*

When we last left our hero, though, he was a young writer bursting with ideas, who spent his days writing short stories, fretting over dough, doodling, and inventing board games. How in the hell did this schlub become Kurt Vonnegut?

I fully intend to answer this question, but to do so, I’ll need to share with you a letter the novelist John Irving wrote to Vonnegut, his former teacher, in 1982:

I think you are (and have been for as long as I’ve known your work) the best writer in this country. Period. I’m afraid I have an almond macaroon for a heart, when it comes to your writing.

I know we are all insecure about what we truly mean. But your books always create the perfect illusion that you know exactly all those parts of the story as you are telling us just one of the parts, and that simply makes everything sound true – makes you the absolute authority. You have to be a writer to feel that.

Gunter Grass can give me this impression, too. No one else living gives it. Dickens gave it. Hardy gave it. Well, it’s a short list.

This strikes me as an apt description of Vonnegut. His trademark as a writer, the key to his magnetism, resides in the awesome assurance of his voice. His narrators all sound like the same plainspoken God. I am now ready to reveal the source of Kurk Vonnegut’s divine voice: a shitload of failure.

I’m not being cute here. To a greater extent than anyone likes to admit, writers evolve simply because they tire of their own mistakes. The best example I can offer happens to be the best book Vonnegut ever wrote, Slaughterhouse-Five.

*

Slaughterhouse-Five is impossible to describe to anyone who has not read it. It is a mix of science fiction, farce, autobiography, war reportage, and meta-fiction. It is somehow all of these things at once, in the service of a single theme: the chaos of war, which is to say, young men sent to foreign countries to kill strangers. The event at the heart of the novel is the firebombing of Dresden, which burned to death 135,000 Germans, nearly all of them civilians, and which Vonnegut survived as a 22-year-old POW. He spent the next two decades trying to write about the experience. And he failed at it, over and over. “Guns Before Butter” begins like so:

The three American soldiers remained seated within the roofless shell of a building amid the smashed masonry and timbers of Dresden, Germany. The time was early March, 1944. Kniptash, Donnini, and Coleman were prisoners of war.

All his initial war stories are like this: hard-bitten and stagy. The characters are thin as dimes. What matters in them are the episodes that keep cropping up – a man is shot for stealing a teapot, another almost dies on a boxcar – memories that would haunt Vonnegut until he exorcised them in Slaughterhouse-Five.

*

By the time Vonnegut took up Dresden again, in the late Sixties, he was riding an unbelievable hot streak. He had published four novels in the space of six years, including the masterpiece Cat’s Cradle, for which the University of Chicago would award him a belated masters degree. He was a best-selling author. You might assume that he tore through Slaughterhouse-Five.

He did not.

His initial draft – at least the initial draft that made its way to Bloomington – is a standard-issue war story, starring a scarred veteran named Weary. “Three in our labor unit in Dresden died,” it begins, wearily.

By his second draft, Vonnegut has come to recognize the necessity of personal confession. But he has lost the struggle against his own nihilism.

I used to pretend, even to myself, that I was deeply sorry about Dresden, tinkered with the idea of writing a book about the massacre with neatly underplayed indignation. But these things happen and there is no stopping them, so the hell with them … The American conscience is dead. The human conscience is dead. It has almost certainly always been dead.

Elsewhere, no doubt as a compensatory measure, he comes off as glib.

That is why the name of this book is “Slaughterhouse-Five”

Zowie.

Whiz-bang.

Mother, pin a rose on me.

Wow.

Some title for a war book. And how.

Vonnegut actually crossed out this passage. He knew he was playing to the balconies. And that’s what I’m getting at here. Vonnegut needed to make all these mistakes. He needed to work through his anger, his evasions, his boredom with conventional approaches. By the third draft, he has found an outlet for his exuberance, in a campy science fiction subplot. He has also found the humility that precedes absolution. There is an air of surrender to the narrative, which begins, “I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time.” He is done lying to the reader, done posing, done pretending his own depression and failure are not part of the story.

I fucking love that about Vonnegut.

*

Another way to put it would be this:

He himself was the most enchanting American at the heart of each of his tales. We can forgive this easily, for he managed to imply that the reader was enough like him to be his brother.

Vonnegut said this about his hero Twain, though he was speaking about himself too, as we always do. That is the great game writers play: pretending what we do is a matter of superior imagination, or empathy, when, in fact, our defining impulse is a desire to be noticed.

*

Of Vonnegut’s many speeches, most notable is his 1981 tribute to the labor leader Eugene Debs, a fellow Hoosier. He quotes the words Debs uttered before being sentenced to 20 years in prison for speaking out against World War I: “While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Vonnegut then asks,

How many of us can echo those words and mean them? If this were a decent nation, we would all find those sentiments as natural and easy to say as, “Good morning. It looks like another nice day.”

But the star system has made us all ravenous for the slightest proofs that we matter to the American story, somehow, at least a little bit more than someone else.

Reading these words, I thought about the reality TV show Erin and I had watched the night before, something called My Super Sweet Sixteen, in which a teenage girl from Scottsdale celebrates her birthday with a $150,000 party, and new two cars. In one scene, she stands in front of her school in a tiara and presents invitations to the other cool kids, while the ugly and poor watch. Two undesirables begin to beg for invites and she allows them to dance for her on the sidewalk, while she and her friends insult them.

It would be natural enough to express disgust for this lunatic display. But all I felt watching that girl was the terrible misery inside her, her monstrous need to be popular, which has become our national aspiration.

*

Included in the speech file is a sheet of paper that includes random notes, mostly political rants of the sort Vonnegut produces at the drop of a hat, along with these two humdingers:

Something you should know about me: Geraldo Rivera

Question of the hour. Does penis size really matter?

I’m not sure what prompted the penis size question, though Vonnegut’s obsession with this topic is well documented. I’m fairly certain he’s the only writer (other than myself) ever to write a novel in which the male characters are identified by the length and girth of their johnsons.

The Geraldo thing is a little less cryptic; for a brief time Geraldo was married to one of Vonnegut’s daughters.

That is so, like, ick.

*

By the Seventies, Vonnegut was himself famous. (Not as famous as Geraldo. But who is?) He had written himself into his work. He had become a renowned speaker, an icon to malcontents and pacifists everywhere. Now came the deluge. Letters. Mountains of them. From Gunter Grass and Herman Wouk and John Updike. From Marlo Thomas and Julie Nixon Eisenhower and Laurie Anderson. From Larry Flynt. (“My attorney is seeking a well-known and respected author who would be willing to offer expert testimony as to the literary merit of Hustler.”) Mostly, from guys like me who fell in love with him and developed the absurd but inevitable notion that he might fall in love right back. Such tender notes of worship! They fill three boxes.

*

Honestly, I don’t like this part of the movie. The stuff that excited me – Vonnegut’s era of struggle, his lean and hungry ascent – is over now. We’ve reached the part where the privileges of fame overtake suspense.

Vonnegut continues to write novels, many of them quite good, but none feel groundbreaking, the way the early books did. He continues to say the right things, with tremendous eloquence, but his actions don’t jibe. He divorces his first wife and takes up with a more glamorous model. He gets a place in the Hamptons. He writes a letter entreating Jack Nicholson to read a script for Breakfast of Champions.

Does Kurt Vonnegut sell out?

Sure. He sells out like hell. He’s flattered by the money and the praise, by the innocent belief that commercial attention means his ideas are being heeded.

He gets himself a fancy New York lawyer, too, to sort through all the contracts and letters and such, the infamous Donald Farber. “I was dumb enough to join a health club,” reads one of his notes to Farber. “It now bores me shitless. I no longer use it. I enclose my lifetime membership … Would you take steps to break off the connection?”

How’s that for mid-career decadence?

*

It was nearly closing time at the Reading Room of the Lilly Library. I had not read 4000 documents in the allotted 840 minutes. More like 400. My eyes were burning. Soon, my wife would be waiting for me outside, gorgeously swollen, perhaps weeping at my inconsideration.

And so, at this point in my odyssey through Vonnegut’s archive, I made a thoroughly stupid (by which I mean rather typical) decision. I watched Vonnegut on TV. The archive contained several programs, the most excruciating of which was a 1989 interview with Charlie Rose, during which Vonnegut admits that he watches TV “all the time,” in particular The People’s Court. Then comes this exchange:

Vonnegut: People have two houses, one in the country and the city.

Rose: Do you have that?

Vonnegut: I do.

Rose: I know, so do I – and we shouldn’t want that?

Vonnegut: No, I don’t think so. And I mean, I wish I didn’t own the house in the country, because I wonder what’s happened to it over the winter.

Rose: And you worry about somebody breaking in.

Vonnegut: Yeah.

Huh?

I know. I know. This is what Americans do. We hold the right beliefs, then do the wrong things. It’s been our national specialty, from All Men Were Created Equal to Support the Troops. Still, it hurt to see Vonnegut reveal himself like this. I had come to Bloomington in the secret hope that the guy would prove a worthy idol, that he had lived by his words, that my faith in him was well placed. And here he was, revealed as a limousine liberal. I felt like I was back at Wesleyan.

*

It was on this somber note that I left the Lilly Library and sped off into the sunset, or at least as far as the Indianapolis suburbs, where my old pals Gerry and Michelle Lanosga were waiting with a much-needed infusion of wine and a slab of salmon, which Gerry barbequed on a cedar plank. The fish tasted so much like bacon that I suspected he had performed some kind of religious transfiguration.

I’d met the Lanosgas 20 years ago, at my first job after college. We were reporters in Phoenix. Michelle was engaged to another man and Gerry was stone cold crazy for her. The two of them spent the summer drinking to excess and attending AC/DC concerts and lusting after each other in the brutal, half-requited manner best suited to energetic 22-year-olds. Now they had three boys and all the American bells and whistles.

After dinner, the boys took me down to the basement to meet the great variety of bugs down there. Then it was time for a pillow fight. Then Miles (age eighteen months) took a header from the lip of the fireplace. It felt a lot like the house I grew up in, in terms of unconstrained boy energy. And I wondered, as I lay next to my sleeping wife that night, if any of these boys would fall for Vonnegut in the way I had. The wine had made me hokey; that was true. But it felt like an important question. The world really was going to run out of oil. It might not happen in our lifetimes, but it would happen in theirs. And our citizens – so infantilized by abundance, so well-armed – would then face a mortal challenge: to look beyond themselves, to care more for each other. It doesn’t come naturally for most boys. They’d need someone like Vonnegut, someone smart and funny and forgiving, to show them the way. So I made myself one of those hokey, wine-soaked promises: to send each of those boys a Vonnegut book for their sixteenth birthdays.

*

We spent two more days on the road. Erin did most of the driving, while I glared at the gas guzzlers around us and imagined that I was somehow better than the drivers who glared back at me. It’s one of my favorite pastimes.

I should have enjoyed the drive. I knew it would be our last for a long time. But we were racing to get somewhere, like always, like everyone. We were treating America like the big floozy she so frequently consents to be. In Ohio, it was surly road crews, chunked up road, the stink of tar. In Pennsylvania, it was distant hills and shitty drivers. And everywhere, the same shining fast food symbols. This was America by super-highway: beautiful curves and no ideas.

Twenty miles outside Erie, we blew a tire at 70 mph. I needed to get the car onto the shoulder, but the drivers in the right lane wouldn’t let me in and the shuddering got worse and finally the back of the car began smoke and we lost speed and I knew for a moment that it was all going to end; I had a terrible vision of crushed steel and blood. Then some brave soul decided to take pity on us and let me into the right lane and I lurched onto the shoulder. The tire had shredded down to the rim. The sign directly in front of us read: No Shoulder – ½ Mile Ahead. A semi screamed past. The blast of air nearly knocked me to the ground. Erin had gone white with dread.

“Stay in the car,” I shouted.

I unpacked the trunk and laid her possessions on the weedy embankment and pulled out the feeble little spare tire and set about failing to change it. This took 20 minutes. Then I stood by the highway and watched the traffic whip past, clenched and joyless faces. From this new perspective, I could see the psychosis of our arrangement. We had become dependent on machines that allowed us to traverse the land without in any way experiencing it, and worse yet to feel this was the natural order of things. It was a kind of violence, to pass by each other at such speeds. Was it really such a surprise that terrorists had turned our vehicles into weapons?

*

This, in case you’re wondering, is how we wound up at the Wal-Mart in Erie, Pennsylvania, on the Friday before July 4. I had vowed never to give Wal-Mart any of my money, but they were the only place available to fix our tire at that hour, or anyway, they were the most convenient, so we gave them our dough, gratefully, and got back on the road and then we gave the assholes at Holiday Inn our dough, then the assholes at Exxon, and by 2 pm the next day we had arrived at our new house in the unsustainable suburbs, where I had vowed for many years I would never live. So this was me being an American, no better than my own purchases.

I should have felt a sense of relief at having conveyed my precious cargo safely home. But doing the Vulcan Mind Meld with Vonnegut for two days had upset me. I didn’t know how to feel about the guy, if I still wanted to be him when I grew up. To sit there, day after day, immersed in the question of whether humankind would survive its own despicable conduct? God had proved an abject failure. Science, the great hope of his youth, had delivered us a hundred new ways to kill and a few spare miracles. Americans enjoyed unprecedented material comfort, and yet they grew sadder every day, more frightened and lonely and mean. Literary prophet wasn’t seeming like such a dream job.

And here I can feel myself struggling for the happy ending, something inspiring about my daughter and the wish that our better angels might still prevail, how the empty fuel can will slow us down, humble us into empathy, maybe even help us reestablish those big, happy families we never had. But that’s bullshit.

Kurt Vonnegut became a writer expressly to oppose such bullshit, to articulate the true woe of his circumstance. Most of this woe, incidentally, came not from Dresden or Vietnam or Iraq – not from the Family of Man, that is – but from his own family, from the insoluble loss of those he wished to love, and from those small, private moments when two people who should love each other fail to do so.

I remind you now what Vonnegut told the crowd down in Hartord: I write again and again about my family.

Vonnegut never got over those moments and he turned to language to express his wrath and disappointment. He did so with such elegance and humor and mercy that he turned me into a writer, too. I love him for that. And I’ll also never forgive him.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Read the whole article on one page

Tweet

Related Posts

• Grieving for Writers I’ve Never Known
• Prepare Yourself Citizens!
• Vonnegut’s Nuclear Bow-tie
• Surely Some Revelation Is at Hand
• Jake Cline: The Last Book I Loved, Mother Night