Chapter 21

Propagation

[The storyteller’s] initial lie, his premise, will suggest many new lies of its own. The storyteller must choose among them, seeking those which are most believable, which keep the arithmetic sound. Thus does a story generate itself [italics mine].251

Memory, fact, observation, an imaginative spree: these are a writer’s resources. You seize the one that springs up out of your tool chest.

You know the amazing passage in Slaughterhouse-Five about Billy Pilgrim’s imagining the war movie backward?

He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.252

And on it goes.

There’s no explaining the imaginative leap that spawned that marvelous scene. However, films were rewound in the good old celluloid days. You could turn the light off your 8mm home movie projector so you didn’t have to see, or you could watch it reel backward. It was amusing to do that. Fellow employees and friends of Vonnegut’s at GE, guys in their late twenties, used to have stag nights watching blue movies, and they’d deliberately rewind the films to view them backward. “Such fun watching the bellboy getting dressed and backing out of the room, carrying a tray.”253 The un-fucking, too, must’ve been entertaining. This experience may have embedded itself more deeply in Kurt’s memory than your everyday rewound home movie, and triggered this transformative use of it.

The word “karass” in Cat’s Cradle? A student in our workshop at Iowa asked Kurt where it came from. In that split second before reply, there was the hushed expectation, the possibility, that it might’ve descended from something magical, meaningful. Kurt responded candidly. It was a name on a mailbox he often passed in Barnstable, Cape Cod.

The prayer, commonly known now as AA’s Serenity Prayer, in Slaughterhouse-Five that adorns Billy Pilgrim’s office wall and the locket between Montana Wildhack’s breasts?254

god grant me

the serenity to accept

the things i cannot change,

courage

to change the things i can,

and wisdom always

to tell the

difference.

Kurt lifted it from a story, he confessed to me, written by Mary Kathleen O’Donnell, his student and my friend, soon after the novel’s publication. He said he’d never done that before, taken something from a student’s work. He was mildly ashamed.

Some stolen property. Soon after he told me that, I saw the prayer in embroidery and framed in my mother’s farmhouse kitchen. AA had adopted it, it turns out, years before.255 That’s probably how Mary knew it. It’s public domain.

Fictional theories about social change, which Vonnegut concocted in The Sirens of Titan, for example? They certainly derived from his mentor Slotkin’s actual theories.

As he says in his Pocket History of Mars: “Any man who would change the World in a significant way must have showmanship, a genial willingness to shed other people’s blood, and a plausible new religion to introduce during the brief period of repentance and horror that usually follows bloodshed.”256

Two novels later, in Cat’s Cradle, it seems Vonnegut applied these theories in creating its characters and “plausible new” religion, Bokonism. Chapter 58, “Tyranny with a Difference,” lets us know that “the new conquerors” of the fictional island of San Lorenzo

“dreamed of making San Lorenzo a Utopia.

“To this end, McCabe overhauled the economy and the laws.

“Johnson designed a new religion.”

I wanted all things

To seem to make some sense,

So we all could be happy, yes,

Instead of tense.

And I made up lies

So that they all fit nice,

And I made this sad world

A par-a-dise.

It was the belief of Bokonon [McCabe’s friend] that good societies could be built only by pitting good against evil, and by keeping the tension high between the two at all times.257

To that end, the religion was outlawed. Laws were instituted. This was one:

anybody caught practicing bokononism in san lorenzo… will die on the hook!258

Let the good times roll.

I don’t know how people explain the imagination, anyway. My books are protests against explanations. It drives me nuts when someone tells me what’s going on.259

“Kurt’s way of looking at people, of creating characters,” Sidney Offit says, “was his own. Take Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five. He comes off like a character in a fable. If you or I were writing that story about Dresden, we’d be trying to dredge the emotion from the scene. Not Kurt.

“With Kurt’s stories there was always something else going on—a spiritual quality. Religion itself has a quality, a spiritual jump.… You could call them science fiction leaps.”260