Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Kurt Vonnegut
List of Illustrations
Title Page
Introduction by Mark Vonnegut
Letter from PFC Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., to his family, May 29, 1945
Kurt Vonnegut at Clowes Hall, Indianapolis, April 27, 2007
Wailing Shall Be in All Streets
Great Day
Guns Before Butter
Happy Birthday, 1951
Brighten Up
The Unicorn Trap
Unknown Soldier
Spoils
Just You and Me, Sammy
The Commandant’s Desk
Armageddon in Retrospect
The History of Vintage
Copyright
A Man Without a Country
Bagombo Snuff Box
Timequake
Fates Worse Than Death
Hocus Pocus
Bluebeard
Galápagos
Deadeye Dick
Palm Sunday
Jailbird
Slapstick
Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons
Breakfast of Champions
Happy Birthday, Wanda June
Slaughterhouse-Five
Welcome to the Monkey House
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Cat’s Cradle
Mother Night
The Sirens of Titan
Player Piano
I trust my writing most and others seem to trust it most when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am.
We might as well have been throwing cream pies.
KURT, ESTIMATING THE NET EFFECT OF THE NET ANTIWAR MOVEMENT ON THE COURSE OF THE VIETNAM WAR
WRITING WAS A spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in. He wanted to get things right but never thought that his writing was going to have much effect on the course of things. His models were Jonah, Lincoln, Melville, and Twain.
He rewrote and rewrote and rewrote, muttering whatever he had just written over and over, tilting his head back and forth, gesturing with his hands, changing the pitch and rhythm of the words. Then he would pause, thoughtfully rip the barely written-on sheet of typing paper from the typewriter, crumple it up, throw it away, and start over again. It seemed like an odd way for a grown-up to spend his time, but I was just a child who didn’t know much.
He had an extra gear language-wise. At eighty-plus he was still doing the New York Times crossword puzzles quickly and in ink and never asking for help. As soon as I told him the verb came last, he could translate my Latin homework at sight, without having ever taken Latin. His novels, speeches, short stories, and even dust-jacket comments are very carefully crafted. Anyone who thinks that Kurt’s jokes or essays came easily or were written off the cuff hasn’t tried to write.
One of his favorite jokes was about a guy who was smuggling wheelbarrows. Every day for years and years a customs agent carefully searched through this guy’s wheelbarrow.
Finally, when he was about to retire, the customs agent asked the guy, “We’ve become friends. I’ve searched your wheelbarrow every day for many years. What is it you’re smuggling?”
“My friend, I am smuggling wheelbarrows.”
Kurt would often laugh so hard at his own jokes that he would end up bent in half, looking up with his head in his lap. If it started a coughing fit, it could get a little scary.
When I complained about being paid fifty dollars for an article that had taken me a week to write, he said I should take into account what it would have cost me to take out a two-page ad announcing that I could write.
Anyone who wrote or tried to write was special to Kurt. And he wanted to help. More than once I heard him talking slowly and carefully to drunks who managed to get him on the phone about how to make a story or a joke, the wheelbarrow, work.
“Who was that?”
“I don’t know.”
When Kurt wrote, he was setting out on a quest. He knew, because it had happened before, that if he could keep the feet moving, he might stumble over something good and work it and work it and make it his own. But as many times as it happened, Kurt didn’t have much self-confidence. He worried that every good idea he got might be his last and that any apparent success he had had would dry up and blow away.
He worried that he had skinny legs and wasn’t a good tennis player.
He had a hard time letting himself be happy, but couldn’t quite hide the glee he got from writing well.
The unhappiest times in his life were those months and sometimes a whole year when he couldn’t write, when he was “blocked.” He’d try just about anything to get unblocked, but he was very nervous and suspicious about psychiatry. In my early-to-mid-twenties he let it slip that he was afraid that therapy might make him normal and well adjusted, and that would be the end of his writing. I tried to reassure him that psychiatrists weren’t nearly that good.
“If you can’t write clearly, you probably don’t think nearly as well as you think you do,” he told me. If you ever think something he wrote was sloppy, you might be right, but just to be sure, read it again.
A little kid coming of age in Indiana in the Depression decides he wants to be a writer, a famous writer, and that’s what ends up happening. What are the odds? He threw a lot of spaghetti up against the wall and developed a keen sense of what was going to stick.
When I was sixteen, he couldn’t get a job teaching English at Cape Cod Community College. My mother claimed that she went into bookstores and ordered his books under a false name so the books would at least be in the stores and maybe someone would buy them. Five years later he published Slaughterhouse-Five and had a million-dollar multi-book contract. It took some getting used to. Now, for most people looking back, Kurt’s being a successful, even famous, writer is an “of course” kind of thing. For me it looks like something that very easily might have not happened.
He often said he had to be a writer because he wasn’t good at anything else. He was not good at being an employee. Back in the mid-1950s, he was employed by Sports Illustrated, briefly. He reported to work, was asked to write a short piece on a racehorse that had jumped over a fence and tried to run away. Kurt stared at the blank piece of paper all morning and then typed, “The horse jumped over the fucking fence,” and walked out, self-employed again.
I’ve never known a person less interested in food. The chain-smoking had something to do with it. When he complained about living so long, I told him that God was curious about how many cigarettes a human could smoke and He couldn’t help wondering what was going to come out of Kurt’s mouth next. The thing that made it hard to take him seriously when he said he was all done and had nothing more to say was that he started saying he was done in his mid-forties and he was still surprising people and coming up with good stuff in his mid-eighties.
The most radical, audacious thing to think is that there might be some point to working hard and thinking hard and reading hard and writing hard and trying to be of service.
He was a writer who believed in the magic of the process—both what it did for him and what it could do for readers. The reader’s time and attention were sacred to him. He connected with people on a visceral level because he realized that content was not the whole story. Kurt was and is like a gateway drug or a shoehorn. Once the reader is over the threshold, other writers become accessible.
“Does anyone out of high school still read me?”
He taught how stories were told and taught readers how to read. His writings will continue to do that for a long time. He was and is subversive, but not the way people thought he was. He was the least wild-and-crazy guy I ever knew. No drugs. No fast cars.
He tried always to be on the side of the angels. He didn’t think the war in Iraq was going to happen, right up until it did. It broke his heart not because he gave a damn about Iraq but because he loved America and believed that the land and people of Lincoln and Twain would find a way to be right. He believed, like his immigrant forefathers, that America could be a beacon and a paradise.
He couldn’t help thinking that all that money we were spending blowing up things and killing people so far away, making people the world over hate and fear us, would have been better spent on public education and libraries. It’s hard to imagine that history won’t prove him right, if it hasn’t already.
Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have. What occurs to people when they read Kurt is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that.
It’s common knowledge that Kurt was depressed, but as with a lot of things that are common knowledge, there are good reasons to doubt it. He didn’t want to be happy and he said a lot of depressing things, but I honestly don’t think he was ever depressed.
He was like an extrovert who wanted to be an introvert, a very social guy who wanted to be a loner, a lucky person who would have preferred to be unlucky. An optimist posing as a pessimist, hoping people will take heed. It wasn’t until the Iraq War and the end of his life that he became sincerely gloomy.
There was a bizarre, surreal incident when he took too many pills and ended up in a psych hospital, but it never felt like he was in any danger. Within a day he was bouncing around the dayroom playing Ping-Pong and making friends. It seemed like he was doing a not very convincing imitation of someone with mental illness.
The psychiatrist at the hospital told me, “Your dad’s depressed. We’re going to put him on an antidepressant.”
“Okay, but he doesn’t seem to have any of the symptoms I’m used to seeing in depression. He’s not slowed down, he doesn’t look sad, he’s still quick on the uptake.”
“He did try to kill himself,” the psychiatrist said.
“Well, sort of.” Of all the medications he took, there wasn’t a toxic level of anything. He had a barely therapeutic level of Tylenol.
“Do you not think we should put him on antidepressants? We have to do something.”
“I just thought I should mention that he doesn’t seem depressed. It’s very hard to say what Kurt is. I’m not saying he’s well.”
The difference between my fans and Kurt’s is that my fans know they’re mentally ill.
Kurt could pitch better than he could catch. It was routine for him to write and say provocative, not always kind things about people in the family. We learned to get over it. It was just Kurt. But when I mentioned in an article that Kurt, wanting to be a famous pessimist, might have envied Twain and Lincoln their dead children, he went ballistic.
“I was just trying to pull readers in. No one but you is going to take it even a little seriously.”
“I know how jokes work.”
“So do I.”
Click and click, we hung up.
“If I should die, God forbid.”
Every few years he sent me a letter telling me what to do in the event of his death. Every time, except the last, the letter would be followed by a phone call, reassuring me that it wasn’t a suicide note. The day before he sent me his last “If I should die” letter, he finished the speech he was to deliver in Indiana to kick off the year of Kurt Vonnegut. Two weeks later he fell, hit his head, and irreversibly scrambled his precious egg.
I got to study that last speech much closer than most, since I was asked to deliver it. I couldn’t help wondering, “How on earth does he get away with some of this crap?” His audience made it work. I quickly realized that I was reading his words to an auditorium and a world utterly in love with my father who would have followed him anywhere.
“[I’m] as celibate as fifty percent of the heterosexual Roman Catholic clergy” is a sentence with no meaning. “A twerp [is] a guy who put a set of false teeth up his rear end and bit the buttons off the back seats of taxicabs.” “A snarf is someone who sniffs girls’ bicycle seats.” Where oh where is my dear father going? And then he would say something that cut to the heart of the matter and was outrageous and true, and you believed it partly because he had just been talking about celibacy and twerps and snarfs.
“I wouldn’t be a doctor for anything. That’s got to be the worst job in the world.”
One of our last conversations:
“How old are you, Mark?”
“I’m fifty-nine, Dad.”
“That’s old.”
“Yes it is, Dad.”
I loved him dearly.
These writings, mostly undated and all unpublished, hold up very nicely by themselves. They don’t need any commentary by me. Even if the content of any given piece isn’t interesting to you, look at the structure and rhythm and choices of words. If you can’t learn about reading and writing from Kurt, maybe you should be doing something else.
His last words in the last speech he wrote are as good a way as any for him to say good-bye.
And I thank you for your attention, and I’m out of here.
Mark Vonnegut
September 1, 2007
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THANK YOU.
I now stand before you as a role model, courtesy of Mayor Bart Peterson, and God bless him for this occasion.
If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.
And just think of this: In only three years’ time, during World War Two, I went from Private to Corporal, a rank once held by both Napoleon and Adolf Hitler.
I am actually Kurt Vonnegut, Junior. And that’s what my kids, now in late middle age like me, still call me when talking about me behind my back: “Junior this and Junior that.”
But whenever you look at the Ayres clock at the Intersection of South Meridian and Washington Streets, please think of my father, Kurt Vonnegut, Senior, who designed it. As far as that goes, he and his father, Bernard Vonnegut, designed the whole darn building. And he was a founder of The Orchard School and The Children’s Museum.
His father, my grandfather the architect Bernard Vonnegut, designed, among other things, The Athenæum, which before the First World War was called “Das Deutsche Haus.” I can’t imagine why they would have changed the name to “The Athenæum,” unless it was to kiss the ass of a bunch of Greek-Americans.
I guess all of you know that I am suing the manufacturer of Pall Mall cigarettes, because their product didn’t kill me, and I’m now eighty-four. Listen: I studied anthropology at the University of Chicago after the Second World War, the last one we ever won. And the physical anthropologists, who had studied human skulls going back thousands of years, said we were only supposed to live for thirty-five years or so, because that’s how long our teeth lasted without modern dentistry.
Weren’t those the good old days: thirty-five years and we were out of here. Talk about intelligent design! Now all the Baby Boomers who can afford dentistry and health insurance, poor bastards, are going to live to be a hundred!
Maybe we should outlaw dentistry. And maybe doctors should quit curing pneumonia, which used to be called “the old people’s friend.”
But the last thing I want to do tonight is to depress you. So I have thought of something we can all do tonight which will definitely be upbeat. I think we can come up with a statement on which all Americans, Republican or Democrat, rich or poor, straight or gay, can agree, despite our country’s being so tragically and ferociously divided.
The first universal American sentiment I came up with was “Sugar is sweet.”
And there is certainly nothing new about a tragically and ferociously divided United States of America, and especially here in my native state of Indiana. When I was a kid here, this state had within its borders the national headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan, and the site of the last lynching of an African-American citizen north of the Mason-Dixon Line, Marion, I think.
But it also had, and still has, in Terre Haute, which now boasts a state-of-the-art lethal-injection facility, the birthplace and home of the labor leader Eugene Debs. He lived from 1855 to 1926, and led a nationwide strike against the railroads. He went to prison for a while because he opposed our entry into World War One.
And he ran for President several times, on the Socialist Party ticket, saying things like this: “While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
Debs pretty much stole that from Jesus Christ. But it is so hard to be original. Tell me about it!
But all right, what is a statement on which all Americans can agree? “Sugar is sweet,” certainly. But since we are on the property of a university, we can surely come up with something which has more cultural heft. And this is my suggestion: “The Mona Lisa, the picture by Leonardo da Vinci, hanging in the Louvre in Paris, France, is a perfect painting.”
OK? A show of hands, please. Can’t we all agree on that?
OK, take down your hands. I’d say the vote is unanimous, that the Mona Lisa is a perfect painting. The only trouble with that, which is the trouble with practically everything we believe: It isn’t true.
Listen: Her nose is tilted to the right, OK? That means the right side of her face is a receding plane, going away from us. OK? But there is no foreshortening of her features on that side, giving the effect of three dimensions. And Leonardo could so easily have done that foreshortening. He was simply too lazy to do it. And if he were Leonardo da Indianapolis, I would be ashamed of him.
No wonder she has such a cockeyed smile.
And somebody might now want to ask me, “Can’t you ever be serious?” The answer is, “No.”
When I was born at Methodist Hospital on November eleventh, 1922, and this city back then was as racially segregated as professional basketball and football teams are today, the obstetrician spanked my little rear end to start my respiration. But did I cry? No.
I said, “A funny thing happened on the way down the birth canal, Doc. A bum came up to me and said he hadn’t had a bite for three days. So I bit him!”
But seriously, my fellow Hoosiers, there’s good news and bad news tonight. This is the best of times and the worst of times. So what else is new?
The bad news is that the Martians have landed in Manhattan, and have checked in at the Waldorf-Astoria. The good news is that they only eat homeless people of all colors, and they pee gasoline.
Am I religious? I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves “Our Lady of Perpetual Consternation.” We are as celibate as fifty percent of the heterosexual Roman Catholic clergy.
Actually—and when I hold up my right hand like this, it means I’m not kidding, that I give my Word of Honor that what I’m about to say is true. So actually, I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an Afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.
We don’t fear death, and neither should you. You know what Socrates said about death, in Greek, of course? “Death is just one more night.”
As a Humanist, I love science. I hate superstition, which could never have given us A-bombs.
I love science, and not only because it has given us the means to trash the planet, and I don’t like it here. It has found the answers to two of our biggest questions: How did the Universe begin, and how did we and all other animals get the wonderful bodies we have, with eyes and brains and kidneys and so on?
OK. So science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn’t even nothing or once. Can you imagine that? You can’t, because there isn’t even nothing to imagine.
But then there was this great big BANG! And that’s where all this crap came from.
And how did we get our wonderful lungs and eyebrows and teeth and toenails and assholes and so on? By means of millions of years of natural selection. That’s when one animal dies and another one copulates. Survival of the fittest!
But look: If you should kill somebody, whether accidentally or on purpose, improving our species, please don’t copulate afterwards. That’s what causes babies, in case your mother didn’t tell you.
And yes, my fellow Hoosiers, and I have never denied being one of you: This is indeed the Apocalypse, the end of everything, as prophesied by Saint John the Divine and Saint Kurt the Vonnegut.
Even as I speak, the very last polar bear may be dying of hunger on account of climate change, on account of us. And I will sure miss the polar bears. Their babies are so warm and cuddly and trusting, just like ours.
Does this old poop have any advice for young people in times of such awful trouble? Well, I’m sure you know that our country is the only so-called advanced nation that still has a death penalty. And torture chambers. I mean, why screw around?
But listen: If anyone here should wind up on a gurney in a lethal-injection facility, maybe the one at Terre Haute, here is what your last words should be: “This will certainly teach me a lesson.”
If Jesus were alive today, we would kill him with lethal injection. I call that progress. We would have to kill him for the same reason he was killed the first time. His ideas are just too liberal.
My advice to writers just starting out? Don’t use semicolons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.
So first the Mona Lisa, and now semicolons. I might as well clinch my reputation as a world-class nutcase by saying something good about Karl Marx, commonly believed in this country, and surely in Indian-no-place, to have been one of the most evil people who ever lived.
He did invent Communism, which we have long been taught to hate, because we are so in love with Capitalism, which is what we call the casinos on Wall Street.
Communism is what Karl Marx hoped could be an economic scheme for making industrialized nations take as good care of people, and especially of children and the old and disabled, as tribes and extended families used to do, before they were dispersed by the Industrial Revolution.
And I think maybe we might be wise to stop bad-mouthing Communism so much, not because we think it’s a good idea, but because our grandchildren and great-grandchildren are now in hock up to their eyeballs to the Communist Chinese.
And the Chinese Communists also have a big and superbly equipped army, something we don’t have. We’re too cheap. We just want to nuke everybody.
But there are still plenty of people who will tell you that the most evil thing about Karl Marx was what he said about religion. He said it was the opium of the lower classes, as though he thought religion was bad for people, and he wanted to get rid of it.
But when Marx said that, back in the 1840s, his use of the word “opium” wasn’t simply metaphorical. Back then real opium was the only painkiller available, for toothaches or cancer of the throat, or whatever. He himself had used it.
As a sincere friend of the downtrodden, he was saying he was glad they had something which could ease their pain at least a little bit, which was religion. He liked religion for doing that, and certainly didn’t want to abolish it. OK?
He might have said today as I say tonight, “Religion can be Tylenol for a lot of unhappy people, and I’m so glad it works.”