Chapter 35

Farting Around in Life and Art

Besides counseling to take stock of dangers to one’s health as a writer, Vonnegut provides some awfully good advice on how to maintain well-being.

Maintenance is, probably, the most important thing a person can do.

Think of the advice in the rest of this book as housekeeping tips for the body and soul, to ward off dust-devil demons like writer’s block, the humdrums, and fear, and to keep your writerly and human engine humming.

How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.551

Vonnegut liked to play tennis and was avid for Ping-Pong. He did the crossword puzzles, played chess, swam. He loved to have a good time. Whatever you like to do for a good time, do it.

Playing around in other arts is one of the most soul-replenishing, exhilarating ways to fart around. Banging on drums, shaping clay, acting—any art can revitalize you and your writing. And you may discover, as Vonnegut did, an avocation that allows another part of your soul self-expression.

Freedom from professional criticism—yours and others—is one reason doing other arts can be invigorating. It’s humbling to be an amateur or a beginner, though, so in order to do it, you must insist on your right to be amateurish and a beginner.

“You’ve said that a problem for new performers is that they’re competing with the best in the world,” an interviewer said to Vonnegut.

They are. That’s dismaying, too. You take my home town of Indianapolis. We used to have our own boxers, our own wrestlers, our own songwriters, singers, and painters. Now it’s all got to be from out of town. You think you’re funny? You’re not funny. We’re going to get Bob Hope.…

It makes life a lot less fun. I remember dancing. I was dancing with my first wife one time on Cape Cod and having a great time and some mean kid was playing the drums, and he said, “Man, you can really jitterbug,” and he said it with a sneer, and I wanted to wade right in and beat the shit out of him. [Laughter] I didn’t dance well enough for him, and he was going to deprive me of the joy of dancing.552

Kurt Vonnegut liked to work with his hands. He even proposed an article on it. (See opposite page.)

“The days my father got his hands dirty were happier days,” his daughter Nanny recalls, than the usual ones, rat-a-tat-tat-ting on the typewriter.553 Once Kurt chiseled the final words from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Joyce’s Ulysses into marble stepping-stones behind their Barnstable house (“… yes, I said yes yes I will Yes.”). He shoveled, built, carved.

In Mother Night, the despondent main character gets some of his mojo back that way:

And then one day in 1958, after thirteen years of living like that [as a despondent recluse], I bought a war-surplus wood-carving set.…

Letter from DeWitt Wallace to Kurt Vonnegut, August 20, 1948. Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

When I got it home, I started to carve up my broom handle to no particular purpose. And it suddenly occurred to me to make a chess set.

I speak of suddenness here, because I was startled to find myself with an enthusiasm. I was so enthusiastic that I carved for twelve hours straight, sank sharp tools into the palm of my left hand a dozen times, and still would not stop. I was an elated, gory mess when I was finished. I had a handsome set of chessmen to show for my labors.

And yet another strange impulse came upon me.

I felt compelled to show somebody, somebody still among the living, the marvelous thing I had made.

So, made boisterous by both creativity and drink, I went downstairs and banged on the door of my neighbor, not even knowing who my neighbor was.554

The neighbor turned out to be a painter. They played chess with the narrator’s newly carved set right then, and every day for the next year.

Vonnegut farted around in class and on the page by doodling.

Vonnegut’s incessant doodling found its way onto his published pages as illustrations, first in Slaughterhouse-Five and then in Breakfast of Champions.555 Check out the nose on the left side of the page above the torso from this draft page from the early ’60s. At a certain point he decided to take himself more seriously as an artist. In the 1980s, he drew on large pieces of acetate, and in 1993 he began collaborating with the artist Joe Petro II, who converted the drawings to silk-screened prints. What did he draw? Mainly faces.

“The human face is the most interesting of all forms,” he told an interviewer. “Because that’s how we go through life, reading faces very quickly.”

Thirty were exhibited in 1983 in a one-man show at the Margo Feiden Gallery in New York. Another exhibition occurred there posthumously in 2014 to celebrate the publication of Kurt Vonnegut’s Drawings, a beautiful book introduced and compiled by his daughter Nanny, and another took place in September 2015 at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University. His equipment? Colored felt tip pens.

Doodle on draft of short story "Harrison Bergeron." Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

“Oil is such a commitment,” he said.556

What do they look like? Realistic? Not on your life. They’re whimsical, sometimes a little horrifying. Surprise!

Intriguingly, in light of Vonnegut’s graphs of plots, Peter Reed says in Kurt Vonnegut’s Drawings, “When I watched Vonnegut draw, he began with a vertical line, and then a horizontal one. It was almost as if he were about to draw a graph.”557 Maybe Vonnegut approached faces as plots.

In 2017, the National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago, which houses more than 2,500 works by veterans, acquired thirty-one of Vonnegut’s screen prints, on exhibit from January to May of that year.558

While at the Writers’ Workshop, a painter classmate gave me Henry Miller’s small book To Paint Is to Love Again, in which he waxes exuberantly upon the sheer pleasure of mucking around with color and in another art. “Every artist worth his salt has his [hobby],” he wrote. “It’s the norm, not the exception.”559 The creators of the workshop were wise to the value of exploring other mediums: the MFA required taking another art.

All the arts involve the creative process. Yet each is distinct. Besides just giving you a kick, delving into another form’s practice can give you a kick in the butt, a shockingly fresh view, and insight. You are yourself no matter what medium you use, as Vonnegut’s drawings evidence.

Vonnegut, like Miller, turned to painting when the writing wasn’t going well, in order for the well to fill again, especially while wrangling with his last novels, Hocus Pocus and Timequake. Writing itself is labor, the reward coming with completion, Vonnegut said, whereas the painter “gets his rocks off while actually doing the painting.”560

Vance Bourjaily invited workshop people to jam sessions in his studio at the Bourjailys’ Red Bird Farm. Kurt would bring his clarinet. Vance would be on his trumpet. Vance confessed one night at such a session that if he were really good at it, he’d prefer to be a trumpeter.

“Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician,” Kurt wrote, years later. “Because music gives pleasure as we never can.”561

Perhaps he underestimated the pleasure people get from words. As with painting, though, playing music is immediate and physical.

In New York, Kurt occasionally jammed with Woody Allen at Allen’s Dixieland pub gig. His friend and lawyer, Don Farber, said Vonnegut was a “remarkably skilled” musician. “Not many people knew he played a mean piano too.”562

Mark Vonnegut remarked offhandedly that his father was even better on the piano than on the clarinet, as he was showing me around his house, filled with his own paintings, furniture he’d made, and a piano we were passing. All Vonnegut’s children embraced their father’s belief in the arts. Dabblers as well as serious artists, each is devoted to one form and investigates others. I once attended a terrific musical in Barnstable that Edie Vonnegut—first and foremost a painter—wrote, directed, acted in, and, I believe, costumed. When Vonnegut exhorts that making art is good for the soul, there is nothing more convincing of his sincerity than the legacy he provided his own brood.

“Since I took up carpentry,” Mark the pediatrician avows, “I measure children much more carefully, sometimes to 1/32 of an inch.”563

A former student at Iowa, Dick Cummins, recalls the last class of his first semester with Vonnegut, expecting a final exam:

It was January and… the wind was whipping a fine powder of snow around the door of our Quonset [hut].… At a quarter past the door flew open and [Vonnegut] strode in, snow swirling behind him. He pushed the door closed with his foot and put the purple box and the 78-record sheath he was cradling down on the desk. We could see it was a child’s portable phonograph as he unclipped the hinged side speakers. Without making eye contact he untied the chin laces that lashed down the thick ear flaps of his Chinese Communist infantry winter cap, slapping off the snow against his desk. Then, sliding a 78 record out of the dust cover he wriggled it onto the spindle and spun the volume knob all the way up. Finally, he lifted the tone arm up and lowered it onto the record. There was a nickel Scotch-taped to the top to keep it from skipping.

… “If you want to make a living as a writer you’ll have to top this!” he shouted over the blaring phonograph. Pressing the fur cap down hard against his head, he escaped back out into the snow, leaving the door open. It was the 1812 Overture, turned so loud it rattled and buzzed the speakers.

Finally a fellow named Herb in the front row reached over and turned it off.

On the way out into the storm we grumbled about what kind of grade we could possibly get.

… When we checked our grades at the beginning of the second semester, it turned out Vonnegut had given us all As.564

No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.565

So too will be the sublime act of going out and farting around in any of the arts.