EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT

THE FAILED PROPHECY OF KURT VONNEGUT
(and How It Saved My Life)

Part One

You are writing for strangers.

Face the audience of strangers.

It would be fair to call me one of the Kurt Vonnegut cult, though a member in poor standing. I read all of his books in high school and college, most of them six times, and I’m sure I walked around for a good number of years spouting little Vonnuggets of wisdom, as his followers so incessantly do.

I devoted most of my senior year in college to a detailed study of his work, writing a thesis titled “Authorial Presence in the Works of Kurt Vonnegut,” a copy of which I recently asked my mother to send me, in her capacity as Chief Curator of the Steve Almond Archives, a capacity, I should add, that she views as the necessary burden of having raised an itinerant narcissist. The Archives have fallen on hard times in the past few years, the result being that the original bound copy of the document—which I feel compelled to note was dedicated to the Chief Curator—no longer exists. It was apparently lent out to my uncle Peter, a man whose own literary archive resides in the backseat of his car.

The Chief Curator was able to find, after what she described as “many hours of excavation,” a draft of the thesis, which included the proofreading marks of my college pal James Shiffer, who, perhaps not coincidentally, no longer speaks to me. The last page bore a circular stamp at the bottom right. I initially took this to be some sort of academic notarization before coming to recognize it as a large, oddly filigreed coffee stain.

         

I WAS REVISITING my thesis because I had been asked to write an appreciation of Vonnegut, a request I initially refused. I was at work on a dying novel, after all, and I hate to be distracted in the midst of such satisfying masochism. But the request lingered. It activated certain deeply rooted fanboy tendencies. I started thinking about how much Vonnegut had meant to me, and why, and whether writing about him might lead to a rendezvous. That was what I wanted. I wanted to interview him. I wanted to sit around on his porch smoking Pall Malls with him, or at least breathing in his secondhand smoke.

Note: This is the fantasy of every single Vonnegut fan.

         

EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO, upon my successful expulsion from college, I was invited to stay with a friend of my girlfriend, out in Sagaponeck, Long Island. I was on the brink of breaking up with this particular girlfriend. But it was also true that these friends of hers were neighbors of Vonnegut. Friends, actually. (They called him Kurt!) So I took a bus out there and hung around for a few days, feeling poor and unsophisticated and properly caddish. In my backpack was a bound copy of my thesis.

All weekend, I fantasized about dropping it off in his mailbox, with a note explaining that I was staying just down the road. He was a busy guy, and a notorious grouch, so he wouldn’t read my thesis immediately. But eventually he’d crack the thing and read a few pages and realize, with a discernable jolt, that, by God, this young Almond fellow knew a few things, that I alone among his legion of literary investigators had divined his essence, understood his crusade, could be trusted with his secrets. This would lead to an invite for cocktails, a long wistful discussion, many Pall Malls, and his eventual decision to adopt me.

But I chickened out.

         

CLUCK CLUCK.

         

FAST-FORWARD TO EARLY 2006. I had agreed to write about Vonnegut. But the word on the street was that no one got to Vonnegut. The best I could hope for was to get a note to his attorney, one Donald Farber. I imagined this Farber as a dead ringer for Bela Lugosi, with a massive desk upon which sat a single small rubber stamp. From time to time, a small, possibly deformed assistant would place a document before him, allowing Farber the solemn pleasure of whacking a bright red “No” on each request.

Around this time, I traveled down to Hartford, Connecticut,¹ for a reading and by chance started thumbing through a local paper and suddenly saw Kurt Vonnegut staring at me. He was slated to appear at something called the Connecticut Forum, along with authors Joyce Carol Oates and Jennifer Weiner. This was obviously kismet, but I managed not to notice, and immediately filed this information away in the precise part of my brain that has been eroded by pot smoke. The newspaper got tossed into my own backseat archive.

A month later, while uncharacteristically cleaning my car, I came upon the ad for the Connecticut Forum, which was taking place the very next evening. I was no longer suffering under the delusion that I would be able to contact Vonnegut directly. And thus, a notion now took root inside my pointy little head: I had to go see Kurt Vonnegut. I had to drive down to Hartford and ask him for an interview. I became convinced this would be my one and only shot at a face-to-face. The man was eighty-three years old. He had been smoking those Pall Malls (unfiltered) for longer than my parents have been alive. To put it indelicately: He would soon be dead.

         

THE CONNECTICUT FORUM event was sold out, naturally. But my friend Catherine, who appears to know every person of consequence in Hartford, managed to finagle me a ticket. And not just to the panel, but to the cocktail reception and dinner beforehand, at which the authors would be appearing.

I spent all that Friday composing a brief letter of introduction² and rehearsing what I would say to Vonnegut. I bought a special envelope, one that would fit into his pocket. I got a haircut. For the first time in years, I had a pair of pants dry-cleaned.

         

ABOUT THE HAIRCUT: It was the worst of my adult life. I had asked my stylist Linda to make sure the bangs weren’t too long, as I didn’t like the idea of looking shaggy for Vonnegut. I wanted him to be able to see my eyes, and specifically the nobility shining forth from them. But Linda left the bangs about a half-inch short and boxy at the corners. I looked like a Beatle, if you can imagine the Beatles reuniting for a tour at age forty and returning (ill-advisedly) to the moptop look.

ANOTHER IRRELEVANT DETAIL: On the way down to Hartford I was pulled over by a cop for eating a ham sandwich.

It is illegal to eat pork on Connecticut byways.

         

I ARRIVED IN Hartford in an addled state. It did not help that I was attending what I would call a corporate event. Honestly, I had no idea what the Connecticut Forum was. But it was immediately apparent they have a lot of money. As soon as Catherine and I arrived at the venue we started to encounter people who had that unmistakable sheen of prosperity: tailored suits, jewelry, the subtle dermal cross-hatchings of a ski tan.

We got talking to one such couple in the elevator.

“Are you all Vonnegut fans?” I asked.

“Not really,” the man said. He was probably in his midfifties. “I’ve never read any of his books.”

“None of them? Not even Slaughterhouse-Five?”

He shook his head.

“What about Joyce Carol Oates?”

“What has she written?” he asked pleasantly.

         

AND THIS IS WHAT I mean by a corporate event. Most of the people at this cocktail/dinner thingee were there not because they were fans of the authors, but because it was a way of supporting the arts, being a good corporate citizen.

Being a good corporate citizen means shaving an infinitesimal portion from your profits—profits that have skyrocketed as the government has dedicated itself to the financial aggrandizement of the private sector while virtually eliminating public funding for the arts (forget the poor)—and politely tossing it at programs like the Connecticut Forum, where lots of well-heeled patrons can experience the joys of literature or, at least, a literary dog and pony show, along with noshing on some truly excellent hors d’oeuvres.

I’m sounding angry here. What I felt in talking with these folks in the elevator was something closer to despair.

THE COCKTAIL RECEPTION was in a massive lobby. I staked out a spot near the table with the Kurt Vonnegut sign and gulped a glass of wine and said hello to my official hosts, the good people of Bank of America. They were all incredibly nice. This is one of the characteristics of the rich: If you are dressed properly, and don’t appear to want their money, they are incredibly nice.

After a while, one of the guys in our circle said, “Isn’t that him?” We all turned and there was Kurt Vonnegut, shuffling toward his little table. I had never seen Vonnegut in any form other than his author photo. I expected a towering figure with a froth of brown curls. But gravity had tamped him down; his famous curls were ashy and shorn.

We forget what the truly old look like in this culture, because we tuck them away in group homes when they start to look too scary.^3. Vonnegut was terribly frail. The flesh had shrunk away from his eyes and gathered in folds above his collar. He stared out at the room full of strangers and sighed.

“That’s so sad!” Catherine said. “He’s going to sit there and nobody is going to go up and talk to him.”

It was sad. For about thirty seconds, none of us could work up the nerve to approach Kurt Vonnegut. He was such a legend, so much larger than life in the minds of his fans, and here he was, revealed as a mere mortal, closer to tortoise than god.

This was my big chance. I needed to move. But I couldn’t do it. My whole plan felt suddenly absurd. Pushy. Or worse than pushy—grabby. I didn’t want to be just one more person grabbing at the guy. This would dishonor my status as a true fan. By the time I’d decided I was being a ninny (twenty-four seconds later) a young couple had walked up to him, and this set off a kind of Brownian surge. He was immediately enveloped by people, all of whom wanted to speak with him at the same time.

A bald fellow at the back of the scrum shouted out, “Hey Kurt! I was in your house in Cape Cod back in 1969! Your nephew invited me to a party.”

“Is that so?” Vonnegut’s voice was faint and wheezy.

Someone asked about his kids and he ticked off their names. “Mark went crazy,” he said, referring to his eldest son. “But he’s okay now. He wrote a fine book.”

“Eden Express!” said a woman with a camera. “I almost brought my copy.”

Vonnegut coughed delicately. He looked pleased.

An eager-looking blond woman asked him what he thought of George W. Bush.

“He makes me wish Nixon were still president,” Vonnegut muttered.

“Who do you think was the greatest president in your lifetime?”

“I was fortunate to have lived during the reign of a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” He added, to no one in particular, “It was the polio that made him compassionate, you know. Being sick like that.”

“You look great,” someone else said.

“Nonsense,” he said.

A pretty girl with auburn hair stepped shyly into Vonnegut’s view.

“This girl came all the way from California to see you!” the blond woman exclaimed.

“Why would you do that, my dear? It’s sunny in California!”

The girl was trembling a little. She wore a white blouse that framed her breasts. There was a moment of suspense while she stood, flushed, struggling to speak. “I wanted to thank you,” she stammered. “Reading your work was what made me start to think for myself.”

Vonnegut gazed at her. There was nothing lascivious in his eyes. He was merely sipping at her beauty. She radiated transference. It was as if Vonnegut were her father, some idealized version, which, of course, he was.

BY THE TIME I worked up the nerve to approach him, Vonnegut looked wiped, so I didn’t waste any time.

“I’ve been asked to write a biography of you,” I said.

“By whom?” he said.

It was a fair question, and I did what any self-respecting young fiction writer would do in this situation: I fictionalized. “Giroux & Schuster.”

Vonnegut sighed. “I’ve heard nothing about it. My papers are collected at the Indiana University library. You are welcome to go look at them.”

And that, as far as he was concerned, was that. He wasn’t defensive, exactly. But he declined to look at me. I felt like a traveling salesman being shown the door.

“What I was hoping is that you might want to be interviewed.”

Vonnegut gazed mournfully at his knuckles, as if hoping to discover a lit cigarette between two of them.

I handed him my letter. He inspected the envelope briefly—such a lovely envelope!—and slipped it into his coat pocket.

The end.

         

WAS I BUMMED? I was bummed as hell. My one chance to meet Vonnegut had been such a bust, such a nothing.

Then again, the guy was eighty-three years old. He was in Hartford, Connecticut. He had five hundred people coming at him. I wasn’t going to get much. So we moved on to dinner, which consisted of large hunks of cow and a wedge of chocolate cake.

I was seated at the table with Jennifer Weiner. I didn’t know her work, only that she was regarded as a popular chick lit author. She made a great point of proclaiming how honored and humbled and baffled she was to be part of a panel with Oates and Vonnegut. Little old her! It wasn’t that hard to figure out, really: She was the fizzy pop culture component.

THE PANEL ITSELF was deeply strange, in the way that only a literary panel can be strange, which is to say the logical result of foisting together three socially maladroit loners before a large crowd of gawkers. The authors made no mention of each other’s work. They didn’t respond to one another’s ideas. They weren’t very nice to each other, actually. The most stunning example of this antagonism came less than half an hour in. Vonnegut was lamenting the destructive capacities of humankind, listing specific atrocities (the Holocaust, Nagasaki, the Roman Games) when Oates cut him off.

“What sex—excuse me, Kurt—what sex is doing all this bad stuff?”

Vonnegut looked confused. He hadn’t expected to be interrupted, nor had he quite heard Oates.

“What?”

“Which sex is doing all this stuff?” Oates asked again, in a chiding tone.

It was an astounding moment.

Here was Kurt Vonnegut, who had fought in the Second World War, who had been a POW during the firebombing of Dresden, who had converted that experience into one of the most powerful antiwar novels ever published, who had spent his entire life as an artist decrying the horror of war, who, as a citizen, had protested against Vietnam (and all the foul wars that would follow it), who has been, in short, the most celebrated and influential literary pacifist of the twentieth century.^4. And rather than let him speak to a group of 2,700 well-heeled Hartfordians, Oates was trying to paint him as a warmongering hypocrite because he…had a penis. She sounded like a freshman-year feminist, drunk on her own sanctimony.

Vonnegut offered a joke in response, something about how men made war because they were better at science. Harvard had done a study. He was trying to lighten the mood. Oates was not amused.

If Vonnegut were less a gentleman, he might have suggested to Oates that aggression is a compulsion that transcends gender. As evidence, he might have pointed out to the crowd that Oates had just released a collection, Female of the Species, in which the protagonist of every single story is a female killer.

         

I DON’T MEAN to play Vonnegut as the helpless victim here. He looked irritable throughout. And he seemed too tired to mask his feelings. He reminded me of my grandfather Irving in his final years. The word often used is “crotchety,” which boils down to impatience with the bullshit that passes for social nicety.

At one point, for instance, the moderator asked him about Bush’s State of the Union speech, specifically his notion that America is addicted to oil.

“That certainly isn’t a thought he could have by himself,” Vonnegut responded. The audience exploded into laughter. But Vonnegut wasn’t joking. “Everything that distinguishes our era from the dark ages—since we still have plagues and torture chambers—is what we’ve been able to do with petroleum, and that is going to end very soon.” He stared out into the audience. “I think the world is ending,” he said softly. “Our own intelligence tells us we’re perfectly awful animals, that we’re tearing the place apart and should get the hell out of here.”

A thudding silence ensued.

The moderator turned to Jen Weiner and asked if she had a more hopeful message to offer the audience.

Weiner looked a bit panicked. “Wow,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting to have to deliver a message about humanity tonight.”

“Well, leave,” Vonnegut murmured.

I DON’T THINK Vonnegut meant to be cruel. He was simply taken aback that any author would sit before a packed house of fellow citizens and have nothing to say on the subject. More so, that she would act offended at the notion that she should have something to say.

Nonetheless, the damage was done. Weiner spent the rest of the panel sniping at Vonnegut. Unfortunately, Weiner is one of those people deeply invested in the idea that her body contains no mean bones. So her attacks were of the throw-a-rock-but-hide-your-hand variety. She made a joke about Vonnegut wanting to kick her off the stage. She asked him why he would offer advice to high school kids if he felt the world was ending. She expressed shock that Vonnegut had any children.^5.

So he was getting it from both sides now.

         

AS IT TURNED OUT, Vonnegut needn’t have bothered chiding Weiner. She did a bang-up job of revealing herself to the crowd. Her most emphatic statement of the night was about how great it was to hang out on the set of In Her Shoes, the movie they made from one of her books. And how she actually got to meet Cameron Diaz. And how super excited she was to be meeting Cameron, but all she could think to say is, “Where’s Justin?” which is totally funny if you happen to know that Cameron Diaz is totally dating the singer Justin Timberlake!

         

I REALIZE THAT I’m being harsh toward Oates and Weiner, and I realize that my motives may be questioned. I feel protective of Vonnegut. He alone seemed to grasp that the panel was a rare chance for writers to speak about what they actually do, and why it might matter. He was compulsively honest with the crowd—about his fears, his doubts, even his own motives. This is why I found the conduct of his colleagues so odious. They weren’t just petty or vain. They were disingenuous.

Oates, for instance, insisted her famous infatuation with violence had nothing to do with her own internal life. Instead, she offered a wistful account of her upbringing on a farm with lots of animals and a river flowing past. She sounded like Laura Ingalls Wilder, not a woman who has made her nut channeling serial killers.^6.

         

VONNEGUT WAS ALSO the only author who seemed burdened by the state of the human race, and the American empire in particular. He kept making these big, clanging statements. The crowd had no idea what to do. Our citizens aren’t used to having their fantasies punctured. We don’t mind watching guys like Jon Stewart josh around about that silly war in Iraq, or global warming. But when someone actually points out that our species is goose-stepping toward extinction—without a comforting laugh line at the end—things get uncomfortable.

Far from offering support, his co-panelists played him as a cranky doomseeker.^7. Neither one had much to say about the moral crises facing this country. Oates spoke of her stories as if they were merely problems of language to be solved, an oddly bloodless attitude given her preoccupation with, well, blood. Weiner seemed most interested in meeting really cool celebs. These were the two authorial personas on display: the geeky genius whose art is hermetically sealed off from the vulgarities of the real world, and the crowd-pleaser slavish after shiny morsels of fame.⁸ Vonnegut, in his belief that artists should serve as instruments of destiny, was utterly alone.

As the first half of the evening drew to a close, Weiner and Oates made a beeline for the wings. Vonnegut rose to his feet with great deliberation. He took a cautious first step, to avoid tripping over his microphone wire. Then he began a long, shuffling trip across the empty stage. “Oh, no,” the woman next to me said tenderly. “He’s all by himself!”

         

AFTER INTERMISSION came questions from the audience.

Someone asked, “What is the political responsibility of a writer?”

Vonnegut responded, “We need to say what political responsibility does an American have.”

Someone asked, “What’s the single most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”

Vonnegut said, “My Lord, that’s a tough question, because there’s so much beauty, really; it’s what keeps me going in life, is just glimpsing beauty all the time. I suppose the most beautiful thing, though you can’t see it exactly, is music.”

Someone asked what his essential topic was.

Vonnegut said, “I write again and again about my family.”

Toward the end, a girl named Mary asked Vonnegut, “Can you sum up your philosophy of life in two sentences? And will you go to the prom with me? It is my senior year.”

It was the kind of setup Vonnegut should have knocked out of the ballpark. But he looked exhausted. More than that, he looked heartbroken. This is what Weiner and Oates seemed unable to grasp: The man was heartbroken.

Not sexist. Not cranky. Heartbroken.

He had spent his entire life writing stories and essays and novels in the naked hope that he might redeem his readers. As grim and dystopic as some of those books were, every one was written under the assumption that human beings are capable of a greater decency. And not because of God’s will, that tired old crutch. But because of their simple duty to others of their kind.

Now, in the shadow of his own death, he was facing the incontrovertible evidence that his life’s work had been for naught. Right before his eyes, Americans had regressed to a state of infantile omnipotence. They drove SUVs and cheered for wars on TV and worshipped the beautiful and ignorant and despised the poor and brushed aside the science of their own doom. They had lost interest in their own consciences, and declined to make the sacrifices that might spare their very own grandchildren.

“My philosophy of life?” Vonnegut said. “I haven’t a clue.”

“What about the prom?” the moderator said, hopefully.

Vonnegut made a crack about the girl being jailbait.

         

IT WAS A LAUGH LINE, and some people did laugh. But there was a terrible disappointment in the moment: Vonnegut, for all his gifts of compassion, was failing in a simple act of generosity.

He knew that this girl, Mary, wanted only a taste of his wisdom, his famous wit. She had read his books and, like all his fans, she had come to love him as a father, someone who had seen the worst of human conduct and refused to lie about the sort of trouble we were in, but who had not allowed his doubt to curdle into cynicism, who, for all his dark prognostication, was a figure of tremendous hope. The evidence was in his books, which performed the greatest feat of alchemy known to man: the conversion of grief into laughter by means of courageous imagination. Like any decent parent, he had made the astonishing sorrow of the examined life bearable.

And this was what Mary wanted from him now: a little of his old magic. So did the rest of the folks sitting in the Bushnell Theater in downtown Hartford, not just the ones who stood and applauded when he was introduced, all us drooling acolytes, but the ones who regarded him merely as an eloquent grump, a fading prophet, an old man shouting the world off his porch.

And Vonnegut seemed to know it, too. He gazed out at the audience, not like his hero Twain, with his inexhaustible charms, his dazzling knack for the mot juste, but in the silent burden of our present condition. His image was magnified, eerily, on the video screen overhead. The camera shook for a moment. He looked stricken. I thought of that passage in Breakfast of Champions where, in exhaustion, he drops the fictional disguise altogether:

“This is a very bad book you’re writing,” I said to myself.

“I know,” I said.

“You’re afraid you’ll kill yourself the way your mother did,” I said.

“I know,” I said.

I thought of Vonnegut, a twenty-one-year-old private, returning to Indianapolis to bury his mother after she took her own life. And his imprisonment in Dresden, just a few months later, all that ashen death, the passing of his sister, the madness of his son, his own suicide attempt in the haunted year of 1984. The camera was still fixed on Vonnegut’s face, and it occurred to me, with great clarity, that he was going to die before he could say another word. He would simply and quietly sit back in his chair and perish. He was all done with the rescuing racket.

Instead, he gathered himself and smiled at all the nice strangers before him and said, with an almost girlish lilt, “Of course I’ll go to the prom with you, Mary. And I love to dance.” And though nobody quite realized it, including Vonnegut himself, he had, with those two fine sentences, answered both her questions.

         

THE CROWD RESPONSE to the panel was about what you’d expect. People thought it had been a good show. They liked the fighting. They liked gossiping afterward about the fighting. Simply put: They were Americans.

Catherine wanted me to come have a drink with a bunch of the money folks, but I had a long drive back to Boston. It was pouring, too, and neither of us had an umbrella, so we lingered in the lobby. The girl with the auburn hair was lingering, too. Her name was Susan. She was talking with the blonde who had utzed her to talk to Vonnegut. The blonde was indignant. She told us that she and Susan had paid a thousand dollars to attend the cocktail party and dinner. They had been promised a meeting with Vonnegut.

“They just did a group photo, but I wasn’t anywhere close to Kurt,” she said.

“I made sure to get myself right next to him,” Susan said. “I could see that’s all we were going to get.”

A thousand bucks for a few minutes of jittery small talk? It sounded like a Bush fundraiser.

But then Susan told a little story, in her soft Texan accent, that took a little of the edge off my gloom.

“I followed him, you know. Every time he went to have a cigarette. I just followed him and bummed a cigarette and we sat there talking. He was totally cool, too. Totally on top of it. They wouldn’t let us smoke inside and it was too cold outside, so you know what we did? We got in one of those things, those doors that spin around—”

“A revolving door?”

“Yeah. We got in one of the compartments and he pushed it around till there was just a crack. It was pretty warm in there and we could just blow the smoke outside.”

         

IT WAS A MISERABLE night for driving. The rain had dissolved into fog, which draped the bare winter trees; my head was still spinning. Focusing on that image—Vonnegut and pretty young Susan puffing away like a couple of truants—helped me feel a little less hopeless. This made no sense. Vonnegut has been killing himself for years, or trying to, with those unfiltered Pall Malls.

But something occurred to me as I sped through that dirty shroud of fog, something Vonnegut has been trying to explain to the rest of us for most of his life. And that is this: Despair is a form of hope. It is an acknowledgment of the distance between ourselves and our appointed happiness.

At certain moments, it is reason enough to live.

Part Two

If you really want to hurt your parents and you don’t have enough nerve to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.

It is an odd and disquieting experience to read the undergraduate thesis you wrote eighteen years ago, not unlike finding photographs of yourself dressed up as a member of Flock of Seagulls. (I am not suggesting here that I ever dressed up like a member of Flock of Seagulls; I am merely using what we in the lit business call an analogy.)

Nonetheless, I cannot proceed any further without some mention of the document. I have read it twice in the past week and am therefore ready to enumerate its major intellectual conclusions:

1. Kurt Vonnegut rules.

2. You should totally read his books.

3. I will never be an academic.

I WOULD ALSO LIKE to reassure those of you concerned that I may not have used the verb adumbrate frequently enough in my thesis. In fact, I found occasion to use the verb three times in the first thirty pages alone: “More fundamentally, I hope through this investigation to adumbrate Vonnegut’s unorthodox conception of author/text/reader relations.” My thesis is full of sentences like this.

         

ONE OF THE FUNNEST things about rereading the thesis is tallying up all the critics and authors I pretended to have read, but hadn’t. A partial list would include James Joyce, Stendhal, Cervantes, Twain, Leslie Fiedler, Ortega y Gasset,¹ Northrop Frye, Rubin,² and Wayne Booth.³

Whom, then, did I read?

I read Vonnegut. I read his novels. I read his stories. I read his essays. I read his interviews. I read his commencement speeches. Had his shopping lists been made available, I would have read those. I also quoted him at length. Approximately one-third of the thesis word count is Vonnegut. I did this mostly because I was, and remain, stupendously lazy. But it is also true (as I shrewdly noted back then) that Vonnegut has not attracted much formal criticism. The foremost commentator on Vonnegut is Vonnegut himself.

         

MY THESIS WAS not a total wash. It was merely a partial wash. But it also had what I believe the Chief Curator has referred to as “a certain plucky undergraduate charm.”

I was interested in the ways Vonnegut makes himself known in his fiction—writing prefaces to his novels, introducing himself as a character—and how these interventions affected what I called, rather grandly, “the fictional contract.”

My best crack at a summary of the thesis ran like so:

Many novelists and critics take as their credo the following sentence from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

“The artist, like the God of Creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

My thesis might be thought of as an attempt to explore what happens when a writer steps forward and, in full view of the audience, bites his nails frantically.

I do not remember having read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and have grave doubts as to whether I ever did, but I do remember taking extraordinary pride in having come up with this last bit.

The thesis also included a term of my very own invention: realismo.⁴ Realismo, as I defined it, entailed “both the reality claims made by the author and their acceptance by the reader.” I am sorry to inform you that this quite obviously brilliant formulation has not, as yet, found its place within the parlance of the lit crit crowd.

As if I even care.

         

AND WHILE WE’RE bashing those dweebs, let me mention, as a significant furthermore, that people read mostly for emotional reasons, not ideas. They seek a chance to experience the feelings inside themselves—lust, shame, agony—for which daily life offers no outlet. The more openly obsessed our narrator is, the better. (Consider Humbert and the thousand eyes wide open in his eyed blood.)

From this perspective, my thesis turns out to be perfectly fascinating, not for its facile notions about authorial presence, but for the moony allegiance it expresses toward Vonnegut. It was a love letter, for God’s sake!⁵ A chance for me to pronounce my adoration for Vonnegut, to defend his style, to advocate for him in what I took to be the court of academic opinion.

         

TWO DECADES LATER, I can see the thesis as something even more excruciatingly personal: an artistic prospectus. I was explaining to myself, often explicitly, the sort of writer I wished to become.

The main thing was that Vonnegut made an impact on readers. He wasn’t one of those recluses who hid behind coy fictional guises. Every sentence he wrote, every character, was stamped in his image. He came clean on the page as a guy losing his shit. Like in that famous opening chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, the image of Vonnegut lying in bed, sleepless, drunk-dialing his old war buddies and stinking of mustard gas and roses.

He was honest about why he wrote, too. He copped to that central (if rarely mentioned) impulse of the writing life: He wanted attention. He spoke bluntly, courageously, about prevailing injustices, not just on the page, but in public. He was funny, self-deprecating, easy to read, a (gasp) populist. He wanted to speak to everyone and he wanted everyone to shape the hell up. He hated rich people and warmongers and fanatics. He didn’t pretend not to care.

         

AND THAT’S NOT ALL.

Vonnegut was an atheist.

(So was I!)

Vonnegut was a Scorpio.

(So was I!)

Vonnegut was a youngest child.

(So was I!)

Vonnegut viewed film and television as enemies of human progress.

(So did I!)

Vonnegut hated literary critics.

(So did I!)

Vonnegut even seemed to intuit the emotional crises in my life: that I felt exiled by my family, simultaneously disgusted and humiliated by the world of men, desperate for human comfort. He spoke of loneliness constantly. He characterized writers as people “who feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.”

He was, to summarize, not just my role model, but my shrink.

         

I AM NOT SUGGESTING that I recognized my own motives in writing about Vonnegut. Of course I didn’t—I was a college student.

But it was more than that. I wasn’t a writer. I had no concept (aside from Vonnegut) of what a writer might be. I didn’t take a single creative writing class at Wesleyan. Instead, I became what one of my classmates called, not unkindly, a “campus cartoon character.” I undertook a variety of extracurricular activities. I edited the newspaper (so did Vonnegut!). I was a sports broadcaster for the college radio station.⁶ I was a resident adviser. I sang in a gospel choir. I raced around our lovely campus asking, with my every gesture and deed, the same question: What will the story of my life be?

         

I DON’T ESPECIALLY like thinking about my college years. They were a bleak era for me, and a bleak era for the country. Ronald Rea gan had just won his second term in a landslide, and the staggering cruelties advocated by what has come to be known as the conservative movement were very much in vogue. Greed was good, facts were stupid things, Jesus was in, personal sacrifice was out, the nation was beginning a long, slow decline into moral disassociation.

The details were straight out of a B movie. Astrologers were setting the agenda upstairs at the White House, while a gang of nutty neocons trashed the basement, running guns to Iran and funneling the cash to the death squads (the term “terrorists” was not yet in vogue) who opposed a legally elected government in Nicaragua.

I had no idea what to do about any of this. I felt guilty and pissed off all the time. I listened to “I Will Dare” by the Replacements 12,000 times. I took a class called Nuclear War. My final project was a newspaper report that detailed the destruction of my hometown by a hydrogen bomb.

         

BOOM.

         

THE VONNEGUT PASSAGE that haunted me throughout my college years is one of the few not quoted in my thesis. It comes from a curious little essay called “Biafra: A People Betrayed,” in his 1974 collection Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons. Vonnegut is reporting from the small African nation of Biafra, whose beleaguered citizens are bracing for a genocidal invasion by the Nigerian army.

He writes,

What did we eat in Biafra? As guests of the government, we had meat and yams and soups and fruit. It was embarrassing. Whenever we told a cadaverous beggar, “No chop,” it wasn’t really true. We had plenty of chop, but it was all in our bellies.

I had never read so ruthless and candid a summary of the relationship between the fed and starving of this world. Vonnegut was writing not only about injustice, but the peculiar American talent for self-deception (his own included), for espousing laudable beliefs just so long as you don’t have to live up to them.

         

TO UNDERSTAND WHY this passage hit me so hard will require some family background. My mother was born and raised in the Bronx. Her mother, Annie Rosenthal, was an elementary school teacher in Harlem. Her father, Irving, was an actuary. Both were members of the Communist Party. My grandmother was eventually asked to testify about her activities before the New York Board of Education. She took an early retirement instead. Secrecy and fear pervaded their apartment.

My own parents came of age during the 1960s. Both were early, vocal opponents of the war in Vietnam. My father helped undergraduates organize antiwar protests at Stanford, where he had taken a job on the faculty of the medical school. He was later arrested himself for taking part in a protest at a nearby air force base. His teaching contract was not renewed. What I am trying to convey here is that I am descended from people who suffered for their beliefs. I arrived at college eager to do the same thing.

         

BUT WESLEYAN WASN’T exactly what I was expecting. It was, to be ruthless and candid, the world capital of Entitled Sanctimony, the kind of place where students staged protests to demand divestment from South Africa, then headed over to the dining hall to stuff themselves full of ice cream, where the lower-class toughs who played hockey and joined frats were considered dangerous misogynists, where kids in carefully torn polo sweaters gathered to chant grave, humanist slogans, then dispersed to drop acid on Foss Hill, where noblesse oblige had mutated into a kind of desperate narcissistic accessory.

I did my best to fit in, to obey, for instance, the elaborate protocols surrounding gender and race nomenclature.⁷ But it was impossible to ignore certain facts, such as that most black students wanted nothing to do with white students, and that the residents of Middletown regarded the lot of us as spoiled brats. I spent a few winter afternoons camped on the corners of Main Street, handing out pamphlets on nuclear disarmament, which the locals accepted politely, then deposited in the nearest trash can.

It was also impossible to ignore the affluence of my classmates. They had new cars and elaborate stereo systems and Park Avenue apartments stuffed with high art. They spent vacations at beach houses and in tennis clubs, and their ease in these exotic precincts struck me hard; these were people born on the banks of what Vonnegut called the Money River.

I don’t mean to make my classmates sound like dolts. They were trying to care about the world, however indulgently. My scorn for them was an expression of my own guilt. I couldn’t shake the benighted notion that the best way to honor the family legacy was to suffer for my beliefs.

         

SO I WASHED DISHES in the cafeteria. I volunteered at a mental health facility. I endured the routine miseries of the unpaid internship. And I read Vonnegut voraciously, through the long, muggy summer evenings, dripping sweat onto the pages of my yellowed paperbacks.

He was the one guy who cut through the bullshit. He understood that our essential crisis was not one of policy but morality, individual greed, inconsideration, suicidal self-regard. He was mad as hell, but—unlike my classmates—he found the absurd comedy within his fury. He didn’t write quiet little novels about bourgeois plight. He wrote about what we college students called, always with that frisson of knowing dread, the real world. In Vonnegut, I found a path back to the political ideals of my family.

But my Vonnegut mania was about more than politics. His books filled me with a terrible personal longing. I had grown up in a family beset by sorrow and had come to believe, unconsciously, that the world was a broader reflection of this sorrow, that it was my job to save the place, that only by banishing pain would my own joy become permissible. Vonnegut operated on the same absurd, sentimental assumptions. He regarded civilization as a failed family, curable only by the reestablishment of clans in which members felt duty-bound to love one another. Happy families. He wrote about them over and over. They became his utopia, then mine as well.

         

NOW COMES a difficult confession.

To this point, I have made myself sound every bit the loyal Vonnegut disciple. But by the middle of my senior year, I felt vaguely ashamed of my thesis, and specifically that it was about Vonnegut.

I had discovered Bellow by then; Henderson the Rain King had ripped my head off. In my upper-level classes, we were studying The Iliad and The Inferno and Lear. My classmates were using phrases like “transcendental signifier”—and they meant it. My pal Steve Metcalf was writing his thesis about Ulysses, which struck me as perhaps the most sophisticated thing one could do on earth, aside from being James Joyce himself.

I began telling people that my thesis was about authorial presence in the modern text, that it was about John Barth and Milan Kundera, though, in the end, I devoted five pages to these authors. I renounced Vonnegut. He became another childish pleasure I would now have to hide from the world. (Others included candy consumption, a weakness for prog rock, and a tendency to conduct imaginary discussions with my twin brother.)

         

THE VONNEGUT APOSTASY.

It happens to thousands of readers every year. They reach a point in their lives where they turn away from Vonnegut, toward authors who offer a greater complexity of prose, a more nuanced version of the world, whose authorial mission entails an examination of individual consciousness rather than collective fate. I would wager that Vonnegut is the least acknowledged influence in modern letters.

In my case, I should admit that vanity, not boredom, was the culprit. I felt that my worship of Vonnegut marked me as somehow lacking in depth, which, as an English major at an elite liberal arts college, was the one thing I wanted to project. Copping to Vonnegut made me feel like a dork.

The feeling has lasted a long time.

I am still embarrassed to admit how much Vonnegut meant to me. When I am asked to name favorite books or authors, I gravitate toward the ones that look the most respectable on paper, and leave Vonnegut off the list.

But it’s more than embarrassment, I think. It has something to do with the way artists absorb influence. They tend to focus on those figures whom they discover later in life, when they have some coherent self-concept and the vocabulary to articulate the conscious facets of their admiration. It was easy enough for me to identify Bellow as an inspiration because I read him thinking: This man is my inspiration! Vonnegut got into the groundwater before my ambition took root.

In this sense, as I’ve suggested, he was more like a parent. And what was the reward for all his hard work? He got taken for granted.

         

VONNEGUT’S BOOKS remain critically underappreciated. But I don’t really give a shit about critical appreciation. As a measure of cultural influence, it turns out to matter a lot less than an expensive hairstyle. The real issue here isn’t his role as an author, but as a prophet.

I’m in no position to lecture anyone on biblical matters, as I find the Holy Books to be wishful poetry for the most part. But I do know the basic plot of the prophetic books: Prophet warns people to shape up. People don’t listen. Prophet winds up howling in hole. This is the plot of Vonnegut’s life.

People may regard him as a literary legend and all the rest of that glitzy stuff, but nobody with any sort of power has heeded his call.

One wonders now where our leaders got the idea that mass torture would work to our advantage in Indochina. It never worked anywhere else. They got the idea from childish fiction, I think, and from a childish awe of terror.

Vonnegut wrote this thirty-five years ago.

         

LET ME OFFER one more Vonnugget before I move on to the literary excavation that closes this wobbly triptych:

I now believe that the only way in which Americans can rise above their ordinariness, can mature sufficiently to rescue themselves and to help rescue their planet, is through enthusiastic intimacy with works of their own imaginations.

This is Vonnegut in a wildly optimistic mood.

In darker moments, he has expressed an equally convincing belief that our greatest works of literature will amount to nothing more than toilet paper. This has been, as far as I can tell, the central existential struggle of his life: Does what I do matter?

         

I CAN’T BLAME him for his doubts. Vonnegut has now been writing for nearly half a century. He has been preaching the same line as Jesus on the Mount: humility, pacifism, intolerance for all forms of human suffering.

During the late sixties, he might even have believed that America was going to right itself. Instead, he has watched the country fall under the spell of leaders who demand nothing from us but the indulgence of our darkest impulses. He has watched his fellow citizens shrink before his eyes, become idolaters of convenience, screen addicts, brutes who cheer for death and call themselves patriots. He has watched the popular press, and the so-called opposition, cower before their moral duties.

And so we come (at last) to the point. Why, after twenty years, am I taking up with Vonnegut again? The cynical answer would be because he will soon be gone. That is getting it all exactly backwards. I am writing about Vonnegut now not because he is leaving us, but because we have left him.

Part Three

He may have been a genius,

as mutants sometimes are

I don’t imagine you’ve ever tried to gain access to the Reading Room at Indiana University’s Lilly Library, but I am here to tell you that security there stops just short of the cavity search. No food or drink allowed. No writing instruments. No cameras. You are given a locker for your possessions and instructed to walk over to a padded door. There is a click. You now have 1.5 seconds to open the door. If you fail to open the door you are led outside and shot in the head.

         

WHY WAS I at the Lilly Library? I was there because Kurt Vonnegut had asked me to go see his papers, during our heart-stopping encounter in Hartford. Or okay, maybe it wasn’t really a request. Maybe it was more like a brushoff. Fine.

The fact remained: I did need to drive my wife from Southern California to Boston. And Indiana was, more or less, on the way. And thus, I had forced her to rise at 5:30 AM.¹ and to drive with me from the lush suburbs of St. Louis, where the lots are the size of football fields, through the corn prairies of downstate Illinois as they came greenly awake at dawn, and onto Route 46 with its quiet procession of church and farm, its gleaming brown soil, and finally into Bloomington.

It was high summer, broiling, and the campus was swarming with incoming freshmen, their faces illuminated by the coming liberation into that kingdom of sports and pizza and cheap beer and—right, sorry!—higher education. They moved about in nervous eager packs, well-fed American youths, the boys dribbling invisible basketballs, the girls heavily deodorized and whispering, That is so, like, whatever.

         

KURT VONNEGUT, JR., was born on November 11, Armistice Day, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, the youngest child of a prominent local architect. His mother, Edith, would later kill herself. Her maiden name was Lieber, which means love in German.

According to an exhaustive family history prepared by an anonymous relative, all eight of Vonnegut’s great-grandparents were part of the vast migration of Germans to the Midwest between 1820 and 1870. The name Vonnegut derives from a distant paternal relation who had an estate—ein gut—on the river Funne, in Westphalia. The name was changed upon immigration, because Funnegut sounded too much like “funny gut.”

You can trust me when I tell you that Vonnegut’s forebears were not comic forces. Here is a direct quote from his great-great-grandfather Jacom Schramm:

It appears human weakness makes it impossible to sustain a republic on this earth for any length of time, and the majority of people need, necessarily, a driving leader without whom they will inevitably wind up in chaos. Nevertheless, the Americans are still very proud of their freedom, even though they are the worst of slaves, and there is sure to be a bloody revolution before a monarchic government can gain a foothold here.

I WILL NOW RESIST the urge to make a disparaging remark about the Bush administration.

         

HOW THE SCION of such hardass German stock became so soft-hearted is not entirely clear. Vonnegut has often blamed the Indianapolis public school system, ironically, given his spotty academic record. A sampling of his years at Shortridge High, for instance, reveals that despite earning an A+ in chemistry his senior year, despite a verified IQ of 137, he ranked 240th in a class of 760.

Of central interest is a newspaper clipping about Vonnegut and two schoolmates, who plan to drive down to New Mexico over the summer to dig up Indian skulls. The boys are pictured demonstrating how to light a campfire. Vonnegut is a foot taller than the others and the approximate width of a beanpole. He wears a fedora. His face is narrow, unlined, absurdly young, with an expression of improvised gravity that doesn’t quite conceal his chronic embarrassment.

         

I HAD HOPED to make photocopies of this odd little document, but when I asked the Reading Room Monitor about this she cocked her head.

“Do you have permission from the author to make copies?”

“Of course,” I said, “Mr. Vonnegut, Kurt, actually asked me to come out.”

“You have a letter on file, then?”

“On file,” I said, thoughtfully.

There now ensued a rather lengthy drama involving a hushed appeal up the chain of command, tense colloquies, trips to the computer to check “the database,” and a culminating interview with one Saundra Taylor, Curator of Manuscripts. I had, in fact, called Ms. Taylor several weeks earlier, on the assumption I would need a reservation to see the Vonnegut papers because they were so wildly popular.²

“There shouldn’t be a problem,” Taylor said. “Just have Mr. Vonnegut or his legal representative fax us a letter.”

“That’s the thing,” I said. “Mr. Vonnegut was the one who asked me to inspect his papers. It was more of a personal request, based on when I met with him. I’ve come all the way out from Boston and I only have two days. My wife is with me.” The rest of the reading room staff was now staring. “She’s six months pregnant,” I added, pathetically.

Ms. Taylor looked pained. It was this sort of moment, I imagined, that separated the minor Special Collection librarians from the big leaguers. Here was a thin, anguished scholar,³ clearly desperate, perhaps prepared to make a scene. What I wanted was simple enough, even reasonable, but in direct contravention to her role as guardian of the collection and the protocols thereof. She paused a moment and smoothed down the corner of a file folder with her thumbnail.

I felt I should say something; perhaps suggest that my wife, in addition to her pregnancy, had lupus.

“It would be best,” Ms. Taylor said, with soft finality, “if you took notes.”

         

THIS WAS NOT GOOD. It had been my intention to use my two days at Lilly to Xerox the documents that struck me as most revelatory, so I could study them later. I did some quick math. The Vonnegut archive contained 4,000 documents. Assuming I worked uninterrupted for the next two days, I would have fourteen hours to inspect the whole shebang, or 840 minutes. This came out to 12.5 seconds per document.

The problem was my reading skills, which are poor, as a result of my having been raised on a steady diet of What’s Happening reruns and not, as I may have implied in certain settings, the collected works of Balzac. It takes me 12.5 seconds to read a standard photo caption.

         

I AM ALSO PRONE to distraction, which gives me another bad habit in common with Vonnegut. This comment is based partly on the fact that he dropped out of Butler University, and ditched Cornell after two piss-poor years to join the army, but even more on the fascinating doodles that he left scattered on virtually all of the school-work in his archive. I’m thinking in particular of an assignment for Anthropology 220, the back of which bears the following in pencil:

I Sherwood like to have everything baked with Robinhood flour. Nottingham like it…. Many’s the time I’ve Maid Marion in the kitching, baking.

I spent considerably longer than 12.5 seconds (best estimate 17 minutes) studying this inscription. I was most intrigued by the word kitching. Was the misspelling intentional, a veiled pun referring to Maid Marion’s nether regions? It had such a ribald ring to it. The old kitching. Get a load of that kitching. That is so, like, kitching.

I felt flushed with a strange joy. Vonnegut was a fellow punster! A fellow horndog! I’d gained official access to the sick little kingdom of his mind.

         

NEAR AS I CAN FIGURE, this doodle dates from his years at the University of Chicago, where he came to get a master’s in anthropology. He was just back from the war then, freshly married to his high school sweetheart, twenty-three years old and clearly bored out of his skull by grad school.

What can I tell you about his thesis, “On the Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales”? I can tell you that it sucks almost as badly as my own. His essential argument is against what he calls “the passionate, partisan, rococo argle-bargle of contemporary literary criticism” that unnecessarily complicates the meaning and purpose of stories. The thesis includes hand-drawn graphs tracing the fortunes of characters in various folktales, and devotes twenty pages—nearly half its length—to reprinting a short story by D. H. Lawrence.

What does all this have to do with anthropology?

Not much.

Vonnegut is merely explaining to himself, as I later would, the sort of writer he hopes to become. “Let it be understood,” he writes, “that a contemporary master story teller cares deeply about the form of his tales because he is obsessed with being entertaining, with not being a bore, with leaving his audience satisfied.” (Translation: Screw the critics.) The attributes of his later work are all manifest here—the sharp command of plot, the brutal wit, the contempt for authority.

In 1946, the anthropology faculty unanimously rejected Vonnegut’s thesis.⁴

         

THE NEXT YEAR, Vonnegut moved to Schenectady to work as a public relations writer at General Electric, where his older brother Bernard was a research scientist. He was, to put it mildly, adrift. And here, as a hack on behalf of whizbang technology, with a wife and an infant son to support, Vonnegut made the most foolhardy decision of his brief lifetime: He would become a writer. Worse yet, a short story writer.

His early record was not promising:

“We are sorry to report that this manuscript did not find an opening here” (The Atlantic, 1948).

“There is a brisk style to this [sic] stories but I’d feel rather dubious that they would take with editors” (Russell & Volkening Literary Agency, 1949).

“Centralized, as it is, around an older character, and placed in a rural setting, it hasn’t sufficient plot and pace to go over with the younger readers we are trying to attract to the magazine” (Redbook, 1949).

The Vonnegut archive contains reams of these rejections. Reading over them sent me into a kind of rapture of indignation. You fuckers! I wanted to shout. Do you know who you’re fucking with? Kurt Fucking Vonnegut! Do you realize how fucking stupid you’re going to look someday?

I don’t imagine it will come as a surprise that I spent most of the nineties receiving rejections of this sort, sitting around in one or another shithole shouting these same imprecations. Such is the fate of short story writers everywhere. We are captains of a dying industry, drama queens, very poor planners.

         

I DON’T MEAN TO compare myself with Vonnegut. Or actually, that’s bullshit. Of course I mean to compare myself with Vonnegut. (The entire point of my visit to Bloomington was to compare myself with Vonnegut.) What I mean is that my decision to write short stories was a cinch compared to his. I was single. I had supportive parents, savings socked away, a miserable little MFA program where I could spin my training wheels. Vonnegut, on the other hand, had a wife and children and no dough. He was a child of the Depression. He had watched his parents tumble from wealth into hard times, insanity, and self-annihilation. The guy tried to go the straight route, dutifully tromped off to Dad’s alma mater and majored in biochemistry, took the office job. Why, then, did he fall off the wagon, into something as disreputable and unreliable as storytelling?

         

IT WOULD BE EASY enough to say that he was a born writer, which plays to all our romantic notions about talent and destiny, that heroic claptrap we’ve been peddling to ourselves since The Iliad. But I suspect Vonnegut was drawn to writing by something more subversive than his abundant self-regard, something closer to mourning, that dark cloud he kept belching in Hartford. He wouldn’t get to the heart of it for another twenty years, but even in his early stories, he seems woefully out of synch with the era.

The fifties were dawning, after all. America was booming! The scientists at GE—as scripted by Vonnegut himself—were promising a brave new world for all those bouncing babies. But he wasn’t buying. He could see that technology would do nothing to correct (and might even exacerbate) the essential design flaw, which was human, which resided in our failure to love one another properly, our loyalty to greed and hatred, the gradual hammering of our hearts into swords.

His first published story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” stars a scientist who learns to control objects with his mind. He gets recruited by the government as a secret weapon.

         

AS AN INVETERATE thief of office supplies, I will now note a fact that amuses me beyond all reason: Vonnegut stored his early stories in GE News Bureau folders. On the folder for “The Euphio Question,” someone—his wife, Jane, I suspect—has written the following in giant red letters: “Sold to Collier’s on February 23, 1951 for $1250!”

And buried in the early drafts of this very story, on the back of a manuscript page, is what ranks as my all-time favorite Vonnegut doodle, a bit of short division:

Under this, he has written “16 shorts,” and a list of titles. Here was Kurt Vonnegut doing what all ambitious young story writers do—taking inventory, figuring the math, pining after a book. And why not? This was (at least in my imagining of things) an exhilarating era for Vonnegut. After years as the family ne’er-do-well, he could sense that he might actually triumph.

         

AND CAN I ALSO SAY, while we’re not on the subject, what a joy it was to see the handiwork of Vonnegut’s own hand, the impatient whir of his mind scattered across all those oniony pages, his letters, his outlines, his plays (Vonnegut wrote plays, dozens of them, who knew?) and above all his drafts, corrected, amended, slashed at, his rewrites spilling sideways into the margins, all his decisions. Nobody tells you this when you become a writer: that you’ll spend 99 percent of your time making decisions.

Thanks to computers, I’ve been able to flush all my bad decisions into cyber oblivion, where, with any luck, they will remain, while my collected works are gathered on a disk the size of a cereal flake.

         

VONNEGUT’S WRITING schedule for the first two months of 1950 begins like so:

1. Between Timid and Timbuktu (Jan. 6–Jan. 9)

2. The Ants (Jan. 8–Jan. 10)

3. Ice-9 (Jan. 27–Feb. 10)

He lists half a dozen other stories, most written in the space of a few days. The page also includes his schedule for the composition of his first novel, Player Piano. He wrote the second chapter in two days, and the whole manuscript in a few months.

Anyone who has struggled with stories, and especially a first novel, will recognize how revoltingly fast Vonnegut was writing, particularly given that he was still working full-time for GE, and that he had two young children at home. The man was a machine.

         

THIS IS NOT to suggest that he was a flawless machine, or even a particularly profitable one. Most of the three hundred stories gathered in his archive remain unpublished, for good reason. I now find it necessary to quote from “God’s Gift to Women,” the account of a would-be Lothario nicknamed Gine:

“Fresh meat for Gine,” said Leora, and she smiled like a pirate who had just captured a fresh young beauty, and she looked poor Amy up and down…

“He isn’t married.”

“He isn’t?” said Amy pipingly.

Yes, pipingly.

Most astounding is the number of different ways Vonnegut finds to screw up. His drafts are at once tepid and moralizing, crammed with feckless heroes and labored metaphors. Reading over them was like being trapped in an elevator with my own early stories.

         

VONNEGUT IS ON record as saying that the reason he writes is so he can edit himself into something approaching charm.⁵ I realize that it may come off as a bit of dirty pool to go mucking through his initial efforts, particularly because it gave me an almost obscene pleasure to see Kurt Vonnegut writing so badly.

Or maybe I mean it gave me a twisted sort of faith.

I mentioned above that I don’t believe in talent, and what I meant by this is that a knack for the language, the stuff identified early on by well-meaning high school teachers, is about as useful a predictor of literary success as shoe size. When students march into one of my undergrad workshops with talent, I regard them as doomed. They are likely to suffer the illusion that writing is about applause rather than humiliation.

But we all come to the keyboard as pitiful supplicants. We all pull the same insecure stunts. We all have our own drawer of horrors. Those who succeed, in the end, are the ones with the biggest drawers.

Which brings us to the file for “The Commandant’s Desk.” It begins with a 1951 letter addressed to Knox Burger, the editor at Collier’s who urged Vonnegut to quit his PR job and write full-time.

Dear Knox:

Here, for operation Brandy Alexander, is THE COMMANDANT’S DESK.

I think it’s pretty good, and, since I am representing myself in this particular deal, let me say my boy deserves a fat bonus.

I’m selling my house and moving somewhere on the Atlantic Coast, probably Massachusetts. We’re renting a place in Province-town for July, August, and September, and hope you’ll pay us a call….⁶

Signed [in pencil]
Kurt Vonnegut

Burger responds with two single-spaced pages of edits. The rest of the file consists of subsequent drafts, six of them by my count. Vonnegut spends two years trying out different narrators, tones, endings. There are notes for further revisions, outlines, more than two hundred pages in all. “The Commandant’s Desk” was never published.

         

VONNEGUT WROTE HIS pal Burger a second fascinating note, but before I could finish transcribing it, I got a tap on the shoulder. “Your wife is outside,” the attendant said.

This was good. I had left Erin at the main library, working on her novel. Now I could explain about the no-copying situation, that we might need to stay an extra day. The moment I saw Erin I could tell that was not going to happen.

“Is everything okay?”

She shook her head.

We went outside to talk.

“I’m exhausted,” she said. “I can’t work here. I need to lie down. I need rest.”

“Sure,” I said. “Take the day off.”

She shook her head and turned away for a moment. When she turned back she was silently weeping.

“I’m sick of this.”

“Sick of what?” I said.

But I knew what she meant.

I’ve neglected to mention this, because I’ve been so hooked on the Vonnegunutia, but upon our arrival in Bloomington, we’d been on the road for three weeks. Erin had spent one of these patiently absorbing the complex distress of my family. She’d slept in Love-lock, Nevada, and Salt Lake City, and York, Nebraska. She’d driven thirty-three hundred miles in a tiny Honda packed to the roof with her worldly possessions. And she had done all this while six months pregnant with our first child. The sun beat down on her pale face.

“I want to go home,” she said.

I was torn. I knew I needed to accommodate her needs. I needed not to be a self-absorbed writer jerkoff. At the same time…we were in Bloomington. It was all right here. Vonnegut had something to tell me, I was convinced of it.

I hugged her for a long time and told her we could leave immediately if she wanted, head straight back to Boston, but that she could also, if it was okay, if she didn’t mind, I felt it might be good for her, just for right now, for today, to get a hotel room—a nice one, a fancy one—and give herself the day off. Then we’d get dinner and see where things stood.

         

IT’S WHAT WRITERS DO, this shuck and jive, this nervous dance to balance the emotional needs of those you love against your own need for glory. To quote that other letter to Burger:

         

Jesus—wouldn’t it be nice to write just one play a year, or just one anything?

I’ve pretty well pooped out as a hack. The old Moxie is gone. As for the book: I like it, I believe in it. But it’s disloyal….

Everything’s going to be just grand, though. Jane says so. She says she knows it in her bones. And I no kidding believe her. I’d better, with two houses and $20,000 in mortgages.

Vonnegut wrote this in 1955. He was thirty-two years old. His first novel had come and gone. Sirens of Titan wouldn’t come out for another four years. He was still pumping out the stories, still dreaming about a collection. He had three kids now.

I can’t fathom how Vonnegut did it. To think of myself at that age—sitting alone in a rented room, writing my lameass stories, hurling my body at the nearest soft disaster. I was such a punk. And here I was pushing forty, with a tolerant wife and a single baby on the way, a few books under my belt—and I felt besieged?

Vonnegut has said in the past that he was lucky, that he began his career during the golden age of magazines, when you could make a living as a story writer. But that’s nonsense. The record indicates that the guy was running one continuous hustle. He worked as an English teacher for troubled kids. He ran a Saab dealership. He even tried inventing a board game.⁷

         

WHEN I TOLD my wife about Vonnegut’s scattered endeavors, she said, “He sounds like you.” It was evening. We had picked up a pizza and now we were wandering the aisles of a dazzling midwestern supermarket. They had everything: seven kinds of lettuce, imported cheeses, vanilla chai smoothies, the glittering bounty of the cheap oil era, toward which I felt a sudden strange sympathy. A light rain fell outside, streaking the high windows, beading the bright cars beyond. We were so lucky to be living in this time, in this place. We had no idea, really.

It was the same feeling I got out on the road, as we sped across America,⁸ through all those little retail environments, with their brightly lit gas stations and calorific convenience stores. They would be dead soon, petroleum ghost towns, like the abandoned farmhouses slowly collapsing off in the distance. So maybe it was nostalgia I was feeling, a kind of pre-nostalgia. These were the good old days. Why hadn’t I noticed?

         

I SHOULD RETURN to the Lilly Reading Room, but before I do I want to mention something that goes unmentioned (so far as I could tell) in the Vonnegut archive. In 1958, his older sister Alice succumbed to cancer, two days after her husband’s death in a train wreck. Vonnegut adopted three of the couple’s four children. His greatest period of artistic growth occurred at a time that he had no fewer than six children in his home.

         

WHEN WE LAST LEFT our hero, though, he was a young writer bursting with ideas, who spent his days writing short stories, fretting over dough, doodling, and inventing board games. How in the hell did this schlub become Kurt Vonnegut?

I fully intend to answer this question, but to do so, I’ll need to share with you a letter the novelist John Irving wrote to Vonnegut, his former teacher, in 1982:

         

I think you are (and have been for as long as I’ve known your work) the best writer in this country. Period. I’m afraid I have an almond macaroon for a heart, when it comes to your writing.

I know we are all insecure about what we truly mean. But your books always create the perfect illusion that you know exactly all those parts of the story as you are telling us just one of the parts, and that simply makes everything sound true—makes you the absolute authority. You have to be a writer to feel that.

Günter Grass can give me this impression, too. No one else living gives it. Dickens gave it. Hardy gave it. Well, it’s a short list.

         

This strikes me as an apt description of Vonnegut. His trademark as a writer, the key to his magnetism, resides in the awesome assurance of his voice. His narrators all sound like the same plain-spoken God. I am now ready to reveal the source of Kurt Vonnegut’s divine voice: a shitload of failure.

I’m not being cute here. To a greater extent than anyone likes to admit, writers evolve simply because they tire of their own mistakes. The best example I can offer happens to be the best book Vonnegut ever wrote, Slaughterhouse-Five.

         

SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE is impossible to describe to anyone who has not read it. It is a mix of science fiction, farce, autobiography, war reportage, and meta-fiction. It is somehow all of these things at once, in the service of a single theme: the chaos of war, which is to say, young men sent to foreign countries to kill strangers. The event at the heart of the novel is the firebombing of Dresden, which burned to death more than 25,000 Germans, nearly all of them civilians, and which Vonnegut survived as a twenty-two-year-old POW. He spent the next two decades trying to write about the experience. And he failed at it, over and over. “Guns Before Butter” begins like so:

The three American soldiers remained seated within the roofless shell of a building amid the smashed masonry and timbers of Dresden, Germany. The time was early March, 1944. Kniptash, Donnini, and Coleman were prisoners of war.

All his initial war stories are like this: hard-bitten and stagy. The characters are thin as dimes. What matters in them are the episodes that keep cropping up—a man is shot for stealing a teapot, another almost dies on a boxcar—memories that would haunt Vonnegut until he exorcised them in Slaughterhouse-Five.

         

BY THE TIME Vonnegut took up Dresden again, in the late sixties, he was riding an unbelievable hot streak. He had published four novels in the space of six years, including the masterpiece Cat’s Cradle, for which the University of Chicago would award him a belated master’s degree. He was a bestselling author. You might assume that he tore through Slaughterhouse-Five.

He did not.

His initial draft—at least the initial draft that made its way to Bloomington—is a standard-issue war story, starring a scarred veteran named Weary. “Three in our labor unit in Dresden died,” it begins, wearily.

By his second draft, Vonnegut has come to recognize the necessity of personal confession. But he has lost the struggle against his own nihilism:

I used to pretend, even to myself, that I was deeply sorry about Dresden, tinkered with the idea of writing a book about the massacre with neatly underplayed indignation. But these things happen and there is no stopping them, so the hell with them…. The American conscience is dead. The human conscience is dead. It has almost certainly always been dead.

Elsewhere, no doubt as a compensatory measure, he comes off as glib.

That is why the name of this book is “Slaughterhouse-Five.”

Zowie.

Whiz-bang.

Mother, pin a rose on me.

Wow.

Some title for a war book. And how.

Vonnegut actually crossed out this passage. He knew he was playing to the balconies. And that’s what I’m getting at here. Vonnegut needed to make all these mistakes. He needed to work through his anger, his evasions, his boredom with conventional approaches. By the third draft, he has found an outlet for his exuberance, in a campy science fiction subplot. He has also found the humility that precedes absolution. There is an air of surrender to the narrative, which begins, “I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time.” He is done lying to the reader, done posing, done pretending his own depression and failure are not part of the story.

I fucking love that about Vonnegut.

         

ANOTHER WAY TO put it would be this:

He himself was the most enchanting American at the heart of each of his tales. We can forgive this easily, for he managed to imply that the reader was enough like him to be his brother.

Vonnegut said this about his hero Twain, though he was speaking about himself too, as we always do. That is the great game writers play: pretending what we do is a matter of superior imagination, or empathy, when, in fact, our defining impulse is a desire to be noticed.

         

OF VONNEGUT’S MANY speeches, most notable is his 1981 tribute to the labor leader Eugene Debs, a fellow Hoosier. He quotes the words Debs uttered before being sentenced to twenty years in prison for speaking out against World War I: “While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Vonnegut then asks,

How many of us can echo those words and mean them? If this were a decent nation, we would all find those sentiments as natural and easy to say as, “Good morning. It looks like another nice day.”

But the star system has made us all ravenous for the slightest proofs that we matter to the American story, somehow, at least a little bit more than someone else.

Reading these words, I thought about the Reality TV show Erin and I had watched the night before, something called My Super Sweet Sixteen, in which a teenage girl from Scottsdale celebrates her birthday with a $150,000 party, and two new cars. In one scene, she stands in front of her school in a tiara and presents invitations to the other cool kids, while the ugly and poor watch. Two undesirables begin to beg for invites and she allows them to dance for her on the sidewalk, while she and her friends insult them.

It would be natural enough to express disgust for this lunatic display. But all I felt watching that girl was the terrible misery inside her, her monstrous need to be popular, which has become our national aspiration.

         

INCLUDED IN THE speech file is a sheet of paper that includes random notes, mostly political rants of the sort Vonnegut produces at the drop of a hat, along with these two humdingers:

Something you should know about me: Geraldo Rivera Question of the hour. Does penis size really matter?

I’m not sure what prompted the penis size question, though Vonnegut’s obsession with this topic is well documented. I’m fairly certain he’s the only writer (other than myself) ever to write a novel in which the male characters are identified by the length and girth of their johnsons.

The Geraldo thing is a little less cryptic; for a brief time Geraldo was married to one of Vonnegut’s daughters.

That is so, like, ick.

         

BY THE SEVENTIES, Vonnegut was himself famous. (Not as famous as Geraldo. But who is?) He had written himself into his work. He had become a renowned speaker, an icon to malcontents and pacifists everywhere. Now came the deluge. Letters. Mountains of them. From Günter Grass and Herman Wouk and John Updike. From Marlo Thomas and Julie Nixon Eisenhower and Laurie Anderson. From Larry Flynt. (“My attorney is seeking a well-known and respected author who would be willing to offer expert testimony as to the literary merit of Hustler.”) Mostly, from guys like me who fell in love with him and developed the absurd but inevitable notion that he might fall in love right back. Such tender notes of worship! They fill three boxes.

         

HONESTLY, I DON’T like this part of the movie. The stuff that excited me—Vonnegut’s era of struggle, his lean and hungry ascent—is over now. We’ve reached the part where the privileges of fame overtake suspense.

Vonnegut continues to write novels, many of them quite good, but none feel groundbreaking, the way the early books did. He continues to say the right things, with tremendous eloquence, but his actions don’t jibe. He divorces his first wife and takes up with a more glamorous model. He gets a place in the Hamptons. He writes a letter entreating Jack Nicholson to read a script for Breakfast of Champions.

Does Kurt Vonnegut sell out?

Sure. He sells out like hell. He’s flattered by the money and the praise, by the innocent belief that commercial attention means his ideas are being heeded.

He gets himself a fancy New York lawyer, too, to sort through all the contracts and letters and such, the infamous Donald Farber. “I was dumb enough to join a health club,” reads one of his notes to Farber. “It now bores me shitless. I no longer use it. I enclose my lifetime membership…. Would you take steps to break off the connection?”

How’s that for mid-career decadence?

         

IT WAS NEARLY closing time at the Reading Room of the Lilly Library. I had not read four thousand documents in the allotted 840 minutes. More like four hundred. My eyes were burning. Soon, my wife would be waiting for me outside, gorgeously swollen, perhaps weeping at my inconsideration.

And so, at this point in my odyssey through Vonnegut’s archive, I made a thoroughly stupid (by which I mean rather typical) decision. I watched Vonnegut on TV. The archive contained several programs, the most excruciating of which was a 1989 interview with Charlie Rose, during which Vonnegut admits that he watches TV “all the time,” in particular The People’s Court. Then comes this exchange:

VONNEGUT:	People have two houses, one in the country and the city.
ROSE:	Do you have that?
VONNEGUT:	I do.
ROSE:	I know, so do I—and we shouldn’t want that?
VONNEGUT:	No, I don’t think so. And I mean, I wish I didn’t own the house in the country, because I wonder what’s happened to it over the winter.
ROSE:	And you worry about somebody breaking in.
VONNEGUT:	Yeah.

Huh?

I know. I know. This is what Americans do. We hold the right beliefs, then do the wrong things. It’s been our national specialty, from All Men Are Created Equal to Support the Troops. Still, it hurt to see Vonnegut reveal himself like this. I had come to Bloomington in the secret hope that the guy would prove a worthy idol, that he had lived by his words, that my faith in him was well placed. And here he was, revealed as a limousine liberal. I felt like I was back at Wesleyan.

         

IT WAS ON THIS somber note that I left the Lilly Library and sped off into the sunset, or at least as far as the Indianapolis suburbs, where my old pals Gerry and Michelle Lanosga were waiting with a much-needed infusion of wine and a slab of salmon, which Gerry barbecued on a cedar plank. The fish tasted so much like bacon that I suspected he had performed some kind of religious transfiguration.

I’d met the Lanosgas twenty years earlier, at my first job after college. We were reporters in Phoenix. Michelle was engaged to another man and Gerry was stone cold crazy for her. The two of them spent the summer drinking to excess and attending AC/DC concerts and lusting after each other in the brutal, half-requited manner best suited to energetic twenty-two-year-olds. Now they had three boys and all the American bells and whistles.

After dinner, the boys took me down to the basement to meet the great variety of bugs down there. Then it was time for a pillow fight. Then Miles (age eighteen months) took a header from the lip of the fireplace. It felt a lot like the house I grew up in, in terms of unconstrained boy energy. And I wondered, as I lay next to my sleeping wife that night, if any of these boys would fall for Vonnegut in the way I had. The wine had made me hokey; that was true. But it felt like an important question. The world really was going to run out of oil. It might not happen in our lifetimes, but it would happen in theirs. And our citizens—so infantilized by abundance, so well armed—would then face a mortal challenge: to look beyond themselves, to care more for each other. It doesn’t come naturally for most boys. They’d need someone like Vonnegut, someone smart and funny and forgiving, to show them the way. So I made myself one of those hokey, wine-soaked promises: to send each of those boys a Vonnegut book for his sixteenth birthday.

         

WE SPENT TWO MORE days on the road. Erin did most of the driving, while I glared at the gas guzzlers around us and imagined that I was somehow better than the drivers who glared back at me. It’s one of my favorite pastimes.

I should have enjoyed the drive. I knew it would be our last for a long time. But we were racing to get somewhere, like always, like everyone. We were treating America like the big floozy she so frequently consents to be. In Ohio, it was surly road crews, chunkedup road, the stink of tar. In Pennsylvania, it was distant hills and shitty drivers. And everywhere, the same shining fast food symbols. This was America by superhighway: beautiful curves and no ideas.

Twenty miles outside Erie, we blew a tire at 70 mph. I needed to get the car onto the shoulder, but the drivers in the right lane wouldn’t let me in and the shuddering got worse and finally the back of the car began to smoke and we lost speed and I knew for a moment that it was all going to end; I had a terrible vision of crushed steel and blood. Then some brave soul decided to take pity on us and let me into the right lane and I lurched onto the shoulder. The tire had shredded down to the rim. The sign directly in front of us read: No Shoulder— ¹/₂ Mile Ahead. A semi screamed past. The blast of air nearly knocked me to the ground. Erin had gone white with dread.

“Stay in the car,” I shouted.

I unpacked the trunk and laid her possessions on the weedy embankment and pulled out the feeble little spare tire and set about failing to change it. This took twenty minutes. Then I stood by the highway and watched the traffic whip past, clenched and joyless faces. From this new perspective, I could see the psychosis of our arrangement. We had become dependent on machines that allowed us to traverse the land without in any way experiencing it, and worse yet to feel this was the natural order of things. It was a kind of violence, to pass by each other at such speeds. Was it really such a surprise that terrorists had turned our vehicles into weapons?

         

THIS, IN CASE YOU’RE wondering, is how we wound up at the Wal-Mart in Erie, Pennsylvania, on the Friday before July 4. I had vowed never to give Wal-Mart any of my money, but they were the only place available to fix our tire at that hour, or anyway, they were the most convenient, so we gave them our dough, gratefully, and got back on the road and then we gave the assholes at Holiday Inn our dough, then the assholes at Exxon, and by 2 P.M. the next day we had arrived at our new house in the unsustainable suburbs, where I had vowed for many years I would never live. So this was me being an American, no better than my own purchases.

I should have felt a sense of relief at having conveyed my precious cargo safely home. But doing the Vulcan Mind Meld with Vonnegut for two days had upset me. I didn’t know how to feel about the guy, if I still wanted to be him when I grew up. To sit there, day after day, immersed in the question of whether humankind would survive its own despicable conduct? God had proved an abject failure. Science, the great hope of his youth, had delivered us a hundred new ways to kill and a few spare miracles. Americans enjoyed unprecedented material comfort, and yet they grew sadder every day, more frightened and lonely and mean. Literary prophet wasn’t seeming like such a dream job.

And here I can feel myself struggling for the happy ending, something inspiring about my daughter and the wish that our better angels might still prevail, how the empty fuel can will slow us down, humble us into empathy, maybe even help us reestablish those big, happy families we never had. But that’s bullshit.

Kurt Vonnegut became a writer expressly to oppose such bullshit, to articulate the true woe of his circumstance. Most of this woe, incidentally, came not from Dresden or Vietnam or Iraq—not from the Family of Man, that is—but from his own family, from the insoluble loss of those he wished to love, and from those small, private moments when two people who should love each other fail to do so.

I remind you now what Vonnegut told the crowd down in Hartford: I write again and again about my family.

Vonnegut never got over those moments, and he turned to language to express his wrath and disappointment. He did so with such elegance and humor and mercy that he turned me into a writer, too. I love him for that. And I’ll also never forgive him.