We don’t know what Longwood College thought of Alexander Theroux, a Byronic New Englander who taught English classes in the late sixties — but we have a pretty good idea of what Theroux thought of Longwood College.    

“Darconville’s Cat” was published in 1981.  It quickly became a cult classic, and it established Theroux’s reputation as a premier loquacious nutjob roaming through the institution of maximalist literature.  

The plot is timeless:  A professor at a women’s college in central Virginia falls in love and becomes romantically involved with one of his students.  After about a year, she jilts him.  They reconcile.  The professor moves to Boston to teach at Harvard, where he gets relationship advice from the Devil, is jilted by his lover,  again, and goes bananas.   

Luckily, by the time Darconville goes insane and the seven-hundred page novel spirals off into space, Theroux’s already gotten plenty of digs in on Longwood College, renamed Quinsy College.  In the first half of the book, when he’s not crying tears of blood over his lover, Theroux is grinding all sorts of axes against the brain-dead southern belles he had to teach and the charlatan English faculty with whom he had to work.  No one is spared:  he even takes the time to pick apart Hampden-Sydney douches!     

Don’t try to figure out who the professors are, because none of them are teaching anymore.  There is a rumor that someone — possibly Theroux — created an annotated edition of the novel with the real names inked in.  In any case, you can still read chapters of “Darconville’s Cat” and spot Farmville landmarks:  The Confederate Soldier on High Street, the bridge going over the Appomattox River, the Baptist church on Main Street.         

So for this second day of Spirit Week, we salute “Darconville’s Cat,” and we salute its writer, the caped misfit who’s become a fixture Longwood lore.  Alexander Theroux, according to all the stories

1.  Wore all black.

2.  Drove around town in Rolls Royce with a steering wheel on the right side.

3.  Sometimes climbed up a drain pipe to get to his classes on second floor Grainger.

4.  Threw wild parties for students at his home on High Street.

5.  Stole a shitload of books from the Lancaster Library before he left town.

If you don’t believe us, ask your professors.  If they’ve been at Longwood long enough to feel underappreciated, they’ve probably heard of him.  They’ve probably read his book, too.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 1:47 pm and is filed under Books, Oktoberfest, Professors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.