Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  We did what tourists in Prague were expected to do—sleep in a luxury hotel, eat duck for breakfast, visit the Castle, look at graveyards. At Vyšehrad, the well-born were nicely planted (Dvorˇák, for example). In Josefov, it was a different story. Though our guidebook described the Old Jewish Cemetery as “picturesque,” these tombstones cried out of the earth, like teeth around a scream. (And the next-door art of the death-camp children was what they must have seen.) Or we cooled our feet in the Wallenstein Gardens (a labyrinth, a grotto, peacocks). Visited the Smetana (a chambered nautilus of Art Nouveau). Went to movies on the Revolution (student heroism). Ate ice cream at the Slavia (where Sorrow-steeped young Werthers killed themselves isometrically). Snuffled cappuccino at the Europa, next door to a restaurant that was a replica of the dining room on the Titanic (more Czech humor). Bought a ticket to the Magic Lantern (I had to go to the theater where they wrote this script) for a performance of the Kouzelný Cirkus, with horses, clowns, and ballerinas, as if Monty Python’s Life of Brian had met Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal. (I’m afraid it’s typical that we should have gone to the Magic Lantern for a circus, late as usual, while Timothy Garton Ash, always on time, had been there for a revolution: “swift, almost entirely nonviolent, joyful and funny.”) And looked for Agnes of Bohemia…

  Only to find instead a ten-foot sculpture of a Trabi, the East German People’s Car, on four huge naked human legs, with a license plate that said in Czech: “QUO VADIS?” This whimsical cyborg, symbolizing the artist’s ambivalent feelings about German reunification, had shown up mysteriously in Old Town Square two months before we did. It was allowed to remain during the “cucumber season” only because the mayor of Prague, Jaroslav Koran, was a friend of Kurt Vonnegut’s, a translator of his fiction, and could be counted on to sympathize with hijinks.

  I knew of the artist who sculpted the cyborg, David Cˇerný, though I’d never met him. He was a friend of my stepdaughter’s, from before the Fall. And also the pilot of the Yellow Submarine scheduled to ship out at the end of cucumber season. He’d created, as well, a Student Slot Machine: You drop in a coin, and the Student, shooting up an arm, shouts: “Freedom! Freedom!” And, since statues in Czechoslovakia are always going up and then toppling down again because of various revolting developments, David had also invented an all-purpose Headless Dignitary, a windmill with mugshots of various Important People stuck on each of its blades, so that, no matter which way the ideological wind was blowing in whatever political weather, there was always someone to salute. Barely born in 1968, entirely innocent of Prague Spring, David and his tribe had lived by their outlaw wits in ironic opposition, in transit underground on discarded Metro tickets to sly conceptual jokes. They didn’t know whether to believe that Havel was real. Nor would they even meet with us, their plutocratic elders, credit-card utopiaheads. Like Peter Pan, they ran away. Like the Mystery Cat in T. S. Eliot, Macavity’s not there.

  But David did show up in the world news before our next visit to Prague. Perhaps you recall the briefly famous pinking of the Prague tank in 1991. Some artists who weren’t named in the first small story in the Los Angeles Times were arrested for having painted, a shocking pink, the Soviet tank that sat as a monument to the Red Army’s liberation of Prague in 1945. One of the artists claimed to have a permit for painting the tank pink, but it proved to be a forgery. This sounded to some of us, in New York, a lot like one of David Cˇerný’s subversive jokes. But the story disappeared, and so did David, who was supposed to visit the United States that month.

  There followed a couple of unsigned postcards from places like Switzerland and then a copy of the English-language expat journal Prognosis, from which we gathered that the pinking of the tank, on April 28, 1991, took forty-six minutes and forty liters of paint, and it looked “like a child’s toy or a newborn child.” Czech soldiers took twice as long to repaint the tank its primary color, on April 30, so that it looked again like James Joyce’s “snotgreen scrotum-tightening sea.” On May 15, twenty members of the Czech Parliament slipped out at night to paint it pink again. And Václav Havel, that Captain Kangaroo, lost his temper. David Cˇerný and his friends were suddenly on trial. With the surprising connivance of Vonnegut’s buddy, the mayor of Prague, they were accused of “criminal hooliganism” under Paragraph 202 of the Czech penal code—the same notorious statute that had been invoked to arrest Václav Havel in the Evil Empire days. If convicted, they faced two years in prison.

  After the second pinking of the tank, Havel wasn’t the only dignitary to stamp his foot. “A vile act!” raged Soviet foreign minister Vitaly Churkin. Poor Alexander Dubcˇek, whose personal experience of Red Army tanks went back to 1968, was dragged out of retirement and hustled off to Moscow to apologize, on television, to the Russians. “Where will it end?” asked the president of Brigadoon, missing the point. “Will we have the St. Wenceslas statue painted red, St. Vitus Cathedral in blue, all the paintings in the galleries spray-painted?” He seemed to forget his own defense, in 1976, of the Plastic People of the Universe, at whose trial he demanded to know—I quote from Open Letters—why “no one present could do the one thing that was appropriate in this situation: stand up and shout: ‘Enough of this comedy! Case dismissed!’”

  A pro-Cˇerný “Pink Coalition” of artists, students, and members of KAN—the Club of Non-Aligned Party Members—then clashed with right-wing shock troops from the Movement for Civic Freedom and the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia. A dozen rock bands gathered on June 1 in Wenceslas Square for a designated Pink Day. Two separate bank accounts were established in Prague to pay Cˇerný’s fines. And by signing a petition that was Pro-Pinking, some sixty deputies to the Federal Assembly and another thousand assorted luminaries violated yet another statute, Law 165, which prohibits “the approval of a proven crime.” Meanwhile, the Soviet tank itself had disappeared from its Smichov pedestal, and was said to be hidden away behind armed guards in an unnamed Prague museum. Perhaps the New York Times would blame this, too, on democracy.

  The Last Innocent White Man

  “I USED TO BE funny,” Kurt Vonnegut informs us in A Man Without a Country, “and perhaps I’m not anymore.” This last bit is untrue, of course. In these essays from the pages of the radical biweekly In These Times, he is very funny as often as he wants to be. For instance: “My wife is by far the oldest person I ever slept with.” And if you don’t smile for at least a week at the friendly notion of the corner mailbox as a “giant blue bullfrog,” you ought to have your license revoked.

  But like Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln, even when he’s funny, he’s depressed. His has always been a weird jujitsu that throws us for a brilliant loop. As much as he would like to chat about semicolons, paper clips, giraffes, Vesuvius, and the Sermon on the Mount—“if Christ hadn’t delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn’t want to be a human being. I’d just as soon be a rattlesnake”—his own country has driven him to furious despair with its globocop belligerence, its contempt for civil liberties, and its holy war on the poor: “Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club… and kiss my ass!” The novelist/pacifist/socialist/humanist who has smoked unfiltered Pall Malls since he was twelve is suing the tobacco company that makes them because, “for many years now, right on the package, Brown and Williamson have promised to kill me. But I am now eighty-two. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick, and Colon.”

  So, although he does mention Jerry Garcia, Madame Blavatsky, Rush Limbaugh, and Saul Steinberg (“who, like everybody else I know, is dead now”), besides wonderfully observing that “Hamlet’s situation is the same as Cinderella’s, except that the sexes are reversed,” he can’t help but notice that “human beings, past and present, have tra
shed the joint,” and that we are stuck in “a really scary reality show” called “C-Students from Yale.” Thus he reiterates what Abraham Lincoln said about American imperialism in Mexico, what Mark Twain said about American imperialism in the Philippines, and what a visiting Martian anthropologist said about American culture in general in a novel Vonnegut hasn’t finished writing yet: “What can it possibly be about blow jobs and golf?”

  When they were inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1973, Kurt Vonnegut said of Allen Ginsberg: “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.”

  Well when you say things like this you do not ingratiate yourself with the sort of people whose racket it is to nominate you for things like Nobel Prizes. You may get to eat at the Swedish consulate here in New York, but not at Town Hall in Stockholm with your face on a postage stamp. Once upon a very long time ago I asked him to review a Joe Heller novel for the New York Times. This is how he concluded his essay on Something Happened: “I say that this is the most memorable, and therefore the most permanent variation on a familiar theme, and that it says baldly what the other variations only implied, what the other variations tried with desperate sentimentality not to imply: That many lives, judged by the standards of the people who live them, are simply not worth living.”

  Some of those variations are his own. A character in Slaughterhouse-Five tells a psychiatrist: “I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren’t going to want to go on living.” The novelist himself tells us in Palm Sunday about seeing a Marcel Ophüls film that included pictures from the Dresden firebombing Vonnegut had lived through as a POW: “The Dresden atrocity,” he then decides, “tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is. One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I’m in.” In the same open vein, he wonders aloud in Hocus Pocus: “How is this for a definition of high art?… Making the most of the raw materials of futility.”

  Indeed. So it goes. Imagine that. And yet there isn’t a person in this room who hasn’t experienced a personal Kurt kindness, or been kissed with grace by something in one of his novels, or both. The way he goes about his business has helped most of us to go on living, if only to find out what happens next. In Slapstick he insisted that even if we aren’t “really very good at life,” we must nonetheless, like Laurel and Hardy, “bargain in good faith” with our destinies. And he recommended instruction books on such bargaining: Robert’s Rules of Order, the Bill of Rights, and the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. To these, Jailbird added two more how-to manuals: Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, “with malice toward none,” and the Sermon on the Mount. Bluebeard suggested Goethe’s Faust, Picasso’s Guernica, Gulliver’s Travels, Alice in Wonderland, and Don Quixote. Elsewhere, at the dedication of a library, he mentioned such “mantras” as War and Peace, Origin of Species, Critique of Pure Reason, Madame Bovary, and The Red Badge of Courage; and in a speech to mental health professionals, such civilizing “fixtures” as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Beethoven’s Fifth, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Twain’s Huck Finn, the Great Wall of China, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and the Sphinx.

  What are these fixtures, mantras, and manuals but attempts to articulate standards according to which life is worth living? We read him as the woman in Jailbird read the books of Starbuck, “the way a young cannibal might eat the hearts of brave old enemies. Their magic would become hers.” Add to these his autumnal novel, Hocus Pocus, so prematurely valedictory, where the Civil War is far from over, the race war still rages, and a class war between the dyslexic rich and the illiterate poor has just begun; where Eugene Debs Hartke, like Howard Campbell in Mother Night and Kilgore Trout in Jailbird, will go on trial for treason; where the novelist seems to say good-bye to American history and literature, to Moby-Dick and Walt Whitman, as if covering so much territory—from evolution to outer space, from Abstract Expressionism to Watergate, from Holocaust to Hirsohima—had worn him out. But he came back to us, over the ice and through the fire.

  That scary fire: Remembering how he looked in the hospital after he almost burned his house down, Billy Pilgrim this time smoked instead of smoking, and seeing him now in these bright lights, the black humorist in black tie, I think we are blessed. It’s as if he had returned, in reverse, from Dresden, like those bombers of his in one of the loveliest passages in our literature: “American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off backward from an air field in England. Over France, a few German fighters flew at them backward, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen…. The formation flew backward over a German city that was in flames.”

  The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the flames, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes…. When the bombers got back to base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating day and night, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

  My wish is for Kurt to enjoy his birthday as much as we have. Because then maybe he’d be happy.

  Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union

  1

  The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.

  —The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

  CERTAINLY, IN ALMOST every Michael Chabon fiction, there is this vanishing—subtractions, desolations, and abandonments; sinister design and rotten luck. In The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), his debonair debut novel, young Art Bechstein suspects that his mother was murdered by mobsters who were really after his father. In Wonder Boys (1995), his graduate-school slapstick, Grady Tripp has lost one parent to postpartum complications and another to suicide. In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), his magnum opus on art, work, buddies, genocide, and the bloodthirstiness of children, Sammy Clayman’s father deserts him (twice!) and Josef Kavalier loses his whole family to the Nazis. In Summerland (2002), his stealing-home baseball fantasy for kids, Ethan Feld’s mother, a veternarian, dies of cancer, and his father, an inventor, is abducted by wolfboys and mushgoblins. In The Final Solution: A Story of Detection (2004), his sly riff on Sherlock Holmes, a nine-year-old German boy named Linus, an orphan, a mute, and a refugee, wanders the English countryside in 1944 with a parrot that sings strings of numbers referring to the cattle cars of the Holocaust. In Gentlemen of the Road (2007), his sword-and-sandals serial publ
ished in the New York Times Magazine, the vagabond physician Zelikman, variously described as a scarecrow and a ghost, drifts through the Dark Ages with a heart turned to stone after the rape and murder of his mother and sister.

  Even in Werewolves in Their Youth (1999), a mixed-nut assortment of stories, one boy, fatherless, turns himself into a werewolf; another perishes in a Fourth of July fireworks explosion; a third runs off with his new baby half brother to save him from their sadistic father; an infant dies in his mother’s arms on a ferryboat, a divorced family therapist is afraid to take a bath with his own daughter, and we get a flabbergasting amount of domestic violence. And finishing up is a horror tale attributed to the shlockmeister August Van Zorn, whom we first met in Wonder Boys, with Yuggog, a cannibal queen in an underground necropolis in bone-pit Pennsylvania, feeding on mill workers and anthropologists. Werewolves also told us that

  sex had everything to do with violence, that was true, and marriage was at once a container for the madness between men and women and a fragile hedge against it, as religion was to death, and the law of physics to the immense quantity of utter emptiness of which the universe was made.

  This chimes, more or less, with the gloomiest feelings of Meyer Landsman, the brokenhearted alcoholic police detective in Chabon’s wonderful new novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. His father committed suicide, his pilot sister died in a plane crash, and the loss of his son Django—“a braided pair of chromosomes with a mystery flaw”—has “hollowed” him out. The “most decorated shammes in the District of Sitka” has only two moods, “working and dead.” He overhears people talking about him “in the hushed tones reserved for madmen, assholes, and unwanted guests.” He has practically disappeared into slivovitz, deep-fried pork, and “a slipstream of sorrow.” His ex-wife, Bina Gelbfish, is now his boss at the precinct station, and he misses her like an arm or heart: “She is getting old, and he is getting old, right on schedule, and yet as time ruins them, they are not, strangely enough, married to each other.” When someone tells him, “You take care,” he has to admit, “I don’t really know how to do that.” When everybody tells him not to investigate the execution-style murder of a chess-playing heroin addict, of course he will end up dodging bullets in the Alaskan snow, wondering just how long “it takes hypothermia to kill a Jewish policeman in his underpants.”