Intimations of Mortality

THE MAN WHO KNEW KENNEDY by Vance Bourjaily. 312 pages. Dial. $5.95.

"For a couple of years before and after the assassination of John F. Kennedy," recalls Novelist Vance Bourjaily, "you'd find yourself talking with someone who had served with him in the war, who'd shaken his hand or been acquainted with some member of his family." A generation felt that it knew J.F.K.--or in a special sort of way understood him. "It must have been partly because of this personal feeling," says Bourjaily, "that the assassination hit us like a death in the family."

Amid the flood of nonfiction about the Kennedy era and its end, Bourjaily's new novel is the first effort to capture its impact in fiction. His book emerges as a civilized and affecting account of how the generation closest to Kennedy in age and aspirations took his death.

Retreat Home. Bourjaily describes the assassination's effect chiefly on two men. One actually knew Kennedy. Dave Doremus not only sailed against Jack as a boy, but he also shared a ward with him in a naval hospital. The other, Barney James, is Doremus' lifelong friend. The story begins when Bourjaily's characters hear of the assassination. Barney and his wife are about to sail on a cruise with Dave and Dave's new wife when the "news from the southwest" reaches them. An instinctual fear that "something is moving around out there in the night" sends Barney James retreating to Connecticut and his children.

The novel's title is an allusion to Sinclair Lewis' The Man Who Knew Coolidge,* which Barney read at 14. At 40, he now admits that "nothing stayed with me but the title." And James quickly makes clear that he is no Lewis-style caricature of a Babbitt businessman. As the head of a New England wood-products factory, he has a fierce and principled pride in the quality of what he makes and in the dignity of the men who work for him. His resources as a human being are as varied as the generation he and his friend Dave represent. In fact, there are times when he seems a little too good, too rounded to be true: he is an athlete, a flyer, loves music, systematically rereads Shakespeare, and does his own household carpentry.

Barney James is, in sum, a man well worth knowing, and he establishes an instant, easy rapport with his audience. Through Barney's memories--the flashbacks are as elegantly managed as anything since James Gould Cozzens' By Love Possessed--the reader comes to know Dave Doremus, the man who knew Kennedy.

Wings Cigarettes. Though Doremus has something of Kennedy's style and personal charm, in the six months following the assassination he comes to ruin in marriage, in business, and finally in life. In the end he commits suicide, having expended his gifts unwisely, particularly his second wife, a mentally unstable and drug-ridden singer. Though Kennedy's fate and Doremus' have far different origins, the twice-bereaved Barney finds a bleak common moral: "Every man, even the most blessed, needs a little more than average luck to survive this world."

This fifth novel of Bourjaily's says more than that. It is an evocation of the memories of a whole generation, from the 100 Wings cigarettes of the Depression to the melodies of forgotten songs and long-silenced dance bands. The author's dialogue rings as accurately as John O'Hara's, and the New England pride of place and family are handled with the sureness of J. P. Marquand. The rhythm of the seas moves through the novel's pages, from an idyllic postwar voyage down the New England coast to the final, brilliant set piece, a Caribbean cruise over which Dave's doom gathers like a rifle slowly being sighted down a sunny avenue. A misty morning approach to Columbus' landfall on San Salvador provides the symbol of all that was thought possible, the poignancy of all that was believed lost, by the generation that knew Kennedy.

* One of the poorest of Sinclair Lewis' Midwestern novels, written in the late 1920s. Its businessman anti-hero is Lowell Schmaltz, who lives in Zenith, admires George Babbitt, and delivers endless monologues on Calvin Coolidge, cafeterias, motor trips, radio, etc. Coolidge sample: "Maybe he isn't what my daughter would call so 'Ritzy' ... he may not shoot off a lot of fireworks, but you know what he is? He's SAFE."

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