Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

by Kurt Vonnegut

  I admire anybody who finishes a work of art, no matter how awful it may be. A drama critic from a news magazine, speaking to me on the opening night of a play of mine, said that he liked to remind himself from time to time that Shakespeare was standing right behind him, so that he had to be very responsible and wise whenever he expressed an opinion about a play.

  I told him that he had it exactly ass backwards—that Shakespeare was standing behind me and every other playwright who was foolhardy enough to face an opening night, no matter how bad our plays might be.

  • • •

  And here is how I praised my friend Irwin Shaw at a banquet in his honor at The Players Club here in New York, a so-called pipe night, on October 7, 1979. My friend Frank Sinatra was there, and my friends Adolph Green and Betty Comden, and my friend Joseph Heller, and my friend Willie Morris, and my friend Martin Gabel, and on and on. I had this to say:

  “I apologize for reading from a piece of paper. Writers are pitiful people in a way. They have to write everything out.

  “This is an actors’ club, and I must admit that actors are far superior to writers when it comes to public speaking. They have somebody else write whatever it is they’re going to say, and then they memorize it.

  “This is a club for memorizers, and I think it’s nice that they have a club. Everybody who wants a club should have one. That’s what America is all about.

  “That, and fighting different diseases, and so on.

  “We are here principally to honor Irwin Shaw as an artist and human being. I would like to thank him, too, for his demonstration of what a lifetime of vigorous athletics can do to the human body.

  “He likes to be thought of as a very tough guy. And it’s true that he has turned skiing into a contact sport.

  “So, Irwin, I salute you now as the Rocky Graziano of American letters—because that is the way I think you want to be saluted. And you will be happy to know that I often get taxi drivers who don’t talk just a little like you. Irwin, they talk exactly like you.

  “They’ve also all turned out to be gentlemen like you.

  “And how can you claim to be so tough anyway, when you have written one of the most innocent and beautiful stories I ever hope to read? I refer to ’The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.’ This story says that even men in love will look longingly at every beautiful girl who comes along when the weather is warm, but concludes that there is no harm in this.

  “Irwin, how innocent can you be?

  “Well, I hate to say this with Joseph Heller present….

  “Actually, it’s sort of elating to say it with Joseph Heller present….

  “Irwin Shaw wrote the best American novel about World War Two, which was The Young Lions. He was the only one of us who had enough wisdom and nerve to write about the European part of that war from both sides of the lines. As a German-American, of course, I was sorry to see him make the Nazis the bad guys.

  “But by and large The Young Lions was such a good book that it made Ernest Hemingway mad. He thought he had copyrighted war.

  “But the Ernest Hemingway story is a tragic one, and the Irwin Shaw story is anything but that. Look how happy Irwin is.

  “I know where a lot of that happiness is coming from, but some of it should surely be attributed to the fact that the publication of Irwin’s collected short stories last year confirmed beyond a doubt that he is one of the greatest storytellers of all time.

  “Oh, I know it is cruel on a man’s ninety-second birthday to talk about nothing but the work he did as a youngster. But I have done that tonight for selfish reasons, to celebrate my own youth, when I was so enthusiastic about so many things. That’s what it was to be young—to be enthusiastic rather than envious about the good work other people could do.

  “And I was so enthusiastic about everything written by Irwin Shaw. He continues to write as well as ever, but I can no longer take pleasure in reading him, since he is my colleague now. I simply can’t afford to like anybody but me. When I read anybody else now, I see his or her words only dimly, as though through a finely divided mist of sulfuric acid or mustard gas.

  “I can see this much in Irwin’s present work, though: Despite all the high living he has done far away from us, in Europe and the Hamptons and so on, he still knows how Americans talk and feel. This is highly unusual in our literary history. Almost every other important American writer who has lived elsewhere has soon lost touch with how we talk and feel.

  “How has he worked this miracle? I will have to guess, but I am almost sure I’m right about this. Every time Irwin comes to New York, I think, he takes a job driving a taxicab.

  “Now that I have let you in on his little secret, you won’t be surprised if you find him driving you home after this banquet in his honor.

  “I thank you for your attention.”

  • • •

  And here is what I said about my friends Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, perhaps the most significant and ridiculous American comedy team alive today, as an introduction to their book Write If You Get Work: The Best of Bob & Ray (Random House, 1975):

  It is the truth: Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

  And if they know what they are doing, they will have especially respectful words for Bob and Ray, whose book this is. They will say, among other things, that Bob and Ray’s jokes were remarkably literary, being fun to read as well as to hear. They may note, too, that Bob and Ray had such energy and such a following that they continued to create marvelous material for radio at a time when radio creatively was otherwise dead.

  I have listened to Bob and Ray for years and years now—in New England, in New York City. We are about the same age, which means that we were inspired by roughly the same saints—-Jack Benny, Fred Allen, W. C. Fields, Stoopnagle and Bud, and on and on. And my collected works would fill Oliver Hardy’s derby, whereas theirs would fill the Astrodome.

  This book contains about one ten-thousandth of their output, I would imagine. And it might be exciting to say that it represents the cream of the cream of the cream of their jokes. But the truth is that there has been an amazing evenness to their performances. I recall a single broadcast of ten years ago, for example, which might have made a book nearly as elating as this one.

  I was in the studio when I heard it—and saw it, too. I was supposedly applying for a job as a writer for Bob and Ray. We meant to talk about the job in between comedy bits, when the microphones were dead. One of the bits I remember was about selling advertising space on the sides of the Bob and Ray Satellite, which was going to be orbited only twenty-eight feet off the ground.

  There was an announcement, too, about the Bob and Ray Overstocked Surplus Warehouse, which was crammed with sweaters emblazoned with the letter “O.” If your name didn’t begin with “O,” they said, they could have it legally changed for you.

  And so on.

  There was an episode from Mary Backstayge. Mary’s actor husband, Harry, was trying to get a part in a play. His big talent, according to his supporters, was that he was wonderful at memorizing things.

  There was an animal imitator who said that a pig went “oink oink,” and a cow went “moo,” and that a rooster went “cock-a-doodle-doo.”

  I very nearly popped a gut. I am pathetically vulnerable to jokes such as these. I expect to be killed by laughter sooner or later. And I told Bob and Ray that I could never write anything as funny as what I had heard on what was for them a perfectly ordinary day.

  I was puzzled that day by Bob’s and Ray’s melancholy. It seemed to me that they should be the happiest people on earth, but looks of sleepy ruefulness crossed their faces like clouds from time to time. I have seen those same clouds at subsequent encounters—and only now do I have a theory to explain them:

  I
surmise that Bob and Ray feel accursed sometimes— like crewmen on the Flying Dutchman or caged squirrels on an exercise wheel. They are so twangingly attuned to their era and to each other that they can go on being extremely funny almost indefinitely.

  Such an unlimited opportunity to make people happy must become profoundly pooping by and by.

  It occurs to me, too, as I look through this marvelous book, that Bob and Ray’s jokes are singularly burglar-proof. They aren’t like most other comedians’ jokes these days, aren’t rooted in show business and the world of celebrities and news of the day. They feature Americans who are almost always fourth-rate or below, engaged in enterprises which, if not contemptible, are at least insane.

  And while other comedians show us persons tormented by bad luck and enemies and so on, Bob and Ray’s characters threaten to wreck themselves and their surroundings with their own stupidity. There is a refreshing and beautiful innocence in Bob’s and Ray’s humor.

  Man is not evil, they seem to say. He is simply too hilariously stupid to survive.

  And this I believe.

  Cheers.

  • • •

  And here is what I said at a funeral here for my friend James T. Farrell on August 24, 1979, whose body was taken afterward to a Catholic cemetery in his native Chicago:

  “I am here at the request of a member of the family— perhaps as a representative of the generation of American writers most influenced by James T. Farrell. I was not a close friend. Many of you were, and I envy you that. I knew him some. I found him easy to love and admire. He was eighteen years my senior.

  “Here is what he did for me and many like me when I was very young: He showed me through his books that it was perfectly all right, perhaps even useful and beautiful, to say what life really looked like, what was really said and felt and done—what really went on. Until I read him, I wished only to be well received in polite company.

  “We were both University of Chicago people.

  “I note that there is a cross over his casket. That is a nice try by whoever put it there, but it is surely known in heaven that James T. Farrell of Chicago and New York was not among our leaders in organized tub-beating for Jesus Christ. He took his chances that way. If he is being scolded at this moment at the Pearly Gates, it may be for his overemphasis of rationality and compassion and honor at the expense of piety. I fear not for him. This is an argument he has won before.

  “The last time I was in this melancholy depot, it was to say farewell to Janet Flanner, another midwesterner who became a planetary patriot. Ms. Flanner and Mr. Farrell were members of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Ms. Flanner came regularly to the annual spring meeting of that organization. So do many of our leading culture heroes. James T. Farrell never came. One time I asked him why not. He said that he did not care to come face to face with some of the critics, fellow writers, who had damned his work years ago—had damned it ostensibly for bad writing, but actually for the supposedly incorrect political opinions he was known to hold. He was a premature anti-Stalinist. He was, and remained so to his death, a left-wing thinking man.

  “The malicious attacks did not humble him, could not humble him, since he was Irish. They did, however, so muddy his reputation that a dispassionate appraisal of his life’s work remains to be made. It is a huge work. It is Balzacian in scale. I spoke at his seventy-third birthday, two years ago, and I suggested that, if only James T. Farrell had produced such a body of work in a smaller country, he would have won a Nobel prize by then. That was a strong statement. It had the added force of ringing true.

  “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.’”

  7

  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.