Slow Players #5: "You Have to Hate Yourself For Quite a While" (Terry Castle)

Hi:

Last week I was in the grips of an emergency. Not an emergency emergency—myocardial infarction, car crash, where-the-fuck-did-I-put-the-Narcan? type stuff—but rather the milder, creative kind, the kind where you can’t marshal your thoughts, or your energy, whatever it is that lets you put one word after another and believe in what you’re writing. Which . . . may not sound like much of an emergency to you, if you happen not to be a writer, and isn’t really, in the context of pandemics and speciously-contested election results, crises of healthcare systems and democracies, and yet. If you happen to be in this business of writing things for a living, or if you happen to understand that said business is more or less like any other business: it moves (and you with it), or it doesn’t . . . you understand that that is an emergency nevertheless. “I’m like a doctor and it’s an emergency room,” Philip Roth said of his office, in a great New Yorker profile that ran twenty years ago or so, adding, “And I’m the emergency.” Which seems right to me. Writers are always seeking emergencies, the kind of crisis that compels an interesting text. And when you can’t find one, well, that’s the most pressing emergency of all.

Anyway, I responded the way you’d expect me to. By eating an unseemly amount of cereal, staring monotonously at my dog (this being a period of quarantine, the options were relatively limited), listening to this gargantuan ambient playlist, twiddling my thumbs. When I’m not working my attention span gets narrow: the very things that should compel me I find irritating instead. I read about thirty pages each of eight different novels, one of which I intend to finish (Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate), one of which I settled upon and did finish (Alfred Hayes’s The End of Me, which is just as excellent as the other two novels of his I’d read), but you know the feeling? When you’re just sort of browsing around and . . . waiting for something to slap you out of your coma?

I first read Terry Castle’s “My Heroin Christmas” eight or ten years ago, I think. My friend David Shields had recommended it to me, and I remembered of course that I liked it but couldn’t recall anything else about it. If I’d had any opiates around the house I probably would have gone after those too, in my boredom, but instead I picked up Castle’s book, The Professor and Other Writings, from my shelf last week because I remembered it contained the essay. Wouldn’t you? All things considered, it’s a hard title to resist (not the book’s, drably Edwardian as it is, but the essay’s). Heroin Christmas? All scholars of Los Angeles literature know that cocaine is generally the Yuletide drug of choice, but any port in a storm, right?

Castle’s essay isn’t really about drugs. (Dang.) She lays it out straight in the piece’s second sentence, after stating in the first that she’s “just come back” from said Xmas at her mother’s house: “Not that I used any—there was definitely not any blowing, tasting, horning, fixing, goofing, getting loaded, or laying out.” (What a great sentence! There are a million different slang terms to describe shooting heroin, but Castle spring loads her description with words that have a sexual undercurrent and then disrupts the whole thing in the middle with the cartoonish and Disney-esque ‘goofing,’ which is just the kind of burlesque at which her writing also excels.) Castle is herself a professor—she teaches literature at Stanford, with an 18th Century specialty—but there’s nothing remotely academic in that sentence, nor in the rest of the essay. (She alludes a few times to an “essay I was . . . supposed to be writing” for the London Review of Books on Madame de Pompadour, but that’s as Department of English as it gets.) It turns out that this “heroin Christmas” was spurred by reading the autobiography of jazz saxophonist and lifelong junkie Art Pepper, which Castle cheerfully proclaims “the greatest book I’ve ever read” (in fact she hijacks Pepper’s own locution to describe her enthusiasm: “my joint is getting big just thinking about it”) before plunging off on a long-ass, multi-page description of it. She goes right ahead and makes the case: I’ve never read Pepper’s book, but now I certainly intend to. But . . . she’s not reviewing it or anything. She’s just kind of—buttonholing you with her passionate enthusiasm. You’ve gotta read this. Cool, cool. I mean what d’you think this newsletter is for?

What makes great writing great? Before I get around to saying why I think Castle’s is—and more the point, why I think you or anyone else should care—I’d like to note that it never seems to be any of the things people assume when you talk about “great writing.” It for sure isn’t subject, or theme, or lyricism, or—God help me— “relevance,” which has a lot to answer for when it comes to selling a lot of less-than-wonderful books to unsuspecting consumers over the last few years especially. Castle’s writing is shot through with incongruity, which is certainly one thing (it’s not just hyperbole— “the greatest book I’ve ever read”—but rather a jousting of both over- and understatement throughout), but even beyond that there’s a kind of racketing chaos, an effulgence: Castle unpacks the contents of her car’s CD case, for example (the essay was originally written just-pre-iPod, in 2003), spills her Christmas list, her pets, her landscape all over your lap. When the CD player in her ex’s Ford Taurus fails, for example, and the ex proposes listening to tapes on their drive from Stanford to San Diego:

“Tapes! I glared and her and peered into the shoebox of dusty old cassettes in the trunk. Could I survive for ten hours solely on Sylvester, the soundtrack from The Crying Game, and The Greatest Hits of Etta James? Now, “Down in the Basement” is a major song and Etta one of the supreme live performers. Once, at a surreal outdoor concert at the Paul Masson Winery, marooned among pre-tech-stock-crash Silicon Valley yuppies dutifully sipping chardonnay, I watched her do the plumpest, most lascivious cakewalk imaginable. But I could hardly live on her for the rest of the day. I started squawking like an infuriated baby vulture.”

See what I mean? What does the Paul Masson Winery—what does any of it, really?—have to do with anything? (Everything, of course.) Castle’s discursive style, played off I suppose against a certain implicit reticence (not to stereotype but both her parents were English), means she’s happy to tell you just about anything. Except . . . not really. There’s always something in check.

“Yuletide in San Diego was the usual: sunny and soporific, the suburban ennui immediate, dazing, and total. The cats, senile and comatose, took up most of the available seating . . . I found myself perusing Via, the official newsletter of the American Automobile Association, in a state of morose torpor. Every now and then, an F-18 from Miramar Naval Air Station, just a couple of miles to the north, would scream over the house on one of its morning practice flights, rending the sky with a colossal sonic boom.”

It’s interesting that one doesn’t know—one won’t know for some time—what Castle’s essay is really about. Is it about Art Pepper? (Yes.) Going home for the holidays? (Also yes.) Is it also—like Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, Dyer being the one contemporary writer Castle somewhat reminds me of—about writer’s block? (Yes, of course.) How the friendships between lesbians and straight men are, as she puts it in one fascinating aside, “the real Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name?” (Yup, also also.) Castle caroms along through a detailed reading of Straight Life’s porny bits, which are extensive, and then arrives at one of the many startling asides with which the essay is filled. “You have to hate yourself for quite a while—and then move beyond it,” she notes of one passage in Pepper’s book, “—to get this loose and crazy in print.”

Ah. Castle is many things in this essay, but she doesn’t seem—not really—self-hating. And yet that line has the authority of someone who knows what she’s talking about there. You have to hate yourself for quite a while. Well.

I’m aware, of course, that plenty of people don’t like this kind of writing at all, that there are those who, why not, prefer much sterner and orderly stuff. I’m not one of them, usually, but if I am, or when I am, it’s because I prefer (say) Joan Didion. It’s rare: Didion can irritate or bore me, or both, probably because her project seems pretty opposite to Castle’s: it’s spare, it’s clipped, and she’s definitely not going to use the term yummyburgers—as Castle does in a different essay—as an adjective. But one thing Didion does get right, among many, is her famous observation in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” that “Writers are always selling somebody out.” It’s true! “Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible,” is how Janet Malcolm, also famously, put it making the same point. Castle’s no journalist, not any more than I am, but she, in her heart of hearts, would probably agree.

Who, then? I mean, the assumption Didion and Malcolm both make, I guess, is the writer by nature sells someone else out. Which is fair enough. These days especially, there are more than enough people who maybe deserve to be sold out—so many villains, so few Isaac Chotiners—and even beyond that, every writer who’s ever stripped their own experience for parts (hi) knows there are at least a few people out there who are pretty unhappy with the result. I don’t imagine Susan Sontag would be thrilled with Castle’s portrait of her, which depicts that tower of American letters in terms that are irreverent (“Somewhat incongruously, she had completed her ensemble with a pair of pristine, startlingly white tennis shoes. These made her feet seem comically huge, like Bugs Bunny’s”), and even bitchy in spots, although ultimately generous. But it’s never really that interesting to sell other people out. You can make a career out of it, but you can’t really make anything worth reading twice. So . . .

Castle writes about a lot of things in The Professor. She writes about Agnes Martin’s paintings, for example, and about Sontag; she writes (hilariously) about an antediluvian lesbian folk-rock record called Lavender Jane and (unsparingly) about an absolutely brutal relationship she had with a professor while she was an undergraduate. All of these pieces are great, but “My Heroin Christmas” is unique as it seems almost not to have a subject. Or rather, she keeps spinning her wheels even inside the essay itself, on purpose, as to what MHC is about: “It’s really about music!” (the italics are hers) “. . . It’s really about California! . . . It’s really about addiction! . . . It’s really about car trips! . . . It’s really about lesbianism!” Yeah, but who are you selling out, Terry? “It will seem as though I’m criticizing my mother again but it will really be myself that I’m attacking,” she writes, and now it seems like we’re a little closer to the point. I can’t tell you what “My Heroin Christmas” is “really” about, not because I don’t know or the essay itself doesn’t know—by the time you get to its absolutely face-smashing final sentence, which is a kind of triple-axel on which Castle sticks the landing, you will know precisely what it’s about—but because if I tell you much more I will spoil something which mustn’t be spoiled. I will say that it’s something that gets worked out on the fly. Castle didn’t know what she was doing when she started out on the essay, that’s for sure, but she knew exactly how to do it. It’s what makes “My Heroin Christmas” so satisfying. Like a bolt of lightning (or like an Art Pepper solo), neither its shape nor its target is predetermined. Yet somehow its strike, and its form, winds up feeling—inevitable.

Did I say something about an “emergency?” Yeah, well, nothing’s changed. (Nothing except everything.) You have to hate yourself for quite a while—and then move beyond it—to get this loose and crazy in print. You do have to hate yourself, I think (and you do have to move beyond it), to get anywhere. Which is probably why writers are prone to spells like the one I described at the top of this letter: you squat on your haunches for a while, marinating in your shame, before you can do the first thing. It’s worth it, though. It’s worth it, surely, for the writer, whose load gets incrementally lighter every time he/she/they does it, and it’s worth it for the reader, who gets the vicarious (and more than ‘vicarious:’ intimate, personal) experience in the reading. Nothing is ever ‘solved.’ And yet everything is again, or maybe even for the first time, possible.

Please enjoy this extremely Christmasy playlist of drug songs. And do yourself a favor by picking up Castle’s book and/or subscribing to the London Review of Books, where you can read much more of her as-yet-uncollected work. Until soon—

Matthew

p.s. that top clip is, of course, from Alison Maclean’s 1999 adaptation of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’s Son, specifically from the portion that conforms to the story “Emergency.” I’ll assume you’ve both read and seen it, but if you haven’t please do, and in that order. (If you haven’t seen it—or even if you have—you may not be aware the vaguely Shatnerian figure with the knife in his eye is played there by Johnson himself.)