Not for the faint-hearted: the other side of love

ESSAYS: CARLO GÉBLERreviews The Professor and Other WritingsBy Terry Castle Tuskar Rock Press, 340pp. £20

TERRY CASTLE’S English parents moved to the west coast of the US after the second World War. She was born there in 1953. She is related to the actress Ellen Terry; hence her first name. Castle’s parents separated when she was eight. Her mother took her back to England. They lived in penury for three years before returning to San Diego. There Mrs Castle married Turk, a widowed US navy submariner with four kids Terry found ghastly.

At 18 the author fled Turk’s brood and went to university. She knew she was a lesbian, but the early 1970s, despite their reputation, were not an easy time for a woman with her orientation. She got through (somehow), had sex (of sorts), graduated, went to graduate school, did a PhD, became an academic in the field of 18th-century English literature and published seven books of criticism.

Today she is the Walter A Haas professor in the humanities at Stanford University. A few years ago, thanks to California’s brief legalisation of same-sex marriage, she got hitched to Blakey Vermeule, her partner, to whom this book is dedicated.

About a decade ago the author made a decision, which is enunciated in her author's note: "Having laboured in the dusty groves of academe for over twenty years, I felt – as a new millennium unfolded – a desire to write more directly and personally than had previously been the case." The Professor and Other Writingsgathers work written in this spirit.

The book comprises seven pieces, all executed in Castle’s trademark style: scurrilous, candid, self-deprecating and ironic. The first six (entrees all) are essays of about 5,000 words covering such topics as a jaunt around the war cemeteries of northern France in search of the grave of a great-uncle and a gruesome holiday with her mother in Santa Fe.

The final piece, The Professor, forms the main meal. This Bildungsroman is 80,000 words long and describes Castle's first real love affair. The professor in question is never named, and what we learn about her life pre-Castle is minimal. The professor was born in the 1930s. She was Jewish. She contracted polio at 12 and limped thereafter. In early adult life she was a folk singer in Greenwich Village and cut some discs.

Then she switched to academe. Her field was linguistics. She had eight years of Freudian analysis. After a hysterectomy (when she delivered an 8lb uterus, as she put it) her hair went silver, after which she always wore it braided. She was made a professor at 35. She slept with men but was primarily a lesbian. She never left the closet.

Castle met the professor when she returned to college as a graduate. There was intense mutual attraction. An affair began. Within weeks, if not days, Castle, as she describes in excruciating, heart-rending detail, was hopelessly in love, believing that, in the professor, she had found the woman who would give her the mothering her own mother hadn’t.

Alas, the professor felt differently. Why would she want to mother, let alone love, a needy drip like Castle? Of course she couldn’t and wouldn’t. She was too promiscuous, narcissistic, selfish, haughty, imperious and sarcastic to mother and love Castle. She had no interest in fidelity either.

So, after a few heady, discombobulating, ecstatic months (during which the professor sometimes made love to Castle so roughly that she bled) the professor began to see other women, which Castle had to accept. Then she dumped Castle unceremoniously for her new love, who was leggy, blond and athletic – everything Castle was not. Thereafter, though they saw one another continually on campus, they barely spoke.

Decades later a lawyer attempting to initiate a class-action suit against the professor, on behalf of students she had seduced, tried to persuade Castle, by now at another university, to testify against the professor. She declined, in part because the past was past and in part because, as she confesses (far too briefly in my opinion: I wanted much more on this), Castle herself went on, though with nothing like the professor’s predatory zeal, to have sexual relations with a younger female student whom she met in the course of her work as an academic. (Castle points out in her defence that she wasn’t cruel like the professor had been and that this was in the 1980s, when sexual relations between staff and students on US campuses hadn’t been formally regulated. She wouldn’t, she writes, do anything like this today.)

The story has one final, incredible twist. Shortly after she declined to testify, Castle bumped into the professor at an academic conference. They had dinner together and the professor, in her inimitable way, apologised for her brutality, although I’m not sure she meant it, and nor is Castle.

Many works have sprung from the humus of academe, but The Professor(and the pieces preceding it) is one of the strangest and most powerful I have ever encountered. It is not for the faint-hearted. The content is hard core (at least emotionally), so those who are easily disturbed are advised to give it a miss, as are doctrinaire feminists and right-thinking academics.

If you like extreme material, however, and are prepared to trust an unreliable, self-serving narrator – and all autobiographers are unreliable and self-serving – Castle’s book will give you many hours of disturbing pleasure.

Carlo Gébler is a writer. His novel The Dead Eight, about the murder of Moll McCarthy in Tipperary in 1940 and the conviction and execution of Harry Gleeson, who found her body, will be published by New Island next month