Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage

by Kurt Vonnegut

  “When the Depression hit I was taken out of private school and put into public school. So I had a new set of friends to bring home to have a look at whatever my father was. These were the ten-year-old children of the yeomanry of Hoosierdom, and it was they who first told me that my father was as exotic as a unicorn.

  “In an era when men of his class wore dark suits and white shirts and monochromatic neckties, Father appeared to have outfitted himself at the Salvation Army. Nothing matched. I understand now, of course, that he had selected the elements of his costume with care, that the colors and textures were juxtaposed so as to be interesting and, finally, beautiful.

  “While other fathers were speaking gloomily of coal and iron and grain and lumber and cement and so on, and yes, of Hitler and Mussolini, too, my father was urging friends and startled strangers alike to pay attention to some object close at hand, whether natural or manmade, and to celebrate it as a masterpiece. When I took up the clarinet, he declared the instrument, black studded with silver, to be a masterpiece. Never mind whether it could make music or not. He adored chess sets, although he could not play that game worth a nickel. My new friends and I brought him a moth one time, wanting to know what sort of moth it was. He said that he did not know its name, but that we could all agree wholeheartedly on this much: that it was a masterpiece.

  “And he was the first planetary citizen my new friends had ever seen, and possibly the last one, too. He was no more a respecter of politics and national boundaries than (that image again) a unicorn. Beauty could be found or created anywhere on this planet, and that was that.

  “AT&T has completed yet another building, this one on the island of Manhattan, near where I live. The telephone company has again done without the services of my father, who could not now be awakened in any case. AT&T hired Philip Johnson instead, a Sleeping Beauty who throughout his adult life has been tickled awake by ardent princes.

  “Should I now rage at Fate for not having enabled my father to have as much fun as Mr. Johnson?

  “I try to imagine my father speaking to me across the abyss between the dead and the living, and I hear him saying this: ‘Do not pity me because I in my prime awaited romantic challenges which never came. If you wish to carve an epitaph on my modest headstone in Crown Hill Cemetery at this late date, then let it be this: IT WAS ENOUGH TO HAVE BEEN A UNICORN.’”

  Thus ends that piece. I am moved to add that Father tried to make good times revisitable (a trick which was easy as pie for the Tralfamadorians in my novel Slaughterhouse-Five) by gluing cheerful documents to sheets of masonite and protecting them with varnish. Thanks to Father, this mummified letter now hangs on the wall of my workroom:

  “Dear Pop:

  “I sold my first story to Collier’s. Received my check ($750 minus a 10% agent’s commission) yesterday noon. It now appears that two more of my works have a good chance of being sold in the near future.

  “I think I’m on my way. I’ve deposited my first check in a savings account and, as and if I sell more, will continue to do so until I have the equivalent of one year’s pay at GE. Four more stories will do it nicely, with cash to spare (something we never had before). I will then quit this goddamn nightmare job, and never take another one so long as I live, so help me God.

  “I’m happier than I’ve been for a good many years.

  “Love.”

  The letter is signed with my first initial, which is what he called me. It is no milestone in literature, but it looms like Stonehenge beside my own little footpath from birth to death. The date is October 28, 1949.

  Father glued a message from himself on the back of that piece of masonite. It is a quotation from The Merchant of Venice in his own lovely hand:

  An oath, an oath, I have an oath in Heaven:

  Shall I lay perjury on my soul?

  II

  If a maiden sits on the ground in a clearing in a forest where a unicorn lives, they say, the unicorn will come to her and put its head in her lap. That is the best way to catch a unicorn. This procedure must have been discovered by a maiden who sat down in a clearing with no intention of catching a unicorn. The unicorn with its head in her lap must have been an embarrassment. (What next?)

  In the household of my childhood and youth, my sister Alice, dead for many years now (and missed like heck by me), was the maiden and our father was the elusive and spookily enchanted unicorn. My only other sibling, my own big brother who went to MIT, Bernard, and I could never catch him. To him we weren’t all that interesting. As far as the two of us are concerned, this is not a remotely tragic tale. We were tough. We could take it. We had other fans.

  (My daughter Edith was once married most unfortunately to a man named Geraldo Rivera who at this writing interviews little clumps of people on weekday afternoon television who have had experiences which are generally perceived as fantastic. I mention him at this point because some of these guests have been sexually abused by close relatives. I hasten to assert that my sister, five years older than I, was not remotely abused by our gentle father. Like a maiden with a unicorn’s head in her lap, she was at worst merely mystified.)

  Our father when I, his youngest child, got to know him was, understandably, desperate for uncritical friendship from a member of the reputedly compassionate sex, since our mother (his wife) was going insane. Late at night, and always in the privacy of our own home, and never with guests present, she expressed hatred for Father as corrosive as hydrofluoric acid. Hydrofluoric acid can eat its way out of a glass bottle, and then through a tabletop and then through the floor, and then straight to Hell.

  (Actually, hydrofluoric acid can’t eat through wax. A joke going around Cornell DU in my day, when most of my brothers were studying engineering of some sort, was, “If you happen to discover a universal solvent, what will you store it in?” And again actually, water is much closer to being a universal solvent than hydrofluoric acid. It just can’t eat through glass.)

  I made the strong suggestion in Palm Sunday that my mother’s untreated, unacknowledged insanity was caused by bad chemicals she swallowed rather than created within herself, principally alcohol and unlimited quantities of prescribed barbiturates. (She did not live long enough to have a doctor pep her up with some sort of amphetamine.) I am willing to believe that her ailment was hereditary, but I have no American ancestors (fully accounted for in Palm Sunday) who were clinically crazy. In any case, what the heck? I didn’t get to choose my ancestors, and I look upon my brain and the rest of my body as a house I inhabit which was built long before I was born.

  (My actual house here in Manhattan was built on spec in 1862 by somebody named L. S. Brooks. It is eighteen and a half feet wide and forty-six feet deep, and three stories high. Brooks built twenty identical houses all at one whack!)

  At the time of the disgraceful Bush vs. Dukakis campaign for the Presidency of the United States of America (at which time the eventual winner was promising to protect rich light people everywhere from poor dark people everywhere), I was an invited speaker at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Philadelphia. My inherited brain and voicebox said this to those assembled:

  “I greet you with all possible respect. It is tough to make unhappy people happier unless they need something easily prescribed, such as food or shelter or sympathetic companionship—or liberty.

  “You have honored my own trade, which is the telling of stories for money, some true, some false, by inviting my friend and colleague Elie Wiesel and then me to speak to you. You may be aware of the work of Dr. Nancy Andreassen at the University of Iowa Medical Center, who interviewed professional writers on the faculty of her university’s famous Writers’ Workshop in order to discover whether or not our neuroses were indistinguishable from those of the general population. Most of us, myself included, proved to be depressives from families of depressives.

  “From that study I extrapolate this rough rule, a very approximate rule, to be sure: You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you
are not depressed.

  “A rule we used to be able to extrapolate from cultural history, one which doesn’t seem to work anymore, is that an American writer had to be an alcoholic in order to win a Nobel Prize—Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, John Steinbeck, the suicide Ernest Hemingway. That rule no longer works, in my opinion, because artistic sensibilities are no longer regarded in this country as being characteristic of females. I no longer have to arrive at this lectern drunk, having slugged somebody in a bar last night, in order to prove that I am not what was a loathsome creature not long ago, which is to say a homosexual.

  “Elie Wiesel made his reputation with a book called Night, which is about the horrors of the Holocaust as witnessed by the boy he used to be. I made my reputation with a book called Slaughterhouse-Five, which is about a British and American response to that Holocaust, which was the firebombing of Dresden—as witnessed by the young American Infantry Private First Class I used to be. We both have German last names. So does the man who invited me here, Dr. Dichter. So do most of the famous pioneers in your profession. It would not surprise me if a plurality of us here, Jews and Gentiles alike, did not have ancestors who were citizens of the German or Austro-Hungarian Empire, which gave us so much great music and science and painting and theater, and whose remnants gave us a nightmare from which, in my opinion, there can never be an awakening.

  “The Holocaust explains almost everything about why Elie Wiesel writes what he writes and is what he is. The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am. I am sure you are miles ahead of me in thinking of a thousand clinical reasons for this being true. I didn’t give a damn about Dresden. I didn’t know anybody there. I certainly hadn’t had any good times there before they burned it down. I had seen some Dresden china back home in Indianapolis, but I thought then and still think now that it’s mostly kitsch. There is another wonderful gift from German-speaking people, along with psychoanalysis and The Magic Flute: that priceless word kitsch.

  “And Dresden china isn’t made in Dresden anyway. It’s made in Meissen. That’s the town they should have burned down.

  “I am only joking, of course. I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations, which is one reason two good women so far have been very sorry on occasion to have married me. Every great city is a world treasure, not a national treasure. So the destruction of any one of them is a planetary catastrophe.

  “Before I was a soldier I was a journalist, and that’s what I was in Dresden—a voyeur of strangers’ miseries. I was outside the event. Elie Wiesel, seeing what he saw—and he was just a boy, and I was a young man—was the event itself. The fire-bombing of Dresden was quick, was surgical, as the military scientists like to say, fitting the Aristotelian ideal for a tragedy, taking place in less than twenty-four hours. The Holocaust ground on and on and on and on. The Germans wanted to keep me alive, on the theory that they might be able to trade me and my captured comrades for some of their own someday. The Germans, aided and abetted, of course, by like-minded Austrians and Hungarians and Slovaks and French and Ukrainians and Romanians and Bulgarians and so on, wanted Elie Wiesel and everyone he had ever known, and everyone remotely like him, to die, as his father would die, of malnutrition, overwork, despair, or cyanide.

  “Elie Wiesel tried to keep his father alive. And failed. My own father, and most of the rest of my friends and loved ones, were safe and sound in Indianapolis. The proper prescription for the fatal depression which killed Elie Wiesel’s father would have been food and rest and tender loving care rather than lithium, Thorazine, Prozac, or Tofranil.

  “I hold a master’s degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago. Students of that branch of poetry are taught to seek explanations for human comfort or discomfort—wars, wounds, spectacular diseases, and natural disasters aside—in culture, society, and history. And I have just named the villains in my books, which are never individuals. The villains again: culture, society, and history—none of them strikingly housebroken by lithium, Thorazine, Prozac, or Tofranil.

  “Like most writers, I have at home the beginnings of many books which would not allow themselves to be written. About twenty years ago, a doctor prescribed Ritalin for me, to see if that wouldn’t help me get over such humps. I realized right away that Ritalin was dehydrated concentrate of pure paranoia, and threw it away. But the book I was trying to make work was to be called SS Psychiatrist. This was about an MD who had been psychoanalyzed, and he was stationed at Auschwitz. His job was to treat the depression of those members of the staff who did not like what they were doing there. Talk therapy was all he or anybody had to offer back then. This was before the days of—Never mind.

  “My point was, and maybe I can make it today without having to finish that book, that workers in the field of mental health at various times in different parts of the world must find themselves asked to make healthy people happier in cultures and societies which have gone insane.

  “Let me hasten to say that the situation in our own country is nowhere near that dire. The goal here right now, it seems to me, is to train intelligent, well-educated people to speak stupidly so that they can be more popular. Look at Michael Dukakis. Look at George Bush.

  “I think I was invited here mostly because of what happened to my dear son Mark Vonnegut, now Dr. Vonnegut. He had a very fancy crack-up, padded-cell stuff, straitjacket stuff, hallucinations, wrestling matches with nurses, and all that. He recovered and wrote a book about it called The Eden Express, which is about to be reissued in paperback by Dell, with a new Afterword by him. You should have hired him instead of me. He would have been a heck of a lot cheaper, and he knows what he is talking about.

  “He speaks well. When he lectures to mental health specialists, he always asks a question at one point, calling for a show of hands. I might as well be his surrogate and ask the same question of you. A show of hands, please: How many of you have taken Thorazine? Thank you. Then he says, ‘Those who haven’t tried it really should. It won’t hurt you, you know.’

  “He was diagnosed, when I took him to a private laughing academy in British Columbia, where he had founded a commune, as schizophrenic. He sure looked schizophrenic to me, too. I never saw depressed people act anything like that. We mope. We sleep. I have to say that anybody who did what Mark did shortly after he was admitted, which was to jump up and get the light bulb in the ceiling of his padded cell, was anything but depressed.

  “Anyway—Mark recovered sufficiently to write his book and graduate from Harvard Medical School. He is now a pediatrician in Boston, with a wife and two fine sons, and two fine automobiles. And then, not very long ago, most members of your profession decided that he and some others who had written books about recovering from schizophrenia had been misdiagnosed. No matter how jazzed up they appeared to be when sick, they were in fact depressives. Maybe so.

  “Mark’s first response to news of this rediagnosis was to say, ‘What a wonderful diagnostic tool. We now know if a patient gets well, he or she definitely did not have schizophrenia.’

  “But he, too, unfortunately, will say anything to be funny. A more sedate and responsible discussion by him of what was wrong with him can be found in the Afterword to the new edition of his book. I have a few copies of it, which I hope somebody here will have xeroxed, so that everyone who wants one can have one.

  “He isn’t as enthusiastic about megavitamins as he used to be, before he himself became a doctor. He still sees a whole lot more hope in biochemistry than in talk.

  “Long before Mark went crazy, I thought mental illness was caused by chemicals, and said so in my stories. I’ve never in a story had an event or another person drive a character crazy. I thought madness had a chemical basis even when I was a boy, because a close friend of our family, a wise and kind and wryly sad man named Dr. Walter Bruetsch, who was head of the State’s huge and scary hospital for the insane, used to say that his patients’ problems were chemical, that
little could be done for them until that chemistry was better understood.

  “I believed him.

  “So when my mother went crazy, long before my son went crazy, long before I had a son, and finally killed herself, I blamed chemicals, and I still do, although she had a terrible childhood. I can even name two of the chemicals: phenobarbital and booze. Those came from the outside, of course, the phenobarbs from our family doctor, who was trying to do something about her sleeplessness. When she died, I was a soldier, and my division was about to go overseas.

  “We were able to keep her insanity a secret, since it became really elaborate only at home and between midnight and dawn. We were able to keep her suicide a secret thanks to a compassionate and possibly politically ambitious coroner.

  “Why do people try so hard to keep such things a secret? Because news of them would make their children seem less attractive as marriage prospects. You now know a lot about my family. On the basis of that information, those of you with children contemplating marriage might be smart to tell them: Whatever you do, don’t marry anybody named Vonnegut.

  “Dr. Bruetsch couldn’t have helped my mother, and he was the greatest expert on insanity in the whole State of Indiana. Maybe he knew she was crazy. Maybe he didn’t. If he did know she was crazy after midnight, and he was very fond of her, he must have felt as helpless as my father. There was not then an Indianapolis chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, which might have helped. One would be founded by my father’s only brother, Alex, who was an alcoholic, in 1955 or so.

  “There—I’ve told you another family secret, haven’t I? About Uncle Alex?