`While Someone Else is Eating'

Some of us this month will give a thought to what would have been the 90th birthday of John F. Kennedy. We know he was not a good man and in most ways he was a disastrous president, but I remember my parents’ excitement when he beat Nixon in 1960, one week after my eighth birthday. My mother was Irish, my father a lapsed Catholic and a union man, so the Kennedy demographic resonated in our customarily apolitical house.

The flood of literary efforts to frame Kennedy’s assassination, from elegies to potboilers, from Berryman and Zukofsky to Don Delillo and James Ellroy, is hardly worth remembering. Most wallow in sentimentality or pulp, and make the fatal mistake of literalness. At least one novelist, Richard G. Stern, respected the power of indirection, of approaching a subject sideways, as an absence not a too-conspicuous presence. The protagonist of Stitch, from 1965, is Edward Gunther, a self-destructive narcissist whose wife has left him. Stern accomplishes the difficult task of making a self-centered man at once sympathetic and terribly sad. Here’s the Kennedy passage:

“From the first hours, after the first shock wave had passed, it was clear to Edward that what had happened in Texas had to do with everything that had happened to him. It really struck him when he heard the first surfers the next day. They made the same bird noises, their shark boards still zoomed in over the waters; nothing had changed for them. The water was here, the sun was out, the tide was in. What did they have to do with what happened? With what ever happened? Their stock of the past was like the birds’ corralled into a few instincts plus a few syllables, automobiles, cans. Their memory was yesterday’s waves. Reality was what was in your sights. The past was what you desired right now.”

Like any narcissist, Gunther projects himself into people and events that have nothing to do with him. Rereading the passage gave me a pang in a way blood and noble words never could. It’s an attenuated allusion to W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” where suffering “takes place/While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”