Bob Crunden, delicious malice in his eyes. The picture was probably taken in the late 1980s. It's being faded and black-and-white are appropriate, since Bob was a Luddite when it came to technology, didn't have a TV or CD, and, though there was a computer on his desk, did his serious writing on a typewriter. I made the following remarks at the March 7, 1999 memorial service for my University of Texas at Austin colleague Robert M. Crunden, who had died at age 58. I was speaking to members, graduates, and friends of the American Studies Program (later a department) in which Bob and I had spent our careers. The names I mentioned needed no footnoting for the audience; none needed to be told for example that Bill Goetzmann had won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for history.
The American Studies family is broken--long live the family!
Bill Goetzmann, the father of us all arrives in 1964 or 5 or 6 (the date is shrouded in myth) and starts the Program in a wilderness of bureaucratic inertia and hostility, with the help of now-almost-forgotten faculty sympathizers and, even more, of Mewes, his wife, our secret mother.
Then, in 1967 or '68, comes Bob Crunden, the first son, a Goetzmann disciple at Yale and the one chosen to enforce Bill's vision. Like most firstborn, Bob internalizes his father's standards and ambitions--indeed so well that, to a degree, he becomes another Goetzmann, a counter-Goetzmann building things of his own on the side.
Then, in 1969, comes Elspeth Rostow, adopted sister to Bill and Mewes, consort and mother to other campus families, bountiful aunt and enabler to our Program.
Then I come, in 1971, because Goetzman's Pulitzer wins him the right to hire two new faculty. The guy who comes with me, a semi-anthropologist twin named Tim, doesn't last. Not everyone lasts in the family; some pass into legend, others oblivion. But I, the second son, am favored, indulged, encouraged to be a peacemaker-diplomat, allowed to be a clown.
Bob is always gentle with me, however exasperated. He knows I am a weak reed but he appreciates even me standing with him.
And there we are: the first family. Our descendants--some of you here--inherit from us. We see Bob in, for example, Jeff Meikle's stubborn self-assertion, though it came a whole lot easier to Bob, and in Mark Smith's curmudgeonliness, though Mark is of course a sweet curmudgeon.
And Bob and Bill and Mewes and Elspeth and me--we are spread across the country now, around the world. And our descendants now have other parents, too: Jeff and Mark and Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Bob Abzug and Desley Deacon and, we gratefully acknowledge, Janice Bradley Garrett and Cynthia Frese and the excellent women who came before them. All of us affecting eternity, as teachers do--as Henry Adams promised in a rare sentimental moment.
So, though Bob's death breaks the family, yet we live and will live on--as he will, in his books and children and friends, and in us and those who come after us and in the new lives we and they promote.
But this is not all I want to say. Bob taught me a great deal. I loved him like a brother (which means of course ambivalently), and I will miss him deeply and always.
One thing I'm still trying to learn from him is to speak boldly, even on occasions like this.
Were Bob here, at this lectern, memorializing me, as he would have been had the genetic roulette come up different, I imagine he would have talked about what we all feel at his untimely passing: life's injustice, absurdity, tragedy. Because he felt these deeply--inconsolably, I'm tempted to say.
I suspect Bob's dark view came from his cool birth family, his boyhood in boarding school (boys only) and all-male Yale. There may also have been a chemical component, as I--my life transformed at age 52 by antidepressant chemicals--tried to convince him.
He knew he was depressed ("Why do you think I keep writing?" he once said to me) but he accepted his fate--accepted it as fate, his necessary condition, the shell in which he lived.
I wonder whether Bob ever considered his and my depressions in the way that he and Bill and the American Studies gurus before them--Henry Adams, for example--encouraged us to see so much of life: in cultural terms, as a personal symptom of national history. He and I, born six months apart in 1940, I as France fell, he during the Battle of Britain, were children of war and Cold War. We were brought up to expect tragedy, responsibility, sacrifice, a long twilight struggle that, we believed, would never end because that was what life was like.
He and I, Yalies 1962, were taught to privileged the power of darkness, ambiguity, paradox, ambivalence, restraint, complexity that the New Critics found in the canonical literature whose words became our words. We believed that tragedy was the Truth, as of course it partly is, and that, as Melville said, the "mortal man who has more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true--not true, or undeveloped." And Bob and I, married at 22, fathers at 27, embraced being old, responsible, and narrow of expectation, without, alas, having ever been young, irresponsible, and grandiose.
"The world has changed, Bob," I wanted to tell him these last years, though of course he knew this. "We're at peace. We don't need to tend the ramparts or be so unyielding. We're free!" And, I might have added, free not in the bitter, cheated way Linda Loman says "We're free!" over Willy's grave in Death of a Salesman, our central play, Bob being Biff, me Happy. "Bob, we really are free."
To which I suspect Bob, bitter and beautiful, would have chuckled and said, "Oh, yeah, Bill. Isn't it nice to think so."
UT's faculty memorial about Bob and a biography of his writing are at http://www.utexas.edu/faculty/council/2000-2001/memorials/Crunden/crunden.html
