Updike on the Kennedy assassination
When writer John Updike died last January I wrote this tribute to him, as well as this discussion of his brave and well-articulated stance on the Vietnam War, a position that estranged him from many of his friends and the literary lights of his day.
Some of the comments to those posts made me realize that Updike’s inimitable style was hard to capture and to describe. So here’s another example, originally published at the time of the JFK assassination in the “Notes and Comments” segment of The New Yorker, and featured again in this New Yorker tribute to Updike published shortly after the author’s death.
It is the only piece of which I’m aware that captures the surrealistic and intense nature of the emotional reaction of those who experienced the event at the time. I tried my hand briefly at describing it; Updike’s hand is infinitely more deft:
It was as if we slept from Friday to Monday and dreamed an oppressive, unsearchably significant dream, which, we discovered on awaking, millions of others had dreamed also. Furniture, family, the streets, and the sky dissolved, only the dream on television was real. The faces of the world’s great mingled with the faces of landladies who happened to house an unhappy ex-Marine; cathedrals alternated with warehouses; temples of government with suburban garages; anonymous men tugged at a casket in a glaring airport; a murder was committed before our eyes; a Dallas strip-tease artist drawled amiably of her employer’s quick temper; the heads of state of the Western world strode down a sunlit street like a grim village rabble; and Jacqueline Kennedy became Persephone, the Queen of Hades and the beautiful bride of grief. All human possibilities, of magnificence and courage, of meanness and confusion, seemed to find an image in this long montage, and a stack of cardboard boxes in Dallas, a tawdry movie house, a tiny rented room where some shaving cream still clung to the underside of a washbasin, a row of parking meters that had witnessed a panicked flight all acquired the opaque and dreadful importance that innocent objects acquire in nightmares.
And here’s Jacqueline Kennedy as Persephone, the Queen of Hades and the beautiful bride of grief:
the salute always gets to me…
A writer’s writer.
It was as if we slept from Friday to Monday and dreamed an oppressive, unsearchably significant dream, which, we discovered on awaking, millions of others had dreamed also.
Updike’s got it right. The JFK assassination — the killing of a young king — was a horrific mythic experience for the nation and even the world.
For a more literal, yet surprisingly literary, account see Bugliosi’s href=”http://www.amazon.com/Four-Days-November-Assassination-President/dp/0393332152/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239749438&sr=1-2″>”Four Days in November” which assembles the story from its multiple viewpoints into a “just the facts, ma’m” whole that is cathartic to read.
As James Piereson argues, I think the liberal side of America lost its collective mind during those days and never recovered. We are still living with the aftermath. And that includes Barack Obama.
The Bugliosi link again: Four Days In November.
Oh, how he could write. I never got along too well with his novels because I had trouble believing in his female characters — it seemed to me that he didn’t understand them. But how powerful that passage on the Kennedy assassination is. It takes me right back to that weekend and my parents’ living room and their little flickering black and white TV. The TV image that comes back to me most clearly is the black horse with no rider and a backward boot in the stirrup. Besides the horse, what I remember is the grownups: how strange they were, how sad and frightened and unstrung, staring at the TV and forgetting to do all their normal things. I am not sure I had fully understood before that grownups could be frightened, and therefore the third thing I remember about that weekend is being terrified myself.
We were awakened at 5 AM. Another hot scramble. Grab the flight suit and the parachute harness. Suit up in the back of the truck on the way to the pad.
This time was different. “Kennedy was assassinated. Class A’s. Formation in ten minutes.” Search through the duffel bags in the store room. Pull out the rumpled uniforms we hadn’t worn in over a year. The brass was tarnished, a little green in spots. Didn’t matter. It was too dark to see.
The Captain called the formation to attention and read the message from DOD. Dismissed!
As we headed back to our disturbed sleep we saw the convoy. We were about half a mile from the hot pad. Four F-100’s fueled and armed 24/7.
There they were. Four bright yellow carriers and the armed escort. They looked like huge insects. Each carried a nuclear weapon.
After a while you learn to sleep when you can. We knew that if the candle got lit the afterburners would wake us in plenty of time to make our peace.
I remember it like you, Mrs Whatsit. I was in the first grade. We watched the funeral all day on television, and I particularly remember the caisson followed by the riderless horse, as well as the solemn cadence of the muffled drums. Terribly impressive.
My parents, Goldwater Republicans, gathered the three of us when news of the assassination came on the news and told us with utmost seriousness, “You children know we aren’t fans of President Kennedy. But he IS the president. And NO ONE gets to assassinate the President of the United States.” My sister and I (our brother was younger) remember being struck by the lesson they imparted: always, always put principles above personalities.
Would that our fellow citizens always taught their children as well.
I was on campus that time, and when King was killed, and Bobby Kennedy.
The first was tragedy. The second and third made it seem as if the roof was coming off. The roof wasn’t fixed and forever up there.
The first wasn’t frightening. The second and third caused many of us to, in our own ways, look to our priming. Whatever that meant to various individuals.
So, to make a metaphor, I have always carried a knife since then. As many, metaphor alert, have in their own ways.
I was five years old when JFK was assassinated, and I don’t remember much about it except my dad coming in from the garage to announce that Oswald had been shot. Presumably he had a portable TV in the garage (black & white, of course).
Five years later my family was gathered around the TV in the living room to watch RFK’s funeral, and that was the first time I saw my father cry. It was very upsetting to me at the time.
Wow.
“The faces of the world’s great mingled with the faces of landladies who happened to house an unhappy ex-Marine”
“how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along”
Bride of grief? No kidding. At the time all was so mythic and so muffled.
Now the photo makes me think of the daughter in “Beetlejuice.”