Chapter 3

The Prime Mover

If you’re a writer, then caring about a subject “others should care about” is a necessity. It’s the primary tool, before pencil, pen, paper, or computer. You must be compelled “in your heart”; otherwise, why would you do such a difficult thing?

Writing is hard work. Writing well is very hard work. It takes courage and perseverance.

“You have to sit there,” as Kurt said. “It’s physically uncomfortable, it’s physically bad for someone to sit still that long, and it’s socially bad for a person to be alone that much. The working conditions are really bad. Nobody has ever found the solution to that.”44

And here let’s take a minute to define the word “writer.” In Player Piano, Vonnegut’s first novel, “The Shah of Bratpuhr, spiritual leader of 6,000,000 members of the Kolhouri sect,” is driving along with Dr. Halyard of the United States Department of State. The Shah sees a beautiful woman on the street and invites her into his limousine, assuming she’s a sex slave, as such a woman would be in his own culture, which consists only of slaves and the elite. She gets in but looks unhappy, Halyard thinks, and finally explains she knows what the Shah wants and that she’s willing, because the problem is, her husband is a writer, and has no “classification number,” the number required for employment. Halyard asks,

“Then how can you call him a writer?”…

“Because he writes,” she said.

“My dear girl,” said Halyard paternally, “on that basis, we’re all writers.”

Halyard’s retort may have popped up in your own mind, dear reader. Vonnegut wrote this scene in the late 1940s. If the fictional Halyard could make such a pronouncement then, think of it now, when we’re all writing like never before! We’re blogging, e-mailing, logging in to comment. We’re “chatting” with our fingers in online “chat” rooms and with experts in “live chats.” We’re tweeting and texting. And we are all “sitting there” at computers.

Does that make us all writers?

The passage continues:

“Two days ago he had a number—W–441 [for a “fiction novice”],” she explains.

“He was to have it until he’d completed his novel. After that, he was supposed to get either a W–440 [for “fiction journeyman”].… Or a W–255 [for “public relations”].… Two months ago he submitted his finished manuscript to the National Council of Arts and Letters for criticism and assignment to one of the book clubs.”…

“Anyway,” said the girl, “my husband’s book was rejected by the Council.”

“Badly written,” said Halyard primly. “The standards are high.”

“Beautifully written,” she said patiently. “But it was twenty-seven pages longer than the maximum length.”…

“And,” the girl continued, “it had an antimachine theme.”

Halyard’s eyebrows arched high. “Well! I should hope they wouldn’t print it! What on earth does he think he’s doing? Good lord, you’re lucky if he isn’t behind bars, inciting to advocate the commission of sabotage like that. He didn’t really think somebody’d print it, did he?”

“He didn’t care. He had to write it, so he wrote it.”

“Why doesn’t he write about clipper ships, or something like that? This book about the old days on the Erie Canal—the man who wrote that is cleaning up. Big demand for that bare-chested stuff.”

She shrugged helplessly. “Because he never got mad at clipper ships or the Erie Canal, I guess.”

“He sounds very maladjusted,” said Halyard distastefully.…

… “And my husband says somebody’s just got to be maladjusted; that somebody’s got to be uncomfortable enough to wonder where people are, where they’re going, and why they’re going there [italics mine]. That was the trouble with his book. It raised those questions, and was rejected. So he was ordered into public-relations duty.”45

So a writer is someone who is willing to be uncomfortable enough—or is uncomfortable enough by nature—to wonder where people are, where they’re going, and why they’re going there. A writer is willing to take risks for that wondering. A writer cares that much about his or her subject.

Thirty-five years and ten novels later, Vonnegut has his characters, the veteran novelist Slazinger and the beginning biographer Mrs. Berman, discuss these same matters:

“Everybody thinks he or she can be a writer,” he said with airy irony.

“Don’t tell me it’s a crime to try,” she said.

“It’s a crime to think it’s easy,” he said. “But if you’re really serious, you’ll find out quick enough that it’s the hardest thing there is.”

“Particularly so, if you have absolutely nothing to say,” she said. “Don’t you think that’s the main reason people find it so difficult? If they can write complete sentences and can use a dictionary, isn’t that the only reason they find writing hard: they don’t know or care about anything?”

Here Slazinger stole a line from the writer Truman Capote… “I think you’re talking about typing instead of writing,” he said.46

Vonnegut uses irony to make the point in other novels:

“You’d be good at public relations,” said Kraft.

“I certainly don’t have any powerful convictions to get in the way of a client’s message,” I said.47

When he was alive he was like a dead man in 1 respect: everything was pretty much all right with him.48

Vonnegut himself was as concerned about how human hearts and their ideas collectively affected societies as he was about the individual.

Oh, God—the lives people try to lead.

Oh, God—what a world they try to lead them in!49

Those short lines could sum up Vonnegut’s entire oeuvre, with an emphasis on the second.

As a young writer, science fiction was the form that beckoned him. He explains why, in the voice of his character Eliot Rosewater addressing sci-fi writers at a science fiction conference:

“I love you sons of bitches,” Eliot said in Milford. “You’re all I read any more. You’re the only ones who’ll talk about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that’ll last for billions of years. You’re the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstandings, mistakes, accidents and catastrophes do to us. You’re the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distances without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell.”

Vonnegut felt so strongly that passion about people and issues ought to be the prime mover for a writer that he would rather you err on the side of caring passionately vs. writing eloquently:

Eliot admitted later on that science-fiction writers couldn’t write for sour apples, but he declared that it didn’t matter. He said they were poets just the same, since they were more sensitive to important changes than anybody who was writing well.50

What made Vonnegut unique, why people love and need him, along with the fact that he was incredibly funny, was his perspective. It was huge.

Ever since studying anthropology, I have regarded history and cultures and societies as characters vivid as any in fiction.51

Vonnegut earned no degree in anthropology. But he gained something invaluable from the attempt. Years later, he described

the extraordinarily important idea (I only now understand) which I picked up from Anthropology: culture is a gadget which can be tinkered with like a Model-T Ford.52

A culture can contain fatal poisons… a respect for firearms, for example, or the belief that no male is really a man until he has had a physical showdown of some kind, or that women can’t possibly understand the really important things which are going on, and so on.… [That] enchantingly suggestive thing I learned… [became an] attitude I assumed.53

I learned to stand outside of my own society and people have said that I am like a Martian visiting the Earth.… It was easy for me to stand outside my own culture. I have discovered that many people are totally incapable of doing this.… They assume that their culture is so immutable that it’s like their skin and they assume that my asking them to stand outside their culture is like asking them to stand outside their skin.54

Here’s some concrete evidence of that training:

Master’s Thesis Project: Mythologies of North American Indian Nativistic Cults

Kurt Vonnegut

Summer, 1947

It is in the new myths that come into being during times of rapid culture change that I am interested, and so propose to examine the myths associated with the Prophet Dance, The Smohalla Cult, The Shaker Religion of Puget Sound, The Ghost Dances of 1870 and 1890, and The Peyote Cult, as variously manifested by North American Indian tribes.

He cites a letter from an infantry captain on “Indian duty” in Nevada, describing prophecies that arose among the Indians regarding the white man. Tavibo, the most influential medicine man, “went up alone into the mountain and there met the Great Spirit” several times, and upon his return, after going in a trance, offered the Spirit’s tidings. Each predicted a great disaster “within a few moons.”

In one, “All the improvements of the whites… would remain, but the whites would be swallowed up, while the Indians would be saved.”

In a second, “all, both Indians and whites, would be swallowed up… but at the end of three days the Indians would be resurrected in the flesh… while their enemies, the whites, would be destroyed forever.”

In a third, “Indians who believed in the prophecy would be resurrected… but those who did not believe in it would… be damned forever with the whites.”55

Entirely different myths were also spawned. One forecast that life on earth would become a “paradise.” “Life was to be eternal, and no distinction was to exist between races.”56 The Cheyenne were informed about Christ, and one reported, “I and my people have been living in ignorance until I went and found out the truth. All the whites and Indians are brothers, I was told there. I never knew this before.”57 They interpreted the Christ story in their own way and incorporated it into their culture.

What’s the common thread? How does each artifact serve and shape the culture? These are the kinds of questions an anthropologist is trained to ask. These are the kinds Vonnegut cared about.

In Player Piano, Vonnegut’s interest in cultures in flux lands on our own society. What did he care about that he thought others should care about? He was outraged at the tough trade-off when machines increasingly do our work: the incalculable cost/loss in terms of people’s sense of “being needed and useful, the foundation of self-respect.”58

It’s based on his experiences and observations growing up in the Depression, and his three years working in public relations at General Electric.

He was born in 1922, and when he was ten years old, in 1932, his architect father lost his job. Adults all around him suffered the indignity of having no work and little income.

During the Depression when people were looking for radical solutions to economic problems… they believed that scientists and engineers and mathematicians should run the world, that they were the only people with common sense.…

I had a father and a brother who believed strongly in technology that the world was going to be remade and I was an enthusiast for this too.… I was a great believer in truth, in scientific truth, and then as I wrote once “truth was dropped on Hiroshima”… and so I was hideously disillusioned.59

My first novel, Player Piano… is a lampoon on GE. I bit the hand that used to feed me.60

Some bites:

Rudy Hertz, a superb machinist whose movements were recorded so that machines could duplicate them, therefore eliminating his and other machinists’ jobs, holds up his hands when he meets the protagonist, Paul, an executive:

Good as ever, and there’s not two like them anywhere.

Each time the protagonist Paul’s wife calls, the conversation concludes exactly the same way:

“I love you, Paul.”

“I love you, Anita.”…

Anita had the mechanics of marriage down pat, even to the subtlest conventions.

One character, a “dull boy” with privileged connections, gets a top job.

The hell of it was that his attitude won grudging admiration from his fellow engineers, who had got their jobs the hard way.

There’s a mechanical checkers player, among other mechanisms, and of course a player piano. A revolutionary secret society springs up: the Ghost Shirt Society.

The factory itself, though, is like a

great gymnasium, where countless squads practiced precision calisthenics—bobbing, spinning, leaping, thrusting, waving.… This much of the new era Paul loved: the machines themselves were entertaining and delightful.61

Vonnegut cared about these issues, and translated the things he cared about into the form of fiction.

But even though he himself was concerned about technology, science and automation, it wasn’t what he himself cared about that mattered to him when teaching or advising budding writers.

Listen to what he said to his former Iowa workshop student, John Casey, in an interview:

Machinery is important. We must write about it.

But I don’t care if you don’t; I’m not urging you, am I? To hell with machinery.62