Last Wednesday was the sixtieth anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy. It seemed to pass by unnoticed. In a stand-up routine somewhere in Canada the comic Paul Merton once asked the audience members if they thought Lee Harvey Oswald remembered, albeit briefly, what he was doing the day JFK was shot. Nobody laughed. On that same day, Aldous Huxley died, as did C. S. Lewis. And the Beatles issued their second LP – With the Beatles. Of 1963, Philip Larkin wrote in his poem Annus Mirabilis:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
It was an extraordinary, tumultuous year. Chatterley, Beatlemania, TW3, the Profumo scandal, the Great Train Robbery… The atmosphere of the time is captured in Bernard Levin’s The Pendulum Years, a review of the sixties, a decade defined in the UK, according to Levin’s view, as a historical turning point, a fulcrum or point d’appui, when Britain sloughed off its starchy, rigorously formal imperial integument and moved on into the “permissive” age. Nobody knew whether the new laissez faire attitude would usher in an era of personal freedom to be cherished, or bring about the end of civilisation as we knew it; whether satire was a robust utilisation of this new-found freedom, or sheer impertinence. Whatever it was, it was clearly capable of bringing down a government.
For the record, I do remember where I was when I heard JFK had been shot. I was at 30 Marlborough Avenue, my Aunt Mhairi’s house in Glasgow’s west end. It no longer exists, replaced now by a shopping centre. By the time I’d made the short walk back home to 51 Rowallan Gardens, he was dead. There was a sense of universal disbelief, and disappointment, perhaps because the President and the First Lady were glamorous, charismatic figures who seemed to represent the new age. Going back to the beginning of the sixties, I remember the US presidential election, and a posse of ruffians going round the school playground asking each of us who we would vote for, Nixon or Kennedy. It was a Catch-22 double bind, with no correct solution. Nixon was a creep, but Kennedy was a Catholic. But Kennedy seemed to embody the future. The torch, he said in his Hyannis Port drawl, has been passed to a new generation. We subsequently found out that the permissive age had certainly not been too late for Jack. At least, so it is said. Bu then, as the man himself remarked, there’s no smoke without a smoke machine.
With the assassination, there was a palpable sense that the US could not cope with the news. Walter Cronkite looked visibly shaken. A couple of days later, Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby, live on TV. The place was completely out of control. Conspiracy theories had to be concocted because the idea that the event resulted from the random act of a sheer nobody was extremely unpalatable. In Dallas Texas, Dealey Plaza became a shrine. I visited in the 1990s. The Texas School Book Depository at the corner of Elm and Houston was exactly as it had appeared in the grainy black and white footage. And the grassy knoll. The entire scenario had the feel of a museum. I ascended to the sixth floor of the depository and stared at the scene through the window from Oswald’s vantage point, measuring angles.
C. S. Lewis aside, the other events of 22/11/63 also touched me. For reasons that I can now scarcely comprehend, I had a childhood fascination for the novels of Aldous Huxley – Chrome Yellow, Eyeless in Gaza, Point Counter-Point etc. I read them avidly. Now why should an urban Scottish waif born into a landscape of sodden tenements, bomb sites strewn with nettles and docken leaves, be in the least bothered by the foppish fantasies, as I saw them, of an oversized, oversexed Oxon galoot inhabiting such improbable hamlets as Bole, Tritton, Spavin Delawarr, Knipswich for Timpany, West Bowlby, Camlet-on-the-Water? Yet I gobbled them up, the Collected Works, in the beautiful Chatto and Windus editions in their cellophane-wrapped russet covers. I could turn out reams of pseudo-Huxley, the smart-arse post-prandial rantings of smug intellectuals with strange names, saturated in gin and Art, stuffed like Strasbourg geese with indiscriminately acquired knowledge, the A-Z of Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Fortunately I was saved by the Beatles’ second LP. I bought it one rainy day in the music shop Cuthbertson’s, which no longer exists, took it home protected from the rain under my duffel coat, and put it on. I thought they’d sold me a dud. The Beatles sounded like the Chipmunks. But once I’d figured out you had to play LPs at 33, and not 45 rpm, all was well.
It won’t be long, yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah…
jamescalumcampbell 