Still sharp as a tack, I'm noticing that my question "Where were you when JFK was assassinated?" increasingly draws blank looks, cocks of the head. Benjamin Taylor knows where, and it's the point of entrance for his sensitive, strange new memoir, "The Hue and Cry at Our House: A Year Remembered" (Penguin Books). Taylor, an impressionable 11-year-old who knew what he was witnessing, was with his mother ("the Kennedy lovers in the house"), at a Fort Worth appearance the President made on the morning of November 22, 1963, delivering a condensed version of the speech he planned to give later that day at the Dallas destination his motorcade never reached.
Theirs was unalloyed fandom, his mother keeping Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Profiles in Courage" on her desk, Benjamin having taped the President's inaugural address to his bedroom door. "It seems that the President is looking right at my mother," Taylor "remembers," his adolescent's febrile imagination reignited. "(Taking a fancy to her? I like to think so.)" Having finished his address, "this Apollo with his copper-colored hair" stepped into the crowds, shaking hands, including theirs.
Taylor was in school �" as was I, four states to the north �" when, later that day, word reached him, via a weeping teacher barely able to make the announcement "(She'd taken off her glasses and looked to us half-naked") that the President had been shot and killed. Like most of his fellow Americans, Taylor was first incredulous, then devastated, possibly, he says later, crying more than another boy might have.
The adult Taylor, the author of novels and such, blew a lot of us away with his 2015 study "Proust: The Search," for Yale University Press' Jewish Lives series. (My turn for a parenthesis: there's a terrific Barbra Streisand volume, not by Taylor.) Taylor's is the paradigm of the Proustian memory, his book a tea set with madeleines galore. Also Jewish, Taylor is "fully equipped �" a boy with asthma, homosexuality, and what would later be called Asperger syndrome." Trips to the psychiatrist start when he is six.
But wait. The televised four-day dead-Kennedy ceremony is not "the hue and cry" at the Taylors' house. A furnace fire at the home of extended family two years earlier killed four and left two psychologically wounded survivors. "When something this terrible happens to a family, it is either spoken about continually or not at all. We were of the not-at-all school. The hue and cry at our house was against disorder, bedevilment, despair."
"I've tried to wrest from the stream of time what happened to the Taylors and the nation between November 1963 and November 1964," Taylor begins. "But any twelve months could stand for the whole. Our years are so implicated in one another that the least important is important enough."
The book is short enough to be read twice in the same day, which I recommend because, despite the discrete chapters and sections within them, on the first reading memories swirl like the tornado in MGM's iconic "The Wizard of Oz." Important players, significant objects, numinous rooms whirl by, then disappear, narrating the story more in the way of stream-of-consciousness than orderly, linear talk-story.
In the wicked witch's trail we find the alarms and diversions of the body politic, from the agonies of ongoing racial strife, with the burning of "coloreds" at the stake over unseasoned firewood for an audience of thousands, and the imagined horrors of nuclear war, the terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis with its darkly comical family-bomb-shelter, duck-and-cover remedies. In the good witch's sphere there's the first appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show by the Beatles and then the Rolling Stones, the great Broadway shows, seen on Broadway, and the magical hand-puppet pageants, including "Madame Butterfly," of a brilliant childhood flame who goes on to become an early AIDS casualty.
The childhood crushes merge into adolescent first loves at camp, recalled, as they are, through the lace curtains of memory. "Nowadays I sleep badly," present-day Taylor interjects, "and sometimes name in reverse order the forty-four Presidents of the United States, or else the twenty-six loves I've survived. Looking back across more than half a century, I see them as a chain of volcanoes, extinct by and large, though one or two still rumble."
The artist in the young man is summoned by Taylor's first reading of Thornton Wilder's "The Bridge of San Luis Rey." The rocky, unequal relationships the Aspergers yielded are recounted with adult honestly and without self-pity. "Literature, starting with 'The Bridge,' existed to convince me that other people were as real as I was." With the collapse of Wilder's bridge in Peru in 1714, Taylor says, "I discovered that it was possible for a sentence to be a perfect window onto the world."
Sometimes his sentences have the simplicity and tread of young-adult literature. Other times they reel with the phantasmagoria of layered time. "The Hue and Cry" is like the Tilt-A-Whirl carnival ride, plastering you on the back of its cave-like shell with dizzying, centrifugal force, then depositing you on terra firma richer for the ride.