(Not that You Asked)
Page 4
THE VONNEGUT APOSTASY.
It happens to thousands of readers every year. They reach a point in their lives where they turn away from Vonnegut, toward authors who offer a greater complexity of prose, a more nuanced version of the world, whose authorial mission entails an examination of individual consciousness rather than collective fate. I would wager that Vonnegut is the least acknowledged influence in modern letters.
In my case, I should admit that vanity, not boredom, was the culprit. I felt that my worship of Vonnegut marked me as somehow lacking in depth, which, as an English major at an elite liberal arts college, was the one thing I wanted to project. Copping to Vonnegut made me feel like a dork.
The feeling has lasted a long time.
I am still embarrassed to admit how much Vonnegut meant to me. When I am asked to name favorite books or authors, I gravitate toward the ones that look the most respectable on paper, and leave Vonnegut off the list.
But it’s more than embarrassment, I think. It has something to do with the way artists absorb influence. They tend to focus on those figures whom they discover later in life, when they have some coherent self-concept and the vocabulary to articulate the conscious facets of their admiration. It was easy enough for me to identify Bellow as an inspiration because I read him thinking: This man is my inspiration! Vonnegut got into the groundwater before my ambition took root.
In this sense, as I’ve suggested, he was more like a parent. And what was the reward for all his hard work? He got taken for granted.
VONNEGUT’S BOOKS remain critically underappreciated. But I don’t really give a shit about critical appreciation. As a measure of cultural influence, it turns out to matter a lot less than an expensive hairstyle. The real issue here isn’t his role as an author, but as a prophet.
I’m in no position to lecture anyone on biblical matters, as I find the Holy Books to be wishful poetry for the most part. But I do know the basic plot of the prophetic books: Prophet warns people to shape up. People don’t listen. Prophet winds up howling in hole. This is the plot of Vonnegut’s life.
People may regard him as a literary legend and all the rest of that glitzy stuff, but nobody with any sort of power has heeded his call.
One wonders now where our leaders got the idea that mass torture would work to our advantage in Indochina. It never worked anywhere else. They got the idea from childish fiction, I think, and from a childish awe of terror.
Vonnegut wrote this thirty-five years ago.
LET ME OFFER one more Vonnugget before I move on to the literary excavation that closes this wobbly triptych:
I now believe that the only way in which Americans can rise above their ordinariness, can mature sufficiently to rescue themselves and to help rescue their planet, is through enthusiastic intimacy with works of their own imaginations.
This is Vonnegut in a wildly optimistic mood.
In darker moments, he has expressed an equally convincing belief that our greatest works of literature will amount to nothing more than toilet paper. This has been, as far as I can tell, the central existential struggle of his life: Does what I do matter?
I CAN’T BLAME him for his doubts. Vonnegut has now been writing for nearly half a century. He has been preaching the same line as Jesus on the Mount: humility, pacifism, intolerance for all forms of human suffering.
During the late sixties, he might even have believed that America was going to right itself. Instead, he has watched the country fall under the spell of leaders who demand nothing from us but the indulgence of our darkest impulses. He has watched his fellow citizens shrink before his eyes, become idolaters of convenience, screen addicts, brutes who cheer for death and call themselves patriots. He has watched the popular press, and the so-called opposition, cower before their moral duties.
And so we come (at last) to the point. Why, after twenty years, am I taking up with Vonnegut again? The cynical answer would be because he will soon be gone. That is getting it all exactly backwards. I am writing about Vonnegut now not because he is leaving us, but because we have left him.
Part Three
He may have been a genius,
as mutants sometimes are
I don’t imagine you’ve ever tried to gain access to the Reading Room at Indiana University’s Lilly Library, but I am here to tell you that security there stops just short of the cavity search. No food or drink allowed. No writing instruments. No cameras. You are given a locker for your possessions and instructed to walk over to a padded door. There is a click. You now have 1.5 seconds to open the door. If you fail to open the door you are led outside and shot in the head.
WHY WAS I at the Lilly Library? I was there because Kurt Vonnegut had asked me to go see his papers, during our heart-stopping encounter in Hartford. Or okay, maybe it wasn’t really a request. Maybe it was more like a brushoff. Fine.
The fact remained: I did need to drive my wife from Southern California to Boston. And Indiana was, more or less, on the way. And thus, I had forced her to rise at 5:30 AM.1 and to drive with me from the lush suburbs of St. Louis, where the lots are the size of football fields, through the corn prairies of downstate Illinois as they came greenly awake at dawn, and onto Route 46 with its quiet procession of church and farm, its gleaming brown soil, and finally into Bloomington.
It was high summer, broiling, and the campus was swarming with incoming freshmen, their faces illuminated by the coming liberation into that kingdom of sports and pizza and cheap beer and—right, sorry!—higher education. They moved about in nervous eager packs, well-fed American youths, the boys dribbling invisible basketballs, the girls heavily deodorized and whispering, That is so, like, whatever.
KURT VONNEGUT, JR., was born on November 11, Armistice Day, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, the youngest child of a prominent local architect. His mother, Edith, would later kill herself. Her maiden name was Lieber, which means love in German.
According to an exhaustive family history prepared by an anonymous relative, all eight of Vonnegut’s great-grandparents were part of the vast migration of Germans to the Midwest between 1820 and 1870. The name Vonnegut derives from a distant paternal relation who had an estate—ein gut—on the river Funne, in Westphalia. The name was changed upon immigration, because Funnegut sounded too much like “funny gut.”
You can trust me when I tell you that Vonnegut’s forebears were not comic forces. Here is a direct quote from his great-great-grandfather Jacom Schramm:
It appears human weakness makes it impossible to sustain a republic on this earth for any length of time, and the majority of people need, necessarily, a driving leader without whom they will inevitably wind up in chaos. Nevertheless, the Americans are still very proud of their freedom, even though they are the worst of slaves, and there is sure to be a bloody revolution before a monarchic government can gain a foothold here.
I WILL NOW RESIST the urge to make a disparaging remark about the Bush administration.
HOW THE SCION of such hardass German stock became so soft-hearted is not entirely clear. Vonnegut has often blamed the Indianapolis public school system, ironically, given his spotty academic record. A sampling of his years at Shortridge High, for instance, reveals that despite earning an A+ in chemistry his senior year, despite a verified IQ of 137, he ranked 240th in a class of 760.
Of central interest is a newspaper clipping about Vonnegut and two schoolmates, who plan to drive down to New Mexico over the summer to dig up Indian skulls. The boys are pictured demonstrating how to light a campfire. Vonnegut is a foot taller than the others and the approximate width of a beanpole. He wears a fedora. His face is narrow, unlined, absurdly young, with an expression of improvised gravity that doesn’t quite conceal his chronic embarrassment.
I HAD HOPED to make photocopies of this odd little document, but when I asked the Reading Room Monitor about this she cocked her head.
“Do you have permission from the author to make copies?”
“Of course,” I said, “Mr. Vonne
gut, Kurt, actually asked me to come out.”
“You have a letter on file, then?”
“On file,” I said, thoughtfully.
There now ensued a rather lengthy drama involving a hushed appeal up the chain of command, tense colloquies, trips to the computer to check “the database,” and a culminating interview with one Saundra Taylor, Curator of Manuscripts. I had, in fact, called Ms. Taylor several weeks earlier, on the assumption I would need a reservation to see the Vonnegut papers because they were so wildly popular.2
“There shouldn’t be a problem,” Taylor said. “Just have Mr. Vonnegut or his legal representative fax us a letter.”
“That’s the thing,” I said. “Mr. Vonnegut was the one who asked me to inspect his papers. It was more of a personal request, based on when I met with him. I’ve come all the way out from Boston and I only have two days. My wife is with me.” The rest of the reading room staff was now staring. “She’s six months pregnant,” I added, pathetically.
Ms. Taylor looked pained. It was this sort of moment, I imagined, that separated the minor Special Collection librarians from the big leaguers. Here was a thin, anguished scholar,3 clearly desperate, perhaps prepared to make a scene. What I wanted was simple enough, even reasonable, but in direct contravention to her role as guardian of the collection and the protocols thereof. She paused a moment and smoothed down the corner of a file folder with her thumbnail.
I felt I should say something; perhaps suggest that my wife, in addition to her pregnancy, had lupus.
“It would be best,” Ms. Taylor said, with soft finality, “if you took notes.”
THIS WAS NOT GOOD. It had been my intention to use my two days at Lilly to Xerox the documents that struck me as most revelatory, so I could study them later. I did some quick math. The Vonnegut archive contained 4,000 documents. Assuming I worked uninterrupted for the next two days, I would have fourteen hours to inspect the whole shebang, or 840 minutes. This came out to 12.5 seconds per document.
The problem was my reading skills, which are poor, as a result of my having been raised on a steady diet of What’s Happening reruns and not, as I may have implied in certain settings, the collected works of Balzac. It takes me 12.5 seconds to read a standard photo caption.
I AM ALSO PRONE to distraction, which gives me another bad habit in common with Vonnegut. This comment is based partly on the fact that he dropped out of Butler University, and ditched Cornell after two piss-poor years to join the army, but even more on the fascinating doodles that he left scattered on virtually all of the school-work in his archive. I’m thinking in particular of an assignment for Anthropology 220, the back of which bears the following in pencil:
I Sherwood like to have everything baked with Robinhood flour. Nottingham like it…. Many’s the time I’ve Maid Marion in the kitching, baking.
I spent considerably longer than 12.5 seconds (best estimate 17 minutes) studying this inscription. I was most intrigued by the word kitching. Was the misspelling intentional, a veiled pun referring to Maid Marion’s nether regions? It had such a ribald ring to it. The old kitching. Get a load of that kitching. That is so, like, kitching.
I felt flushed with a strange joy. Vonnegut was a fellow punster! A fellow horndog! I’d gained official access to the sick little kingdom of his mind.
NEAR AS I CAN FIGURE, this doodle dates from his years at the University of Chicago, where he came to get a master’s in anthropology. He was just back from the war then, freshly married to his high school sweetheart, twenty-three years old and clearly bored out of his skull by grad school.
What can I tell you about his thesis, “On the Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales”? I can tell you that it sucks almost as badly as my own. His essential argument is against what he calls “the passionate, partisan, rococo argle-bargle of contemporary literary criticism” that unnecessarily complicates the meaning and purpose of stories. The thesis includes hand-drawn graphs tracing the fortunes of characters in various folktales, and devotes twenty pages—nearly half its length—to reprinting a short story by D. H. Lawrence.
What does all this have to do with anthropology?
Not much.
Vonnegut is merely explaining to himself, as I later would, the sort of writer he hopes to become. “Let it be understood,” he writes, “that a contemporary master story teller cares deeply about the form of his tales because he is obsessed with being entertaining, with not being a bore, with leaving his audience satisfied.” (Translation: Screw the critics.) The attributes of his later work are all manifest here—the sharp command of plot, the brutal wit, the contempt for authority.
In 1946, the anthropology faculty unanimously rejected Vonnegut’s thesis.4
THE NEXT YEAR, Vonnegut moved to Schenectady to work as a public relations writer at General Electric, where his older brother Bernard was a research scientist. He was, to put it mildly, adrift. And here, as a hack on behalf of whizbang technology, with a wife and an infant son to support, Vonnegut made the most foolhardy decision of his brief lifetime: He would become a writer. Worse yet, a short story writer.
His early record was not promising:
“We are sorry to report that this manuscript did not find an opening here” (The Atlantic, 1948).
“There is a brisk style to this [sic] stories but I’d feel rather dubious that they would take with editors” (Russell & Volkening Literary Agency, 1949).
“Centralized, as it is, around an older character, and placed in a rural setting, it hasn’t sufficient plot and pace to go over with the younger readers we are trying to attract to the magazine” (Redbook, 1949).
The Vonnegut archive contains reams of these rejections. Reading over them sent me into a kind of rapture of indignation. You fuckers! I wanted to shout. Do you know who you’re fucking with? Kurt Fucking Vonnegut! Do you realize how fucking stupid you’re going to look someday?
I don’t imagine it will come as a surprise that I spent most of the nineties receiving rejections of this sort, sitting around in one or another shithole shouting these same imprecations. Such is the fate of short story writers everywhere. We are captains of a dying industry, drama queens, very poor planners.
I DON’T MEAN TO compare myself with Vonnegut. Or actually, that’s bullshit. Of course I mean to compare myself with Vonnegut. (The entire point of my visit to Bloomington was to compare myself with Vonnegut.) What I mean is that my decision to write short stories was a cinch compared to his. I was single. I had supportive parents, savings socked away, a miserable little MFA program where I could spin my training wheels. Vonnegut, on the other hand, had a wife and children and no dough. He was a child of the Depression. He had watched his parents tumble from wealth into hard times, insanity, and self-annihilation. The guy tried to go the straight route, dutifully tromped off to Dad’s alma mater and majored in biochemistry, took the office job. Why, then, did he fall off the wagon, into something as disreputable and unreliable as storytelling?
IT WOULD BE EASY enough to say that he was a born writer, which plays to all our romantic notions about talent and destiny, that heroic claptrap we’ve been peddling to ourselves since The Iliad. But I suspect Vonnegut was drawn to writing by something more subversive than his abundant self-regard, something closer to mourning, that dark cloud he kept belching in Hartford. He wouldn’t get to the heart of it for another twenty years, but even in his early stories, he seems woefully out of synch with the era.
The fifties were dawning, after all. America was booming! The scientists at GE—as scripted by Vonnegut himself—were promising a brave new world for all those bouncing babies. But he wasn’t buying. He could see that technology would do nothing to correct (and might even exacerbate) the essential design flaw, which was human, which resided in our failure to love one another properly, our loyalty to greed and hatred, the gradual hammering of our hearts into swords.
His first published story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” stars a scientist who learns to co
ntrol objects with his mind. He gets recruited by the government as a secret weapon.
AS AN INVETERATE thief of office supplies, I will now note a fact that amuses me beyond all reason: Vonnegut stored his early stories in GE News Bureau folders. On the folder for “The Euphio Question,” someone—his wife, Jane, I suspect—has written the following in giant red letters: “Sold to Collier’s on February 23, 1951 for $1250!”
And buried in the early drafts of this very story, on the back of a manuscript page, is what ranks as my all-time favorite Vonnegut doodle, a bit of short division:
Under this, he has written “16 shorts,” and a list of titles. Here was Kurt Vonnegut doing what all ambitious young story writers do—taking inventory, figuring the math, pining after a book. And why not? This was (at least in my imagining of things) an exhilarating era for Vonnegut. After years as the family ne’er-do-well, he could sense that he might actually triumph.
AND CAN I ALSO SAY, while we’re not on the subject, what a joy it was to see the handiwork of Vonnegut’s own hand, the impatient whir of his mind scattered across all those oniony pages, his letters, his outlines, his plays (Vonnegut wrote plays, dozens of them, who knew?) and above all his drafts, corrected, amended, slashed at, his rewrites spilling sideways into the margins, all his decisions. Nobody tells you this when you become a writer: that you’ll spend 99 percent of your time making decisions.
Thanks to computers, I’ve been able to flush all my bad decisions into cyber oblivion, where, with any luck, they will remain, while my collected works are gathered on a disk the size of a cereal flake.
VONNEGUT’S WRITING schedule for the first two months of 1950 begins like so:
1. Between Timid and Timbuktu (Jan. 6–Jan. 9)
2. The Ants (Jan. 8–Jan. 10)
3. Ice-9 (Jan. 27–Feb. 10)