Perfect Wave by Dave Hickey

Author:Dave Hickey [Hickey, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780226515151
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

Firecrackers

Terry Castle Celebrates Her Independence

I picked up Terry Castle’s The Professor and Other Writings, despite the title, despite the shadowy prospect of tenured vipers slithering across the Persian Soumak in the faculty lounge. I bought it because of the author and this was the right thing to do. I read page 1, then read the book three times straight through, like a kid imprinting a new chunk of “Jingle Bells.” The Professor, it turned out, is a bravura collection of autobiographical essays with the musical attribute of altering and renewing itself every time you punch Repeat. The tone darkens with each reading, but there are always new angels in the clouds.

On my first reading of The Professor, I was beaming throughout. It was all so swift and dead on, so profoundly an artifact of the adult world. On my second reading, the book was still funny but sadder too, because we all contribute to the vanity of intellectual culture. On my third reading, the atmospheres turned toxic. The landscape of blanched California, the snow-mantled nights of the high Midwest, and the gray, rainy streets of SoHo began closing in—only to be held at bay by majestic slalom turns in Castle’s prose that, while digressing from the content of one essay, elaborate the content of another, so that piece by piece, everything falls sweetly into place. As a consequence, one finishes The Professor pretty much convinced that one has experienced a work of art.

So there I was with a real book coming at me. Like a bush-league catcher, I marveled at the spin on the high, hard ones, at the arc on the curves. I marveled at things that could have gone wrong and didn’t. How, I wondered, had Castle resisted the marketing pressure to begin her memoir with the sexy acrobatics and the talk-show fodder of her novella-length title essay? “The Professor” recounts Castle’s fraught and feverish lesbian affair with one of those envious, charismatic, brain-gobbling professors who entangle their gifted students in duels to the death in the guise of real “grown-up” love.

I have no idea how Castle won this argument; but in the book we come upon her romantic train wreck on the way out. By this time, we are well acquainted with its high-hearted protagonist. She seems okay. We have accompanied her to France, Sicily, Santa Fe, and Ocean Beach. We have suffered with her through a dour dinner party in SoHo with Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Marina Abramović, and Susan Sontag—these four—being special together. We know that Castle prefers Agnes Martin to Georgia O’Keeffe and that her mother does not. We know that, like Mario Praz, Castle finds intelligent people who dwell in “fundamental and systematic ugliness” disturbing and not to be trusted.

Most critically, we know that Castle eschews victimhood, even when she is victimized. We know that she is obsessed with Nicole Eisenman, Ingrid Bergman, cool jazz, rubber stamps, buttons, and twee shelter magazines—all of which stand as a hedge against the gothic and all of which remind us that Castle is the comic hero of her own adventures.

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