To this point, I have made myself sound every bit the loyal Vonnegut disciple. But by the middle of my senior year, I felt vaguely ashamed of my thesis, and specifically that it was about Vonnegut.
I had discovered Bellow by then; Henderson the Rain King had ripped my head off. In my upper level classes, we were studying The Illiad and The Inferno and Lear. My classmates were using phrases like “transcendental signifier” – and they meant it. My pal Steve Metcalf was writing his thesis about Ulysses, which struck me as perhaps the most sophisticated thing one could do on earth, aside from being James Joyce himself.
I began telling people that my thesis was about authorial presence in the modern text, that it was about John Barth and Milan Kundera, though, in the end, I devoted five pages to these authors. I renounced Vonnegut. He became another childish pleasure I would now have to hide from the world. (Others included: candy consumption, a weakness for prog rock, a tendency to conduct imaginary discussions with my twin brother.)
*
The Vonnegut Apostasy.
It happens to thousands of readers every year. They reach a point in their lives where they turn away from Vonnegut, toward authors who offer a greater complexity of prose, a more nuanced version of the world, whose authorial mission entails an examination of individual consciousness, rather than collective fate. I would wager that Vonnegut is the least acknowledged influence in modern letters.
In my case, I should admit that vanity, not boredom, was the culprit. I felt that my worship of Vonnegut marked me as somehow lacking in depth, which, as an English major at an elite liberal arts college, was the one thing I wanted to project. Copping to Vonnegut made me feel like a dork.
The feeling has lasted a long time.
I am still embarrassed to admit how much Vonnegut meant to me. When I am asked to name favorite books or authors, I gravitate toward the ones that look the most respectable on paper, and leave Vonnegut off the list.
But it’s more than embarrassment, I think. It has something to do with the way artists absorb influence. They tend to focus on those figures whom they discover later in life, when they have some coherent self-concept of themselves, and the vocabulary to articulate the conscious facets of their admiration. It was easy enough for me to identify Bellow as an inspiration because I read him thinking: this man is my inspiration! Vonnegut got into the groundwater before my ambition took root.
In this sense, as I’ve suggested, he was more like a parent. And what was the reward for all his hard work? He got taken for granted.
*
Vonnegut’s books remain critically underappreciated. But I don’t really give a shit about critical appreciation. As a measure of cultural influence, it turns out to matter a lot less than an expensive hairstyle. The real issue here isn’t his role as an author, but as a Prophet.
I’m in no position to lecture anyone on Biblical matters, as I find the Holy Books to be wishful poetry for the most part. But I do know the basic plot of the Prophetic books: Prophet warns the people to shape up. The people don’t listen. The Prophet winds up howling in hole. This is the plot of Vonnegut’s life.
People may regard him as a literary legend and all the rest of that glitzy stuff, but nobody with any sort of power has heeded his call.
One wonders now where our leaders got the idea that mass torture would work to our advantage in Indochina. It never worked anywhere else. They got the idea from childish fiction, I think, and from a childish awe of terror.
Vonnegut wrote this 35 years ago.
*
Let me offer one more Vonnugget before I move on to the literary excavation that closes this wobbly triptych:
I now believe that the only way in which Americans can rise above their ordinariness, can mature sufficiently to rescue themselves and to help rescue their planet, is through enthusiastic intimacy with works of their own imaginations.
This is Vonnegut in a wildly optimistic mood.
In darker moments, he has expressed an equally convincing belief that our greatest works of literature will amount to nothing more than toilet paper. This has been, as far as I can tell, the central existential struggle of his life: does what I do matter?
*
I can’t blame him for his doubts. Vonnegut has now been writing for nearly half a century. He has been preaching the same line as Jesus on the Mount: humility, pacifism, intolerance for all forms of human suffering.
During the late Sixties, he might even have believed that America was going to right itself. Instead, he has watched the country fall under the spell of leaders who demand nothing from us but the indulgence of our darkest impulses. He has watched his fellow citizens shrink before his eyes, become idolaters of convenience, screen addicts, brutes who cheer for death and call themselves patriots. He has watched the popular press, and the so-called opposition, cower before their moral duties.
And so we come (at last) to the point. Why, after twenty years, am I taking up with Vonnegut again? The cynical answer would be because he will soon be gone. That is getting it all exactly backwards. I am writing about Vonnegut now not because he is leaving us, but because we have left him.