The Hue and Cry at Our House

by Benjamin Taylor

  PRAISE FOR

  The Hue and Cry at Our House: A Year Remembered

  “In this lyrical and brilliant memoir, Benjamin Taylor investigates his childhood with piercing clarity and unapologetic nostalgia. His insights are wise, his sense of humor always in evidence, and his yearning for lost time exquisitely palpable. Reading this book is like reading all of Proust in just under two hundred pages. It is an utterly enchanting little masterpiece.”

  —Andrew Solomon

  “A witty, painful, uninhibited memoir of, ostensibly, one year of childhood. Within his chosen focus, Taylor achieves a necessary feat of autobiography: The child who grew and the adult who more than remembers live together as one on the page. You encounter vitalistic youth; and sense there, also, the wing of mortality. Taylor’s Hue and Cry is a vast offer of thanks and glowing triumph, his masterpiece to date.”

  —Richard Howard

  “Benjamin Taylor enchanted readers by his Tales Out of School. He has done it again. The Hue and Cry at Our House, a short elegiac memoir that moves gracefully between the fateful year of President Kennedy’s assassination, when Taylor was eleven, and other moments of searing significance in Taylor’s life, is wondrously candid and deeply moving.”

  —Louis Begley

  “In his keen focus on the 1963 death of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Benjamin Taylor returns to the morning of the assassination in his hometown of Fort Worth when he had the dazzling experience, as a schoolboy, of shaking the hand of the President, his hero. This acute, intense memoir achieves the stature of national as well as personal elegy, a breathtaking accomplishment, classical and impassioned. It belongs to the best American literature of idealism and loss, a profoundly eloquent reading of our mid-century history and its heartbroken legacy to this day.”

  —Patricia Hampl

  “Benjamin Taylor’s memoir is an American classic but also a Proustian classic: exquisitely attuned to the nuances of adolescence, and to the experience of being an outsider in a world of conventional manners and expectations. It is rare, outside of Proust’s fiction, to find such fearless candor in a consummate prose stylist.”

  —Judith Thurman

  “What was it like to be a gifted, gay, upper-middle-class Jewish kid (with a touch of Asperger Syndrome) in 1964 Fort Worth, Texas? The answer is brilliantly explicated in Ben Taylor’s memoir, The Hue and Cry at Our House, which begins with the assassination of JFK (Taylor shook the President’s hand a few hours before Dealey Plaza) and gains momentum from there. That the author will grow up to be one of our most elegant, multifaceted writers is the final turn of the screw.”

  —Blake Bailey, author of Cheever: A Life and The Splendid Things We Planned

  “Reaching the last page of The Hue and Cry at Our House, I found myself marveling that such a slender volume could contain so much wisdom and emotion. Benjamin Taylor writes in beautiful, precise prose about his younger self and his older self, about his parents and his friends, about a life lived over time, and about all our lives lived over time. This is a mesmerizing memoir.”

  —Margot Livesey

  “Memory. History. Loss. Love. These are the themes of Ben Taylor’s haunting Hue and Cry at Our House. A beautiful book about finding meaning by sifting through the past.”

  —David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl and The 19th Wife

  “Taylor has painted a gem-like portrait, in delicate colors and with fine detail, of a childhood in genteel Fort Worth at the end of the Kennedy era, and has written an honest and moving account of a mercurial boy’s struggle to be himself.”

  —Caleb Crain

  PRAISE FOR

  Proust: The Search

  “A marvel of brief biography.”

  —Thomas Mallon, The New York Times Book Review

  “Those who found reading Proust too grand an undertaking over the years because of distractions and deficiencies of their own, might well rush to reconsider after confronting this dazzlingly elegant biography.”

  —Philip Roth

  “Taylor’s slim and elegant biography will bring new readers to Proust, and remind us to see him as truly modern.”

  —Ingrid Wassenaar, The Times Literary Supplement

  “Because Taylor has been willing to learn from Proust how to write his biography—be enjoyably clever but not too presumptuous—his book is unusually instructive about how we can read Proust. . . . Explains both formally and intimately, through straightforward documentary narrative and engaging interpretation, the facts and fictions of Proust’s extraordinarily improbable life.”

  —Adam Phillips, London Review of Books

  “Deeply researched, and immensely well considered, Benjamin Taylor’s own search is an outstanding addition to Proust studies.”

  —Robert McCrum, The Observer (London)

  PRAISE FOR

  Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay

  “Splendid.”

  —Stacy Schiff, author of Cleopatra: A Life

  “There is no more witty, worldly, cultivated, or amiably candid observer imaginable than Benjamin Taylor. This book belongs on the shelf of the very best literary travel guides.”

  —Phillip Lopate, author of Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan

  “Erudite and charming, Naples Declared is a remarkable book; it’s about place and history and survival; it’s fresh, it’s wise, and it’s not to be missed.”

  —Brenda Wineapple, author of White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson

  “From novelist/essayist/editor Taylor, an idiosyncratic, atmospheric portrait of ‘the great open-air theater of Europe.’ The author wears his formidable erudition lightly as he cites classical authors and twentieth-century travel writers with equal zest and acuity. Yet some of his most enjoyable pages are present-day encounters with a fervently communist doctor, with a chain-smoking student of Faulkner, and with novelist Shirley Hazzard, one of Naples’ many devoted longtime, part-time residents.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Taylor’s book, like his subject, Naples, is a lot of things at once; there are lengthy discussions of history, philosophy, religion, art, culture, literature, customs. The book meanders between past and present, wanders in stream-of-thought fashion through the Naples streets, delves deeply into the city’s stories, lives, and lore, and drops in for conversations with locals; it is an accurate representation of what travel is and what it means. Scholarly and insightful and balanced with wit and levity, [Naples Declared] is written with an effortless poeticism.”

  —Library Journal

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE HUE AND CRY AT OUR HOUSE

  Benjamin Taylor is the author of Proust: The Search, named a Best Book of 2016 by Thomas Mallon in The New York Times Book Review; Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay, named a Best Book of 2012 by Judith Thurman in The New Yorker; and of two award-winning novels, Tales Out of School and The Book of Getting Even. He edited Saul Bellow: Letters, named a Best Book of 2010 by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times and Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post, along with Bellow’s There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction. A faculty member in the New School’s Graduate School of Writing, Taylor also teaches in the Graduate Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia University. A past fellow and current trustee of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, he has also been elected president of the Edward F. Albee Foundation.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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ork 10014

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  Copyright © 2017 by Benjamin Taylor

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  “Island [1]” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor. Copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC and Harold Ober Associates Incorporated. All rights reserved.

  Excerpt from “The Ninth Elegy” from Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell. Translation copyright © 1982 by Stephen Mitchell. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS:

  Here: The University of Texas at Arlington Library Special Collections, here: Courtesy, Beth-El Congregation Archives, Fort Worth, Other photographs courtesy of the author

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Taylor, Benjamin, 1952– author.

  Title: The hue and cry at our house : a year remembered / Benjamin Taylor.

  Description: New York : Penguin books, [2017] |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016054540 (print) | LCCN 2016049441 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524705299 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143131649 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Taylor, Benjamin, 1952– | Authors, American—20th century—Biography.

  Classification: LCC PS3570.A92714 (print) | LCC PS3570.A92714 Z46 2017 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016049441

  Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  Cover design: Nayon Cho

  Cover photograph: Courtesy of the author

  Version_1

  For you, P.

  We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.

  —MARY MCCARTHY

  CONTENTS

  Praise for Benjamin Taylor

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  CHAPTER One

  No Faint Hearts

  CHAPTER Two

  A Clean Burrow

  CHAPTER Three

  The Real Man, the Imagination

  CHAPTER Four

  Peru

  CHAPTER Five

  Forebears

  CHAPTER Six

  Natural Shocks

  CHAPTER Seven

  Lake Effect

  CHAPTER Eight

  No Jews, No Commies, No Fags Neither

  CHAPTER Nine

  A Statute of Limitations

  PREFACE

  One year suffices. I’ve tried to wrest from the stream of time what happened to the Taylors and the nation between November 1963 and November 1964. But any twelve months could stand for the whole. Our years are so implicated in one another that the least important is important enough. In act three of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Emily Webb Gibbs has died and been brought to the Grover’s Corners burial ground, joining the taciturn, unempathic, all-knowing dead who sit together in rows. New to eternity and homesick for life, she asks her mother-in-law, Mrs. Gibbs, whether she can go back and relive one day. “Choose an unimportant day,” says Mother Gibbs, who thinks the whole idea unwise. “It will be important enough.” Emily chooses February 11, 1899, a bitter-cold Tuesday: her twelfth birthday.

  The four of us, autumn, 1952.

  “Do you want any special time of day?” asks the Stage Manager. “Oh, I want the whole day!” Emily says.

  Standing invisibly in the family kitchen, watching her parents at their morning routines, she cannot look hard enough, since in a single day are all the days. How unbearably beautiful Mama and Papa are. And how oblivious, whereas their omniscient daughter sees the whole future—in which they’ll lose their son, Wally, whose appendix is going to burst on a camping trip to Crawford Notch, and lose Emily when she dies giving birth to a second child. Life is poised to strip the Webbs clean. “Just for a moment we’re all together,” Emily says, “just for a moment let’s be happy,” though of course her parents, busy with breakfast, don’t hear.

  “Take me back—up the hill—to my grave,” she says sadly to the Stage Manager, then asks him if the living ever comprehend life while they’re living it.

  “No—Saints and poets, maybe—they do some.”

  An unsanctified, unpoetical life like mine is lived in the blind alleys, makeshifts, work-arounds, long cuts, fool’s errands—all the unforeseeables of a decent run. But you get one temperament only and it ramifies through all the decades. Any year I chose would show the same mettle, the same frailties stamping me at eleven and twelve.

  In front of the Hotel Texas, Fort Worth, November 22, 1963, 8:30 A.M.

  | CHAPTER ONE |

  NO FAINT HEARTS

  He shook my hand! This hand!” I announced, holding it aloft as I reeled into class. With the tiniest of smiles Mrs. Westbrook directed me to my seat. The Phoenicians were under discussion. She’d written “Byblos” and “Tyre” on the chalkboard. “Prior to the high civilization of the Greeks, boys and girls, prior to the triumphs of Rome, there flourished a maritime people situated here,” and she yanked down the map and took up her pointer to indicate the eastern Mediterranean. “Phoenicia gave us”—she paused pedagogically—“the alphabet. But history isn’t only what happened long ago. It can be shaking a President’s hand this morning.” And saying so she smiled with all her teeth, at me.

  On this Friday as on every other, our principal, Mr. Singleton, came onto the public-address system to say, “Teachers, the ghost is walking,” a deep mystery until Mrs. Westbrook explained that it was code for “Your paychecks have arrived.” But this was Friday, November 22, 1963, and it was history that was walking. In preparation for the big day of President Kennedy’s visit to Fort Worth, we’d memorized the names of all thirty-four of his predecessors, pictures of whom ran around the space above the chalkboard. Those pesky ones between Jackson and Lincoln gave me trouble, as did those between Lincoln and TR.

  Lincoln was Mrs. Westbrook’s passion. She’d rounded off our presidential unit with a reading of “O Captain! My Captain!” About most of these flabby-faced monuments we were left to draw our own conclusions. Warren Harding resembled Dr. Schwarz, my pediatrician. William McKinley was the guy behind the counter of the hardware store. In his vest with white piping, Woodrow Wilson had an undertaker look. William Howard Taft, the only smiler, appeared as rotund and crinkly-eyed and fake-jovial as poor Uncle Isadore, destined for a bad end. (About Isadore Wolchansky, unaffectionately called “Walnuts” at our house, more later.) I spotted James Buchanan as one who cracks a silly joke while slipping a hand down your pants.

  Thelma Westbrook wielded her opinions unanswerably. If she said “O Captain! My Captain!” was the greatest poem, that was that. Around her were arcana I hadn’t the temerity to look into: What did Mr. Westbrook do? Did they have children? What street did they live on? It would have seemed a profanation to wonder about her life apart from us. Did she sleep in her socks? We could as soon picture the goddess Minerva cooking breakfast as Mrs. Westb
rook.

  Life had never been better than on that Friday morning. Fort Worth was the center of the universe and I was in the best sixth-grade class of Westcliff Elementary, where the Westbrook ruled and I was her darling. “One of your mothers tells me that her child sheds tears over his homework!” she’d announced earlier that autumn, a reproach to the sluggards among us. Treasonable of Mom to have revealed that and I told her so. Tears over what? I try now to recall. Surely not Phoenicia or Walt Whitman. Math, no doubt, and the child was father to the man: I count on my fingers to this day.

  A repellently good boy like most of my kind, Jewish and going-to-be-homosexual, I seemed all the more so by comparison with Floyd Hickey, for instance, who liked opening his fly to show girls the goods—for which outrage he’d been not just spanked but beaten by the ordinarily lenient Mr. Singleton. It hadn’t worked. Back in class next day Floyd sat there smiling in bitter triumph. A tough kid, surely now in prison or dead. And I was his opposite, high-minded and with the testimony of tears over homework to prove it.

  It was unusual for me to be late to class, even when coping with asthma, as I usually was. (Thirty minutes on the nebulizer before school were routine.) But that morning had been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, countenanced beforehand by Mrs. Westbrook: I’d been to the rally in front of the Hotel Texas. Mom woke me before dawn and we dressed and ate a hasty breakfast. We were determined to go despite heavy rain. The event exists on audiotape and in still shots. I remember an elderly lady beside me with a homemade placard: KENNEDY 1964! GOLDWATER 1864! This made me crumple up with laughter. Less friendly homemade placards would greet the President later that morning. At the Dallas airport one of them read VOTE RIGHT! VOTE WHITE! ANYONE BUT THE NAACP’S KENNEDY!

  Many of the ladies out front of the Hotel Texas have on rain bonnets, but the umbrellas are mostly down. The foul weather of earlier that morning has let up. “There are no faint hearts in Fort Worth!” John F. Kennedy declares to us from a platform mounted on a truck. He sounds like nobody we’ve heard before: the domed vowels, the rapid stately cadences, the victorious hammering home of point after point. He isn’t Ike. As the drizzle tapers he says: “What we’re trying to do in this country and what we’re trying to do around the world is, I believe, quite simple, and that is to build a military structure which will defend the vital interests of the United States. And in that great cause, as it did in World War Two, as it did in developing the best bomber system in the world, the B-58, and as it will now do in developing the best fighter system in the world, the TFX, Fort Worth will play its proper part!” Mad cheering from us. He comes down from the platform to shake our outstretched hands. A file photo from that moment captures Mom looking very happy under her rain bonnet. Indeed, almost every face in the interracial throng is happy. It seems that the President is looking right at my mother. (Taking a fancy to her? I like to think so.) Directly in front of Mom, there I am—obscured by the head of a Secret Service agent but recognizable by my meticulously parted hair.