Only months after her husband was cut down by an assassin in Dallas, Jacqueline Kennedy sat with the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. for a series of interviews. Knowing her comments would be sealed for several decades, she began freely recounting her husband’s political career and what she knew of the thought processes behind the great decisions of his presidency. The tapes of these conversations, sealed since 1964, were published last year. It was Caroline Kennedy’s responsibility to finally release her mother's memories.
“When does someone no longer belong to you,” she asked, “but belong to history?”
We often forget that history isn’t large impersonal forces, dates and names, but humans making decisions - be they short-sighted or far-reaching. The people of the past, and we of the present, have to live with the consequences. When we view their decisions years, decades, centuries later, we no longer see clearly the alternatives, or the pressures. Everything seems inevitable. As inevitable as a bullet, fired from a gun.
The premise of Stephen King’s “11/22/63” isn’t exactly new, but the result is one of the most satisfying long works in his prolific career. Imagining alternate realities to the Kennedy assassination has long been a parlor game for the Baby Boom generation. But Stephen King is content to create a fiction acknowledging the impersonal forces of individuals and the decisions and destinies of millions.
“11/22/63” follows Jake Epping, a Maine schoolteacher who is introduced by a dying acquaintance to a portal into the past. There the visitor from the present always arrives at the same date and same moment: September 9, 1958, at 11:58 a.m. Step through a second time, and you undo whatever you may have changed in the past. This allows for two things in the course of our story - the protagonist will have to spend a good deal of time assimilating into the past in order to change the outcome on Nov. 22, 1963, and whatever is changed can also be undone.
The story allows King to leaven in his usual ingredients - pop culture references, song lyrics, meetings with characters from previous King novels. It also allows him to create a nostalgic view of the past that we enjoy visiting. We can see the late fifties and early sixties in a way that invites us in. People, for the most part, are friendlier. The pace is more leisurely. Money goes a lot further. Even when things get dark, we enjoy the pulpy character of the darkness. This allows Jake, whom we accompany on the journey, to make the inevitable modern observations on the nature of the past.
Occasionally, the difficulties of the time are dealt with too easily. King mostly touches on the segregated nature of 1960s America in one scene that occupies two pages and dispenses with it in a way that seems too pat. It’s also easy to forget that in this simpler, easier time, people lived everyday under the tension of the Cold War, with the lurking idea that megatons of nuclear weapons were aimed at them and could be detonated at any moment, possibly even by mistake.
King also establishes a rule early on - the past is obdurate, Jake tells us. The more significant an event is, the more obstacles will emerge to block someone bent on forcing it in a different direction. When Jake does change the past, the results are sometimes bloody - and only marginally better or worse than the actual time he came from. Jake becomes a dark guardian angel, a man who realizes that at the end of his journey, he may very well have to kill a man to accomplish it, though he has no idea when he sets out that Oswald's murder will not be the only one required of him.
To carry out his mission, Jake assumes the identity of George Amberson and eventually finds his way to Texas to resume his career as a teacher in the past. The longer he stays there, the more he risks becoming involved in the past. His love affair with Sadie Dunhill is a sweet diversion, and in some ways a more subtle obstacle thrown up by the obdurate past. If Jake wants to thwart history, he is going to have to be willing to sacrifice something.
"11/22/63" allows King to indulge in one of his great themes - the nature of fate.
Many times in King's major works he comments on how much control his characters - and we as human beings have - over the way our lives will turn out. King often riffs on how the random acts of terror that dot our lives don't seem so much to be aberrations as the actual fabric of life, and that human beings seem in the grip of forces much larger than just emotions of the moment, much larger than just individual sin:
"For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark."
In the course of Jake/George's odyssey, we see several images rubbed raw by their constant evocation in our collective memory - the Texas School Book Depository, the Grassy Knoll, the specter of the Vietnam War. Jake understands that he must undo Oswald's act - and much of the book deals with Jake determining whether Oswald was the actual assassin - because Kennedy's death set in motion the events after: Vietnam, Watergate, the cynicism of the present, the loss of American idealism etc. Jake isn't intent on preventing one horror, but all the ones that follow. As he says, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it harmonizes, and what it usually makes is the devil's music."
In “Camelot and the Cultural Revolution,” James Piereson remarks on one consequence of that day in Dallas. Piereson states that the assassination changed the character of American liberalism, once it was revealed that Oswald was not a right-winger incensed by Kennedy‘s support of civil rights or his stance on Communism, but a misbegotten Marxist hungry for attention. It did so “by undermining the confidence of liberals in the future; and…by changing their perspective from one of possibility and practical reform to one of grief, loss, and frustrated hopes. It also compromised their faith in the nation because many concluded, against all factual evidence, that in some way the nation itself was responsible…A confident, practical, and forward-looking philosophy, with a heritage of genuine accomplishment, was thus turned into a pessimistic doctrine - and one with a decidedly negative view of American society and its institutions….It now seems clear that Kennedy’s assassination had the effect of draining much of that political energy out of the liberal movement.”
For Piereson, the political affiliation of Oswald is key to understanding the result. The initial belief of Kennedy supporters was that it was the climate of Dallas - a right-wing bastion in the heart of the segregated South - that had killed Kennedy. This view is stamped on virtually every page of William Manchester’s “The Death of a President,” where Dallas sometimes looms as a cross between some backwoods version of the Inferno and a Martian colony.
But the truth was that Oswald was a left-winger - an ex-Marine who renounced his citizenship and defected to the Soviet Union, disenchanted with American materialism and foreign policy. This, followed by Oswald’s immediate death, froze in many people’s minds the idea that Oswald was somehow not so much an assassin as a stand-in for whatever individual bogeyman could be made to stick in his place. In this climate of blame, the evitable result was the succeeding generations of conspiracy theories the event spawned, trying in vain to invest in Kennedy’s death a sense of meaning that was not there, if the official narrative - Oswald, a nobody, acted alone for quixotic reasons - turned out to be true.
King even quotes from Manchester’s explanation of why he did not believe the various theories:
“To employ what may seem an odd metaphor, there is an aesthetic principle at work here. If you put six million dead Jews on one side of a scale and on the other side put the Nazi regime - the greatest gang of criminals ever to seize control of a modern state - you would have a rough balance: greatest crime, greatest criminals. But if you put the murder of the President of the United States on one side of another scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn’t balance. You want to add something along with Oswald, something weightier. A photograph of H.L. Hunt handing Oswald a check for a million dollars would do the job nicely. Unfortunately, it doesn’t exist.”
The key word there for future generations is that last “unfortunately.” Manchester, as with other chroniclers of the Kennedy years, desperately wished there was such evidence because it would bear out their worst suspicions about American political life, not to mention invest in Kennedy’s death the meaning that the event cries out for.
But King takes that absence of meaning and fills it with something else. His solution is simple and ingenious. A few months prior to the assassination, when time becomes even more precious, Jake/George is attacked and injured. During his time in the hospital, Jake is unable to remember the most basic facts about who he is, and what he has ahead of him. Suddenly all the conspiracies are rendered meaningless, all the minutiae of the story moot. It becomes a simple issue of a man in a tall building with a gun bent on murder, and another lonely, confused man bent on maiming history. He feels for Oswald "sorrow for a spoiled life. But you can feel sorry for a good dog that goes rabid, too. That doesn't stop you from putting him down."
By the book's end, Jake/George must decide whether he wants to continue his mission, and then whether he can live with the results. The book continues to delight, continues to entertain, continues to illuminate. Time, it seems, has its own guardians, and eventually Jake must learn to dance with them, and find a way to dance in the world that is left.
It is hard to read "11/22/63" without wondering how your own life might be different with just a few changes here and there. In June 1999, I wrote a newspaper story about a man from Gadsden, Alabama, Don Gentry, who served in the Marine Corps in the 1950s with Lee Harvey Oswald in Japan.
On the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, he was sitting in a barber shop when news came over the television that the president's possible assassin had been arrested in a theater. Gentry sat bolt-upright, dumbstruck, when he heard the name of the assassin. He told me his immediate impression, knowing what he knew about Oswald from the service, was that he probably did it. "You could have poured me out of that chair," he said.
It probably shouldn't surprise us that Don Gentry later became a preacher. He wondered how history might have been different if he had shared the Gospel with the man who later killed Kennedy. The impersonal forces of history can be very personal.
Other posts about Stephen King's work here and here.
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Read a piece I did for WestBow Press about writing the book here.Read another interview with the fleegan book blog here.
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