Did You Know These Great Men Died On The Same Day?

JFK, C.S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley

On November 22, 1963, three towering figures of the 20th century died. John F. Kennedy is the one that we all remember, but let’s consider the others.

How to measure these men, 50 years on? Huxley’s star has been on the wane since his misappropriation by a hedonistic drug culture whose escapism and self-indulgence he deplored even before their zenith in the late Sixties. The English grave he shares with his parents in Compton, Surrey, has been neglected. Most of his 50-odd books, many hugely popular in their time, are now eclipsed by one. Yet that book, Brave New World, remains with George Orwell’s 1984 one of the great dystopian novels of the modern world, and for many the most applicable to a post-Soviet world of vast populations lulled to torpidity by consumer culture.

Lewis is now more than ever a name to conjure with, his Narnia books established as classics (and a film franchise), his works of theology bringing a devoted and perpetually renewed following, his overall work earning him a memorial stone in Poet’s Corner at London’s Westminster Abbey, to be unveiled on 22 November.

And Kennedy, whose grave at Arlington is marked by an eternal flame? Thanks no doubt to his assassination, he divides opinion as much as ever, his Presidency seen by some as the high water mark of liberal democratic hopes, by others as a whited sepulchre. You might say that by thus exposing our differences, he still helps define who we are.

But the manner of Kennedy’s going transfigured him utterly. At the 1964 Democratic National Convention nine months after his death, when his brother Bobby arrived on the podium to introduce a film about JFK, the audience stood and applauded for fully 22 minutes before they would let him speak. Almost overcome, Bobby finally managed to talk about his brother’s vision for party and nation. Then he enshrined him in words from Romeo and Juliet:

When he shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.

 The idea of the dying god had once struck an acute chord with the young Lewis, who awoke to myth and ‘Northernness’ when he read Longfellow’s words, ‘I heard a voice that cried, / Balder the beautiful / Is dead, is dead…’ He later admitted he had ‘loved Balder before Christ’. In 1931, Lewis was persuaded by Tolkien that such myths were not ‘lies breathed through silver’ but fragments or glimpses of an original truth, ‘refracted light … splintered from a single White / to many hues’. So Lewis was able to reconcile his love of myth with his philosophical acceptance of God, and finally came to believe in Christ. And in Narnia Lewis created his own ‘refracted light’ of Christ, his own myth of the dying god, in the sacrifice of Aslan on the Stone Table — a reconfiguring of Calvary for a world of talking beasts.

Both Lewis and Huxley would have laughed heartily at the thought of the thoroughly worldly John F. Kennedy being translated to celestial glory. But William Manchester, in his 1967 micro-history The Death of a President, argues that Kennedy fulfilled the perennial roles of Balder, Osiris, Adonis and others, including historical figures such as Joan of Arc — betrayed by the French on 21 November, 1430. These are autumnal deaths to expiate the sins of a people and appease the heavens so summer might return. Such myths, Manchester argues, may be vestigial in the modern era, but they remain vital to the cohesion of a culture.

Through his entire political career, and most of all since his presidential campaign, Kennedy had capitalised on his relative youth and vigour and his apparent health, especially in contrast to his aging predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower. Kennedy had in fact read about the myths of the young and sacrificial god in 1960, the year of the presidential campaign, in Mary Renault’s novel The King Must Die. If he had ever paid attention to the thought of posterity, he might just have wondered whether he could end up in Balder’s place. In classic Henry II style, he had turned a blind eye to CIA efforts to bump off Fidel Castro in Cuba, and as a realist he knew he too was certainly a potential assassin’s target.

But of the three who died that day in November, only Kennedy had no time to prepare. Soon, without a security detail covering his tracks and cleaning up behind him, his thoroughly dirty linen was being flung out for all to see. Hodgson recalls: ‘So much emphasis had been placed on how young and beautiful and vigorous Kennedy was, in a conscious contrast with Eisenhower; so it was interesting to discover that Kennedy had at least two and possibly three life-threatening diseases as well as an uncured sexual infection.’

Yet these revelations have done little to dent his myth. At worst, they have only served to polarise opinion. We’ve since seen similar transfigurations in the deaths of Princess Diana and John Lennon, whose considerable sins have been largely washed away by a flood of tears. As William Manchester asserts

What the folk hero was and what he believed are submerged by the demands of those who follow him. In myth he becomes what they want him to have been, and anyone who belittles this transformation has an imperfect understanding of truth.

Youth, beauty, apparent vigour and even the most arguable personal virtues may be sanctified by a sudden and violent death. And the fact that such a man paradoxically took on godhead for a while is proof that we continue to see death not just as an end, but as a doorway to transcendence.

What does the departure of these three men tell us?

It would be difficult to argue that there was some divine purpose behind the conjunction of their deaths; easier, perhaps, to see it all as a wild coincidence and therefore as evidence of a chaotic and purposeless universe. Nor does it tell us whether C.S. Lewis truly went to meet his maker on 22 November 1963, or whether Aldous Huxley, aided by ‘LSD … intramuscular 100mm’ administered by his wife, passed through the doors of perception. What his assassination tells us about Kennedy is infinitely less valuable than what it tells us about our capacity to build myths in the face of mortality. It is surely in their achievements in life that we must really measure these men: the foundation of the moon mission, certainly, but also the writings of Huxley and Lewis which look beneath and beyond the world; and the 13 days in 1962 when Kennedy ensured the survival of that world in which we can continue to read them.

This is an excerpt from a piece that first appeared in Oxford Today, the official magazine of the University of Oxford.

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