*
The panel itself was deeply strange, in the way that only a literary panel can be strange, which is to say the logical result of foisting together three socially maladroit loners before a large crowd of gawkers. The authors made no mention of each other’s work. They didn’t respond to one another’s ideas. They weren’t very nice to each other, actually. The most stunning example of this antagonism came less than half an hour in. Vonnegut was lamenting the destructive capacities of humankind, listing specific atrocities (the Holocaust, Nagasaki, the Roman Games) when Oates cut him off.
“What sex – excuse me, Kurt – what sex is doing all this bad stuff?”
Vonnegut looked confused. He hadn’t expected to be interrupted, nor had he quite heard Oates.
“What?”
“Which sex is doing all this stuff?” Oates asked again, in a chiding tone.
It was an astounding moment.
Here was Kurt Vonnegut, who had fought in the Second World War, who had been a POW during the firebombing of Dresden, who had converted that experience into one of the most powerful anti-war novels ever published, who had spent his entire life as an artist decrying the horror of war, who, as a citizen, had protested against Vietnam (and all the foul wars that would follow it) who has been, in short, the most celebrated and influential literary pacifist of the 20th century.[4] And rather than let him speak to a group of 2700 well-heeled Hartfordians, Oates was trying to paint him as a warmongering hypocrite because he … had a penis. She sounded like a freshman-year feminist, drunk on her own sanctimony.
Vonnegut offered a joke in response, something about how men made war because they were better at science. Harvard had done a study. He was trying to lighten the mood. Oates was not amused.
If Vonnegut were less a gentleman, he might have suggested to Oates that aggression is a compulsion that transcends gender. As evidence, he might have pointed out to the crowd that Oates had just released a collection, Female of the Species, in which the protagonist of every single story is a female killer.
*
I don’t mean to play Vonnegut as the helpless victim here. He looked irritable throughout. And he seemed too tired to mask his feelings. He reminded me of my grandfather Irving in his final years. The word often used is crotchety, which boils down to impatience with the bullshit that passes for social nicety.
At one point, for instance, the moderator asked him about Bush’s State of the Union Speech, specifically his notion that America is addicted to oil.
“That certainly isn’t a thought he could have by himself,” Vonnegut responded. The audience exploded into laughter. But Vonnegut wasn’t joking. “Everything that distinguishes our era from the dark ages – since we still have plagues and torture chambers – is what we’ve been able to do with petroleum and that is going to end very soon.” He stared out into the audience. “I think the world is ending,” he said softly. “Our own intelligence tells us we’re perfectly awful animals, that we’re tearing the place apart and should get the hell out of here.”
A thudding silence ensued.
The moderator turned to Jen Weiner and asked if she had a more hopeful message to offer the audience.
Weiner looked a bit panicked. “Wow,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting to have to deliver a message about humanity tonight.”
“Well leave,” Vonnegut murmured.
*
I don’t think Vonnegut meant to be cruel. He was simply taken aback that any author would sit before a packed house of fellow citizens and have nothing to say on the subject. More so, that she would act offended at the notion that she should have something to say.
Nonetheless, the damage was done. Weiner spent the rest of the panel sniping at Vonnegut. Unfortunately, Weiner is one of those people deeply invested in the idea that her body contains no mean bones. So her attacks were of the throw-a-rock-but-hide-your-hand variety. She made a joke about Vonnegut wanting to kick her off the stage. She asked him why he would offer advice to high school kids, if he felt the world was ending. She expressed shock that Vonnegut had any children.[5]
So he was getting it from both sides now.
*
As it turned out, Vonnegut needn’t have bothered chiding Weiner. She did a bang-up job of revealing herself to the crowd. Her most emphatic statement of the night was about how great it was to hang out on the set of In Her Shoes, the movie they made about one of her books. And how she actually got to meet Cameron Diaz. And how super excited she was to be meeting Cameron, but all she can think to say is, “Where’s Justin?” which is totally funny if you happen to know that Cameron Diaz is totally dating the singer Justin Timberlake!
*
I realize that I’m being harsh toward Oates and Weiner, and I realize that my motives may be questioned. I feel protective of Vonnegut. He alone seemed to grasp that the panel was a rare chance for writers to speak about what they actually do, and why it might matter. He was compulsively honest with the crowd – about his fears, his doubts, even his own motives. This is why I found the conduct of his colleagues so odious. They weren’t just petty or vain. They were disingenious.
Oates, for instance, insisted her famous infatuation with violence had nothing to do with her own internal life. Instead, she offered a wistful account of her upbringing on a farm with lots of animals and a river flowing past. She sounded like Laura Ingalls Wilder, not a woman who has made her nut channeling serial killers.[6]
*
Vonnegut was also the only author who seemed burdened by the state of the human race, and the American empire in particular. He kept making these big, clanging statements. The crowd had no idea what to do. Our citizens aren’t used to having their fantasies punctured. We don’t mind watching guys like Jon Stewart josh around about that silly war in Iraq, or global warming. But when someone actually points out that our species is goose-stepping toward extinction – without a comforting laugh line at the end – things get uncomfortable.
Far from offering support, his co-panelists played him as a cranky doomseeker.[7] Neither one had much to say about the moral crises facing this country. Oates spoke of her stories as if they were merely problems of language to be solved, an oddly bloodless attitude given her preoccupation with, well, blood. Weiner seemed most interested in meeting really cool celebs. These were the two authorial personas on display: the geeky genius whose art is hermetically sealed off from the vulgarities of the real world, or the crowd-pleaser slavish after shiny morsels of fame.[8] Vonnegut, in his belief that artists should serve as instruments of destiny, was utterly alone.
As the first half of the evening drew to a close, Weiner and Oates made a beeline for the wings. Vonnegut rose to his feet with great deliberation. He took a cautious first step, to avoid tripping over his microphone wire. Then he began a long, shuffling trip across the empty stage. “Oh no,” the woman next to me said tenderly. “He’s all by himself!”
*
After intermission came questions from the audience.
Someone asked, “What is the political responsibility of a writer?”
Vonnegut responded, “We need to say what political responsibility does an American have?”
Someone asked, “What’s the single most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”
Vonnegut said, “My Lord, that’s a tough question, because there’s so much beauty, really; it’s what keeps me going in life, is just glimpsing beauty all the time. I suppose the most beautiful thing, though you can’t see it exactly, is music.”
Someone asked what his essential topic was.
Vonnegut said, “I write again and again about my family.”
Toward the end, a girl named Mary asked Vonnegut, “Can you sum up your philosophy of life in two sentences? And will you go to the prom with me? It is my senior year.”
It was the kind of set-up Vonnegut should have knocked out of the ballpark. But he looked exhausted. More than that, he looked heartbroken. This is what Weiner and Oates seemed unable to grasp: the man was heartbroken.
Not sexist. Not cranky. Heartbroken.
He had spent his entire life writing stories and essays and novels in the naked hope that he might redeem his readers. As grim and dystopic as some of those books were, every one was written under the assumption that human beings were capable of a greater decency. And not because of God’s will, that tired old crutch. But because of their simple duty to others of their kind.
Now, in the shadow of his own death, he was facing the incontrovertible evidence that his life’s work had been for naught. Right before his eyes, Americans had regressed to a state of infantile omnipotence. They drove SUVs and cheered for wars on TV and worshipped the beautiful and ignorant and despised the poor and brushed aside the science of their own doom. They had lost interest in their own consciences, and declined to make the sacrifices that might spare their very own grandchildren.
“My philosophy of life?” Vonnegut said. “I haven’t a clue.”
“What about the prom?” the moderator said, hopefully.
Vonnegut made a crack about the girl being jailbait.
*
It was a laugh line, and some people did laugh. But there was a terrible disappointment in the moment: Vonnegut, for all his gifts of compassion, was failing in a simple act of generosity.
He knew that this girl, Mary, wanted only a taste of his wisdom, his famous wit. She had read his books and, like all his fans, she had come to love him as a father, someone who had seen the worst of human conduct and refused to lie about the sort of trouble we were in, but who had not allowed his doubt to curdle into cynicism, who, for all his dark prognostication, was a figure of tremendous hope. The evidence was in his books, which performed the greatest feat of alchemy known to man: the conversion of grief into laughter by means of courageous imagination. Like any decent parent, he had made the astonishing sorrow of the examined life bearable.
And this was what Mary wanted from him now: a little of his old magic. So did the rest of the folks sitting in the Bushnell Theater in downtown Hartford, not just the ones who stood and applauded when he was introduced, all us drooling acolytes, but the ones who regarded him merely as an eloquent grump, a fading prophet, an old man shouting the world off his porch.
And Vonnegut seemed to know it, too. He gazed out at the audience, not like his hero Twain, with his inexhaustible charms, his dazzling knack for the mot juste, but in the silent burden of our present condition. His image was magnified, eerily, on the video screen overhead. The camera shook for a moment. He looked stricken. I thought of that passage in Breakfast of Champions, where, in exhaustion, he drops the fictional disguise altogether.
“This is a very bad book you’re writing,” I said to myself.
“I know,” I said.
“You’re afraid you’ll kill yourself the way your mother did,” I said.
“I know,” I said.
I thought of Vonnegut, a 21-year-old private, returning to Indianapolis to bury his mother after she took her own life. And his imprisonment in Dresden, just a few months later, all that ashen death, the passing of his sister, the madness of his son, his own suicide attempt in the haunted year of 1984. The camera was still fixed on Vonnegut’s face and it occurred to me, with great clarity, that he was going to die before he could say another word. He would simply and quietly sit back in his chair and perish. He was all done with the rescuing racket.
Instead, he gathered himself and smiled at all the nice strangers before him and said, with an almost girlish lilt, “Of course I’ll go to the prom with you, Mary. And I love to dance.” And though nobody quite realized it, including Vonnegut himself, he had, with those two fine sentences, answered both her questions.
*
The crowd response to the panel was about what you’d expect. People thought it had been a good show. They liked the fighting. They liked gossiping afterwards about the fighting. Simply put: they were Americans.
Catherine wanted me to come have a drink with a bunch of the money folks, but I had a long drive back to Boston. It was pouring, too, and neither of us had an umbrella, so we lingered in the lobby. The girl with the auburn hair was lingering, too. Her name was Susan. She was talking with the blond who had utzed her to talk to Vonnegut. The blond was indignant. She told us that she and Susan had paid $1000 to attend the cocktail party and dinner. They had been promised a meeting with Vonnegut.
“They just did a group photo, but I wasn’t anywhere close to Kurt,” she said.
“I made sure to get myself right next to him,” Susan said. “I could see that’s all we were going to get.”
A thousand bucks for a few minutes of jittery small talk? It sounded like a Bush fundraiser.
But then Susan told a little story, in her soft Texan accent, that took a little of the edge off my gloom.
“I followed him, you know. Every time he went to have a cigarette. I just followed him and bummed a cigarette and we sat there talking. He was totally cool, too. Totally on top of it. They wouldn’t let us smoke inside and it was too cold outside, so you know what we did? We got in one of those things, those doors that spin around—”
“A revolving door?”
“Yeah. We got in one of the compartments and he pushed it around till there was just a crack. It was pretty warm in there and we could just blow the smoke outside.”
*
It was a miserable night for driving. The rain had dissolved into fog, which draped the bare winter trees; my head was still spinning. Focusing on that image – Vonnegut and pretty young Susan puffing away like a couple of truants – helped me feel a little less hopeless. This made no sense. Vonnegut has been killing himself for years, or trying to, with those unfiltered Pall Malls.
But something occurred to me as I sped through that dirty shroud of fog, something Vonnegut has been trying to explain to the rest of us for most of his life. And that is this: Despair is a form of hope. It is an acknowledgment of the distance between ourselves and our appointed happiness.
At certain moments, it is reason enough to live.
