Palm Sunday, Welcome to the Monkey House

by Kurt Jr. Vonnegut

  "The ancient Greeks believed, or some of them did, anyway, that a person could not be said to have lived well if he or she died in unhappy circumstances. This is a deservedly unpopular opinion in America, where so many lives end abominably, almost as a matter of routine. But let us suppose that the Greeks were right. By their hard standards we can say that the American writer James T. Farrell had a wonderful life. He died in his sleep, in the presence of deep love such as the world has seldom seen—and owing no one an apology for anything.

  "He was a sports nut, of course—and once an athlete of great and varied skills. So it is appropriate if we now address our memories of him in this fashion: 'You won, you won.''

  PLAYMATES

  I delivered a speech at the University of Virginia maybe eight years ago, which mercifully has been lost, so I do not have to paste it in here somewhere. I said, I remember, that Thomas Jefferson in his mansion called Monticello, with an artificial trout pool in its front yard, and its dumbwaiters for bringing wine and cider up from the basement, and its secret staircases and so on, was the Hugh Hefner of his time. Jefferson didn't have for servants young women with great balls of cotton stuck to their behinds. He owned honest-to-God slaves instead.

  A history professor explained to me afterward that Jefferson was so slow to free his slaves because he did not really own them. He had mortgaged them. Like this mortgaged house in which I write now, they belonged to the bank.

  Author's note: No entirely white descendent of Thomas Jefferson is alive today.

  BUT the best part of that visit was finding out what had happened to a childhood playmate of mine. He was two years my junior, and had lived right next door to me in Indianapolis. We were playmates during the 1930s. His father and mine had both built grandiose houses during the boom of the 1920s. But during the 1930s they were both going broke. His father owned a furniture store which was bankrupt, and my father could find no work as an architect, and my mother and father were becoming widely known as deadbeats who would run huge charge accounts and never pay. This playmate sent me a note while I was in Charlottesville, and by God if he hadn't become head of the astronomy department at the university. Sam Goldstein was his name.

  So Sam and I had a good talk about the work he was doing, which was mainly with radio telescopes, and the work I was doing. We told about our children. Things were going well. We refreshed our memories about neighborhood dogs we had known, dogs which had known us, too. We remembered two bulldogs named Boots and Beans, who were owned by a family named Wales. Boots and Beans used to catch cats and small dogs and pull them in two. I personally witnessed their doing that to a cat of ours.

  Sam and I laughed when I told about my father's sending the message to Mr. Wales that he would shoot Boots and Beans if they ever came into our yard again. Mr. Wales sent back the message that he would shoot Father if Father shot Boots and Beans.

  Psychoanalysts are missing important clues about patients' childhoods if they do not ask about dogs the patients knew. As I have said elsewhere, dogs still seem as respectable and interesting as people to me. Any day.

  DOG poisoning is still the most contemptible crime I can think of. Boots and Beans were poisoned finally, but I couldn't celebrate that, and our family certainly had nothing to do with it. If we were going to poison anybody, it would have been Mr. Wales.

  THE dogs of our childhood were dead when Sam Goldstein and I were reunited in Charlottesville, so we would have been crazy to speculate about what they might be doing nowadays. We could speculate about children we had known, though, since human beings live so long. We would say things like, "What do you suppose ever happened to Nancy Briggs?" or "Where do you think Dick Martin is now?" and on and on. Sometimes one or the other of us had a stale clue or two. Nancy Briggs married a sailor and moved to Texas during the Second World War. How's that for a clue?

  I have played that game so often in this jerry-built society of ours—"Whatever Became of So-and-so?" It becomes a truly sad game only if someone actually knows in detail what became of several so-and-sos. Several ordinary life stories, if told in rapid succession, tend to make life look far more pointless than it really is, probably.

  The people I am most eager to have news of, curiously enough, are those I worked with in the General News Bureau of the General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York —from 1948 to 1951, from the time I was twenty-six until I was twenty-nine. They were all men I worked with, but when I think of that good old gang of mine, I include their wives.

  As the song from the Gay Nineties, "That Old Gang of Mine," would have it:

  So long forever, old fellows and pals,

  So long forever, old sweethearts and gals…

  My persisting concern about all those General Electric people is so irrational and deep that I have to suspect that it may have genetic roots of some sort. I may have been born with some sort of clock in me which required me to love those working alongside of me so much at that time. We were just getting our footing as adult citizens, and in other times we might have been correct in thinking that we had better like and trust each other a lot, since we would be together for life.

  It was the Darwinian wish of General Electric, of the Free

  Enterprise System, of course, that we compete instead.

  I have heard other people say that they, too, remain irrationally fond of those who were with them when they were just starting out. It's a common thing.

  ONE of my closest friends from General Electric is Ollie M. Lyon, who became a vice-president at Young and Rubicam advertising for a while, and then went back to his home state of Kentucky to sell sophisticated silos to farmers. The silos were so airtight that almost no silage was lost to fermentation and vermin and rot.

  I loved Ollie's wife Lavina exactly as much as I loved him, and she died fast of cancer of the pancreas out there in Kentucky. One of her last requests was that I speak at her funeral. "I want him to say good-bye to me," she said. So I did.

  I said this:

  "Lavina asked me to be up here.

  "This is the hardest thing Lavina ever asked me to do, but then she never asked anyone to do anything hard. Her only instructions were that I was to say good-bye to her as an old friend—as all old friends.

  "I say it now. If I had to say it at the end, to build up to saying it, I would go all to pieces, I think. I would bark like a dog. So I say it now: 'Good-bye, darling Lavina.'

  "There—that is behind me now. That is behind us, now.

  "It is common at funerals for survivors to regret many things that were said and done to the departed—to think, 'I wish I had said this instead of this, I wish I had done that instead of that.' This is not that sort of funeral. This is not a church filled with regrets.

  "Why not? We always treated Lavina with love and decency. Why did we do that? It was Lavina's particular genius to so behave that the only possible responses on our part were love and decency. That is her richest legacy to us, I think: Her lessons in how to treat others so that their only possible responses are, again, love and decency.

  "There is at least one person here who does not need to learn what Lavina knew. He is Lavina's spiritual equal, although he was so much in love with her that perhaps he never knew it. He is Ollie Morris Lyon.

  "Ollie and Lavina are country people, by the way. "I have seen them achieve success and happiness in the ugly factory city of Schenectady, New York, where I first met them. They were not much older than Mary and Philip then. Think of that. Yes, and when they lived in New York City, they had as much fun as any jazz-age babies ever did. Good for them! But they were always a farmer and his wife. "Now the farmer's wife has died. I'm glad they got back here before she died. "The wife died first.

  "It happens all the time—but it always seems like such a terrible violation of the natural order when the wife dies first. Is there anyone here, even a child, who did not believe that Lavina would survive us all? She was so healthy, so capable, so beautiful, so strong. She was supposed to com
e to our funerals—not the other way around.

  "Well—she may come to them yet. She will, if she can. She will talk to God about it, I'm sure. If anybody can stretch the rules of heaven a little, Lavina can.

  "I say she was strong. We all say she was strong. Yes, and in this bicentennial springtime we can say that she was like a legendary pioneer woman in her seeming strengths. We know now that she was only pretending to be strong—which is the best any of us can do. Of course, if you can pretend to be strong all your life, which is what Lavina did, then you can be very comforting to those around you. You can allow them to be childlike now and then.

  "Good job, Lavina, darling. And remember, too, Lavina, the times we let you be a little girl.

  "When she was a little girl in Palmyra, Illinois, being the youngest of a large family, she was expected to leave a note in the kitchen saying where she had gone after school. One day the note that was found said 'I have gone where I have decided.'

  "We loved you.

  "We love you.

  "We will always love you.

  "We will meet again."

  I now confess that the American poems which move me most are those which marvel most, simply and clearly, at the queer shapes which the massive indifference of America gives to lives. So The Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters seems a very great book to me.

  That is a barbarous opinion. So I have nothing to lose by blurting moreover that I find much to celebrate in the shrewd innocence of many of the poems now being set to country music.

  Pay attention, please, to the words of "The Class of '57," a big country hit of a few years ago:

  Tommy's sellin' used cars,

  Nancy's fixin' hair,

  Harvey runs a groc'ry store

  And Marg'ret doesn't care,

  Jerry drives a truck for Sears

  and Charlotte's on the make.

  And Paul sells life insurance

  And part-time real estate.

  And the Class of Fifty Seven had its dreams.

  But we all thought we'd changed the world

  With our great works and deeds;

  Or maybe we just thought the world

  Would change to fit our needs.

  The Class of Fifty Seven had its dreams.

  Betty runs a trailer park,

  Jan sells Tupperware,

  Randy's on an insane ward,

  And Mary's on welfare,

  Charley took a job with Ford,

  Joe took Freddy's wife,

  Charlotte took a millionaire,

  And Freddy took his life.

  And the Class of Fifty Seven had its dreams,

  But livin' life from day to day

  Is never like it seems.

  Things get complicated

  When you get past eighteen,

  But the Class of Fifty Seven had its dreams.

  Helen is a hostess,

  Frank works at the mill,

  Janet teaches grade school

  And prob'ly always will,

  Bob works for the city,

  And Jack's in lab research,

  And Peggy plays the organ

  At the Presbyterian Church.

  And the Class of Fifty Seven had its dreams.

  But we all thought we'd change the world

  With our great works and deeds;

  Or maybe we just thought the world

  Would change to fit our needs.

  The Class of Fifty Seven had its dreams.

  John is big in cattle,

  Ray is deep in debt,

  Where Mavis fin'ly wound up

  Is anybody's bet,

  Linda married Sonny,

  Brenda married me,

  and the class of all of us

  Is just part of history.

  And the Class of Fifty Seven had its dreams,

  But livin' life from day to day

  Is never like it seems.

  Things get complicated

  When you get past eighteen,

  But the Class of Fifty Seven had its dreams.

  Ah, the Class of Fifty Seven had its dreams.

  Copyright © 1972 by House of Cash.

  The authors are Don and Harold Reid, the only actual brothers in the country-music quartet that calls itself the Statler Brothers. Nobody in the quartet is named Statler. The quartet named itself after a roll of paper towels.

  MY wife Jill and I admire the Statler Brothers so much that we went all the way to the Niagara Falls International Convention Center in April of 1980 to hear them and to shake their hands. We had our pictures taken with them, too.

  Yes, and they announced from the stage that they were honored that night to have in the audience "the famous writer Kurt Vonnegut and his wife, Jill Krementz, the famous photographer." We got a terrific hand, although we did not stand up and identify ourselves, and although nobody, I'm sure, had ever heard of us before.

  A woman came up to us afterward, and she said that we must be the famous people the brothers had mentioned, since we didn't look like anybody else in the auditorium. She said that from now on she was going to read everything we wrote.

  Jill and I stayed in the same Holiday Inn as the Statler Brothers, but they slept all afternoon. Their bus was parked outside where we could see it from our room. Right after their performance, around midnight, they got on the bus, and it started up with that fruity, burbling, soft purple rumble that bus engines have. The bus left without any lights showing inside. Nobody waved from a window. It headed for Columbus, Ohio, for another performance the next night. I forget where it was supposed to go after that—Saginaw, Michigan, I think.

  I would actually like to have "The Class of '57" become our national anthem for a little while. Everybody knows that "The Star Spangled Banner" is a bust as music and poetry, and is as representative of the American spirit as the Taj Mahal.

  I can see Americans singing in a grandstand at the Olympics somewhere, while one of our athletes wins a medal—for the decathlon, say. I can see tears streaming down the singers' cheeks when they get to these lines:

  Where Mavis fin'ly wound up

  Is anybody's bet.

  "THE Class of '57" could be an anthem for my generation, at least. Many people have said that we already have an anthem, which is my friend Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," which starts off like this:

  I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed

  by madness, starving hysterical naked,

  dragging themselves through the negro streets

  at dawn looking for an angry fix,

  angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient

  heavenly connection to the starry dynamo

  in the machinery of night.

  And so on.

  I like "Howl" a lot. Who wouldn't? It just doesn't have much to do with me or what happened to my friends. For one thing, I believe that the best minds of my generation were probably musicians and physicists and mathematicians and biologists and archaeologists and chess masters and so on, and Ginsberg's closest friends, if I'm not mistaken, were undergraduates in the English department of Columbia University.

  No offense intended, but it would never occur to me to look for the best minds in any generation in an undergraduate English department anywhere. I would certainly try the physics department or the music department first—and after that biochemistry.

  Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that.

  ALSO, and again I intend no offense, the most meaningful and often harrowing adventures which I and many like me have experienced have had to do with the rearing of children. "Howl" does not deal with such adventures. Truly great poems never do, somehow.

  ALLEN Ginsberg and I were inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters in the same year, 1973. Somebody from Newsweek called me up to ask what I had to say about two such antiestablishment writers being embraced by such a conservative organization.

  I said this, and I
meant it, and my comment was not printed: "My goodness, if Mr. Ginsberg and I aren't already members of the establishment, I don't know who is."

  To return to the subject of childhood playmates: In the Vonnegut house, with its charge-account deadbeats, and in the Goldstein house next door, with its bankruptcy, there were many books. As luck would have it, the Goldstein children and I, and the Marks children three doors down, whose father would soon die quite suddenly, could all read about as easily as we could eat chocolate ice cream. Thus, at a very tender age and in utter silence, disturbing no one, being children as good as gold, we were comforted and nourished by human minds which were calmer and more patient and amusing and unafraid than our parents could afford to be.

  YEARS later, on October 1, 1976,1 would pay this circuitous tribute to the art of reading at the dedication of a new library at Connecticut College, New London:

  "The name of this speech is The Noodle Factory.'

  “Like life itself, this speech will be over before you know it. Life is so short!

  “I was born only yesterday morning, moments after day-break—and yet, this afternoon, I am fifty-four years old. I am a mere baby, and yet here I am dedicating a library. Something has gone wrong.

  "I have a painter friend named Syd Solomon. He was also born only yesterday. And the next thing he knew, it was time for him to have a retrospective exhibition of his paintings going back thirty-five years. Syd asked a woman claiming to be his wife what on earth had happened. She said, 'Syd, you're fifty-eight years old now.' "You can imagine how he felt.