DeLillo’s Novel Look at Oswald: Rescuing History From Confusion

People often tell Don DeLillo that “Libra,” his ninth and most recent novel, is upsetting. It is difficult to read even a fictionalized account of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, they say. It is troubling to relive those terrible seven seconds in Dallas.

But it is DeLillo’s “conceit,” he responds, that as a novelist he can offer a certain consolation to history’s disturbing truths.

“Fiction is one of the consolation prizes we receive for having endured the rigors of living in the world,” DeLillo said.

Filling in the Blanks

Fiction, DeLillo said, can “fill in the blank spaces” of history. “There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can’t experience in real life,” he said.

“So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion.”

Nevertheless, it was as a nonfiction work, an article for Rolling Stone in 1983, the 20th anniversary of the J.F.K. assassination, that “Libra” had its genesis.

“That was when I began to realize how far-reaching the material was, and how I would have to search before I could do justice to it--justice in this case being a novel.”

So DeLillo, a compact man with intense brown eyes and the curious nervous gesture of licking his lips between phrases, took on the formidable task of reading the U.S. Government Printing Office’s 26-volume version of the Warren Commission Report. From this endeavor came the character Nicholas Branch, one of the more appealing of the 125 real and invented people in “Libra” (Viking). Branch, a clear DeLillo alter ego, is writing a history of the Kennedy assassination.

“But the data is so massive. He feels the past changing as he writes,” DeLillo said. “He despairs of ever being able to finish a definitive account of these events.”

It was the event of the assassination and its effect on the American consciousness that DeLillo sought to explore. Like most Americans 30 and older, DeLillo, 51, remembers exactly where he was and what he was doing (eating lunch with two friends in a restaurant on the Westside of Manhattan) when he heard that Kennedy had been shot on Nov. 22, 1963. Direct or indirect references to the assassination appear in three or four of his novels, DeLillo said, including, as a friend recently reminded him, in the last paragraph of his first book, “Americana.”

Slipped His Mind

“I had completely forgotten about that,” DeLillo said. “Obviously it had been in my mind a long time.”

DeLillo goes so far as to term the Kennedy assassination “the turning point in consciousness” for contemporary Americans. “I think we have been suspicious ever since,” he said.

“The assassination sends out tributaries in so many different directions,” DeLillo said. In treating the material through fiction, “I wanted to convey not only what happened in the months and years before, but how we have interpreted it almost unwittingly. I think in the past 25 years we have seemed to have entered the world of randomness and ambiguity.” Nicholas Branch, DeLillo said, refers to this phenomenon as “disaster in the heartland of the real.”

With disagreement on the number of shots, the number of gunmen, the presence or absence of a grand conspiracy or conspiracies, the unanswered questions that linger, “I think we lost confidence in government institutions, but also, for those of us who have studied the data that has flowed from the assassination, I think some of us have been forced to question the grip we have on reality.” DeLillo licked his lips. “Why is it so hard to learn what happened?” he asked.

“Beyond this confusion of data, I think there is a sense we have developed of the secret manipulation of history.”

Though Lee Harvey Oswald became the central focus of the novel, DeLillo said there was no “moral coin” to this starring role, no attempt to aggrandize Oswald.

“What you have read is the fullest portrait I could manage of Lee Oswald. I don’t set out to make characters sympathetic or unsympathetic. I think those qualities ought to pass directly from character to reader.”

The Oswald DeLillo came to know and depict was “duplicitous, self-pitying, paranoid and violent. . . . He beat his wife and he tried to kill two public figures (Gen. Edwin Walker and Kennedy).

“I think people also understand that he was almost systematically battered as he tried to make his way in the world. Most of that battering is simply due to the way our society is set up.”

Classic Outsider

Oswald, DeLillo said, was “the classic outsider. But he tried to struggle against the odds, and I think this ultimately produced a greater rage and a greater frustration.”

His anger was complicated by “a political vision most people in his economic position do not hold,” DeLillo said. “It led him to do a startling thing: He defected to the Soviet Union.”

In turn this act produced still greater disappointments, whose consequences “led him into graver trouble, a kind of psychic dead end.”

The decision to shoot at Kennedy put Oswald “outside history,” DeLillo said, stemming as it did from forces that one character in the novel describes as “dreams, intuitions, coincidences,” even, DeLillo added, “the force exerted by the alignment of the stars.”

DeLillo puts no credence in astrology. But this odd cosmic force of history prompted him to name the novel “Libra” after Oswald’s astrological sign.

“In this second sense, this nonhistoric sense, I think Oswald anticipates more recent potential assassins, like John Hinckley or Arthur Bremer,” DeLillo said. These men who shot respectively at President Reagan and Alabama Gov. George Wallace “seem to be acting out of a backdrop of dreams, and indeed even convenience,” DeLillo said. It is as if, “if he is there, I will shoot him.”

Even as he worries about the ambiguity of modern history, DeLillo is enormously reticent about his own past. By all accounts, he does not make television appearances, give lectures, participate in promotional campaigns, or otherwise plug his books. Only with reluctance does he grant interviews.

The author, who grew up in the Bronx and attended Fordham University in the late 1950s, first attracted critical attention in the early ‘70s when he published two novels about games: “End Zone,” which parlayed football into a metaphor for thermonuclear war, and “Ratner’s Star,” a surrealistic science-fiction novel. Although his early books made DeLillo a critical favorite, he significantly enlarged his audience with publication of “White Noise,” his eighth novel, about technology and death, which won a 1985 American Book Award in fiction.

DeLillo began “Libra” with no preconceptions about his story, he said. Certainly he knew the President had been shot. But “I didn’t even know whether there was a conspiracy,” he said. “I didn’t know that Oswald would be accompanied by another gunman necessarily. My only goal was to get as close to the real Oswald as I possibly could.”

DeLillo did visit Dallas and New Orleans, cities where Oswald had lived. But he interviewed no one in connection with “Libra,” reasoning, “I didn’t want to inhibit myself. My first sense of what I had to do was based solely on the fact that I was writing a piece of fiction. I knew the themes would present themselves to me.”

A Firm Belief

This confidence derives from DeLillo’s firm belief that “to me, writing is thinking.” When he sets out on a novel, “I don’t really know what I am going to think about a character until I begin to create them.”

In the case of Oswald, “No, I didn’t like him, but I understood him” DeLillo said. “For me, that was the beginning of creating a complete character.

“I felt my way into his mind, page by page,” he said. “I even developed particular kinds of prose which I took to be a reflection of Oswald’s own sensibilities.” The Oswald cadence, he said, was “a kind of abrupt, broken rhythm.”

Researching his character, DeLillo learned that during his early teens, Oswald had spent about a year and a half in the Bronx. At the time, DeLillo lived just six or seven blocks away. They never knew one another; so far as DeLillo knows he never laid eyes on Oswald. But “when I discovered this, it gave me a particularized impetus,” he said.

The genre, this facto-fiction, blends real people like Oswald and the bizarre secret agent David Ferrie with make-believe characters like Nicholas Branch. It invents conversation based on actual events. It surmises motives and suggests nuances.

To that extent, it seems as much a historical novel as any tale of palace intrigue in, say, the Middle Ages.

But this categorization makes DeLillo uncomfortable. “There is something about the phrase historical novel that makes me think of crinoline skirts,” not, presumably, pillbox hats or Schiaparelli pink suits.

“I call it a novel,” he said. “It is simply a novel as far as I am concerned.”

DeLillo bristles also when asked if the book in any way exploits this national tragedy. It arrives, after all, on the eve of the 25th anniversary of Kennedy’s slaying, one of at least two dozen books this year to address the subject.

“Viking made it a point not to publish in November,” DeLillo said, licking his lips. “I finished the book last November, and none of us wanted it published this November. If they had wanted to capitalize on it, they would have waited until November.”

Finally, the book did provide DeLillo with the consolation he believes fiction can bring.

“It is not that I feel I know what happened,” he said. “I don’t, any more than anyone else does.

“But the long labor has at least helped me understand many of the major characters in the story.”

Yet “Libra,” DeLillo said, remains “the most haunting book I have ever written.” He may feel a new compassion for the characters, real and imagined. “But I can’t say that it has put my mind to rest,” DeLillo said.