FROM THE SERIES, "REVISITING CLASSICS"
Book Review Article
Don DeLillo, Libra, NAL/Penguin paperback, 1989, 456
pp. (first published by Viking Penguin, Inc., 1988)
WHO ARE YOU?
In an interview that she gave some fifty years after the
fact, Marina Oswald Porter is still puzzling over the whole business. What
happened, how and why, and by whom was it made to happen? She isn’t sure she
knows even the least thing about the man she married in the USSR and lived with,
bore two children with. The interviewer asked her what question she would ask
Lee, were he to return somehow miraculously from the dead. She said, “I’d ask
him, Who are you?”
Scads of books have been published since November 22, 1963,
all trying to answer questions that arose on that date. In fact, interlarded
with the story of Lee Oswald and the assassination of President Kennedy in Libra
is the tale of a researcher, Nicholas Branch. This fictional character is a
retired senior analyst of the CIA, “hired on contract to write the secret
history of the assassination.” We first meet him on page 15, and already he is
overwhelmed by facts, fictions and factions. “Sometimes he looks around him,
horrified by the weight of it all, the career of paper. He sits in the
data-spew of hundreds of lives. There’s no end in sight.”
Branch shows up periodically throughout the pages of Libra, always
struggling with the data, the facts both pertinent and impertinent, musing upon
any number of irresolvable issues. “He has his forensic pathology rundown, his
neutron activation analysis. There is also the Warren Report, of course, with
its twenty-six accompanying volumes of testimony and exhibits, its millions of
words. Branch thinks this is the megaton novel James Joyce would have written
if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.”
Of course, it all always comes back to Lee Harvey Oswald, a
man who was simply Lee Oswald until that November day in 1963. Then he was
awarded, as the notorious are—compare U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, who also
shows up in the pages of Libra—with “the full intonation of the name,”
which seems strange to him. Lee Harvey Oswald is on everyone’s lips, but
to Lee “it sounded odd and dumb and made up.” That’s not him. “They were
talking about somebody else.” Yes. Maybe they were.
Who is he/was he? Here’s the best answer: Lee was a misfit
from day one, a loner, not particularly talented at anything, but determined to
show the world that he was somebody, not nobody. And he did, because now
he’s in all the history books. “After Oswald, men in America are no longer
required to lead lives of quiet desperation. You apply for a credit card, buy a
handgun, travel through cities, suburbs and shopping malls, anonymous, anonymous,
looking for a chance to take a shot at the first puffy empty famous face, just
to let people know there is someone out there who reads the papers.”
That’s the way it went in the sixties and seventies of the
last century. Of course, the times have changed. The loner/misfit/loser with
the gun, the assassinations of the famous in the U.S.—this has gone out of
style in the year 2020. Politicians apparently have much better security these
days; the technology is so much more highly developed. So those mired in quiet
desperation have to find other ways to prove to the world that they exist.
But Marina’s questions still remain unanswerable. Despite
the piles of evidence in the office of the fictitious Nicholas Branch,
notwithstanding the multitude of books on the Kennedy Assassination. We just do
not know and never will how and why a concatenation of circumstances came
together on that fateful day in November, 1963. Nonfiction cannot get even
close to definitive answers, but fiction possibly can. Sitting like Nicholas
Branch, all alone in a room not far from where young Lee once lived with his
mother Marguerite—and where Trotsky lived as well, “only blocks away,” in the
Bronx—a writer of fiction circumvents the massive pile of data and tears
through the very veil of existence with his fictional account. You want the
best possible variant on what happened that day and how, and why? Read Don
DeLillo’s Libra.
IN THE BRONX: RIDING
THE SUBWAY WHILE MAKING UP A LIFE
Libra begins with a chapter titled “In The Bronx,” a
wonderful description of young Lee Oswald as he rides the New York subway
trains, not riding to get anywhere, but just riding for the sake of the ride.
“The train smashed through the dark. People stood on platforms, staring
nowhere, a look they’d been practicing for years. He kind of wondered, speeding
past, who they really were . . . . . . Then the express stations, the creaky
brakes, people bunched like refugees. They came wagging through the doors,
banged against the rubber edges, inched their way in, were quickly pinned,
looking out past the nearest heads into that practiced oblivion.” Ah, people in
elevators or subway stations, practicing their looks of blankness—right away we
know we’re in a DeLillo novel.
Then again, the random riding of the train is a kind of
all-enveloping metaphor for the existence of loser Lee. Random movement is
characteristic of the whole of his short life. It begins as he and his weird
mother Marguerite move from city to city, and from apartment to apartment
within those cities. “They were not wanted anymore and they moved to the
basement room in the Bronx, the kitchen and bedroom and everything together,
where blue heads spoke to them from the TV screen.” Two lonely people, sitting
alone together, watching blue talking heads.
Lee was born in New Orleans and did not wander his way north
with his mother until early adolescence. He always has “a turbulence running
through him, the accepted fact of a fatherless boy.” He finds nothing in school
to interest him, no contact with his peers in the Bronx, who mock him for his southern
accent. He skips school, not once or twice, but every day. He hangs out at the zoo,
watches the animals. Two fellow students, Nicky Black and Scalzo, harass him there.
Nicky Black, a dreamer, sums up the modest aspirations of an adolescent boy in
the American fifties: “The kid quits school the minute he’s sixteen. I mean
look out . . . The kid gets a job in construction. First thing, he buys ten
shirts with Mr. B collars. He saves his money, before you know it he owns a
car. He simonizes the car once a month. The car gets him laid. Who’s better
than the kid?”
Nicky Black never shows up again later in the novel, but you
can imagine him fitting right in with the narrative as it proceeds in the
sixties, joining the multitude of sad nonentities who come together to make up
the story. For Libra is all about nonentities, little people with big
ideas. The biggest nonentity of all is Lee Oswald, but he does not think so, and
nothing’s either good or bad but thinking makes it so. Lee lives in a magic
world of his own imagination. He watches “I Led Three Lives” on TV and sees
himself in the role of secret agent Herb Philbrick. Several times the movie Seven
Samurai is mentioned; that’s another film Lee would like to star in. He’d
like to be one of the “men outside society” these “free-lance warriors” who are
called on to save a helpless people from destruction.
Lee Oswald is certainly a person from outside of society. He
never even begins getting inside society, would have no idea of how that is
done. He meanders on through his nocount life, grinning his little grin, which
says, like Nicky Black, “Who’s better than the kid?” The answer is that practically
everybody is, but in the kid’s own smug mind he dreams grandiose dreams. “There
is a world inside the world.” That leitmotif of a sentence shows up four or
five times scattered through the text. As if to say that our world is not real,
that there’s a world more real inside our world. And Lee’s.
THE MARINES
The kid has big plans. Like Nicky Black, his plan number one
involves quitting school at age sixteen. Which will assure that he has no
education and few chances to make a decent wage for the rest of his sorry life.
But the kid doesn’t care, for his dreams soar far above the pallid bourgeois
dream of gainful employment, home, hearth and family. Even before joining the
Marines at age seventeen Lee Oswald reads Marxist literature, fancies himself a
rebel socialist. While in the Marines, stationed at Atsugi, a U-2 base in
Japan, he preaches Communism to his fellow Marines, who call him Ozzie the
Rabbit and Oswaldovich. Note the casual disdain. Nobody ever takes this guy
seriously. “In Atsugi he went on a movie binge. He saw every movie twice,
keeping to himself, spent serious time at the base library, learning Russian
verbs.”
Given the complexities of the Russian verbal system, I’d
have loved to be there for that scene, observing the dyslexic Oswaldovich as he
struggled with the imperfective and perfective forms. Marine life is
oppressive, but so what? “Maybe what has to happen is that the individual must
allow himself to be swept along, must find himself in the stream of no-choice,
the single direction. This is what makes things inevitable. You use the
restrictions and penalties they invent to make yourself stronger. History means
to merge. The purpose of history is to climb out of your own skin. He knew what
Trotsky had written, that revolution leads us out of the dark night of the
isolated self.”
Lee never came out of the dark night of the isolated self,
nor, it appears, did he ever wish to. His narcissistic, sociopathic personality
had little need of his fellow man. Who’s better than the kid, heh? In Atsugi he
was a radar operator with a security clearance, which he lost when he violated
a rule about prohibition of personal firearms. He shot himself in the arm, with
the aim of averting a transfer, and ended up in the brig. Always scheming.
DeLillo invents the description of Lee’s time in the brig. I
don’t think anything here is based on actual fact, it’s all fiction, but Libra
is so written that you cannot always tell who the real characters
are—Marguerite Oswald, Jack Ruby, Guy Bannister, and so on—and who are the
totally fictitious—Nicholas Branch, Win Everette, T.J. Mackey. But then, when
DeLillo works his magic upon the person of a real character, he so thoroughly
delillocizes that character that he or she fits perfectly into what some critic
once called “the insidious and chronic disquiet” of the DeLillo fiction.
Bobby
Dupard, Lee’s cellmate in the brig and fellow native of Texas, is, I think,
totally made up. Later on, back in Texas, he helps Lee in his attempt to
assassinate right-wing general Edwin Walker. Walker was real, and so was
Oswald’s attempt to shoot him. Dupard is a fictional character, he wasn’t
“really” there, but the story makes sense the way it’s told. Much later in the
text Dupard’s violent end—he is shot and killed in a robbery—jibes with the
violent ends of so many others in the scenario, real and imagined.
Next comes an early discharge from the Marines, predicated
on false grounds—that Oswald had to go back home and help his poor mother. The
kid had no use for his mother, nor any desire to help her. He was already under
the sway of a new grandiose dream. He would defect to the Soviet Union and live
there in the magical world of ideal socialism. And that’s exactly what this
nineteen-year-old kid did, a person not totally ignorant, but not all that
smart either. At this point his life held, apparently, few prospects for future
success, but there was something there, not yet delved by history itself, but
it was there. And could be there are fiction writers out there who, unbeknown
to us, write us as we live our lives. One of these is the fictitious Win
Everette, a renegade CIA agent who is instrumental in fomenting a plot to
assassinate, or pretend to assassinate, President Kennedy.
“We lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters
in plots, without the compression and numinous sheen. Our lives, examined
carefully in all their affinities and links, abound with suggestive meaning,
with themes and involute turnings we have not allowed ourselves to see
completely. He [Everette] would show the secret symmetries in a nondescript
life” [Oswald’s life]. What’s going on here? Everette’s scheme to make up a
fitting background life for Lee Oswald, the man he will use as the patsy, to
take all the blame for the attempt on Kennedy’s life that Everette and other
renegade former CIA employees are planning. Meanwhile, another concocter of
fictions behind the scenes, Don DeLillo, adds “the compression and numinous
sheen,” reveals “the secret symmetries,” not only in the lives of Oswald and
Everette, but also in the lives of all the other fictional and semi-fictional
characters in the plot of Libra.
THE USSR: A MISFIT
ABROAD
October, 1959. Bright-eyed boy in never-never land, writing
in his “Historic Diary.” He can barely spell the words “and” or “the” right,
but does that mean he’s dumb? No, he’s dyslexic. “He could not clearly see the
picture that is called a word.” In Norman Mailer’s biography, Oswald’s Tale:
An American Mystery (1995), he re-spelled all the misspelled passages in
Oswald’s writings, and the boy came out looking not so ignorant at all.
In Moscow, out of the blue, Lee tells his Intourist guide
Rimma that he wants to stay in the Soviet Union, apply for Soviet citizenship.
She is flabbergasted. He meets with some official, tries to explain to him why
he wishes to remain in the glorious USSR, vanguard of the worldwide struggle of
the workers and peasants. After carefully checking that the door is closed,
that bureaucrat tells him in confidence: “USSR is great only in literature. Go
home, my friend, and take our good wishes with you.” For his twentieth
birthday, two days after his arrival, Rimma gives him a copy of Dostoevsky’s
novel, Идиот (The Idiot).
No way in hell Lee Oswald would ever read that novel in
Russian, no way he could read Dostoevsky, with his complex, jagged, nervous
style, with his nineteenth century literary vocabulary—not even after he had
lived in Minsk for two years and already spoke the language, at least at a
rudimentary level. No way. I see this gift as an inside joke on the part of the
KGB officers, who were giggling in the background of that scene—ha-ha, let’s
give the idiot a copy of The Idiot—the same men who, a mere four years
later, on November 22, 1963, after hearing news about the dull young American
they had once come across, sat in their offices at the Lubyanka, messing their
pants.
As if to prove his good intentions, Lee next goes to the
American embassy, where he does some very stupid and rash things. He renounces
his U.S. citizenship and hands over his American passport; he won’t need it any
more. Burning all the bridges to his past life. Except that, only a few years
later, when he changes his mind, he has to find a way to build those bridges back.
And that, once again, is a leitmotif in the confused life of Lee Harvey Oswald:
riding the subway train of random behavior, never deciding exactly what stop to
take, where to get off, or get back on, or who he wants to be or where he wants
to go.
From the “Historic Diary”: “I leave [American] Embassy,
elated at this showdown. I’m sure Russians will except [sic] me after this sign
of my faith in them.” Accept my life, accept my life, accept my life. Lee was
soon surprised to learn that nobody in the USSR was happy with his decision to
defect. Nobody. Most of the officials he dealt with wanted only to get rid of
him, this in line with the Russian propensity to avoid taking responsibility in
ticklish cases. “Does Mother Russia want this boy? He was useful as a radar
specialist at a U.S. base. What do we do with him here? Is it conceivable we
might send him to the building on Kutuzovsky Prospect, where he would be
trained, genuinely educated, in Marx and Lenin, microphotography and secret
writing, Russian and English, rebuilt so to speak, given a new identity, sent
back to the West as an illegal?”
No. Mother Russia does not want this boy. “This was not
agent material. You want self-command and mettle, a steadiness of will. This
boy played Ping-Pong in his head. But Alek [KGB guy] liked him and would
arrange something decent. Has to be far from Moscow. A place where there are no
foreign journalists, no chance to use him for propaganda. Give him a nice
apartment, a well-paying job, a sweet subsidy in the name of the Red Cross.”
So Lee was sent to Minsk, capital of Belarus. Not, however,
until he had cut his wrist in a real or fake suicide attempt and ended up in Moscow’s
Botkin Hospital. Libra makes much of the workings of coincidence, and
many people will never accept the coincidental deaths of so many persons on the
fringe of the events of the Kennedy assassination. But coincidence is
everywhere. Here’s the bodyguard Tony Astorina, speaking to the high-level
gangster Carmine Latta midway in the book: “Speaking of Cuba, a couple of weeks
ago I dream I’m swimming on the Capri roof with Jack Ruby. The next day I’m on
Bourbon Street, who do I fucking see? You talk about coincidence.”
Don DeLillo, coincidentally, lived only a few short blocks
from where Lee and Marguerite once lived in the Bronx. He quite likely passed
young Lee in the streets in those days; had they only known what was to come
they might have greeted one another.
In 1967-68, when I was a graduate student in Russian at
Tulane, I must have driven many times past the New Orleans apartment where Lee
once lived, on Magazine Street. I surely stepped on his former footprints along
Canal Street. During my first stay in the Soviet Union (summer of 1972), I
ended up, after a bout with dysentery, a patient in Botkin Hospital. Later, in
the late eighties and nineties, when running student study tours into the
Soviet Union for Miami University, I frequently had an overnight stay in
Helsinki, Finland, at the Klaus Kurki Hotel, the same hotel where Lee stayed in
1959, while awaiting a visa that would admit him to the USSR. Coincidence.
MINSK
So the KGB and all the bureaucrats in Moscow “footballed” (сфутболили) the kid, passed on
potential trouble to distant Minsk. Now, had Oswald been the type to satisfy
himself with the bourgeois dream—a nice place to live, a job, home and hearth,
marriage and children—Minsk was the best place imaginable for him. Back home in
the U.S. what were his prospects? Zilch. Not even a high school education, no
training for any kind of decent job, zero talent for making friends and
influencing people. What about women? He never had got anywhere with women in
his American years and not likely he ever would; for he had so little to offer.
But in Minsk they set him up with a job working at a factory
making radios. They provided him with a nice subsidy check every month and a nice
place to live. Of course, he did not want to work making radios, he slacked off
at his job, just as he would at every job he ever held. In the U.S. they would
fire him for his work ethic, but not in the Soviet Union. Then again, here, in
Russia, he was something special, a man from the Cinderella world of America,
so he did fine with women. After a very short courtship he ended up marrying a
local beauty, Marina Prusakova. The newlyweds did not get along, for who could
get along with his sociopathic personality? But, had they remained in Minsk, he
could have indulged himself in any number of extra-marital affairs. Who’s
better than the kid, heh? His apartment with balcony overlooking the Svisloch
River was nothing special by American standards, but by Soviet standards it was
way above average. As it turned out, this apartment was the nicest place the
kid ever lived in his short life.
But, notwithstanding the birth of his first child, June, the
kid was not one to let home and hearth interfere with his big plans. As usual,
he did not know exactly what those plans entailed, but, as usual again, he
assumed that he, loser Lee, was destined for some kind of greatness—staying
here in provincial Minsk was a dead end. So after two years in the Soviet Union
he managed to get his passport back and returned, with his wife and child, to
the U.S. He feared that maybe some consequences awaited him back home for his
disloyal behavior, but there were none.
Mother America re-embraced her prodigal
son. Maybe back here, at last, the man with no identity would finally discover
who he was. “That’s what they want, isn’t it, these people who live in corners
inside themselves, in blinds and hidey-holes? A second and safer identity.
Teach us how to live, they say, as someone else.” Is that what Lee Oswald
wanted? You might have asked him but you would receive no satisfactory answer,
for Lee did not really know what he wanted.
Newly arrived in Fort Worth, strolling one evening past a
department store, Marina and Lee, June in his arms, come upon a television set
in the show window, broadcasting live. “It was the world gone inside out. They
were gaping back at themselves from the TV screen.” Marina was astonished. “She
looked at Lee and June in the window, then turned to see them on the sidewalk.
She kept walking out of the picture and coming back. She was amazed every time
she saw herself return.” Lee’s reaction to seeing himself on TV is not
described, but quite possibly this is the one thing that he wants: to be both
on TV and not on TV at the same moment, and to be the director behind the
camera, setting up the action for The Life of Lee Oswald, Secret Agent.
Back at the time Oswald was planning to defect to the USSR
he heard rumors about a false defector program run by the Office of Naval
Intelligence. “The whole scheme was written with him in mind. He half expected
to be approached by Naval Intelligence. It was easy to believe they knew about
his pro-Soviet remarks and Russian-language newspaper. They’d train him
intensively. He’d be a real defector posing as a false defector posing as a
real defector. Ha ha.” But what he’d really be was what he always had been, all
his life, a loser/dreamer playing Cowboys and Indians in his own solipsistic
mind.
TEXAS, NEW ORLEANS:
THE MISFIT RETURNS, ENTERS INEVITABILITY
Black is white is black and left is right and right is left,
and neither are quite right, and some things are true, but some are truer than
true. That is a mélange of quotations from various passages in Libra. The
researcher Nicholas Branch thinks, “There is enough mystery in the facts as we
know them, enough of conspiracy, coincidence, loose ends, dead ends, multiple
interpretations. There is no need, he thinks, to invent the grand and masterful
scheme, the plot that reaches flawlessly in a dozen directions.”
The crackpot Guy Bannister, anti-Castro crusader, speaks
with T.J. Mackey, one of the fictional characters (renegade CIA) who is to
become instrumental in bringing about the assassination. “I believe deeply
there are forces in the air that compel men to act. Call it history or
necessity or anything you like. What do you sense in the air? That’s all I’m
saying, T-Jay. Is there something riding in the air that you feel on your body,
prickling your skin like warm sweat?”
The kid’s back home, where he runs into the inevitability of
the thing hanging somehow in the air; it’s a thing that has to be done. Here’s
Carmine Latta in conversation, the gangster who yearns to resume his Cuban
business dealings, just the way they were under Batista:
“The
President crossed the line when he put out word he wanted Castro dead. Let me
tell you something.”
“What?”
“I want to
tell you a little thing you should always remember. If somebody’s giving you
trouble, again, again, again, again, somebody with ambitions, somebody with a
greed for territory, the first thing you consider is go right to the top.”
“In other
words you take action at the highest level.”
“That’s
where they’re letting it get out of hand.”
“In other
words you bypass.”
“You clean
out the number one position.”
“In other
words you arrange it so there’s a new man at the top who gets the message and
makes a change in the policy.”
“You cut off
the head, the tail doesn’t wag.”
The primary contention in Libra about what “really”
happened in November of 1963 is that a lot of different men—former big players
in Batista's Cuba, Bay of Pigs veterans who hated Kennedy, former CIA operatives who
thought the President had to pay for cozying up to Castro, and others, perhaps
many others—were plotting all over the place, determined to kill John Kennedy.
By 1963 there was that inevitability in the air; one way or another Kennedy had
to die. That was among the things that were truer than true.
DeLillo goes to great effort to reinforce that sense of
inevitability throughout the novel, but I’m not convinced. Read the wonderful biography
of Huey P. Long by T. Harry Williams, read where the author describes another
sort of inevitability in the air of the 1930s; Huey Long had to die. Nobody
knew who would do it, but everyone assumed someone would. That I can believe;
not so much the same thing in 1963 with our President. At any rate, in the
fiction that we are reading the inevitability is paramount, and loser Lee
Oswald floats about in the atmosphere of that feeling, himself unaware of it.
Meanwhile a group of conspirators, the CIA renegades led by
Win Everette in Texas are grooming Lee for his patsy role, the kid who will
take the rap. The conspirators had first learned of the existence of this boy
defector now back in the U.S. from the improbable George de Mohrenschildt, another of the real
characters in the book who is more believable as a fictional character.
Mohrenschildt, a man with a highly checkered past, a speaker of Russian, had met Lee Oswald at a gathering of
Russian exiles in Texas.
Still ignorant of the conspiracy, Lee goes about
readjusting, in his own unique way, to living back home. He takes a series of
menial jobs, doesn’t do the work, loses the jobs. In January, 1963, he
mail-orders a snub-nose .38 pistol from a firm in LA; in March he sends away to
Chicago for an Italian carbine rifle with a sniper’s scope. Both weapons arrive
the same day.
Meanwhile, Win Everette is busily constructing a reliable past for his
patsy. “Through his contacts in Little Havana, Everett had planted a cryptic
news item in an exile magazine published in New Jersey. The story, from an
unnamed source, concerned an operation run in July, 1961 by the Office of Naval
Intelligence out of Guantánamo, the U.S. base near the eastern end of Cuba. The
story was fabricated but the plan itself was real, involving the assassination
of Fidel Castro and his brother Raul. This news item would be found among the
subject’s effects after the failed attempt on the life of the President.”
Note that Everette’s plan from the beginning was to shake
things up, to perpetrate a failed attempt on the life of Kennedy, but as
the plot burgeoned, then progressed, the word “failed” somehow was left out of
the equation. The thing of the inevitability proposed not a stray bullet, but a
fatal shot.
The conspirators plot on, but fate and coincidence are also
busily at work, and Everette soon becomes aware of a striking truth: “It was no
longer possible to hide from the fact that Lee Oswald existed independent of
the plot.” T.J. Mackey picks the lock at the apartment where Oswald lived
briefly in New Orleans, at 4907 Magazine Street, and “What Mackey learned about
him in a brief tour of his apartment made Everette feel displaced. It produced
a sensation of the eeriest panic, gave him a glimpse of the fiction he’d been
devising, a fiction living prematurely in the world.” In other words,
Everette’s fiction is anachronistic before he has completed it; Fate has
already concocted the necessary background detail.
Mackey discovers, among other things, Oswald’s
correspondence with the national director of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee,
the leaflets Oswald had been handing out on the streets (“Hands Off Cuba”), a
novel, The Idiot, in Russian (and most certainly still unread), several
fabricated documents—a draft card in the name of Lee H. Oswald and another in
the name of Alek James Hidell. The kid has been hard at work, playing Cowboys
and Indians.
There are the true things, and then there are the truer than
the true. “There is always another level, another secret, a way in which the
heart breeds a deception so mysterious and complex it can only be taken for a
deeper kind of truth.” What is a conspiracy? “If we are on the outside, we
assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with
unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It’s
the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us . . . . . .
But maybe not.” Nicholas Branch’s research has led him to conclude that “the
conspiracy against the President was a rambling affair that succeeded in the
short term due mainly to chance. Deft men and fools, ambivalence and fixed will
and what the weather was like.” Fate playing games, laughing in the process.
For a time the conspirators lose track of their patsy; he
has disappeared. Then suddenly the kid appears, of all places, at the offices
of Guy Bannister in New Orleans—U.S. headquarters for the anti-Castro
movement—where he, Oswald the Castro lover, asks for a job as some sort of
secret agent, claiming that he has experience in fabricating aliases. This, in
terms of verisimilitude, rivals, e.g., the story of how Elvis once dropped in
on President Nixon, all drugged up as usual and asking for a job as a narcotics
agent.
Still working free of charge and independently on the
fictional background that Everette wanted created for him, Lee takes a potshot
in April at General Edwin Walker, shoots through a window at his house and just
misses killing him. This is not DeLillo’s fiction, but almost certainly fact.
Above and beyond all idea of literary fiction, there is a story fabricating
itself here, a story full of coincidences too unbelievable to be used in
fiction. There are true stories, and then there are the truer than true.
NOVEMBER 22, 1963
Where were you? Here’s where I was. I was in the U.S. Army,
studying Russian at the Defense Language Institute, Monterey, California. On
that particular day they took us on buses into downtown Monterey, to the
Steinbeck Theater, where we watched a film of a Russian opera, Tchaikovsky’s Queen
of Spades. From the libretto: “At last, at last, Heaven has sent us a sunny
day, what air, what a sky! It could even be May, what delight it would be,
delight indeed, to spend our whole day here, we’ll not see another day like
this, no, no not for eons of time.” Our teachers, most of whom were old, who came
out of the First Emigration—right after the Russian Revolution and Civil
War—went with us to watch the opera. Seated beside me was one of them, Count
Leuchtenberg. I’ve already lent this scene, in a number of variants, to
characters in my fictions.
We watched the movie; nothing untoward was apparently in the
air. We watched them sing the opera. The movie ended, we got up to go, but then
the projectionist stuck a handwritten note in the lens and projected it onto
the screen: “President Kennedy felled by assassin’s bullet in Dallas.” That was
it; no details. We looked at each other, milled around; no one knew what to
say. Standing next to me, Count Leuchtenberg, like most of our teachers, had
little English. He asked me, in Russian, “What is this, what does it mean, this
word, ‘felled.’ I told him that the President apparently was shot, and he
‘fell.’ Was he dead or alive? I didn’t know. Nobody did.
They put us back in the buses posthaste and we returned to
the Presidio, which was then locked down, like military bases all over the U.S.
Nobody knew what to expect next; possibly a nuclear assault from the USSR. The
only television was in the orderly room, so we went there to watch. The
announcement came on: the President was dead. Not long after that a suspect was
in custody, and that suspect had a Russian wife. This news set off another of
our teachers, a bent old man who went by the sobriquet “Shaky Jake.” Stomping
around with his arms folded behind his back, Shaky went into a tirade in
Russian: “How dare they? How dare they? Just because he has a Russian wife they
say he shot the President. How dare they?”
Years later I learned that while he was living in Minsk
Oswald sometimes went to the opera. His favorite was Tchaikovsky’s Queen of
Spades. Coincidence. So that while we were in the Steinbeck Theater,
listening to the arias, he may well have been nervously humming one of them, as
he aimed his Italian carbine out the window of the Texas School Book Depository.
Here’s another coincidence, this one almost unbelievable. Ruth Paine, with whom
Marina was staying in Dallas, had mentioned that the chronically unemployed Lee
needed a job. A neighbor lady, Linnie Mae Randle, said that her brother worked
at a book warehouse in downtown Dallas. They may be hiring there.
So it turned out, they were. Going to extremes to make its garbled
plot work, defying all odds of probability, Sheer Fate got the kid employed in
the perfect spot, on the perfect floor of the building, just in time for the
President’s visit to Dallas. Did the CIA, or its renegade officers set him up
there? No. At the time he took that job nobody could possibly have known about
the motorcade route through downtown Dallas.
Coincidence? “Nicholas Branch has a roster of the dead. A
printout of the names of witnesses, informers, investigators, people linked to
Lee H. Oswald, people linked to Jack Ruby, all conveniently and suggestively
dead.” George de Mohrenschildt, David Ferrie, Guy Bannister, etc., etc. A lot
of them died violent deaths, but “In 1979 a House select committee determined
there was nothing statistically abnormal about the death rate of those who were
connected in some way to the events of November 22.” Want something for
comparison? Say you loved the film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” released
in the year 1975. How many of its cast members are still alive, and how many
dead? How many died violent deaths? There’s a site on the Internet where you
can check this out. Life is precarious.
The plot of Libra, as concerns the events of November
22, does not appear to differ that much from what “apparently” happened. The
kid shot three times (apparently), hitting Kennedy once in the neck, missing
him once but hitting the Texas governor, then blowing off the top of Kennedy’s head
with the third shot. In Libra Oswald hits Kennedy once, hits governor
Connelly, then misses his third shot. A Bay of Pigs veteran, the Cuban Raymo (a
fictitious character) takes the final shot from ambush, the head shot, makes
it, then escapes. In “reality” the kid goes back to his lodgings, gets his
thirty-eight, wanders randomly down the street (where did he think he was
going?), shoots a policeman who tries to question him.
That Oswald shot the
policeman Tibbett there seems to be no doubt. He did it. Then he ducks into a
movie theater. In the Libra plot the conspirators have told Lee to
reconnoiter with them in the theater. They will drive him to Galveston, where
he will meet up with David Ferrie, who will fly him out of the country. But
they have sent another loser/nonentity, Wayne Elko, to the theater to shoot
Oswald in the back on the head. Wayne has no time, however, to eliminate their
patsy, because the police arrive on the scene almost immediately and arrest
Oswald.
THE RHYTHMS OF
AMERICAN SPEECH
Libra could be read as a kind of guidebook on
American speech: here’s the way people talked, still talk, in American English.
DeLillo’s ear is perfectly tuned to pick up the jargon, and that adds to the
atmosphere of unreal reality that pervades the novel. Here is young Lee, moving
amidst the teenage world of the early fifties in the Bronx, hearing someone
say, “A two-tone Rocket Olds with wire wheels,” being hassled by Scalzo and
Nicky Black, two other losers and truants just like himself.
“But how
come you never talk to me, Tex?” [says Scalzo]
“Let’s hear
you drawl,” Nicky Black said.
“I say all
right.” [nonsense language, equivalent to something like “Hey bob-a-ree-bah”]
“Talk to
Richie. He’s talking nice.”
“But let’s
hear you drawl. No shit. I been looking forward.” [truncated sentences, typical
all thru Libra]
Scalzo and
Nicky Black were ten yards behind.
“Hey fruit.”
“He sucks
Clorets.”
“Bad-breath
kissing sweet in seconds.” [advertising slogans of the times]
“One and a
two.”
“I say all
right.”
“One two cha
cha cha.” [popular dances of the times]
“He don’t
know dick.”
“I mean look
out.”
“But how
come he won’t talk to me?”
“I say all
right.”
“But talk to
us.”
“We’re
talking bad or what?”
“But say
something.”
“Think fast,
Tex.” [followed immediately by a punch, or by throwing something at you]
“I say all
right.”
Here’s Jack Karlinsky, a lowlife mobster, persuading Jack
Ruby, one and the same type, to kill Oswald.
“Jack, I’m
sure you hear the same thing in the street I’ve been hearing for almost two
days. The man who kills that communist bastard is saving the city of Dallas
from world shame. This is what they’re saying in the streets.”
“What is
Carmine [Latta, high-level mobster involved obliquely in the assassination]
saying?”
“Good point.
Because here you have an ally. Here you have protection and support. Carmine
himself brought up the subject of the loan. I think you’ll be delighted with
the terms.”
“And for
this?”
“For this
you undertake to rid the city.”
“In other
words.”
“Jack,
you’re a floater all your life. This is a chance you put your fist around
something solid. You want to end your life selling potato peelers in Plano,
Texas? Build something. Make a name.”
“So what
you’re saying, Jack.”
“Take him
off the calendar.”
“Clip him.”
“Turn him
into a crowd,” Karlinsky said sadly.
Marguerite Oswald and Jack Ruby are perfectly rendered as
fictional personages in Libra. DeLillo’s portrayal of them must
certainly come close to how they really were, crackpots and nonentities, both of them. The
author achieves this perfection of characterization by perfect description of
their random, chaotic movement through life, and by showing us the haphazard, distorted
speech by which they express themselves. Here’s Jack Ruby in the midst of all
the chaos right after the assassination.
“A burly man moved through the crowd introducing out-of-town
reporters to Dallas cops. He handed out a brand-new card he’d printed for his
club. Who could it be but Jack Ruby? It was a card he was proud of, with a line
drawing of a champagne glass and a bare-ass girl in black stockings. It was a
come-on to the average patron, but with class. Nobody challenged Jack’s
presence in the assembly room. He had the ability to carry a domineering look
into a building. He was looking for a radio reporter named Joe Long because he
had a dozen corned-beef sandwiches in the car which he planned to take to the
crew at KLIF working into the night to report this frantic tale to the
unbelieving city . . . Jack was playing newsman and tipster tonight. He was in
complete charge of mentally reacting. He had a pencil and pad at the ready,
just in case he caught a remark he could give to NBC.”
Here is Marguerite Oswald, blathering her way along, to
anyone who will listen, in the final pages of the novel.
“I will time his movements on the fatal day. I will
interview every witness. I am not speaking just to be speaking [but she really
is]. I know as the accused mother I must have facts. Listen to me. Do you know
I took Russian classes at the library? I went and studied once a week on my one
day off, hoping in my heart that Lee would contact me someday, that I could
talk to Marina in a normal way. Listen to me. Listen. I cannot live on donation
dribs and drabs. Marina has a contract and a ghostwriter. She refused to wear
the shorts I bought. And this boy on a Sunday in Fort Worth was not packed to
go anywhere and the next day he was gone with his wife and baby to a job in
Dallas, overnight, without notice to his former employer or his mother. A job
in photography where the details are not known. You have to wonder. Who
arranged the life of Lee Harvey Oswald? It goes on and on and on. Lee had a
stamp collection. Lee swam at the Y. I used to see him on Ewing Street with his
hair all wet. Hurry home dear heart or you will catch your death. I am not letter-perfect
but I have managed, judge. I have worked in many homes for fine families. I
have seen a gentleman strike a wife in front of me. There is killing in fine
homes on occasion. This boy and his Russian wife did not have a telephone or
television in America. So that is another myth cut down. Listen to me.” And on
and on and on and on. American blather, nonstop.
NONENTITY PILED UPON
NONENTITY
The title of the book is Libra, because that is
Oswald’s astrological sign. There are several mentions of this in the book,
explaining why the title is suitable, but a better title might be American
Nonentity. The action describes how a concatenation of losers and nobodies,
led by one Super Nobody, come together, much aided and abetted by Fate, to kill
an American President. Of course, it’s so preposterous that it could not
possibly have happened this way: not the way it happens in Libra, and
not the way it happened in “reality.” It is as if playing in the background
score of the whole Libra libretto and the whole “real” events surrounding
November 22, 1963, were the nonsensical messages broadcast during the Bay of
Pigs invasion by Radio Swan, “located on a tiny guano island”—the gibberish
meant to discombobulate Castro’s armed forces: the boy is in the yellow
house, the one-eyed fish are biting this evening, and it’s a perfect day for
bananafish, or, to repeat the leitmotifs that show up all through Libra,
left is right and right is left, black is white is black, and some true things
are much, much truer than other true things, even if those true things are
true.
“Curtain rods found on shelf in garage of Ruth Paine.”
A metaphor for the whole random mess that is the plot of the book, for these
curtain rods are lonely. “There they are. The picture shows no more or less.
But Branch feels there is a loneliness, a strange desolation trapped there. Why
do these photographs have a power to disturb him, make him sad? Flat, pale,
washed in time, suspended outside the particularized gist of this or that era,
arguing nothing, clarifying nothing, lonely. Can a photograph be lonely?”
The bleak, blurred unreality of the colossal disarray revolving
around November 22, 1963. Does it come into focus with time? No. Watch Marina
Oswald in interviews, fifty years after the fact, still agonizing, still trying
to figure something out. Anything. That has an air of unreality. Watch
interviews with her grown daughters, June and Rachel. They are remarkably intelligent,
well-spoken young ladies. But when they begin talking about their father, some
of the gnawing sense of loneliness creeps back into their speech. June
complains, e.g., that she has no birth certificate. It was among the many items
confiscated as evidence after the assassination, and the government refuses to
return it to her. Imagine that lonely document, moldering somewhere in a
government file. Imagine what it looks like in its original Russian. Oswald
wanted to name her June Marina Oswald, but Russian tradition demands that the
middle name be based on the father’s name. It is called the patronymic, and if
you’re a Russian you’re not allowed not to have a patronymic. Even if you’re
born illegitimate, somehow a father has to be produced. June’s name on that
document would look very strange, almost eerie to a Russian: Июнь (or did they
transliterate the original from English: Джун?) Леевна Освальд (June
Leevna Oswald).
WHAT HAPPENED AND WHO
DUNNIT?
It’s fifty-seven years now, and we’ll never know how exactly
it played out. We can sift through all the “evidence,” study the doctored snapshot
that Marina took of armed vigilante Lee, holding his weapons, ever playing
Cowboys and Indians—wait, now they say the photo was not doctored—on the back
of which Marina wrote in Russian, “The Fascist hunter, ha, ha.” We can study
the dreams of eyewitnesses after the assassination and after the Jack Ruby
fiasco follow-up killing. We can ponder mad Ruby’s final days, when he believed
all his brothers and sisters would be killed on account of what he did, when he
imagined all the Jews of America were being put in kill machines, slaughtered
in enormous numbers, when he believed people distorted every word that came out
of his mouth, since “there is a process that takes place between the saying of
a word and when they pretend to hear it correctly but actually change it to
mean what they want.”
My own opinion, for what it’s worth. Oswald and Oswald
alone, loser Lee killed our President. There was no conspiracy, no one helped
him. And no one but voices in Ruby's own wacko brain put Jack Ruby up to killing
Oswald. But, you object, that’s simply not possible, such a nonentity, such a
vicious little nerd of a kid, no way he could do that all by himself. Nor could
Ruby, an armed man, be allowed so close to the proceedings on the day Oswald
was being moved. It simply lacks all verisimilitude.
Well, the fact is that God
loves humankind and usually takes good care of us, but once in a while He’s
tired, or in a bad mood, and He turns things over temporarily to his twin
brother, a jokey sort of guy with a loud irritating laugh. Just for the fun of
it that Evil Joker sets things up, working against all rules of logic and
probability, cackling his way through the plot. He’s the one responsible for
the coincidences, the totally impossible things that could not have happened
but did. You want somebody to blame for the Kennedy assassination? Blame God’s
nasty twin brother.
Maybe the best way to end this review is with a picture of
Shaky Jake, stalking about the orderly room at the Presidio of Monterey—long,
long dead now, Shaky, but this is his ghost we’re seeing, a spectre from out of
an incongruous past, truer than the truest true—hands behind his back, shaking even
more than usual, screaming out his plaint for all the world to hear, in Russian:
Как они смеют, как они смеют, How dare they?
