Chapter 10

Sanctuary

Besides nurturing the soul, Vonnegut notes, the act of writing can be a solace and refuge.

I found me a place where I can do good without doing any harm. —Boaz in Sarah Horne Canby’s Unk and Boaz in the Caves of Mercury133

In Bluebeard,

I asked her if she would write. I meant letters to me, but she thought I meant books. “That’s all I do—that and dancing,” she said. “As long as I keep that up, I keep grief away.” All summer long, she had made it easy to forget that she had recently lost a husband who was evidently brilliant and funny and adorable.134

Using the Socratic method, [James Slotkin, Vonnegut’s professor at the University of Chicago] asked his little class this: “What is it an artist does—a painter, a writer, a sculptor—?”

He already had an answer, which he had put down in the book he was writing, a book which would never be published. But he would not tell us what it was until the end of the hour, and he might discard it entirely if our answers to his question made more sense than his. This was a class composed entirely of veterans of the Second World War in the summertime. The class had been put together in order that we might continue to receive our living expenses from our government when most of the rest of the university was on vacation.

If any of us came up with good answers, I now have no idea what they might have been. His answer was this: “The artist says, ‘I can do very little about the chaos around me, but at least I can reduce to perfect order this square of canvas, this piece of paper, this chunk of stone.’”

Everybody knows that.

• • •

Most of my adult life has been spent in bringing to some kind of order sheets of paper eight and a half inches wide and eleven inches long. This severely limited activity has allowed me to ignore many a storm.…

• • •

About nine years ago I was asked to deliver an address to the American Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters here. I was not then a member, and was terrified. I had left home, and was spending most of my time counting flowers on the wall and watching Captain Kangaroo in a tiny apartment on East Fifty-fourth Street. My friend with the gambling sickness had just cleaned out my bank account and my son had gone insane in British Columbia.

I asked my wife please not to come, since I was rattled enough as it was. I asked a woman with whom I had been keeping company some not to come, either—for the same reason. So they both came, all dressed up for a fancy execution.

What saved my life? Pieces of paper eight and a half inches wide and eleven inches long.

• • •

I am sorry for people who have no knack for reducing to seeming order some little thing.135

But everybody can. And people do. Vonnegut knew that. The most unread among us, the most unlikely to write, will take pen to paper in times of duress or to record important occurrences or to make sense of a perplexing time in their lives.

In The Sirens of Titan, the character Unk writes a letter to himself before his memory is wiped out:

It was literature in its finest sense, since it made Unk courageous, watchful, and secretly free. It made him his own hero in very trying times.136

If you’re professional, like Vonnegut, you will be exacting about word choice, sequence, punctuation, and rhythms. You will strive for “Those masterful images because complete,” as Yeats says, and that will take “all [your] thought and love.”137 Or at least, your absorption. That’s sanctuary.

One can also whittle, bake.

What is that perfect picture which any five-year-old can paint? Two unwavering bands of light.138