"Three Great Men Died On November 22, 1963: JFK, C.S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley"

by John Garth Nov 3, 2013 

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 strange and magnificent lives of C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley and the parallels between all three.

A gigantic shadow: The Kennedy assassination and the deaths it obscured

Do you remember what you were doing the day Aldous Huxley died? Or C.S. Lewis? You don’t think so? Well, the odds are that if you were old enough to be laying down memories at the time, you do. Because it was also the day President Kennedy was assassinated.

The indelible experience of hearing the news is captured well in the opening scene of Frederick Forsyth’s thriller The Odessa File, as the announcement interrupts a song in mid-bar on our German hero’s car radio.

‘Jesus,’ he breathed quietly, eased down on the brake pedal and swung into the right-hand side of the road. He glanced up. Right down the long, broad, straight highway through Altona towards the centre of Hamburg other drivers had heard the same broadcast and were pulling in to the side of the road as if driving and listening to the radio had suddenly become mutually exclusive, which in a way they had.

In this way the shots fired in Dallas echoed almost instantaneously around the world, and plunged uncountable numbers into shock, grief, fear for the future, and reflections on mortality. It was the day of St Cecelia, patron saint of music. Later American singer-songwriter Dion, and after him Marvin Gaye, hauntingly sang ‘Has anybody here seen my old friend John? Can you tell me where he’s gone?’—because John F. Kennedy’s assassination did touch many millions as if they had lost a friend.

But virtually no one on 22 November 1963 realised—and relatively few realise even now—that that day also saw the departure of the two other major figures, who were also world-shapers in their very different ways. The deaths of Lewis and Huxley were mute, private events, only reported in The Times three days later.

Death had moved remorselessly westward to claim his scalps. Lewis died first, in his brother’s arms, a few minutes after tumbling with a crash from his bed at the foot of the stairs at the Kilns, his house outside Oxford, at 5.30pm. He was just a week shy of 65. One hour later—12.30pm in Texas—the 46-year-old President was shot. At the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles, Huxley’s second wife Laura, leaving his bedside with his request for an LSD injection, found the doctor and nurses in shock watching the news of the assassination; Huxley died, aged 69, at 5.20pm local time, just under eight hours after Lewis.

Huxley was quietly cremated in Los Angeles on the Saturday and remembered by friends with a walk at Mulholland Drive on the Sunday. JFK lay in state in the White House and then the Capitol, where hundreds of thousands queued to pay their respects; and he was interred in Arlington Cemetery on the Monday in front of the representatives of 90 nations. With his assassination blurrily smeared onto Abraham Zapruder’s home movie, and photographers capturing his son John saluting the flag-draped casket that Monday (his third birthday), this was—to adapt the title of Lewis’s 1961 book—the most observed grief in history. Lewis himself was buried at Holy Trinity Church near his home on the Tuesday, but the hullabaloo over Kennedy’s death had prevented news of Lewis’s from reaching many friends, and it was a poorly attended funeral . His brother Warnie, apparently unable to face it, was elsewhere, blind drunk.

Alan: Here is the last paragraph:

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 expanded version of a piece that first appeared in Oxford Today, the official magazine of the University of Oxford.

Alan: The rest of this long article -- republished from Oxford Today -- is available at 
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/11/03/three-great-men-died-that-day-jfk-c-s-lewis-and-aldous-huxley.html

John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, with an ebook forthcoming. As a freelance journalist, John Garth has recently interviewed Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, British Turner Prize-winning artist Elizabeth Price, and Carnegie Medalist Alan Garner.