitlement, and given to lofty ex cathedra pronouncements (“I adore Janacek’s sound world”), Sontag was destined to be a comic character in someone’s book.
In the mid-’90s, Sontag made a series of much-publicized trips to war-torn Sarajevo. On the streets of upmarket Palo Alto, Calif., Sontag re-enacts, for Castle’s benefit, how she bravely dodged sniper fire:
“Lickety split she was off, dashing in a feverish crouch from one boutique doorway to the next, white tennis shoes a blur, all the way down the street to Restoration Hardware and the Baskin-Robbins store. Five or six perplexed Palo Altans stopped to watch as she bobbed zanily in and out, ducking her head, pointing at imaginary gunmen on rooftops and gesticulating wildly at me to follow. . . .”
The semi-friendship hits a few snags: Castle is out of her depth when invited by Sontag to a party of downtown New York A-listers, which includes Laurie Anderson; Castle fatally misinterprets a smile from the famous performance artist:
“I smiled in gratitude in return and held up my little place card so she would at least know my name. Annoyed, she gestured back impatiently with a sharp downward flick of her finger; she wanted me to pass the wine bottle. . . .”
Painful truth
After Sontag’s death, Castle admits the truth to herself: As unsatisfying as their friendship had been, Sontag was, as many of our heroes are, the unseen audience for her own self-fashioning; the articles Castle wrote, the career she chose, the records and books she picked out for the home that Sontag never visited were all selected with the famous writer’s phantom approval in mind.
If Castle’s essay on Sontag reaches a bittersweet conclusion, the title essay, which recounts an affair that Castle had in the ’70s while she was an undergraduate, delivers a judgment that’s just plain bitter.
The Lesbian Hug
The writer describes her coming out as a lesbian in the touchy-feely ’70; with eyeball-peeling clarity and an anthropologist’s — or a born comedian’s — detachment she recalls the social rituals of the consciousness-raising groups of the time. Here is the Lesbian Hug:
“Soulful, interminably held, embraces — in which you closed your eyes, buried your head deep in the warm place between the other woman’s neck and shoulder, rocked slowly back and on your heels and made susurrating goo-goo sounds. …
“The lesbian hug had another meaning if performed in the presence of a new girl: everyone’s hugs took a peculiarly self-congratulatory warmth and fervor as if to signal the primal Hobbesian law that underlay so much of the era’s you’re-in-or-you’re-out Sapphic culture. . . .”
Drawing on her diaries from the time, which she wrote in “with the ardor of a Victorian onanist,” Castle details her own seduction and betrayal by the polio-crippled Professor, a female Don Juan with, as it turns out, a string of undergraduate conquests.
Expecting the things that enlightened women expected from each other in the “Our Bodies, Ourselves” era — empowerment, validation, openness — Castle is instead entrapped in a kind of amour fou that Proust would have recognized.
The professor is a Jekyll and Hyde who treats the young Terry with “a mixture of compassion and contempt” and leaves their bed to initiate young girls into the ways of Sapphism.
Castle has been compared to David Sedaris; the comparison, though, is unfair — to Castle. She is funnier and cuts deeper.
She is trenchant on the erotic nature — now taboo in academia — of the teacher-student relationship. And she is superb in bringing to life an era whose cornball utopian- ism left many ill-equipped to deal with real life.
Castle’s tormentors had this in common: For better or worse they made her what she was. The writer holds the Professor accountable for making her the medicated, angry and difficult person she became:
“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?”
Forget the triumphant tales of forgiving and moving on you’ve read in the Personal Growth section of the bookstore, Castle seems to say; in the scars they leave on our psyches it is our abusers who usually get the last word.
John Broening is a freelance writer in Denver.
NONFICTION
The Professor
By Terry Castle, $25
