Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series)

We were on a sightseeing bus in Stockholm during an international congress of the writers’ organization P.E.N. (Poets, Playwrights, Essayists, Editors, Novelists) in 1973. I told Henreich Böll of a German veteran of World War II (then a carpenter of my acquaintance on Cape Cod) who had shot himself in the thigh in order to get away from the Russian Front but whose wound had healed by the time he got to a hospital. (There was talk of a court-martial and a firing squad, but then the Red Army overran the hospital and took him prisioner.) Böll said that the correct way to shoot yourself was through a loaf of bread, in order to avoid powder burns. That is what we laughed about. (The Vietnam War was going on then, during which many infantrymen surely considered wounding themselves and pretending that it had been done by an enemy.)

Later on (when we had stopped laughing) he said that the French writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus came looking for German writers after World War II, saying in effect, “You must tell us what it was like for you.” (Böll, like Sartre and Camus, would win a Nobel Prize for Literature.) In 1984, a year before Böll’s death at the age of sixty-seven (one year short of my age now, and I smoke as much as he did), he invited me to take part in a dialogue about Germanness to be taped and edited for television by the BBC. I was honored. I loved the man and his work. I accepted. The program was a flop, fogbound and melancholy and mainly pointless, although it is still aired again and again on cable in this country when there is nothing else to show. (We are sort of packing material to keep a big box of junk jewelry from rattling.) I ask him what the most dangerous flaw is in the German character, and he replies, “Obedience.”

Here are the last words he would ever say to me in this life (and he was on two canes and still smoking like a chimney, and about to board a taxicab to the airport in a cold London drizzle): “Oh, Koort, it is so hard, so
hard.”
He was one of the last shreds of native German sorrow and shame about his country’s part in World War II and its prelude. He told me off camera that he was despised by his neighbors for remembering when it was time to forget.

Time to forget.

A preface is commonly the last part of a book to be written, although it is the first thing a reader is expected to see. Six months have passed since the completion of the body of this book. Only now am I stitching this coverlet, as my editor, Faith Sale, and I prepare to put the creature to beddy-bye.

My daughter Lily has turned eight during the interval. The Russian Empire has collapsed. All the weapons we thought we might have to use on the USSR we are now applying without stint and unopposed to Iraq, a nation one-sixteenth that populous. A speech our President delivered yesterday on the subject of why we had no choice but to attack Iraq won him the highest rating in television history, a record held many years ago, I remember, by Mary Martin in
Peter Pan
. Yes, and I provided answers that same yesterday to questions put to me by a British publication,
Weekly Guardian
, with these results:

K.V.

January 17, 1991

Here we have a sequel, not that anyone has clamored for one, to a book called
Palm Sunday
(1980), a collection of essays and speeches by me, with breezy autobiographical commentary serving as connective tissue and splints and bandages. Here we go again with real life and opinions made to look like one big, preposterous animal not unlike an invention by Dr. Seuss, the great writer and illustrator of children’s books, like an oobleck or a grinch or a lorax, or like a sneech perhaps.

Or a unicorn, not a Seuss invention.

(The real name of Dr. Seuss is Theodor Geisel. He was born in 1904 and I was born in 1922.)

When I went to Cornell University in 1940, I joined a fraternity (Delta Upsilon) which had murals by Dr. Seuss in its basement bar. He had drawn them in pencil long before my time. An artist in the fraternity made them bold and permanent with paint afterward.

(For those who do not know the drawings of Dr. Seuss: They depict animals with improbable numbers of joints, with crazy ears and noses and tails and feet, brightly colored usually, such as persons sometimes report seeing when suffering from delirium tremens. More commonly, I am told, people with d.t.’s see rats.)

Dr. Seuss was a Dartmouth man and not a DU, but he drew the murals while roistering in Ithaca with a painter pal, Hugh Troy, who was both a Cornellian and a DU. Troy was also a legendary player of elaborate practical jokes. (There was no money in any of his stunts. They were all
pro bono publico.)
Troy would revisit his old fraternity during my freshman year and regale me and my callow brothers with tales of his exploits.

He told us about the time he emptied a New York subway car in three stops by boarding it with a large number of friends who pretended to be strangers to one another. This was in the wee hours following New Year’s Eve. Each conspirator was carrying a copy of the
Daily News
with the bold headline:
HOOVER OUT, ROOSEVELT IN
. Troy had saved the papers from Roosevelt’s landslide victory about a year before. (That would have been back at the very start of 1934, I guess, when I was eleven years old, the fourth year of the Great Depression.)

Another time Troy bought a park bench, insisting on a bill of sale. He and a friend set it down in Central Park until a policeman appeared. Then they picked it up and ran. When the policeman caught up with them Troy showed him the bill of sale. They did this many times, until all the police in the area understood that Troy owned the bench. Then they started picking up benches belonging to the City, with the police leaving them strictly alone. They made a big pile of them somewhere in the park.

Even in my salad days (when I was green in judgment) that seemed like a dumb joke to me, a heck of a lot of work for nothing. But I listened to Troy respectfully, since I had been sent to an Ivy League college from a public school in Indianapolis in order that I might become more sophisticated. (If I had gone to Indiana University or Purdue or Wabash or DePauw, I might now be a Congressman or Senator.)

After Troy left, I experimented with becoming a practical joker myself. I went to the final examinations of several large courses in which I was not enrolled, stood up, tore the questions to pieces, threw them into the face of the instructor, and exited, slamming the door behind me. I evidently inspired many copycats, since this sort of behavior at finals became epidemic.

Success!

My final practical joke at Cornell, like my first one, made a jackass out of nobody but myself. All males were required to take two years of ROTC. I was in the horse-drawn Artillery, believe it or not. (That is how long ago that was.) By the end of my sophomore year the USA was at war with Germany, Italy, and Japan. I had enlisted in the Army and was waiting to be called. A Major General came to inspect us. I went to that inspection wearing every sort of medal, for swimming, for scouting, for Sunday-school attendance or whatever, that I could borrow from anyone. I may have been going nuts, since I was flunking practically everything, including ROTC.