What Can You Say About an Old Lady Who Died?

Dolly Parton died today at the age of eighty. Her nephew and security chief Bryan Seaver announced it in a moving video on behalf of her family.  He says Parton asked him to do it several years ago. That impressed me, because it suggests that Parton planned ahead, aware of her mortality before it really caught up with her.  Maybe she'd had some health scares even then? There were bursts of publicity in the past year when she had to cancel appearances, but she always minimized them in her public statements. Probably that was a good idea; she was always a canny manipulator of her image.

Many people, predictably, are going nuts. One old friend of mine, a highly educated and intelligent person in her sixties, wailed on Facebook that she'd believed Dolly would live forever, and said Willie Nelson should be wrapped in cellophane bubble-wrap to protect him.  To be fair, she's dealing better with her own mother's failing health, having just moved her to a closer care facility as her memory gets worse.  I suspect that people are more realistic about the people they are close to and must care for, while celebrities just aren't real to them and they can fantasize that they're immortal. I shudder to think what will happen to her when her idol Bruce Springsteen (age 76) buys the farm.

I've written before about this, how people refuse to let their heroes go, when I saw the mass tantrums over Nelson Mandela's long decline. 

For years before [his death], he had "retired from retirement" because of his failing health.  2013 was a morbid death watch, the way millions of people panicked every time Mandela went into the hospital.  At 95, after a very long life of public service, I'd have thought he had earned the right to rest.  But people still wanted a piece of him, and wanted him to go on living no matter what.  They saw this craving as love, but I think it was something else.  Selfishness is when you let your wishes override the wishes of another person, and I think that selfishness was the dominant emotion in those who wanted Mandela, or anyone else, to be kept alive forever, no matter what.

Robin Williams was another morbid case.  I know people who are still obsessed with him. 

My friend is a Parton fan, and I'm not.  I like some of her music, but country has never done much for me.  What mattered to me was that Parton transcended her background, wandering beyond country as she pleased, while insisting that she was just a simple country girl all along. I will always wonder how much of that was a conscious act, though it doesn't really matter.  Her philanthropy is also important - as a reader I naturally admired her books for kids initiative, and will forever hate my state's governor, for cutting off funding to it. (I know, others did too.)  It didn't really affect the program, it was more a show of allegiance to Trump and his own MAGA base.  Parton's openness and humanity is her legacy.  I expect we'll see more of her planning in the days and years to come; she didn't let death take her by surprise. But like all of us, she was never going to live forever.  I'm seventy-five myself, my health is tolerably good, but I know my days are numbered.  I need to do some more planning myself.

In one of those meaningless coincidences that make life interesting, Parton's death was announced just as I was coming to the end of David Lodge's 2008 novel Deaf Sentence.  Lodge died last year at the age of 90, which I didn't know until I looked him up just now.  The protagonist of Deaf Sentence is a retired professor of linguistics in his 60s. He's progressively losing his hearing and the novel is largely about his struggle to adjust.  But it's also about mortality and the meaning of life.  The protagonist encounters a young American graduate student who's studying the rhetoric of suicide notes.  His first marriage ended in his wife's death of cancer, and he's caring for his elderly father; he makes a lot of dad jokes about deafness, playing on the word's closeness to death, such as I had not known deaf had undone so many, and of course the novel's title. In many ways it's a dark, disturbing book, but it has Lodge's typical humanity and humor.  I was annoyed when I read a recent review of another novelist's survey of The Novel, who singled Lodge out as an especially bad novelist.  I disagree vehemently, but then I don't much care, and Deaf Sentence is a reason why, apart from the fact that I happened to read it at an appropriate time.

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Embracing The Barbaric Yawp

I've been reading a number of satirical novels about academia lately.  It started by chance, but then a friend, an academic, mentioned another one to me (Robert Grudin's Book), and I began thinking about the genre a bit.  I may or may not write on this topic at length, but I'm near the end of David Lodge's 1975 novel Changing Places now, and found a passage that I feel compelled to quote.

The premise is that two professors of English literature, one English and one American, take each other's places in their institutions.  The story began slowly, but became much more engaging as Lodge developed some entertaining complications.  It even made me laugh aloud a few times, which these novels almost never do.  What I'm going to copy here isn't one of the laugh-aloud passages; it is, I think, more interesting than that.  The Brit, sitting in a coffeehouse toward the end of his American stay, suddenly has an epiphany:

He understood American literature for the first time in his life that afternoon, sitting in Pierre's on Cable Avenue as the river of Plotinus life flowed past, understood its prodigality and indecorum, its yea-saying heterogeneity, understood Walt Whitman who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary, and Herman Melville who split the atom of the traditional novel in the effort to make whaling a universal metaphor and smuggled into a book addressed to the most puritanical reading public the world has ever known a chapter on the whale's foreskin and got away with it; understood why Mark Twain nearly wrote a sequel to Huckleberry Finn in which Tom Sawyer was to sell Huck into slavery, and why Stephen Crane wrote his great war-novel first and experienced war afterwards, and what Gertrude Stein meant when she said that 'anything one is remembering is a repetition, but existing as a human being, that is being listening and hearing is never a repetition'; understood all that, though he couldn't have explained it to his students, some thoughts do often lie too deep for seminars ... [195 of the 1978 Penguin edition].

Reading this passage in the context of the novel, I understood it too.  It's a notably generous insight to give a protagonist in an academic novel, most of which are extended sessions of Ain't It Awful.  Lodge is, unlike most of the authors of such books I've read, smarter than his characters, yet he doesn't look down on them.  He's written more academic novels, and I think I'll end up checking them out too.