Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

by Kurt Vonnegut

  And much of what any human being feels is oceanic. The wife of a man counting the flowers on the wall may not yearn so much to be a widow, and yet the culture in which the man is floating may be telling him that it is right for her to yearn for that.

  He is no longer needed as a father, and no longer useful as a soldier who could stop a bullet winging toward his loved ones, and he has no hope for being honored for his wisdom, for it is well understood that people only become more tiresome as they grow old.

  The man is experimenting with the Christian idea of heaven without actually dying, and more and more women, of course, are doing it, too. In heaven, you see, or so the childish dream goes, people are liked and honored simply for having been alive. They don’t have to have any utility up there.

  The man counting flowers on the wall has no appreciable utility anymore. He probably wasn’t all that good in earning money even when he was in his prime. What is he waiting for?

  For an angel to knock on his door. Angels love anybody who has simply been alive.

  • • •

  It seems to me that the most universal revolutionary wish now or ever is a wish for heaven, a wish by a human being to be honored by angels for something other than beauty or usefulness.

  The women’s liberation movement of today in America, in its most oceanic sense, is a wish by women to be liked for something other than their reproductive abilities, especially since the planet is harrowingly overpopulated. And the rejection of the Equal Rights Amendment by male state legislators is this clear statement by men, in my opinion: “We’re sorry, girls, but your reproductive abilities are about all we can really like you for.”

  The truth.

  • • •

  There are other hard truths about the old and those without friends and those without skills or capital, and on and on.

  • • •

  No angel knocked on my door while I was counting flowers on the wall, but an old friend with the gambling sickness was quick to find me. He had never borrowed anything from me, but now my turn had come. He told me of a family emergency, and asked for a sum that was just about the size of the little grubstake I had built. I ran into him about five years later, and he told me that he scarcely thought of anything but the day when he could pay me back with interest.

  And people reached me by mail, most often asking me to read this or that new novel and write some words of praise for the jacket.

  No book had been published in the past ten years for which I had not written a blurb.

  But then an old friend wrote a book so bad that even I, crossing my eyes and ransacking it from end to end, could find nothing in it which could be mistaken for even a winsome sort of imbecility. So I declined to write a blurb. This may have been a major turning point in my life.

  It was a crisis in the life of another writer, too, it turned out. He had written a blurb for the book I had spurned. He called me up in the middle of the night, long distance and sounding as though he had just swallowed Drano. “My God,” he said, “you just can’t leave me on that book jacket all alone.”

  • • •

  And so on. Somewhere in there my son Mark went crazy and recovered. I went out to Vancouver and saw how sick he was, and I put him in a nut house. I had to suppose that he might never get well again.

  He never blamed me or his mother, as I have said before. His generous wish not to blame us was so stubborn that he became almost a crank on the subject of chemical and genetic causes of mental illness. Talk therapy made sense as poetry but not as a means to a cure, he thought.

  But now, as a physician, as an open-minded scientist, he has delivered himself into the hands of a talk therapist, blabbing his head off about Jane and me and his sisters and his cousins and all that, I hope, and finding it hilariously beneficial.

  Hooray.

  There will be talk about how people wronged him. It’s about time. It’s about time.

  • • •

  Everything is about time.

  Yes, and somewhere in there I looked in on George Roy Hill while he made a motion picture based on a novel of mine, Slaughterhouse-Five.

  There are only two American novelists who should be grateful for the movies which were made from their books. I am one of them. The other one? Margaret Mitchell, of course.

  • • •

  The Eastern Seaboard’s intellectual ranks will probably always require one woman to be so brilliant, supposedly, that everybody else is scared to death of her. Mary McCarthy used to hold that job. Susan Sontag has it now.

  Susan Sontag approached me at a party one time. I was petrified. What brilliant question would she ask me, and what would be my pip-squeak reply?

  “How did you like the movie they made of Slaughterhouse-Five?” she said.

  “I liked it a lot,” I confessed.

  “So did I,” she said.

  How sweet and easy that was, and what a great motion picture Slaughterhouse-Five must really be!

  • • •

  There was a depression going on in the movie industry in Hollywood back then. Only two pictures were being made, both based on works of mine. The other one was Happy Birthday, Wanda June.

  This movie, starring Rod Steiger and Susannah York, turned out so abominably that I asked that my name be taken off it. I had heard of other writers doing that. What could be more dignified?

  This proved to be impossible, however. I alone had done the thing the credits said I had done. I had really written the thing.

  • • •

  Yes, and it wasn’t the only bad job I ever did. I have graded my separate works from A to D. The grades I hand out to myself do not place me in literary history. I am comparing myself with myself. Thus can I give myself an A-plus for Cat’s Cradle, while knowing that there was a writer named William Shakespeare. The report card is chronological, so you can plot my rise and fall on graph paper, if you like:

  Player Piano B

  The Sirens of Titan A

  Mother Night A

  Cat’s Cradle A-plus

  God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater A

  Slaughterhouse-Five A-plus

  Welcome to the Monkey House B-minus

  Happy Birthday, Wanda. June D

  Breakfast of Champions C

  Wampeters, Poma & Granfalloons C

  Slapstick D

  Jailbird A

  Palm Sunday C

  • • •

  What has been my prettiest contribution to my culture? I would say it was a master’s thesis in anthropology which was rejected by the University of Chicago a long time ago. It was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun. One must not be too playful.

  The thesis has vanished, but I carry an abstract in my head, which I will here set down. The fundamental idea is that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads.

  In the thesis, I collected popular stories from fantastically various societies, not excluding the one which used to read Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post. I graphed each one.

  Anyone can graph a simple story if he or she will crucify it, so to speak, on the intersecting axes I here depict:

  “G” stands for good fortune. “I” stands for ill fortune. “B” stands for the beginning of a story. “E” stands for its end.

  The late Nelson Rockefeller, for example, would be very close to the top of the G-I scale on his wedding day. A shopping-bag lady waking up on a doorstep this morning would be somewhere nearer the middle, but not at the bottom, since the day is balmy and clear.

  A much beloved story in our society is about a person who is leading a bearable life, who experiences misfortune, who overcomes misfortune, and who is happier afterward for having demonstrated resourcefulness and strength. As a graph, that story looks like this:

  Another story of which Americans never seem to tire is about a person who becomes happier upon
finding something he or she likes a lot. The person loses whatever it is, and then gets it back forever. As a graph, it looks like this:

  An American Indian creation myth, in which a god of some sort gives the people the sun and then the moon and then the bow and arrow and then the corn and so on, is essentially a staircase, a tale of accumulation:

  Almost all creation myths are staircases like that. Our own creation myth, taken from the Old Testament, is unique, so far as I could discover, in looking like this:

  The sudden drop in fortune, of course, is the ejection of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

  Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” in which an already hopelessly unhappy man turns into a cockroach, looks like this:

  But could my graphs, when all was said and done, be useful as anything more than little visual comedies, cartoons of a sort? The University of Chicago asked me that, and I had to ask myself that, and I say again what I said at the beginning: that the graphs were at least as suggestive as pots or spearheads.

  But then I had another look at a graph I had drawn of Western civilization’s most enthusiastically received story, which is “Cinderella.” At this very moment, a thousand writers must be telling that story again in one form or another. This very book is a Cinderella story of a kind.

  I confessed that I was daunted by the graph of “Cinderella,” and was tempted to leave it out of my thesis, since it seemed to prove that I was full of shit. It seemed too complicated and arbitrary to be a representative artifact— lacked the simple grace of a pot or a spearhead. Have a look:

  The steps, you see, are all the presents the fairy godmother gave to Cinderella, the ball gown, the slippers, the carriage, and so on. The sudden drop is the stroke of midnight at the ball. Cinderella is in rags again. All the presents have been repossessed. But then the prince finds her and marries her, and she is infinitely happy ever after. She gets all the stuff back, and then some. A lot of people think the story is trash, and, on graph paper, it certainly looks like trash.

  But then I said to myself, Wait a minute—those steps at the beginning look like the creation myth of virtually every society on earth. And then I saw that the stroke of midnight looked exactly like the unique creation myth in the Old Testament. And then I saw that the rise to bliss at the end was identical with the expectation of redemption as expressed in primitive Christianity.

  The tales were identical.

  I was thrilled to discover that years ago, and I am just as thrilled today. The apathy of the University of Chicago is repulsive to me.

  They can take a flying fuck at the moooooooooooooooon.

  • • •

  And, my goodness, haven’t we come far a field from the stated subject of this chapter, which is the sexual revolution? I have spoken elsewhere of how neophyte writers, and even some old poops in the field, will veer away from subjects which alarm them. Just look how far I myself have veered away from the subject of sex. There is little that is genuinely sexual in telling a great university to take a flying fuck at the moooooooooooooooon.

  Am I too much of a sissy to discuss anal intercourse, aphrodisiacs, armpits, bidets, birth control, bisexuality, bondage, buttocks, chastity belts, circumcision, clitorises, condoms, dildoes, discipline, ejaculation, feathers, femoral intercourse, fetishes, foursomes, frigidity, genitals, hair, hair-trigger trouble, impotence, karezza, kisses, and so on? I have lifted this list from the index of The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to Love Making (illustrated), edited by Alex Comfort, M.B., Ph.D. (Crown, 1972). Actually, I feel quite free to discuss any and all of those matters, and even to laugh some while doing so.

  What isn’t congenial is an admission that I have been forced to be celibate for long periods of time. I search the index of The Joy of Sex in vain for “celibacy,” which happens to be the most common human sexual adventure, and which could be illustrated nicely by a page as white as a snowdrift.

  To take an example: I was a private in the United States Army (actually the Army of the United States, since I was a volunteer) for three years. I was one warrior ant in an enormous colony of identical ants, imprisoned in rural areas, and sent finally to an all-male battlefield in a foreign country. How many women eager to fuck me do you suppose I encountered in three long years? I could ask the same question about months and months in my civilian life, and get the same answer: to all practical purposes, none.

  I was talking one time to my friend Robert Penn Warren, a lusty old gentleman and a great poet and novelist, and I asked him about another majestic literary figure, dead, who had been an acquaintance of his. Mr. Warren is seventeen years older than I am. He was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, in 1905. He drew in words an enchantingly Edwardian caricature of the man I had asked about, and he concluded it with a statement which was in no wise a joke. It was meant to have clinical significance. A person versed in psychology and medicine, he seemed to say, would be able to extrapolate an entire syndrome from this one small clue. This was the clue: “He was a masturbator, of course.”

  This ended the conversation. I did not protest. I was grateful, though, to remember something far more casual about masturbation which had been said to me with all possible cheerfulness by my friend Milos Forman, the motion picture director.

  “You know what I like about masturbation?” he asked me.

  “What is it you like about it, Milos?” I said.

  “You don’t have to talk afterward,” he replied.

  • • •

  I peruse what is at this moment the number one nonfiction best seller in America, written by Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor’s Wife. It is meant to be a quite universal analysis of the current sexual revolution. According to Tálese, women are becoming more hospitable and casual, less discriminating with respect to sexual contacts. I oversimplify but do not entirely misrepresent that supposed revolution if I describe it this way: Whereas an ideal woman in olden times might have given a dusty male wayfarer on the road of life a piece of pie—a modern woman may now give him a hand job or a blow job as well.

  I am sorry, but that is how I read it.

  I do not wish to mock the book, even having said that, for it is to me a secretly deep history of a generation of middle-class American males, my own, which was taught by parents and athletic coaches and scoutmasters and military chaplains and quack doctors and so on to be deeply ashamed of masturbation and wet dreams.

  And the hidden plea in the book is one which first appeared in my eyes when I was fourteen, say, and which has not vanished entirely to this day. It is part of the mystery of me. The plea is addressed by old-fashioned males forever full of jism to any pretty human female, on the street, in a magazine, in a movie—anywhere. The plea is this: “Please, pretty lady, don’t make me play with my private parts again.”

  19

  IN THE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

  SO HERE I SIT on the fourth floor of a town house on the East Side of New York City, the Capital of the World, with a report card on the past thirty years of my life—signed by myself and tacked to the wall. I look at all those grades, some high, some low, and I think that I am like the compulsive gambler who borrowed so much money from me and who could not pay me back: I could not help myself.

  I have spoken elsewhere of the mentor I had at the University of Chicago, who was so brilliant, who could not find anyone to publish his most audacious work, and who committed suicide. I have not proved how brilliant he was. As I set out to do so now with an example, I am hesitant, not only because I have his reputation in my hands for a moment, but because all the good things he said which I remember were so simple and clear. It has been my experience with literary critics and academics in this country that clarity looks a lot like laziness and ignorance and childishness and cheapness to them. Any idea which can be grasped immediately is for them, by definition, something they knew all the time.

  So it is with literary experimentation, too. If a literary experiment works like a dream, is easy to read and enjoy, the experimenter is a hack. The
only way to get full credit as a fearless experimenter is to fail and fail.

  • • •

  A music critic once regaled a party I attended with a list of composers of serious music in the past. Nobody had heard of any of them, and the critic told us that they were all regarded in their own time as being the greatest composers alive. These were contemporaries of Beethoven and Brahms and Wagner and so on, composers for full orchestras in the Romantic mode.

  We asked him why they weren’t admired today. He had made it his business to hear as much of their work as he could, and he had this to say: “It was all gesture.” By this he meant that musical promise after musical promise of great themes to come were made, and were not kept. The composers were honored in their own time for the gorgeousness of the promises they made but could not keep. They perhaps made promises which not even an archangel could keep.

  Some of the most imposing literary reputations of my own time, it seems to me, are based on just that sort of promising.

  • • •

  The example of my mentor’s brilliance:

  Using the Socratic method, he asked his little class this: “What is it an artist does—a painter, a writer, a sculptor—?”

  He already had an answer, which he had put down in the book he was writing, a book which would never be published. But he would not tell us what it was until the end of the hour, and he might discard it entirely if our answers to his question made more sense than his. This was a class composed entirely of veterans of the Second World War in the summertime. The class had been put together in order that we might continue to receive our living expenses from our government when most of the rest of the university was on vacation.

  If any of us came up with good answers, I now have no idea what they might have been. His answer was this: “The artist says, ’I can do very little about the chaos around me, but at least I can reduce to perfect order this square of canvas, this piece of paper, this chunk of stone.’”

  Everybody knows that.