Afterward
On April 11, 2007, Kurt Vonnegut died of injuries sustained during a fall in his Manhattan home. He was 84. When I received word, I couldn’t help but to think of that moment in Hartford when Vonnegut rose from his chair and stepped so slowly, so gingerly, over that errant microphone cord.
Someone was cruel enough to send me a link to the Fox News coverage. The reporter cited Vonnegut’s “unique brand of despondent leftism,” which struck me as an apt reflection of Fox’s unique brand of thrift-store fascism. I couldn’t bring myself to scan any of the other obits. I knew what they said, all the praise mustered for such occasions.
Vonnegut would have been revolted. As a younger man, he had lusted after acclaim. He thought people were actually listening to him, a respectable Christian mistake. Vonnegut was an atheist, of course. No sweet dreams of heaven for him. No jokes tossed down to the suckers in purgatory. He leaves us his books, his pleas for kindness, his foolish hope for our salvation.
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[1] Hartford, I was recently informed, is “the world capital of closeted insurance executives.” Awesome.
[2] An excerpt of the letter follows. Note: in a misguided effort to endear myself to Vonnegut, I addressed him as Mr. Rosewater, a reference to the benevolent protagonist of his novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.
Dear Mr. Rosewater,
As fate would have it, I’ve just been asked to write an appreciation of your work. I wondered if you would be willing to be interviewed. I have read most everything you’ve ever written. I became a writer, in large part, because of my admiration for you. My own books (three fiction and one non-fiction) all express the essential notion that our species will perish if we do not awaken our mercy.
You must be good and tired of people asking you for things aside from your work. I am sorry to trouble you. I wouldn’t ask if I thought my proposed book, or the world, could do without you.
With Deep Respect,
Steve Almond
[3] It should be noted, as well, that the median age of our current celebrities is roughly nineteen.
“Wherever you went there were women who would do anything for food or protection for themselves and their children and the old people … the whole point of war is to put women everywhere in that condition. It’s always the men against the women, with the men only pretending to fight among themselves … the ones who pretend the hardest get their pictures in the papers and medals afterwards.”
[5] For the record, he has four kids of his own and three children that he adopted after his sister died of cancer and his brother-in-law died in a car crash.
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[6] Asked about her interest in boxing, Oates insisted she was drawn to subjects “very different” from herself. I immediately pictured her in silk shorts and a mouthpiece, working the speedbag. I recognize that this image is both gratuitous and erotically disturbing. It should be taken as a measure of my frustration with her comments on the panel, and not (I should emphasize) a dismissal of her fiction, which I admire precisely because it exposes our shared lust for mayhem.
[7] Weiner later posted a summary of the evening on her blog, here excerpted:
At 83, Kurt Vonnegut’s written world-changing books, and he’s got his grumpy-old-man-at-the-end-of-the-world shtick down so pat that other people on stage were rendered extraneous annoyances…
Mr. Vonnegut didn’t appear to have much use for authors who hadn’t figured out a cogent philosophy of life, on par with his “just get off the planet” line — and I would have paid good money for a snapshot of the high school students’ faces when he informed them that human beings are a disease on the face of the planet and the best thing they can do is not reproduce and leave as quickly as possible….
Note how incredibly classy Weiner is – not at all bitter or defensive, as you might expect from someone who got punked in front of 2700 people.
[8] I would be remiss if I failed to mention this quinessential Weiner moment. Oates had named Emily Dickinson as her favorite writer, and was in the midst of discussing Dickinson’s work, when Weiner piped up with the following question: “Did you know that you can set ‘Because I Would Not Stop for Death’ to the tune of ‘Yellow Rose of Texas’? Have you ever done that?” Weiner then began chanting the words of the poem in a frantic, square dancey cadence.
Regretably, I am not making this up.
[9] No idea who he is, or what his first name might be.
[11] Actually, I did read the first hundred pages of Booth’s very thick and impressive-looking volume The Rhetoric of Fiction, and I derived a great deal of pleasure from carrying it around with me, on the off chance that some New Critical thug wanted to throw down. (None did.)
[12] I believe the Chief Curator had this neologism in mind when she used the adjective “plucky,” though perhaps she realized – as I did not, obviously – that realismo is an actual word in Spanish.
[13] I fantasize on page one of the thesis about the prospect of meeting Vonnegut, though I stop short of cataloguing what I might wear.
[14] I cannot begin to describe how pathetic it was to serve in this capacity for a Division Three liberal arts college. I would compare it to carrying a spittoon for one of the minor dwarves, such as Sneezy. The memory that leaps to mind is of an away game against our arch rival Amherst. The halftime score was, if memory serves, 51-0. I am talking about football, though we broadcast other sports, too, such as women’s field hockey. I was privileged to be one of the broadcast team who worked the famous Wesleyan/Colby bloodbath of 1987, a match that took place in a persistent drizzle and which was, inexplicably, a home game.
[15] I dutifully referred to members of the opposite sex as womyn, this being linguistically preferable to the suffixally oppressive women.
[16] Why 5:30 am? This will be hard to answer without calling into question my competence as a planner/husband. Briefly: I figured I’d need at least two days to look over Vonnegut’s papers, but I was also psychopathically in the thrall of the World Cup and needed, or felt I needed, to reach Boston by Saturday afternoon, when France played Brazil, which would only happen, based on my calculations (again, questionable) if I squeezed in Day One of the excavation after driving from St. Louis.
[17] Taylor told me that the Sylvia Plath collection actually got a lot more requests. I was devastated.
[18] You can stop laughing now. I am merely suggesting that – so far as Ms. Taylor was concerned – I might very well have been a scholar (i.e. I was wearing chinos, my shirt was tucked in, etc.).
[19] Look: I am not blaming Taylor. It certainly wasn’t her fault that Vonnegut is impossible to reach. I myself had failed to ask about making copies earlier, because – as is probably clear at this point – I’m an idiot. Still, it struck me as odd that a library would hold Vonnegut’s papers, would allow members of the public to inspect them, even take notes about them, but not copy them. In fact, it struck me as symptomatic of the entire vibe of the Special Collections staff. These were people devoted to the preservation of holy texts, like the monks of the Middle Ages, and like monks they drifted silently through silent rooms. They seemed simultaneously honored and offended at my presence, sadistic in the exercise of their power, yet polite to a fault. I guess conflicted is the word I’m looking for.
[20] I should mention that I was, to this point, reading as fast as I could and tapping out notes on my computer while also fretting over how little time I had, an activity to which I devoted nearly as much time as the actual note taking. This, if I may be frank, is called Judaism.
[21]As far as I can tell, this is raison d’etre of all writers.
[22] How familiar this all seems to me! The strutting tone, the inside jokes, the desperate whiff of personal ingratiation. How many letters like this have I written to editors over the years?
[8]Vonnegut’s 1956 letter to Karl Saalfield (president of Saalfield Games) is a classic. It includes 20 pages of specs for “General Headquarters,” a troop warfare game best described as a cross between chess, Stratego, and quantum mechanics. On the other side of one particularly baroque diagram I found this oddity, jotted down in Vonnegut’s elegant chicken scratch:
In 1925, Hal Irwin had a contractor build him a French Chateau out at 57th and North Meridian Street in Indianapolis.
There’s still old Metzger pear trees out through there, and a lot of em would still bear, if somebody’d think to spray em – hard little pears, taste like rock candy and lemon juice … Hal had had Ella the cook out there, on her days off, rehearsing it
The story stops right there. Vonnegut must have been struck by the idea in the midst of his diagramming. That’s the scenario I like best, that his imagination dragged him away from matters of money and war, back to the tawdry precincts of human desire.
[24] Ten years ago, when I was applying to grad school, I very nearly decided to attend the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, because I became hopelessly enamored with the idea of driving from my home in Miami Beach to Fairbanks, the northernmost hub of America if you don’t count Barrow, which (my apologies to the brave residents of that city) I don’t. The route ran 5021 miles. It was a great plan, very cinematic, its central flaw being that it would oblige me to actually live in Fairbanks, which is a hundred miles south of the Artic Circle and dark up to eighteen hours a day and where – according to a newspaper clipping sent to me by the Chief Curator at the inception of the plan – perfectly innocent citizens are occasionally killed by moose.
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Rumpus original art by Ilyse Magy (pieces one and two) and Miranda Harter (piece three)