'The Drums and Horses Were Adequate'

“For four days we’ve lived in a tragedy, on stage.” 

Even without context, readers my age will recognize the subject. The memory is a black-and-white collage of stills from the Zapruder film and late-November monochrome in Ohio. Everything stopped that Friday. It was a holiday with nothing to celebrate. It was the first time I saw my mother cry. I had turned eleven a month earlier. We were forbidden to play outside because we would be noisy and that would have been sacrilegious, even in a non-churchgoing family. Three months earlier, Guy Davenport had moved to Lexington, where he would teach at the University of Kentucky for twenty-seven years. He continues writing in his letter to Hugh Kenner four days after the assassination:

 

“History has little to match the terror of the two public murders and the well nigh miraculous return to ancient dignity and ritual of the funeral. Never in American history has real tradition so held its own against the maddened fury of Jacobinism and the terror of the art of the assassin and the revolutionary.”

 

It’s almost as though Davenport sensed what was coming to post-assassination America. I’m no Kennedy admirer but the murder remains the most emotionally potent and long-lasting public event of my life. Davenport continues:

 

“Mrs Kennedy’s Roman behavior and the mythological mystery of the drums and horses elevated the black terror of the assassination to a level never before reached in American civilization. Lincoln’s brutal death had no such order: it took a while for history, for Whitman, for the mythologists, to find it there. One feels that only the Church and the military have kept their bulwarks against universal vulgarity and the need of tradition and ritual has never been more evident.

 

“Perhaps a few professional Liberal minds will have felt the meaning of the treason implicit in their every point of procedure, but I doubt it.”

 

On November 29, Kenner responds:

 

“I forwarded your paragraphs on the Funeral to [William F. Buckley], hoping they may suggest the theme for a [National Review] editorial. . . . I think of Lincoln’s funeral as no more than terrified bearded faces gazing into a brutal mystery; the whole reaching its catharsis in a mass public hanging. But I don’t think anyone feels a frustrated NEED for the execution of Oswald. The drums and horses were adequate; Oswald was an incident.”

 

Davenport, in turn, responds to Kenner on December 2:

 

“And you’re right about Oswald: we may have been spared hearing the worm on the spit, and I think he had precious little to tell. And his whining would have been a poison to breathe. [John Wilkes] Booth would have done well to break his neck rather than his leg when he sprang onto the stage.”

[The letters quoted above can be found in Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner, ed. Edward M. Burns, Counterpoint, 2018.]