Look Homeward Angel, Once Again

Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise. Ay me! Whilst thee the shores and sounding seas Wash far away… –John Milton, Lycidas

Years ago, I attended an event at Hickory Hill, Robert F. Kennedy’s family home in Virginia. It was an award ceremony for a prize given by the family, and many of the family were present. After lunch, Ethel Kennedy rose to speak–something she rarely did–but her eye caught the sculpted head of her slain husband, which was the award, propped on the table. At that, she broke down in tears, but only for a moment. Seeing her falter, the entire family got up from their seats and rushed to surround her–Ted Kennedy, her children, cousins. They hugged her, and laughed and made cheerful sounds, like birds. Soon she was laughing too. It was as if the Kennedys have learned to function like a biological organism, have developed a collective reflex to deal with pain as best they can.

They will have use of that reflex now, and so will many others who hardly know them as individuals, yet oddly know them well because of their oversize presence in American life. When a Kennedy smiles, the country smiles back, whether it wants to or not. When a Kennedy dies, the country weeps, sometimes without being aware of it.

Comparisons of the fate of the family to Greek tragedy are commonplace, though the analogy comes just as close to the Romans. The Gracchi, two highborn brothers in the second century B.C. who scorned their fellow aristocrats and were elected tribunes to effect social good, were both assassinated. But when one thinks of the Kennedys, the Greeks come to mind–the Agamemnon family especially–because one feels that their disasters can only be the result of some terrible curse. It’s all nonsense and superstition, of course. But this is what happens when “frail thoughts dally with false surmise” about people and events too big to grasp. The Kennedys instill thoughts beyond reason in reasonable people.

Better, I think, to try to deal with the painful subject of the sudden end of a young, good, prominent life, and to attempt to know why it affects us so. This is what John Milton did with the death of a Cambridge schoolmate, Edward King, in his famous elegy, Lycidas. King (who also died at sea) was no Kennedy, but he was a handsome young cleric and a poet on the verge of a great career. Milton’s lament was for King in particular and for youth in general, cut off at a moment of high momentum.

It must have been tricky for John Kennedy Jr. to use the public life to his advantage. In Lycidas, Milton called fame “that last infirmity of Noble mind,” but for Kennedy fame was not a weakness; he never had a choice about it. His cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took a path away from politics too; he has exercised a gift for public duty in his work for the environment. George magazine was John’s way of getting to the public, which is what publishing means.

One sensed more about him than one knew, and what one sensed was all pretty good. He seemed to handle everything with a bouncy grace, including his share of mistakes. He didn’t look or sound like a Kennedy, and did not seem to have picked up the family gene for recklessness. In short, he was as much an emblem of the family as a member of it, and for the observing public, he was useful as a figure to dream into.

So, strange to say, has been his entire family, which, for all its calamities, has remained a family in the public view. Love or hate the Kennedys, there is no family in American history like them–not the Adamses, not the Roosevelts. They may lack the blue-blood lineage, but they have stuck together (even if the glue has sometimes been messy), have forged and sustained a civilization before our eyes. Kennedy was headed for a family wedding when he went down. When one of them goes, the ideal of family is at once injured and made intense, and, divorce statistics aside, America holds to that ideal.

The sense of loss for John Kennedy, too, like Milton’s sense of loss, is more abstract than personal, and yet is personally felt because it connects with our private hopes for bright young futures. Nothing is as attractive as the sight of young people flinging boisterously into life (see the American women’s soccer team), and the thrill comes as much from wishing them well as from anything of their own doing. Admirable young people speak for life itself, and when they stop suddenly, everything stops.

Not fair, not right, that’s what one thinks, as if one could comprehend a justice system of that magnitude. Milton dealt with his sorrow by projecting his young man into immortality. But he is more persuasive in the phrase “Look homeward Angel,” when he asks an angel to turn his pitying gaze on England. America, the country of young hopes, lost something of itself last weekend, and we will deal with it as best we can.