Chapter 22

Regeneration

If you keep writing, your concerns will sneak up again and again in various forms.

Long after Vonnegut said he’d put his mother’s suicide to rest by writing Breakfast of Champions, it kept materializing.261 In fact, in Deadeye Dick, three novels later, he took it on more directly.

I would be glad to attempt a detailed analysis of Celia Hoover’s character, if I thought her character had much of anything to do with her suicide by Drāno. As a pharmacist, though, I see no reason not to give full credit to amphetamine.

Here is the warning which the law requires as a companion now for each shipment of amphetamine as it leaves the factory:

“Amphetamine has been extensively abused. Tolerance, extreme psychological dependence, and severe social disability have occurred. There are reports of patients who have increased dosages to many times that recommended. Abrupt cessation following prolonged high dosage results in extreme fatigue and mental depression; changes are also noted in the sleep EEG.

“Manifestations of chronic intoxication with amphetamine include severe dermatoses, marked insomnia, irritability, hyperactivity, and personality changes. The most severe manifestation of chronic intoxication is psychosis, often indistinguishable from schizophrenia.”

Want some?262

Further on, the pharmacist narrator, who converts all his worst memories into plays, remembers “the snaggletoothed ruins” of Celia knocking on his back door, begging for more:

Rudy: You came here because you’ve been shut off everyplace else. And I wouldn’t give you any more of that poison, if you had a prescription signed by God Almighty. Now you’re going to tell me you don’t love me after all.

Celia: I can’t believe you’re so mean.

Rudy: And who was it who was so nice to you for so long? Dr. Mitchell, I’ll bet—hand in hand with the Fairchild Heights Pharmacy. Too late, they got scared to death of what they’d done to you.263

All the above is fiction. Vonnegut’s mother did not drink Drano. She was not addicted to amphetamines. This is what actually happened, in his words:

So when my mother went crazy, long before my son went crazy, long before I had a son, and finally killed herself, I blamed chemicals, and I still do, although she had a terrible childhood. I can even name two of the chemicals: phenobarbital and booze. Those came from the outside, of course, the phenobarbs from our family doctor, who was trying to do something about her sleeplessness.264

Vonnegut ups the ante from the truth, in his fictional story, as any good fiction writer does.

About truth and fiction: at a Slate magazine panel discussion I attended about Slaughterhouse-Five and fan fiction, the editorial participants declared that Kurt’s mother had been addicted to amphetamines and downed Drano.

They conflated fiction with fact. They had not done their homework.

Besides “sneaking up,” you can intentionally recycle and elaborate upon your concerns. Whichever way it developed, intuitively or purposefully, here’s a Vonnegut example: his use of taking literally the adage “everybody is created equal.”

It appears in his first novel, Player Piano, as an idea two characters discuss.

“Well—I think it’s a grave mistake to put on public record everyone’s I.Q. I think the first thing the revolutionaries would want to do is knock off everybody with an I.Q. over 110, say…”

“… Things are certainly set up for a class war based on conveniently established lines of demarkation.… The criterion of brains is better than the one of money…”

“It’s about as rigid a hierarchy as you can get,” said Finnerty. “How’s somebody going to up his I.Q. [italics mine]?”265

In his second book, The Sirens of Titan, Vonnegut actualizes the idea within his sci-fi society.

He… rattled the blue canvas bag of lead shot that was strapped around his wrist.

There were similar bags of shot around his ankles and his other wrist, and two heavy slabs of iron hung on shoulder straps—one slab on his chest and one on his back.

These weights were his handicaps in the race of life.

He carried forty-eight pounds—carried them gladly. A stronger person would have carried more, a weaker person would have carried less.…

The weakest and meekest were bound to admit, at last, that the race of life was fair.266

Vonnegut describes realistic handicaps, as well:

There were… several true believers who had chosen handicaps of a subtler and more telling kind.…

A dark young man, whose lithe, predaceous sex appeal could not be spoiled by bad clothes and bad manners, had handicapped himself with a wife who was nauseated by sex.

The dark young man’s wife, who had reason to be vain about her Phi Beta Kappa key, had handicapped herself with a husband who read nothing but comic books.267

Two years after The Sirens of Titan was published in 1959, the short story “Harrison Bergeron,” with its opening premise of everybody being equal, appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine. In the short story Vonnegut forgoes the realism of “subtler and more telling” handicaps. He zeroes in on the physically obvious, keeping the story tight and to the point. It’s hilarious. And haunting.