Pity the Reader

Chapter 37

Better Together or Community

Who cares more about writing than other writers? Your mates, family, and friends may care about you, but if writing is not their passion, you can’t expect them to care about writing itself, or your particular writing, nearly as much as fellow writers will.

At lunch with Kurt and Jill soon after they returned from the Galápagos, where Kurt had been doing research for his novel of the same name, I asked how they enjoyed the trip. Kurt responded with enthusiasm, Jill not so much. Kurt remarked that it was nice of Jill to accompany him at all, since it wasn’t her thing.

It’s unfair to expect friends or your partner to always like what you like, let alone be your right hand as editor or coach. Therefore, your community of writers, however loose, may be the most valuable tool of all for buoying your writerly spirit and practice.

Communities are very comforting to human beings.587

Until recent times, you know, human beings usually had a permanent community of relatives. They had dozens of homes to go to. So when a married couple had a fight, one or the other could go to a house three doors down and stay with a close relative until he was feeling tender again. Or if a kid got fed up… he could march over to his uncle’s for a while. And this is no longer possible. Each family is locked into its little box.588

Artists of different kinds constitute a sort of extended family.… Artists usually understand one another fairly well, without anybody’s having to explain much.589

Kurt Vonnegut learned the value of a communal extended family as a kid, in the summertime around a lake in northern Indiana, where his father and his father’s sister and brother jointly owned a cottage.

There were lots of Vonneguts in the phone book [in Indianapolis].… And at Lake Maxinkuckee… I was surrounded by relatives all of the time. You know, cousins, uncles and aunts. It was heaven.590

If he got lost,

The closed loop of the lakeshore was certain to bring me home not only to my own family’s unheated frame cottage on a bluff overlooking the lake, but to four adjacent cottages teeming with close relatives. The heads of those neighboring households, moreover, my father’s generation, had also spent their childhood summertimes at Lake Maxinkuckee.591

It was to that cottage he took his bride, just after being discharged from the army, on their honeymoon. By then, it had already been sold to a stranger.

Today, due to a man with a “love of local history” who, fittingly, gathered a community of like-minded investors to rescue the cottage from a developer’s demolition in 2012, it stands, according to the rental website, as “a spiritual restoration of the cottage culture the Vonneguts enjoyed.”592 You can enjoy it yourself. Minus the relatives, of course.

Vonnegut’s anthropological studies further influenced his ideas about communities, validated by his 1970 trip to war-torn Biafra. He reported:

General Ojukwu gave us a clue, I think, as to why the Biafrans were able to endure so much so long without bitterness: They all had the emotional and spiritual strength that an enormous family can give.… [The general’s family] was three thousand members strong. He knew every member of it by face, by name, and by reputation.

A more typical Biafran family might consist of a few hundred souls.… The families took care of their own…

The families were rooted in land.…

Families met often, men and women alike, to vote on family matters.593

Vonnegut insinuates that such a survival mechanism, though in extremis for the Biafrans, should be adapted insofar as possible, simply for well-being.

The benefits of belonging and the sad lack of it pop up throughout Vonnegut’s work. Minor characters often exhibit a longing for kinship, or show what a blessing even a fragile makeshift community can be. In Breakfast of Champions, for example, Kilgore Trout takes a ride with a truck driver.

The driver… said it was hard for him to maintain friendships that meant anything because he was on the road most of the time.…

He suggested that Trout, since Trout was in the combination aluminum storm window and screen business, had opportunities to build many lasting friendships in the course of his work. “I mean,” he said, “you get men working together day after day, putting up those windows, they get to know each other pretty well.”

“I work alone,” said Trout.

… “All the same,” he insisted, “you’ve got buddies you see after work. You have a few beers. You play some cards. You have some laughs.”

Trout shrugged.

“You walk down the same streets every day,” the driver told him. “You know a lot of people, and they know you, because it’s the same streets for you, day after day. You say, ‘Hello,’ and they say ‘Hello,’ back. You call them by name. They call you by name. If you’re in a real jam, they’ll help you, because you’re one of ’em. You belong. They see you every day.”594

Just out of prison, the narrator in Jailbird approaches a coffee shop his first morning, feeling so old and ugly that he’s fearful everyone will be nauseated by him.

But I somehow found the courage to go in anyway—and imagine my surprise! It was as though I had died and gone to heaven! A waitress said to me, “Honeybunch, you sit right down, and I’ll bring you your coffee right away.” I hadn’t said anything to her.

So I did sit down, and everywhere I looked I saw customers of every description being received with love. To the waitress everybody was “honeybunch” and “darling” and “dear.” It was like an emergency ward after a great catastrophe. It did not matter what race or class the victims belonged to. They were all given the same miracle drug, which was coffee. The catastrophe in this case, of course, was that the sun had come up again.595

“Is there some way our country could encourage the growth of extended families?” a Playboy interviewer asked Vonnegut.

By law. I’m writing a Kilgore Trout story about that right now.…

… So the President happens to visit Nigeria, where extended families have been the style since the beginning of time.… So the President is going to have the computers of the Social Security Administration assign everybody thousands of relatives.596

The assigned-relatives conceit sprouted from a Trout story into a major framework for Vonnegut’s novel Slapstick, subtitled Lonesome No More. In it, the would-be president campaigns on that platform:

I spoke of American loneliness. It was the only subject I needed for victory, which was lucky. It was the only subject I had.

It was a shame, I said, that I had not come along earlier in American history with my simple and workable anti-loneliness plan. I said that all the damaging excesses of Americans in the past were motivated by loneliness rather than a fondness for sin.

An old man crawled up to me afterwards and told me how he used to buy life insurance and mutual funds and household appliances and automobiles and so on, not because he liked them or needed them, but because the salesman seemed to promise to be his relative, and so on.

“I had no relatives and I needed relatives,” he said.

“Everybody does,” I said.

He told me he had been a drunk for a while, trying to make relatives out of people in bars. “The bartender would be kind of a father, you know—” he said. “And then all of a sudden it was closing time.”

“I know,” I said. I told him a half-truth about myself which had proved to be popular on the campaign trail. “I used to be so lonesome,” I said, “that the only person I could share my innermost thoughts with was a horse named ‘Budweiser.’”597

“If you get elected… what if I get some artificial relative I absolutely can’t stand?”

“What is so novel about a person’s having a relative he can’t stand?” I asked him.…

… In all my years of public life, I had never said an off-color thing to the American people.

So it was terrifically effective when I at last spoke coarsely.…

“Mr. Grasso,” I said, “I personally will be very disappointed, if you do not say to artificial relatives you hate, after I am elected, ‘Brother or Sister or Cousin,’ as the case may be, ‘why don’t you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don’t you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon?’”598

In Jailbird the character Cleveland Lawes—who has endured family ravages at the hands of the KKK—is befriended by a Chinese classmate at Harvard who “persuaded him to come to China instead of going back home to Georgia when the war was over.”

And he worked for two years, as I say, as a deckhand on the Yellow Sea. He said that he fell in love several times, but that nobody would fall in love with him.

“So that was what brought you back?” I asked.

He said it was the church music more than anything else. “There wasn’t anybody to sing with over there,” he said. “And the food,” he said.

“The food wasn’t any good?” I said.

“Oh, it was good,” he said. “It just wasn’t the kind of food I like to talk about.”

“Um,” I said.

“You can’t just eat food,” he said. “You’ve got to talk about it, too. And you’ve got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food.”599

Whether by profession, personal history, purpose, or whatever, Vonnegut points out myriad ways in which we group ourselves so that, metaphorically, we’re with “somebody who understands that kind of food.”

There was nothing new about artificial extended families in America. Physicians felt themselves related to other physicians, lawyers to lawyers, writers to writers, athletes to athletes, politicians to politicians, and so on.600

“The people I am most eager to have news of, curiously enough,” Vonnegut confided,

are those I worked with in the General News Bureau of the General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York—from 1948 to 1951, from the time I was twenty-six until I was twenty-nine.…

I have heard other people say that they, too, remain irrationally fond of those who were with them when they were just starting out. It’s a common thing.

In Charlottesville to give a speech at the University of Virginia one year, he got a note from a former Indianapolis next-door neighbor.

But the best part of that visit was finding out what had happened to a childhood playmate of mine.…

We refreshed our memories about neighborhood dogs we had known, dogs which had known us, too.601

A helpful thing to do, when you’re feeling lonely and unsupported, is to list the groups in which you are both purposely and accidentally a part, from your biological relatives, neighbors, and friends to the people who go to your yoga class or get a coffee at the same time you do at your local Starbucks, and so on. And don’t forget the pets you know.

How did Americans beat the Great Depression? We banded together. In those days, members of unions called each other “brother” and “sister,” and they meant it.602

After Donald Trump’s inauguration, citizen calls to the Capitol switchboard surpassed any in US history for three days, from January 31 to February 2, jamming it.603 An estimated 470,000 people showed up in Washington, DC, for the Women’s March, one out of every one hundred Americans marched in towns all across America, and sister marches occurred worldwide.604 His election galvanized people to join organizations to protect civil liberties, the environment, women’s reproductive rights, immigrants’ rights, and many others. Attendance at town hall meetings and citizens’ groups soared, as did petitions and calls to Congress.

In crisis, people team up for a common cause. Whether personal or political.

But I am surely a great admirer of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Gamblers Anonymous, and Cocaine Freaks Anonymous, and Shoppers Anonymous, and Gluttons Anonymous, and on and on… since they give to Americans something as essential to health as vitamin C, something so many of us do not have in this particular civilization: an extended family.605

… [These groups are] very close to a blood brotherhood, because everybody has endured the same catastrophe. And one of the enchanting aspects… is that many people join who aren’t drunks [or whatever the addiction is]… because the social and spiritual benefits are so large.606

Writers, too, have similar sob stories to offer one another, as well as ambitions, inspiration, tips, and chicken soup. They exchange work in progress to get feedback and help from their peers. They socialize. They organize, as in PEN, to ensure free speech and freedom of the press, and to assist threatened writers worldwide.

The military—a crisis-oriented, purposeful organization composed of people dislocated from their homes—utilizes the human need for association. This is how Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Bernard O’Hare (mentioned in Slaughterhouse-Five) became friends:

The Army had instituted what it called the “Buddy System.” Every Private or PFC was told to pick somebody else in his squad to know about and care about, since nobody else was going to do that. The show of concern had to be reciprocal, of course, and nobody was to be left a bachelor.… So O’Hare and I got hitched, so to speak.

It worked. He and O’Hare were selected to be battalion intelligence scouts. O’Hare had been trained how to sneak ahead of combat lines to check out the enemy. Vonnegut had not.

I never told anybody but O’Hare about my lack of Infantry training, since somebody might have decided that I’d better have some.… Besides, I didn’t want to leave O’Hare [italics mine].607

They endured combat, capture, and the bombing of Dresden together. They remained in touch for the rest of their lives.

Vonnegut’s praise for communities as bastions of support is equaled by his criticism of their drawbacks. The human inclination to be part of a group can be poisonous, he warns.

And here, according to Trout, was the reason human beings could not reject ideas because they were bad: “Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity.

“… Agreements went on, not for the sake of common sense or decency or self-preservation, but for friendliness.

“Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead.… So they were doomed.”608

Communities by definition are exclusive. Somebody or some class of person belongs, and somebody else doesn’t. Taken to extremes, Vonnegut says through his fictional narrator in Breakfast of Champions, that can be lethal.

The Vietnam War couldn’t have gone on as long as it did, certainly, if it hadn’t been human nature to regard persons I didn’t know and didn’t care to know, even if they were in agony, as insignificant. A few human beings have struggled against this most natural of tendencies, and have expressed pity for unhappy strangers. But, as History shows, as History yells: “They have never been numerous!”609

Vonnegut’s anthropology professors pointed out adverse aspects of the tight-knit societies they studied.

First of all, a Folk Society was isolated, and in an area it considered organically its own. It grew from that soil and no other.… There was such general agreement as to what life was all about and how people should behave in every conceivable situation that very little was debatable.

… Dr. Redfield denounced sentimentality about life in Folk Societies, saying they were hell for anyone with a lively imagination or an insatiable curiosity or a need to experiment and invent—or with an irrepressible sense of the ridiculous.610

Anyone like Kurt Vonnegut, for example.

A vitamin or mineral deficiency always has bad effects. A Folk Society deficiency (hereafter “FSD”) quite often does. The trouble begins when a person suffering from FSD stops thinking, in order to become a member of an artificial extended family which happens to be crazy. The homicidal “family” of Charles Manson springs to mind. Or… the cult of the Reverend Jim Jones.611

In spite of what his big brain knew about the liabilities of folk societies, Vonnegut confessed:

But I still find myself daydreaming of an isolated little gang of like-minded people in a temperate climate, in a clearing in a woodland near a lake.612

He sought communities all his life.

Whenever I’m alone in a motel in a big city, I look up Vonneguts and Liebers [his mother’s maiden name] in the telephone book.613

An eager young Kurt Vonnegut Jr. at Cornell University is depicted sitting on the floor next to his future wife, front row and center, in a fraternity portrait photograph.

When he and Jane moved to Iowa City, they joined the local country club, seeking to be part of the community. I waitressed, one year, at that country club. I can’t imagine them feeling fulfilled as members there. And it didn’t work out. People weren’t very welcoming, he told me later, so they quit. They were to find a richer, more compatible community in the faculty and students at the Writers’ Workshop.

Vonnegut loved the theater for its communal liveliness. On Cape Cod, he participated actively in local theater as well as the local library, and later, he delved in and out of playwriting. In one short story, a director invites a stranger to try out for a part, a beautiful woman who travels from place to place teaching employees how to use a new billing machine, who “seemed kind of numb, almost a machine herself.”

She looked surprised, and she warmed up a little. “You know,” she said, “that’s the first time anybody ever asked me to participate in any community thing.”

“Well,” I said, “there isn’t any other way to get to know a lot of nice people faster than to be in a play with ’em.”614

Perhaps the most complex aim Vonnegut takes in crystallizing our propensity for like-minded groups is this concoction in Cat’s Cradle:

Karass: “a team, one of many that humanity is organized into in order to do God’s will (without ever discovering what they are doing).”615

The lack of awareness of being part of such a team separates the members of a “karass” from those of all other groups. To emphasize that vital distinction, Vonnegut conjured up another word:

Hazel’s obsession with Hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon. Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows—and any nation, anytime, anywhere.616

These “granfaloons” may be meaningless in terms of the way “God gets things done,” but as Vonnegut shows, however tongue-in-cheek, they’re meaningful to their members’ sense of well-being. Vonnegut’s cockamamie-sounding concepts serve up the whole platter of pros and cons of community.

Readers tend to misuse the word “karass,” I’ve noticed when teaching Cat’s Cradle, perversely inverting it, as is the human penchant, into a recognizable, affinity-minded group: “You’re in my karass!” someone might exclaim, meaning a fellow Vonnegut aficionado.

Google “karass” and you’ll find several redefinitions. Some lean toward the fellow-traveler notion, others restate Vonnegut’s original definition in other words. Some indicate that the word derives from similar-sounding words (alas, see chapter 21 again). All this is understandable, endearing. I’ve been told even Kurt misused it! We all so want to make sense of the world and be in community.

But identifying who is in your karass contradicts the definition. Teammates of a karass don’t know that they are teammates. They are acting out God’s mysterious, unfathomable will. Not their own.

Here’s what the fictional guru and karass-creator Bokonon says about it:

“If you find your life tangled up with somebody else’s life for no very logical reasons,” writes Bokonon, “that person may be a member of your karass.”

… “Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass.”… A karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries.

It is as free-form as an amoeba.617

Because of the sorts of minds we were given at birth, and in spite of their disorderliness, [my brother] Bernard and I belong to artificial extended families which allow us to claim relatives all over the world.618

Bernard belonged to the artificial extended family of scientists. Kurt belonged to the artificial extended family of writers.

If you’re a writer, so do you. Vonnegut’s advice? Make the most of it.

Vonnegut went to science fiction writers’ conventions when he was starting out.619

He became a very active member of PEN, the international writers’ organization, when he moved to New York. He first met his close friend Sidney Offit at a PEN seminar in 1970.

I think [every writer] ought to join this group. I don’t care if the person is a fascist or a member of the Klan—if the person’s a writer, he belongs in PEN.620

It’s doubtful that a fascist or a Klan member would want to join, given its mandate: “PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect open expression in the United States and worldwide.”

In my inbox today appeared this subject line: “Dear Writers, You Are Not Alone” from Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this twenty-first century, ways for writers to connect abound—classes, magazines, websites, blogs, Facebook, conferences, residencies, workrooms, readings, organizations, and peer writing groups.

In 1951, slogging it out by himself, Vonnegut wrote to his friend Miller Harris:

Dear Miller:

Thought, rather fuzzily, about something I want to add to my recent letter to you.… At the instigation of a bright and neurotic instructor named Slotkin [in the anthropology department at the University of Chicago], I got interested in the notion of the school.…

… What Slotkin said was this: no man who achieved greatness in the arts operated by himself; he was top man in a group of like-minded individuals. This works out fine for the cubists, and Slotkin had plenty of good evidence for its applying to Goethe, Thoreau, Hemingway, and just about anybody you care to name.

If it isn’t 100% true, it’s true enough to be interesting—and maybe helpful.

The school gives a man, Slotkin said, the fantastic amount of guts it takes to add to culture. It gives him morale, esprit de corps, the resources of many brains, and—maybe most important—one-sidedness with assurance.…

Slotkin also said a person in the arts can’t help but belong to some school—good or bad. I don’t know what school you belong to. My school is presently comprised of Littauer & Wilkinson (my agents), and Burger, and nobody else.…

… It isn’t a question of finding a Messiah, but of a group’s creating one—and it’s hard work, and takes a while.

If this sort of thing is going on somewhere (not in Paris, says Tennessee Williams), I’d love to get in on it.621

Describing Jackson Pollock for Esquire years later, Vonnegut observed:

He was unique among founders of important art movements, in that his colleagues and followers did not lay on paint as he did.… Pollock did not animate a school of dribblers. He was the only one.… What bonded Pollock’s particular family was not agreement as to what, generally, a picture should look like. Its members were unanimous, though, as to where inspiration should come from: the unconscious, that part of the mind which was lively, but which caught no likenesses, had no morals or politics, and had no tired old stories to tell yet again.622

The musician Brian Eno coined the word “scenius” to describe the kind of thing Kurt was getting at in his letter to Harris: “Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.” In other words, “Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes.… The extreme creativity that groups, places or ‘scenes’ can occasionally generate.”623

Whether or not you have the good fortune to be part of a rarified school, like the Surrealists or the Beats, you can’t help being part of a group as an artist or writer, as Vonnegut’s professor said, delineated by similar sensibilities—such as the magical realists or the black humorists or the eco-fabulists, or broadly by genre, race, gender, region, nation, etc. Therefore, consider following the young Vonnegut’s inclination: embrace the designations within which your work seems to fall, cleave to those with which you have an affinity, and thereby empower yourself.

And anyone who has finished a book, whether the thing has been published or not, whether the thing is any good or not, is a colleague of ours.624

Vonnegut replied to a grateful first-time novelist, who had thanked him for being an inspiration:

The fact that you have completed a work of fiction of which you are proud, which you made as good as you could, makes you as close a blood relative as my brother Bernard.625

Kurt was generous to other writers. He championed and encouraged. He was as good as a good relative.626

Go forth and be that, too.

And thank those who give you support. Acknowledgment is powerful.

Kurt told us once in class a definition of heaven and hell he’d heard somewhere that had charmed him:

In hell everyone is chained to a dining table laden with food, each trying but unable to eat. In heaven, it’s exactly the same. Except in heaven, the people are feeding each other.

I invite you to join Kurt Vonnegut’s awesome congregation.

worship

I don’t know about you,

but I practice a disorganized religion.

I belong to an unholy disorder.

We call ourselves,

“Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment.”

You may have seen us praying

for love

on sidewalks outside the better

eating establishments

in all kinds of weather.

Blow us a kiss

upon arriving or departing

and we will climax

simultaneously.

It can be quite a scene,

especially if it is raining

cats and dogs.627

Consider practicing Vonnegut’s holy and wholly fictional Bokonist ritual of boko-maru, two by two, while sole to sole, reciting its litany to one another. It begins:

“Gott mate mutt,” crooned Dr. von Koenigswald.

“Dyot meet mat,” echoed “Papa” Monzano.

“God made mud,” was what they’d said, each in his own dialect. I will here abandon the dialects of the litany.

“God got lonesome,” said Von Koenigswald.

“God got lonesome.”

“So God said to some of the mud, ‘Sit up!’”

“‘See all I’ve made,’ said God, ‘the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.’”

“And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.”

“Lucky me, lucky mud.”

“Lucky me, lucky mud.”628