Part Three
He may have been a genius, as mutants sometimes are.
I don’t imagine you’ve ever tried to gain access to the Reading Room at Indiana University’s Lilly Library, but I am here to tell you that security there stops just short of the cavity search. No food or drink allowed. No writing instruments. No cameras. You are given a locker for your possessions and instructed to walk over to a padded door. There is a click. You now have 1.5 seconds to open the door. If you fail to open the door you are led outside and shot in the head.
*
Why was I at the Lilly Library? I was there because Kurt Vonnegut had asked me to go see his papers, during our heart-stopping encounter in Hartford. Or okay, maybe it wasn’t really a request. Maybe it was more like a brush off. Fine.
The fact remained: I did need to drive my wife from Southern California to Boston. And Indiana was, more or less, on the way. And thus, I had forced her to rise at 5:30 am[16] and to drive with me from the lush suburbs of St. Louis, where the lots are the size of football fields, through the corn prairies of downstate Illinois as they came greenly awake at dawn, and onto Route 46 with its quiet procession of church and farm, its gleaming brown soil, and finally into Bloomington.
It was high summer, broiling, and the campus was swarming with incoming freshmen, their faces illuminated by the coming liberation into that kingdom of sports and pizza and cheap beer and – right, sorry! – higher education. They moved about in nervous eager packs, well-fed American youths, the boys dribbling invisible basketballs, the girls heavily deodorized and whispering, That is so, like, whatever.
*
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born on November 11, Armistice Day, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, the youngest child of a prominent local architect. His mother, Edith, would later kill herself. Her maiden name was Lieber, which means love in German.
According to an exhaustive family history prepared by an anonymous relative, all eight of Vonnegut’s great-grandparents were part of the vast migration of Germans to the Midwest between 1820 and 1870. The name Vonnegut derives from a distant paternal relation who had an estate – ein gut – on the river Funne, in Westphalia. The name was changed upon immigration, because Funnegut sounded too much like “funny gut.”
You can trust me when I tell you that Vonnegut’s forebears were not comic forces. Here is a direct quote from his great-great-grandfather, Jacom Schramm.
It appears human weakness makes it impossible to sustain a republic on this earth for any length of time, and the majority of people need, necessarily, a driving leader without whom they will inevitably wind up in chaos. Nevertheless, the Americans are still very proud of their freedom, even though they are the worst of slaves, and there is sure to be a bloody revolution before a monarchic government can gain a foothold here.
*
I will now resist the urge to make a disparaging remark about the Bush Administration.
*
How the scion of such hardass German stock became such a soft-hearted pinko is not entirely clear. Vonnegut has laid most of the blame at the feet of the Indianapolis public school system. Vonnegut’s papers include a sampling of his years at Shortridge High School. I can tell you, for instance, that despite earning an A+ in chemistry his senior year, despite a verified I.Q. of 137, he ranked 240 in a class of 760.
Of central interest is a newspaper clipping about Vonnegut and two schoolmates, who plan to drive down to New Mexico over the summer to dig up Indian skulls. The boys are pictured demonstrating how to light a campfire. Vonnegut is a foot taller than the others and the approximate width of a beanpole. He wears a fedora. His face is narrow, unlined, absurdly young, with an expression of improvised gravity that doesn’t quite conceal his chronic embarrassment.
*
I had hoped to make photocopies of this odd little document, but when I asked the Reading Room Monitor about this she cocked her head.
“Do you have permission from the author to make copies?”
“Of course,” I said, “Mr. Vonnegut, Kurt, actually asked me to come out.”
“You have a letter on file, then?”
“On file,” I said, thoughtfully.
There now ensued a rather lengthy drama, involving a hushed appeal up the chain of command, tense colloquies, trips to the computer to check “the data base,” and a culminating interview with one Saundra Taylor, Curator of Manuscripts. I had, in fact, called Ms. Taylor several weeks earlier, on the assumption I would need a reservation to see the Vonnegut papers because they were so wildly popular.[17]
“There shouldn’t be a problem,” Taylor said. “Just have Mr. Vonnegut or his legal representative fax us a letter.”
“That’s the thing,” I said. “Mr. Vonnegut was the one who asked me to inspect his papers. It was more of a personal request, based on when I met with him. I’ve come all the way out from Boston and I only have two days. My wife is with me.” The rest of the reading room staff was now staring. “She’s six months pregnant,” I added, pathetically.
Ms. Taylor looked pained. It was this sort of moment, I imagined, that separated the minor Special Collection librarians from the big leaguers. Here was a thin, anguished scholar,[18] clearly desperate, perhaps prepared to make a scene. What I wanted was simple enough, even reasonable, but in direct contravention to her role as guardian of the collection and the protocols thereof. She paused a moment and smoothed down the corner of a file folder with her thumbnail.
I felt I should say something; perhaps suggest that my wife, in addition to her pregnancy, had lupus.
“It would be best,” Ms. Taylor said, with soft finality, “if you took notes.”[19]
*
This was not good. It had been my intention to use my two days at Lilly to Xerox the documents that struck me as most revelatory, so I could study them later. I did some quick math. The Vonnegut archive contained 4000 documents. Assuming I worked uninterrupted for the next two days, I would have fourteen hours to inspect the whole shebang, or 840 minutes. This came out to 12.5 seconds per document.
The problem was my reading skills, which are poor, as a result of my having been raised on a steady diet of “What’s Happening” reruns (and not, as I may have implied in certain settings, the collected works of Balzac). It takes me 12.5 seconds to read a standard photo caption.
*
I am also prone to distraction, which gives me another bad habit in common with Vonnegut. This comment is based on the fact that he dropped out of Butler University, and ditched Cornell after two piss-poor years to join the army, but even more so on the fascinating doodles that he left scattered on virtually all of the schoolwork in his archive. I’m thinking in particular of an assignment for Anthropology 220, the back of which bears the following in pencil:
I Sherwood like to have everything baked with Robinhood flour. Nottingham like it. … Many’s the time I’ve Maid Marion in the kitching, baking.
I spent considerably longer than 12.5 seconds (best estimate 17 minutes) studying this inscription. I was most intrigued by the word kitching. Was the misspelling intentional, a veiled pun referring to Maid Marion’s nether regions? It had such a ribald ring to it. The old kitching. Get a load of that kitching. That is so, like, kitching.
I felt flushed with a strange joy. Vonnegut was a fellow punster! A fellow horndog! I’d gained official access to the sick little kingdom of his mind.
*
Near as I can figure, this doodle dates from his years at the University of Chicago, where he came to get a masters in anthropology. He was just back from the war then, freshly married to his high school sweetheart, 23 years old and clearly bored out of his skull by grad school.
What can I tell you about his thesis, “On the Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales”? I can tell you that it sucks almost as badly as my own. His essential argument is against what he calls “the passionate, partisan, rococo argle-bargle of contemporary literary criticism” which unnecessarily complicates the meaning and purpose of stories. The thesis includes hand-drawn graphs tracing the fortunes of characters in various folktales, and devotes 20 pages – nearly half its length – to reprinting a short story by D.H. Lawrence.
What does all this have to do with anthropology?
Not much.
Vonnegut is merely explaining to himself, as I later would, the sort of writer he hopes to become. “Let it be understood,” he writes, “that a contemporary master story teller cares deeply about the form of his tales because he is obsessed with being entertaining, with not being a bore, with leaving his audience satisfied.” (Translation: fuck the critics.) The attributes of his later work are all manifest here – the sharp command of plot, the brutal wit and contempt for authority.
In 1946, the anthropology faculty unanimously rejected Vonnegut’s thesis.[20]