The Hue and Cry at Our House: A Year Remembered

by Benjamin Taylor

Overview

A memoir of one tumultuous year of boyhood in Fort Worth, Texas, opening with a handshake with JFK, and recalling the changes and revelations of the months that followed.
 
“A marvel of a book—elegant, touching, singular.” —Mary Karr

“Brief and moving . . . An elegantly written book, erudite, perceptive and at times painfully candid.”—Moira Hodgson, Wall Street Journal

A New York Times Editor's Choice
 
After John F. Kennedy’s speech in front of the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth on November 22, 1963, he was greeted by, among others, an 11-year-old Benjamin Taylor and his mother waiting to shake his hand. Only a few hours later, Taylor’s teacher called the class in from recess and, through tears, told them of the president’s assassination. From there Taylor traces a path through the next twelve months, recalling the tumult as he saw everything he had once considered stable begin to grow more complex. Looking back on the love and tension within his family, the childhood friendships that lasted and those that didn’t, his memories of summer camp and family trips, he reflects upon the outsized impact our larger American story had on his own.
 
Benjamin Taylor is one of the most talented writers working today. In lyrical, translucent prose, he thoughtfully extends the story of twelve months into the years before and after, painting a portrait of the artist not simply as a young man, but across his whole life. As he writes, “[A]ny twelve months could stand for the whole. Our years are so implicated in one another that the least important is important enough . . . Any year I chose would show the same mettle, the same frailties stamping me at eleven and twelve.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781524705299
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/23/2017
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	12 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt from the 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 im-portant 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 taci-turn, unempathic, all-knowing dead who sit together in rows. New to eternity and home-sick for life, she asks her mother-in-law, Mrs. Gibbs, whether she can go back to Grover's Corners 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.

Table of Contents

Preface xvii

Chapter 1 No Faint Hearts 1

Chapter 2 A Clean Burrow 19

Chapter 3 The Real Man, the Imagination 41

Chapter 4 Peru 59

Chapter 5 Forebears 89

Chapter 6 Natural Shocks 107

Chapter 7 Lake Effect 125

Chapter 8 No Jews, No Commies, No Fags Neither 141

Chapter 9 A Statute of Limitations 161

Editorial Reviews

Taylor's self-portrait of an odd, bewildered boy born into the frightening middle of the 20th century is touching, and a little shattering. Sometimes his prose can be fuzzily poetic, but more often it's precision-guided…Even though Benjamin's handshake with the president is only a moment in a time loop, The Hue and Cry at Our House adds something meaningful to the literature of the Kennedy assassination. Books like Dallas 1963…and Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy…have portrayed—not inaccurately—the witch's caldron of intolerance and hate speech that bubbled over in Texas during those years. But Taylor's memoir reminds us that Texas then, just like Texas now, was too big a state to paint one toxic shade of red…His brush with history has the breath of life.

The New York Times Book Review - Stephen Harrigan

03/13/2017
Taylor (Proust: The Search), a writing professor at Manhattan’s New School and Columbia University, recalls the eventful year that began with the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas. Detailed, clear-eyed memories pour forth onto the pages of this slender volume. At the time, Taylor was a frail sixth grader who had just received a cherished handshake from J.F.K. outside a Fort Worth hotel. That moment of grace was followed by the shocking news of his death, the body lying in state in the Capitol, the killing of his assassin, and the solemn state funeral. Wrapping himself in a cozy remembrance of his well-meaning parents and his doomed older brother, Tommy, Taylor is hardest on himself, a sly, asthmatic boy later diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. Historic and cultural incidents dot the crackling narrative, including the Beatles’ appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, the Clay vs. Liston fight, A-bomb shelters, civil rights protests, and the Patty Duke TV show. Taylor, a lyrical wordsmith, broadens the usual boundaries of memoir writing with his analysis of time and childhood: “What has happened cannot happen again.” In this skillful blend of dialogue between youth and maturity, Taylor sums up the value and quality of the years of his treasured past and unforgettable present, while stressing the sanctity of life. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"Taylor’s self-portrait of an odd, bewildered boy born into the frightening middle of the 20th century is touching, and a little shattering . . . His brush with history has the breath of life." — Stephen Harrigan, New York Times Book Review
 
"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    
 
“In this brief and moving memoir, Mr. Taylor chronicles the events of the following 12 months from the double viewpoint of a boy and of a middle-aged writer recollecting the past . . . Mr. Taylor writes bracingly of life in the early ’60s, a time at once light-hearted and filled with dread—of polio, race riots and Russian missiles . . . An elegantly written book, erudite, perceptive and at times painfully candid.” — Moira Hodgson, Wall Street Journal

"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 
 
"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 
 
"[A] witty, painful, uninhibited, compactly Proustian 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

"In pellucid prose, Benjamin Taylor unties the knots in the country’s psyche and more urgently in his own life growing up Jewish and gay in suburban Fort Worth. . . . In the end, we are aware that we have been reading an exquisite portrait of the artist as a young man, the developing consciousness of our narrator abundant recompense for the suffering engendered by the long-held secrets of his childhood."  — Prof. Jonathan Wilson, Tufts University
 
"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
 
"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 mesmerising memoir."  —Margot Livesey
 
"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 frail, mercurial boy's struggle to be himself." — Caleb Crain

"Short on length and long on power, this self-exposé has a haunting poetry" —Huffington Post

“Historic and cultural incidents dot the crackling narrative . . . Taylor, a lyrical wordsmith, broadens the usual boundaries of memoir writing with his analysis of time and childhood . . . In this skillful blend of dialogue between youth and maturity, Taylor sums up the value and quality of the years of his treasured past and unforgettable present, while stressing the sanctity of life.”
— Publishers Weekly
 
"Taylor is erudite, often eloquent, and eminently quotable...[A] sage memoir from an elegant writer." — Kirkus Reviews

"This is a marvelous memoir that will appeal to anyone who loves good stories and interesting lives." — Library Journal

From the Publisher

★ 04/15/2017
This wonderfully tangential memoir from nonfiction author (Proust: The Search), novelist (The Book of Getting Even), and writing professor (New School Graduate Sch. of Writing; Columbia Univ.) Taylor covers much more than a year in the author's life. We learn about his parents and grandparents, his upbringing in Forth Worth, TX, his undiagnosed Asperger's, his passion for literature, and that he shook John F. Kennedy's hand on the day the president was assassinated. Taylor seems incapable of sticking to one subject for long, and therefore, we reap the benefits. This slim memoir boggles the mind with so much life covered in so few words, teaching us much about our own lives in the process. VERDICT This marvelous memoir will appeal to anyone who loves good stories and interesting lives. (Memoir, 3/15/17; ow.ly/tdvI30a5BVh)—DS

Library Journal

2017-03-07
Taylor (Proust: The Search, 2015, etc.) leans on gay and Jewish perspectives to craft a memoir of 1963-1964, with the touchstones of his youth still resonating today.The author, who teaches at Columbia University and the New School's Graduate School, may be revered for his work, but this slender volume is somewhat less than the sum of its parts. "Trusting to what comes handiest," there is lovely, atmospheric writing and a deft interplay of his former and current selves. Taylor is erudite, often eloquent, and eminently quotable, though occasionally he exudes a whiff of the effete. Random recollections defy immediate connection, and though the author usually gets around to tying the thread, we are sometimes left wondering what the point may have been. He reveals a cozy childhood and valiant parents, wherein no familial scourge—alcoholism, madness, discord, abuse—found a purchase. Nor was money an issue for this largely secular Jewish family of Texas, not after his father made a killing in the market. Perhaps to a fault, Taylor celebrates the past. His mantra: memory clarifies while nostalgia obscures. But are not they forged of similar materials, and is memory not just as prone to gloss? It seems that what has departed from his life feels more substantial to him than what remains, that he is more active in memory than in life, and that he prefers the "sunlit, lavishly hospitable past" to a present that seems insubstantial. His successful life in letters and in academe would seem to belie this self-consciously literary wish to inhabit the past. In certain areas, the author is off the mark, not least in his too-narrow definition of what constituted "the Sixties" and in a cynical dismissal of "privileged" Vietnam War protestors. An occasionally problematic but mostly sage memoir from an elegant writer.

Kirkus Reviews