by Steve Almond
He knew that this girl, Mary, wanted only a taste of his wisdom, his famous wit. She had read his books and, like all his fans, she had come to love him as a father, someone who had seen the worst of human conduct and refused to lie about the sort of trouble we were in, but who had not allowed his doubt to curdle into cynicism, who, for all his dark prognostication, was a figure of tremendous hope. The evidence was in his books, which performed the greatest feat of alchemy known to man: the conversion of grief into laughter by means of courageous imagination. Like any decent parent, he had made the astonishing sorrow of the examined life bearable.
And this was what Mary wanted from him now: a little of his old magic. So did the rest of the folks sitting in the Bushnell Theater in downtown Hartford, not just the ones who stood and applauded when he was introduced, all us drooling acolytes, but the ones who regarded him merely as an eloquent grump, a fading prophet, an old man shouting the world off his porch.
And Vonnegut seemed to know it, too. He gazed out at the audience, not like his hero Twain, with his inexhaustible charms, his dazzling knack for the mot juste, but in the silent burden of our present condition. His image was magnified, eerily, on the video screen overhead. The camera shook for a moment. He looked stricken. I thought of that passage in Breakfast of Champions where, in exhaustion, he drops the fictional disguise altogether:
“This is a very bad book you’re writing,” I said to myself.
“I know,” I said.
“You’re afraid you’ll kill yourself the way your mother did,” I said.
“I know,” I said.
I thought of Vonnegut, a twenty-one-year-old private, returning to Indianapolis to bury his mother after she took her own life. And his imprisonment in Dresden, just a few months later, all that ashen death, the passing of his sister, the madness of his son, his own suicide attempt in the haunted year of 1984. The camera was still fixed on Vonnegut’s face, and it occurred to me, with great clarity, that he was going to die before he could say another word. He would simply and quietly sit back in his chair and perish. He was all done with the rescuing racket.
Instead, he gathered himself and smiled at all the nice strangers before him and said, with an almost girlish lilt, “Of course I’ll go to the prom with you, Mary. And I love to dance.” And though nobody quite realized it, including Vonnegut himself, he had, with those two fine sentences, answered both her questions.
THE CROWD RESPONSE to the panel was about what you’d expect. People thought it had been a good show. They liked the fighting. They liked gossiping afterward about the fighting. Simply put: They were Americans.
Catherine wanted me to come have a drink with a bunch of the money folks, but I had a long drive back to Boston. It was pouring, too, and neither of us had an umbrella, so we lingered in the lobby. The girl with the auburn hair was lingering, too. Her name was Susan. She was talking with the blonde who had utzed her to talk to Vonnegut. The blonde was indignant. She told us that she and Susan had paid a thousand dollars to attend the cocktail party and dinner. They had been promised a meeting with Vonnegut.
“They just did a group photo, but I wasn’t anywhere close to Kurt,” she said.
“I made sure to get myself right next to him,” Susan said. “I could see that’s all we were going to get.”
A thousand bucks for a few minutes of jittery small talk? It sounded like a Bush fundraiser.
But then Susan told a little story, in her soft Texan accent, that took a little of the edge off my gloom.
“I followed him, you know. Every time he went to have a cigarette. I just followed him and bummed a cigarette and we sat there talking. He was totally cool, too. Totally on top of it. They wouldn’t let us smoke inside and it was too cold outside, so you know what we did? We got in one of those things, those doors that spin around—”
“A revolving door?”
“Yeah. We got in one of the compartments and he pushed it around till there was just a crack. It was pretty warm in there and we could just blow the smoke outside.”
IT WAS A MISERABLE night for driving. The rain had dissolved into fog, which draped the bare winter trees; my head was still spinning. Focusing on that image—Vonnegut and pretty young Susan puffing away like a couple of truants—helped me feel a little less hopeless. This made no sense. Vonnegut has been killing himself for years, or trying to, with those unfiltered Pall Malls.
But something occurred to me as I sped through that dirty shroud of fog, something Vonnegut has been trying to explain to the rest of us for most of his life. And that is this: Despair is a form of hope. It is an acknowledgment of the distance between ourselves and our appointed happiness.
At certain moments, it is reason enough to live.
Part Two
If you really want to hurt your parents and you don’t have enough nerve to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.
It is an odd and disquieting experience to read the undergraduate thesis you wrote eighteen years ago, not unlike finding photographs of yourself dressed up as a member of Flock of Seagulls. (I am not suggesting here that I ever dressed up like a member of Flock of Seagulls; I am merely using what we in the lit business call an analogy.)
Nonetheless, I cannot proceed any further without some mention of the document. I have read it twice in the past week and am therefore ready to enumerate its major intellectual conclusions:
1. Kurt Vonnegut rules.
2. You should totally read his books.
3. I will never be an academic.
I WOULD ALSO LIKE to reassure those of you concerned that I may not have used the verb adumbrate frequently enough in my thesis. In fact, I found occasion to use the verb three times in the first thirty pages alone: “More fundamentally, I hope through this investigation to adumbrate Vonnegut’s unorthodox conception of author/text/reader relations.” My thesis is full of sentences like this.
ONE OF THE FUNNEST things about rereading the thesis is tallying up all the critics and authors I pretended to have read, but hadn’t. A partial list would include James Joyce, Stendhal, Cervantes, Twain, Leslie Fiedler, Ortega y Gasset,1 Northrop Frye, Rubin,2 and Wayne Booth.3
Whom, then, did I read?
I read Vonnegut. I read his novels. I read his stories. I read his essays. I read his interviews. I read his commencement speeches. Had his shopping lists been made available, I would have read those. I also quoted him at length. Approximately one-third of the thesis word count is Vonnegut. I did this mostly because I was, and remain, stupendously lazy. But it is also true (as I shrewdly noted back then) that Vonnegut has not attracted much formal criticism. The foremost commentator on Vonnegut is Vonnegut himself.
MY THESIS WAS not a total wash. It was merely a partial wash. But it also had what I believe the Chief Curator has referred to as “a certain plucky undergraduate charm.”
I was interested in the ways Vonnegut makes himself known in his fiction—writing prefaces to his novels, introducing himself as a character—and how these interventions affected what I called, rather grandly, “the fictional contract.”
My best crack at a summary of the thesis ran like so:
Many novelists and critics take as their credo the following sentence from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
“The artist, like the God of Creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”
My thesis might be thought of as an attempt to explore what happens when a writer steps forward and, in full view of the audience, bites his nails frantically.
I do not remember having read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and have grave doubts as to whether I ever did, but I do remember taking extraordinary pride in having come up with this last bit.
The thesis also included a term of my very own invention: realismo.4 Realismo, as I defined it, entailed “both the reality claims made by the author and their acceptance by the reader.” I am
sorry to inform you that this quite obviously brilliant formulation has not, as yet, found its place within the parlance of the lit crit crowd.
As if I even care.
AND WHILE WE’RE bashing those dweebs, let me mention, as a significant furthermore, that people read mostly for emotional reasons, not ideas. They seek a chance to experience the feelings inside themselves—lust, shame, agony—for which daily life offers no outlet. The more openly obsessed our narrator is, the better. (Consider Humbert and the thousand eyes wide open in his eyed blood.)
From this perspective, my thesis turns out to be perfectly fascinating, not for its facile notions about authorial presence, but for the moony allegiance it expresses toward Vonnegut. It was a love letter, for God’s sake!5 A chance for me to pronounce my adoration for Vonnegut, to defend his style, to advocate for him in what I took to be the court of academic opinion.
TWO DECADES LATER, I can see the thesis as something even more excruciatingly personal: an artistic prospectus. I was explaining to myself, often explicitly, the sort of writer I wished to become.
The main thing was that Vonnegut made an impact on readers. He wasn’t one of those recluses who hid behind coy fictional guises. Every sentence he wrote, every character, was stamped in his image. He came clean on the page as a guy losing his shit. Like in that famous opening chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, the image of Vonnegut lying in bed, sleepless, drunk-dialing his old war buddies and stinking of mustard gas and roses.
He was honest about why he wrote, too. He copped to that central (if rarely mentioned) impulse of the writing life: He wanted attention. He spoke bluntly, courageously, about prevailing injustices, not just on the page, but in public. He was funny, self-deprecating, easy to read, a (gasp) populist. He wanted to speak to everyone and he wanted everyone to shape the hell up. He hated rich people and warmongers and fanatics. He didn’t pretend not to care.
AND THAT’S NOT ALL.
Vonnegut was an atheist.
(So was I!)
Vonnegut was a Scorpio.
(So was I!)
Vonnegut was a youngest child.
(So was I!)
Vonnegut viewed film and television as enemies of human progress.
(So did I!)
Vonnegut hated literary critics.
(So did I!)
Vonnegut even seemed to intuit the emotional crises in my life: that I felt exiled by my family, simultaneously disgusted and humiliated by the world of men, desperate for human comfort. He spoke of loneliness constantly. He characterized writers as people “who feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.”
He was, to summarize, not just my role model, but my shrink.
I AM NOT SUGGESTING that I recognized my own motives in writing about Vonnegut. Of course I didn’t—I was a college student.
But it was more than that. I wasn’t a writer. I had no concept (aside from Vonnegut) of what a writer might be. I didn’t take a single creative writing class at Wesleyan. Instead, I became what one of my classmates called, not unkindly, a “campus cartoon character.” I undertook a variety of extracurricular activities. I edited the newspaper (so did Vonnegut!). I was a sports broadcaster for the college radio station.6 I was a resident adviser. I sang in a gospel choir. I raced around our lovely campus asking, with my every gesture and deed, the same question: What will the story of my life be?
I DON’T ESPECIALLY like thinking about my college years. They were a bleak era for me, and a bleak era for the country. Ronald Rea gan had just won his second term in a landslide, and the staggering cruelties advocated by what has come to be known as the conservative movement were very much in vogue. Greed was good, facts were stupid things, Jesus was in, personal sacrifice was out, the nation was beginning a long, slow decline into moral disassociation.
The details were straight out of a B movie. Astrologers were setting the agenda upstairs at the White House, while a gang of nutty neocons trashed the basement, running guns to Iran and funneling the cash to the death squads (the term “terrorists” was not yet in vogue) who opposed a legally elected government in Nicaragua.
I had no idea what to do about any of this. I felt guilty and pissed off all the time. I listened to “I Will Dare” by the Replacements 12,000 times. I took a class called Nuclear War. My final project was a newspaper report that detailed the destruction of my hometown by a hydrogen bomb.
BOOM.
THE VONNEGUT PASSAGE that haunted me throughout my college years is one of the few not quoted in my thesis. It comes from a curious little essay called “Biafra: A People Betrayed,” in his 1974 collection Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons. Vonnegut is reporting from the small African nation of Biafra, whose beleaguered citizens are bracing for a genocidal invasion by the Nigerian army.
He writes,
What did we eat in Biafra? As guests of the government, we had meat and yams and soups and fruit. It was embarrassing. Whenever we told a cadaverous beggar, “No chop,” it wasn’t really true. We had plenty of chop, but it was all in our bellies.
I had never read so ruthless and candid a summary of the relationship between the fed and starving of this world. Vonnegut was writing not only about injustice, but the peculiar American talent for self-deception (his own included), for espousing laudable beliefs just so long as you don’t have to live up to them.
TO UNDERSTAND WHY this passage hit me so hard will require some family background. My mother was born and raised in the Bronx. Her mother, Annie Rosenthal, was an elementary school teacher in Harlem. Her father, Irving, was an actuary. Both were members of the Communist Party. My grandmother was eventually asked to testify about her activities before the New York Board of Education. She took an early retirement instead. Secrecy and fear pervaded their apartment.
My own parents came of age during the 1960s. Both were early, vocal opponents of the war in Vietnam. My father helped undergraduates organize antiwar protests at Stanford, where he had taken a job on the faculty of the medical school. He was later arrested himself for taking part in a protest at a nearby air force base. His teaching contract was not renewed. What I am trying to convey here is that I am descended from people who suffered for their beliefs. I arrived at college eager to do the same thing.
BUT WESLEYAN WASN’T exactly what I was expecting. It was, to be ruthless and candid, the world capital of Entitled Sanctimony, the kind of place where students staged protests to demand divestment from South Africa, then headed over to the dining hall to stuff themselves full of ice cream, where the lower-class toughs who played hockey and joined frats were considered dangerous misogynists, where kids in carefully torn polo sweaters gathered to chant grave, humanist slogans, then dispersed to drop acid on Foss Hill, where noblesse oblige had mutated into a kind of desperate narcissistic accessory.
I did my best to fit in, to obey, for instance, the elaborate protocols surrounding gender and race nomenclature.7 But it was impossible to ignore certain facts, such as that most black students wanted nothing to do with white students, and that the residents of Middletown regarded the lot of us as spoiled brats. I spent a few winter afternoons camped on the corners of Main Street, handing out pamphlets on nuclear disarmament, which the locals accepted politely, then deposited in the nearest trash can.
It was also impossible to ignore the affluence of my classmates. They had new cars and elaborate stereo systems and Park Avenue apartments stuffed with high art. They spent vacations at beach houses and in tennis clubs, and their ease in these exotic precincts struck me hard; these were people born on the banks of what Vonnegut called the Money River.
I don’t mean to make my classmates sound like dolts. They were trying to care about the world, however indulgently. My scorn for them was an expression of my own guilt. I couldn’t shake the benighted notion that the best way to honor the family legacy was to suffer for my beliefs.
SO I WASHED DISHES in the cafeteria. I volunteered at a mental health facility. I endured the routine miseries of the
unpaid internship. And I read Vonnegut voraciously, through the long, muggy summer evenings, dripping sweat onto the pages of my yellowed paperbacks.
He was the one guy who cut through the bullshit. He understood that our essential crisis was not one of policy but morality, individual greed, inconsideration, suicidal self-regard. He was mad as hell, but—unlike my classmates—he found the absurd comedy within his fury. He didn’t write quiet little novels about bourgeois plight. He wrote about what we college students called, always with that frisson of knowing dread, the real world. In Vonnegut, I found a path back to the political ideals of my family.
But my Vonnegut mania was about more than politics. His books filled me with a terrible personal longing. I had grown up in a family beset by sorrow and had come to believe, unconsciously, that the world was a broader reflection of this sorrow, that it was my job to save the place, that only by banishing pain would my own joy become permissible. Vonnegut operated on the same absurd, sentimental assumptions. He regarded civilization as a failed family, curable only by the reestablishment of clans in which members felt duty-bound to love one another. Happy families. He wrote about them over and over. They became his utopia, then mine as well.
NOW COMES a difficult confession.
To this point, I have made myself sound every bit the loyal Vonnegut disciple. But by the middle of my senior year, I felt vaguely ashamed of my thesis, and specifically that it was about Vonnegut.
I had discovered Bellow by then; Henderson the Rain King had ripped my head off. In my upper-level classes, we were studying The Iliad and The Inferno and Lear. My classmates were using phrases like “transcendental signifier”—and they meant it. My pal Steve Metcalf was writing his thesis about Ulysses, which struck me as perhaps the most sophisticated thing one could do on earth, aside from being James Joyce himself.
I began telling people that my thesis was about authorial presence in the modern text, that it was about John Barth and Milan Kundera, though, in the end, I devoted five pages to these authors. I renounced Vonnegut. He became another childish pleasure I would now have to hide from the world. (Others included candy consumption, a weakness for prog rock, and a tendency to conduct imaginary discussions with my twin brother.)
