When my daughters, ages 12 and 9, say that something "sucks," I often suggest an alternative, such as "stinks" or "tis to be rued," but one thing that really does suck is when, curious about some old friend or acquaintance, you google their name and the first return is their obituary. This is what happened to me yesterday when I googled "Lonnie Durham" and within a minute or two had read this. No reason to have been surprised, I suppose: he was 86. Weird how, at least for me, it's apparently impossible to imagine people you've lost touch with advancing through life. I'm not surprised to be 62, or that my dad is 87: this is what happens when, day after day after day, you don't die. But it was shocking to me that Lonnie Durham should have been 86. He's frozen in time at the front of the classroom, expostulating on Shakespeare or Milton, being diverted from his notes by a student question, launching off in some new direction now and speaking extemporaneously, his knowledge apparently comprehensive.
A few disconnected thoughts relating to the obit. I knew none of the details of the first 30 or so years of his life, but, from an altitude, they must be shared by a lot of Americans his age—the Depression, a struggling family, a gifted kid with a period of "drifting," military service and the GI bill and education and, because of his abilities, fellowships and graduate school and a PhD followed by an academic career in which he, as we say, "made a difference" in the lives of hundreds of young people. I was his teaching assistant one term for "Introduction to Shakespeare." This would have been during the 1981-82 school year, start of Reagan's first term. In the first or second class session, he lectured on Shakespeare's biography and the theater world in which he worked, including the detail that he was not only a playwright but an actor too. Toward the end of the class period, a student asked whether, back then, actors had the status and social prestige that they enjoy today. Lonnie said that they most certainly did not and, elaborating, explained that the Globe Theater was "on the other side" of the Thames, alongside the bear-baiting sites and other low entertainments, to keep the riffraff away from the respectable precincts of the capital's business and governmental hubs. Zoning, in other words. Eyes twinkling, he added, "Why, any of Shakespeare's colleagues would have been astounded to be informed that, almost 400 years hence, a man, and not the most distinguished among them, would rise from their ranks, to become the leader of a great and powerful nation . . . ."
Lonnie connected a lot of the world's absurdity and troubles to something he called "the cult of masculinity." This referred to the way in which males, under the impression they have incurred some slight, feel unmanned and are thus tempted to perform desperate compensatory acts, such as voting for Republicans. To illustrate further, here is Lady Macbeth manipulating her husband whose determination to attain the throne by killing his guest and kinsman, the current king, is flagging:
Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dressed yourself? Hath it slept since?
And wakes it now to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely? From this time
Such I account thy love. Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valor
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem,
Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,'
Like the poor cat i' th' adage?
. . . .
When you durst do it, then you were a man.
(The cat in the adage wants the fish but is laughably afraid of getting its paws wet.)
I often think of Lonnie when some swashbuckler is swashbuckling, and am then inevitably reminded of my most vivid interaction with him. I had injured myself and my arm was in a sling. Naturally, he asked the cause, and I had to explain that I had broken my shoulder sliding head first in a ball game. He laughed, and when he was done laughing he "predicted" that this was "the kind of ball game in which the pitcher, employing an underhanded motion, delivers a grapefruit-sized spheroid toward the overfed batter, and that when enough outs have somehow been made for the game to end everyone goes to a bar to speak of their exploits, old and new." Exhibited no interest in whether I'd been called safe!
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