Free The Professor and Other Writings by Terry Castle Page B

monomaniacal. In one of the Pompadour books I’d been reading, the author had explained the fey jargon affected by Louis XV and his courtiers at Versailles: “Court language and pronunciation were quite different from that of Paris; courtiers said ‘ roue ’ for ‘ roi ,’ ‘ chev soi ’ for ‘ chez soi ’ certain words and phrases were never used, ‘ cadeau ’ should be ‘ présent ,’ ‘ louis d’or ’ should be ‘ louis en or ,’ and so on.” Lots of room here, obviously, for some LRB -ish, off-with-their-heads moralizing: how we loathe the upper classes! But what I found myself thinking of instead was the sad and dreamy little language invented by Lester Young—Absolute Monarch of the Swing Tenor—after his disastrous nervous breakdown in the U.S. Army in the 1940s:
    Many claims, some of them vague and inflated, have been made about the linguistic originality of black American English, but in the case of Lester Young’s language, such claims seem to have some substance. Buck Clayton believed Lester coined the usage of the word“bread” to mean money, when he asked of a job, “How does the bread smell?” To express his own hurt feelings he would say he had been “bruised”—a frequently heard word in the Young vocabulary. Another favorite expression was “Ivey Divey” which signaled a rather bleak, stoic acceptance of some misfortune. Lester also used the title “Lady,” which he had bestowed on Billie Holiday, as a rather unnerving handle to the names of male friends and colleagues. It was a habit which along with his rather languid, camp manner, gave the wholly inaccurate impression that he was homosexual. *
    Especially when my mother’s jabs began hitting the mark, I found myself moodily adapting some of Lester’s plaints. “The other ladies make all the bread.” “I ain’t groovy like the other ladies.” “Those LRB cats goin’ to give all their reviewing gigs to the other ladies.” It was a struggle to be even halfway ivey-divey.
    Art, it turned out, was my salvation—though not in the way I expected. There’s no CD player at my mother’s: she’s still got—believe it or not—the same wacky fake-wood-grained cabinet-style phonograph we had in the Buena Vista apartments in the 1960s. It has spindly metal legs and space-age styling and looks like something the Eameses might have designed on a not-so-good day. Granted, I can get all weepy and nostalgic just looking at the thing. Back in the eighth grade, I was so addicted to surreptitious music listening, I would get up at 6:00 a.m. and in the hour or so before I had to go to school glut myself (ever so quietly) on cherished selections from my small and eccentric LP collection. (I had to keep the volume absurdly low so not to wake up my mother or Tracy.) Prized possessions back then were a budget Everest recording of Beethoven’s Seventh, the complete works of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, some huge, breakers-rolling-in-to-shore Rachmaninoff, and my favorite: Elizabethan LuteSongs . (My mother noticed the record jacket of the last-mentioned one day and opined, with a strange stare, that Julian Bream and Peter Pears were “pansies.”) In my current technological fix, however, it was obvious that the ancient family sound machine wasn’t up to much. The boom box was still non compos mentis. Forced to adopt emergency measures—under normal circumstances I loathe listening on headphones—I ended up buying an ugly red Walkman at the Rite-Aid on the morning of Christmas Eve.
    I won’t say too much about Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section : even the most garrulous bride needs to keep a few things about her wedding night a secret. Suffice it to note that as soon as I pressed the Walkman “play” button in bed that night I started having the