The Professor and Other Writings Page 2

  I suppose it was some desire to get free of a certain robot feeling in myself that prompted my trip to France and Belgium. Not that I was planning on renouncing my books or my collections. (Nor have I.) It was more a matter of, Okay, you’ve been talking about it forever; go find him. Blakey was teaching and couldn’t go, but Bridget could, and wanted to, even though she is not from the Braddock side of the family. She turned out to be the ideal companion. She’s my first cousin, a South Londoner by way of Ipswich. Our estranged fathers are brothers. We knew each other as children—for a brief time, before my mother took us back to San Diego—but then I didn’t see her for two decades until I looked her up one day in the London telephone book. (After my parents’ divorce I’d let all the Castle relatives go to hell.) Bridget, it turned out, had been in the Army for eleven years, in Germany and Belfast, and was now running the transport department for a London borough. She is slangy and brusque and ultracompetent—knows all about plumbing and engines and dogs—and regards me, the Prodigal Bluestocking, as a bit feckless. A couple of years ago we went down to Dungeness to see Derek Jarman’s garden and ran into a man with his wife and mother-in-law whose car had got stuck in the wet gravel. Bridget had it hitched up in a trice and dragged it free, while the man stood by looking utterly flummoxed and outdone. (“Ex-military,” she said, by way of explanation.) Anyway, Bridget set it all up: our Chunnel car-ticket, the package-deal hotel in Ghent, our route map. Needless to say, she drove all the way from Herne Hill to the outskirts of Ypres, with me a slightly cranked-up presence in the passenger seat.

  I’d been hoping, obviously, that the trip might bring some new understanding, might clarify both my relationship with my dead great-uncle and my war fixation. But no such éclaircissement took place, at least not immediately. On the contrary. Though a “success” from a practical standpoint—we found Newton’s neat little grave and red geraniums on the second day—the journey seemed only to provoke more disorientation. As Bridget gamely motored us from one memorial to the next, the freezing rain walloping down on the windscreen (“Hooge Crater is just up here”), I found myself less and less able to grasp what I was doing there. I felt misty, numb, a bit ghoulish. I was the Big Girl-Expert: an Unusual and Fascinating Person Now at Last Visiting the Western Front. (She’s slept with more women than her father has!) But I felt increasingly disgusted with myself. I started thinking that probably a lot of people I knew didn’t really like me, were only pretending to.

  The nadir came on the second day. We’d spent the first day in and around Ypres, visiting Tyne Cot and neighboring cemeteries, moping around the In Flanders Fields museum. Ypres itself is a huge bummer, fake and nasty and foul, with machine-cut cobblestones and dead-eyed people everywhere. Numerous renovations were going on, presumably to make the spot more of a “target” destination for European Community tourists (though it’s already been flattened and rebuilt more times than anyone can count). We found a Great War souvenir shop, run by a surly Falklands War vet, but I couldn’t bring myself to buy anything, not even one of the dull gold cap badges or orphaned tunic buttons. That night we retreated in a downpour to our Ibis in Ghent Zentrum, the only good news being the charred steak and frites we gobbled down in a place near the cathedral. The hotel was filled with paunchy Benelux businessmen who took one look and didn’t bother giving us the eye; the bedroom was cramped and small, with two narrow beds about a foot apart. I got horribly self-conscious at having to undress in front of Bridget, and started blushing. The Incest Taboo, in one of its weirder manifestations, seemed to descend thickly, like a cloud of odorless gas.

  The next day we zipped south on a motorway, Moby on the CD player, huge container trucks from Holland and Germany careening by in the rain. Coffee in Albert, a quick gander in the drizzle at the French war memorial in the town square, then on to the giant Lutyens monument to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval. It was midmorning, and we were the only people there apart from a sullen group of French lycée students playing around on the steps of the thing. (They all had the same annoyed-teenager look: We’re too old to be standing around here!) The memorial itself is a massively ugly parody-arch in the middle of nowhere. You see it coming up on the horizon from miles away. (“The majestic Memorial to the Missing,” says Miss Coombs, “stands amid fields still scarred with the trench lines of the Leipzig Redoubt.”) Blakey would call it fugly. Loads of Castles among the 73,000 or so incised names, though nobody known to us. One of them had been in the Bicycle Corps, which made us laugh because it was all so Edwardian and English and pathetic. “He died heroically, his bicycle shot out from under him.” Housman could have written a poem about it.

  Uncle Newton, it turned out, was not far off, halfway between Amiens and Albert, in a pretty little walled “extension” cemetery at Franvillers filled mainly with Australians. The cemetery was on a small rise, presumably close to the place where he had died, and impeccably maintained. It had three or four farmhouses around it, probably built in the 1960s. I figured I was the fifth person to visit him in the eighty years since his death, the other four being my grandmother, her sister Dolly, her sister’s daughter Sue, and my uncle Neil (on his way back from the Italian Front in 1945). As Bridget and I unlatched the gate and went in, the sun came out, just like in a Jane Austen novel when the heroine is about to get proposed to. We walked around; we scrutinized the inscription on the Blomfield Cross of Sacrifice. We read the homely greeting-card messages in the memorial book. (“Sleep well, lads!” “We’ll never forget you!” “Thinking of you always with love and gratitude.” “Always with us.”) Bridget took a photograph of me by the grave—glum and fat and respectful—and that was that.

  But even as we began winding back north towards Calais and home in the late afternoon, I suppose we were getting close to having had enough. I started to feel broody and compulsive and “Urne Buriall”–ish; the sky got dark and pent again. I asked Bridget, as we drove, if she thought soldiers buried in tidy little battlefield cemeteries like my great-uncle’s occupied separate plots. True, they had their individual headstones; but might they not, in the hurry and chaos of war, have simply been piled willy-nilly into a single burial pit somewhere in the vicinity of the present markers? A mass grave, if you like. Bridget said, “Yes, I’m afraid so,” and kept her handsome gray-blue eyes on the road. We both hunkered down. Then back toward Ypres we decided on one last stop: a little old-fashioned war museum that, according to the guidebook, incorporated some vestiges of front-line trench—something, for all of our perambulations, we hadn’t yet seen. We followed an ancient Roman track a mile or two across sodden beet fields; made several bumpy turns up a hill and into a copse; then rolled up, even as the rain started again, in the little dirt parking lot.

  Dank thoughts in a dank shade. In the front of the “museum”—a little cluster of dilapidated houses and sheds—was a café, deserted inside except for a couple of bloated Flemish men with wet black mustaches. Empty beer glasses. The drill here was: buy your ticket in the café walk through the two side rooms where the “exhibits” were; then out into the back garden where the bit of old trench was; then back again. The bleary-eyed proprietor, likewise with mustache, looked like that Belgian serial killer who got caught by Interpol a while ago. He contemplated us briefly with deep alcoholic hatred. How yoo zhay in Inghlissh? Who arrhh zeeez two fhucking dykes? The place was damp and cold and dirty—old spiked Uhlan helmets and things lined up on a shelf behind him—and smelled like hell.

  The place, I learned afterward, is famously horrible. Stephen O’Shea, the wonderful Canadian writer, has a stark riff on it in Back to the Front, his extraordinary 1996 account of hitchhiking the entire length of the Western Front. (O’Shea is another catastrophe junkie: one of his later books is on the Cathars.) But Bridget and I needed no guidebook to alert us to the vibe. Down one side of the display room we proceeded, dutifully examining the fly-blown war photos on the wall. They got worse as you went along. Battlefield shots first—mudslides, craters, collapsing
limbers and dead horses—then a switch to British and German wounded laid out in hospital beds. The photographer, “Ferdinand of Ypres,” had signed each picture in a flowery chemical script. (An early example of diversification no doubt: the Ypres carte de visite business must have fallen off dramatically when the place got pulverized in November 1914.) The last two were clearly Ferdinand’s masterpieces: tight, nauseating close-ups of men with ghastly facial injuries, jaws and mouths gone, rubbery slots for noses, an eye or an ear the only human thing left. The one other person in the room with us was a pale young man in a windbreaker, one of the Four Horsemen on his day off. He was busy taking photos of the photos and smiling delightedly.

  We passed next through a kind of garage with rusty stuff piled all around: shell casings, barbed wire, rotting Sam Browne belts, a pair of ludicrous French shop dummies gaily attired in mismatched officers’ uniforms. Then on out to the display trenches, snaking off into the woods behind the building. These had a neat, generic, recently packed-down aspect, the corrugated iron supports looking as if they’d just come from the Lille DIY store. Not much to see really, once you’d peered down into them or clambered in—as Bridget briefly did—so we went back in the house and down the other side of the exhibit room. Here was further war debris: ammunition boxes, ancient bully-beef tins and, jarringly, some bits of Nazi regalia and Hitler junk (a blotted letter to him at the front from his grandmother). I knew Hitler had fought—valiantly—in a Bavarian infantry regiment near the Messines Ridge, but this part of the show seemed nonetheless a mite too enthusiastic. A big dusty swastika banner, sorely in need of dry-cleaning, was draped in a corner, like a prop from the Hall of the Grail scene in Syberberg’s postmodern Parsifal.

  But they saved the best till last. Zhose ughly girls get snooquered Beeg Time! Along the far wall by the exit was a long wooden work desk with five or six seats attached, rather like a junior high school science class setup. Mounted at each seat was a beautiful old-fashioned viewing machine—a kind of antique stereopticon—made of brass and polished wood, with a double eyepiece and hand crank. It was all too exquisite and Proustian to resist. Like silent film cameramen, Bridget and I took our seats and eagerly began to crank.

  Yet hellish indeed what assailed us. Trench-pix again, in lots of twenty, but now eternally fixed in a lurid, refulgent, Miltonic 3-D. Sickening and brain-twisting. A clicking, clacking kaleidoscope of atrocities. Don’t forget the vertigo. Even as I sat and stared I felt myself lurching forward, into the bright intolerable sunshine of some ruinous as usual summer day in 1917. The light itself was a somatic wedge tilting one into the past. The cerebellum went walkabout.

  Granted, the light preserved in old photographs can be unnerving at the best of times. I have a picture in one of my books of Mahler and Richard Strauss stepping out into bright sunlight after a matinee of Salomé in Graz in 1906. The Old World sun glinting off the side of Mahler’s polished shoe, the sharp edge of Strauss’s boater, the geometric shadows thrown onto the wall behind them: these teleport one instantly into the scene. You start remembering what the day was like. But here the illusion of reality was fearsomely, even fiendishly intensified. The febrile glare, conjoined with the stereoscopic depth of field, equaled My God They’re Right There. A corpse with flies. A headless body upside down in the sand. Two skulls on a battlefield midden. An obscure something or other in feldgrau. I got up in disgust after seeing yet another moribund horse, its intestines spilled out and glistening.

  In the weeks and months that followed, nothing made very much sense. (After a surreal shopping spree at the vast Eurostar mall outside Calais, Bridget and I got back to Herne Hill without incident.) I confess I was moody. I was on sabbatical; I should have been happy. But I maundered and malingered. On the flight home to San Francisco I stopped for the weekend in Chicago to see Blakey. She politely admired the absurd keychain I’d brought her from Flanders: a laminated reproduction of a 1914 recruiting poster. A cadre of shrewish females exhorting their unfortunate men, “Women of Britain Say—Go!” (I myself had a plastic, finger-pointing Kitchener, the brave homo-warlord bristling like a 1980s Castro Street clone.) We took my photos of Tyne Cot and Franvillers to be developed at the Walgreens on Michigan Avenue. But then we had a big blow-up fight that evening and she rushed out of her apartment building in a rage. I had to ask the Polish doorman which way she’d gone and ran after her, gesticulating like a Keystone Cop, up Lake Shore Drive.

  When I got back to California, friends asked about the trip. I gave brief, potted, cousin-rich recountings; sometimes I even described the stereopticon. But I felt like a bit of a sociopath, especially when one of my colleagues looked at me with revulsion as I related the itinerary. At the same time I became irrationally indignant when listeners seemed insufficiently captivated by my odyssey of death. In March I gave a lecture at an esteemed university where I hoped to get a job. (The people there knew that Blakey and I wanted to be together; I had been asked to apply.) The talk had to do with the war and writers of the 1920s: Wyndham Lewis, Woolf, the Sitwells. I showed slides of Claud Lovat Fraser’s sad little trench drawings and expressed, all too dotingly, my love for them. I even mentioned (obliquely) Uncle Newton. It was not a success. The department Medusa—a steely Queer Theorist in bovver boots—decided I was “wedded to the aesthetic” and needed “nuking” at once. And so I was. Hopes dashed, I fell into a pompous, protracted, maudlin depression, like Mr. Toad when he finds the stoats and ferrets have taken over Toad Hall. Friends kept saying “But they are the ones who look bad!” But I couldn’t get over the ghastly cruelty of it all. I felt like a bullet-ridden blob. The cemetery trip had done something to me—induced a kind of temporary insanity?—but I couldn’t get a grip on how or why. I was cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d, and bound in to saucy doubts and fears.

  My resolution’s plac’d, and I have nothing

  Of woman in me; now from head to foot

  I am marble-constant, now the fleeting moon

  No planet is of mine.

  —ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, V. II. 237–40

  A clue to the nature of my feelings came only this past autumn, haltingly, in the wake of the attacks on the East Coast. Even in balmy California there was no escaping what had happened. Televisions—especially the silly little army of them suspended above the treadmills at the gym I belong to—became existential torture devices. No more Frasier reruns or baseball; just Peter Jennings and dirty bombs.

  The boys with tattoos flexed nervously. Even the female-to-male transsexuals looked shaken. (It’s a gay gym.) I went through my own quiet days feeling gusty, shocked, and forlorn. Blakey was still in Chicago. One evening I broke down and called my father for the first time in months. He was surprised to hear from me. I mumbled that I was “calling to see how he was,” that I was upset by the attacks. Long, baffled pause. He allowed that he was fine. Silence, followed by clotted hmmms. He seemed to apprehend that I wanted something. I started raging inwardly. After a long silence, as if goaded by tiny jumper cables, he morosely acknowledged that when he and his brother were evacuated to the North of England in 1940, he thought it was “the end of the world.” Two weeks later, though, he was feeling “somewhat better.” Glum Larkinesque half-chuckle. Now, this was all unprecedented self-revelation, but didn’t help much. I asked after his wife and the trombone-playing nephew. He sank back into his customary Arctic mode. I hung up, swearing as always never to call again.

  I’d got off the World War I thing after the job fiasco—couldn’t bear to look at my lecture notes, had tried to put everything out of my mind. But now it came inching back. I was desperate for something to read in those disordered weeks, something to match up with the lost way I was feeling. I galloped through Ann Wroe’s book on Pontius Pilate, but it was too weird and dissociated. I ordered Kenneth Tynan’s diaries from Amazon but found I was in no mood for high camp and dominatrixes. I wanted something stolid and sad. With a sense of oh-what-the-hell, I finally picked up a book I’d bought on the trench trip an
d then instantly lost interest in: a new paperback edition of Vera Brittain’s Great War diary, the very diary she later transmuted into her celebrated 1933 war memoir, Testament of Youth.*

  Brittain was hardly an unknown quantity. I’d read Testament of Youth in my twenties and had never forgotten the intensity with which she related the primal bereavements of her early years. (I had once observed my grandmother surreptitiously dabbing at her eyes while reading it in the 1970s; her own Great War losses—of fiancé and only brother—duplicated Brittain’s exactly.) Yet I couldn’t say I had ever exactly warmed to Brittain, as either author or woman. For all the pain and horror she had suffered—and for all the integrity of her subsequent personal and political commitments—she struck me as abrasive and conceited. I tended to agree with Woolf, who, after devouring Testament of Youth, applied the usual backhanded praise in a comical diary entry from the 1930s:

  I am reading with extreme greed a book by Vera Brittain. Not that I much like her. A stringy metallic mind, with I suppose, the sort of taste I should dislike in real life. But her story, told in detail, without reserve, of the war, and how she lost lover and brother, and dabbled her hands in entrails, and was forever seeing the dead, and eating scraps, and sitting five on one WC, runs rapidly, vividly across my eyes.