Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) (14 page)

“So it’s curtains not just for me as i grow old. it’s curtains for everyone. how’s that for full-strength royal astronomy?”

“MIT has played an important part in the history of my branch of the Vonnegut family. My father and grandfather took degrees in architecture here. My Uncle Pete flunked out of here. My only brother Bernard, nine years my senior, took a doctor’s degree in chemistry here. Father and Grandfather became self-employed architects and partners. Uncle Pete became a building contractor, also self-employed. My brother knew early on that he would be a research scientist, and so could not be self-employed. If he was to have room enough and equipment enough to do what he did best, then he was going to have to work for somebody else. Who would that be?”

Such was what I considered a tantalizing beginning of a speech I gave at MIT back in 1985. (There have been times when I was nutty enough to believe that I might change the course of history a tiny bit, and this was one of them.) There in Kresge Auditorium I had a full house of young people who could do what the magician Merlin could only pretend to do in the Court of King Arthur, in Camelot. They could turn loose or rein in enormous forces (invisible as often as not) in the service or disservice of this or that enterprise (such as Star Wars).

“Most of you,” I went on, “will soon face my brother’s dilemma when he graduated from here. In order to survive and even prosper, most of you will have to make somebody else’s technological dreams come true—along with your own, of course. You will have to form that mixture of dreams we call a partnership—or more romantically, a marriage.

“My brother got his doctorate in 1938, I think. If he had gone to work in Germany after that, he would have been helping to make Hitler’s dreams come true. If he had gone to work in Italy, he would have been helping to make Mussolini’s dreams come true. If he had gone to work in Japan, he would have been helping to make Tojo’s dreams come true. If he had gone to work in the Soviet Union, he would have been helping to make Stalin’s dreams come true. He went to work for a bottle manufacturer in Butler, Pennsylvania, instead. It can make quite a difference not just to you but to humanity: the sort of boss you choose, whose dreams you help come true.

“Hitler dreamed of killing Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, mental defectives, believers in democracy, and so on, in industrial quantities. It would have remained only a dream if it hadn’t been for chemists as well educated as my brother, who supplied Hitler’s executioners with the cyanide gas known as Cyklon-B. It would have remained only a dream if architects and engineers as capable as my father and grandfather hadn’t designed extermination camps—the fences, the towers, the barracks, the railroad sidings, and the gas chambers and crematoria—for maximum ease of operation and efficiency. I recently visited two of those camps in Poland, Auschwitz and Birkenau. They are technologically perfect. There is only one grade I could give their designers, and that grade is A-plus. They surely solved all the problems set for them.

“Yes, and that is the grade I would have to give to the technicians who have had a hand in the creation of the car bombs which are now exploding regularly in front of embassies and department stores and movie theaters and houses of worship of every kind. They surely solve the problems set for them.
Ka-blooey!
A-plus! A-plus!

“Which brings us to the differences between men and women. Feminists have won a few modest successes in the United States during the past two decades, so it has become almost obligatory to say that the differences between the two sexes have been exaggerated. But this much is clear to me: Generally speaking, women don’t like immoral technology nearly as much as men do. This could be the result of some hormone deficiency. Whatever the reason, women, often taking their children with them, tend to outnumber men in demonstrations against schemes and devices which can kill people. In fact, the most effective doubter of the benefits of unbridled technological advancement so far was a woman, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who died 134 years ago. She, of course, created the idea of the Monster of Frankenstein.

“And to show you how fruity, how feminine I have become in late middle age: If I were the President of MIT, I would hang pictures of Boris Karloff as the Monster of Frankenstein all over the institution. Why? To remind students and faculty that humanity now cowers in muted dread, expecting to be killed sooner or later by Monsters of Frankenstein. Such killing goes on right now, by the way, in many other parts of the world, often with our sponsorship—hour after hour, day after day.

“What should be done? You here at MIT should set an example for your colleagues everywhere by writing and then taking an oath based on the Hippocratic Oath, by which medical doctors have been bound for twenty-four centuries. Do I mean to say that no physician in all that time has violated that oath? Certainly not. But every doctor who has violated it has been correctly branded a scumbag. And why has the late Josef Mengele become the most monstrous of all the Nazis, in the opinion of most of us? He was a doctor, and he gleefully violated the Hippocratic Oath.

“If some of you elect to act on my suggestion, to write a new oath, you will of course have to examine the original, which is conventionally dated 460 years before the birth of Jesus Christ. So it is a musty old Greek document, much of it irrelevant to a physician’s moral dilemmas in the present day. It is also a perfectly human document. No one has ever suggested that it came from a god in a vision or on clay tablets found on a mountaintop. A person or some people wrote it, inspired by nothing more than their own wishes to help rather than harm humankind. I assume that most of you, too, would rather help than harm humankind, and might welcome formal restraints on what a wicked boss might expect of you.

“The part of the Hippocratic Oath which needs the least editing, it seems to me, is this: ‘The regimen I adopt shall be for the benefit of my patients, according to my ability and judgment, and not for their hurt or for any wrong. I will give no deadly drug to any, though it be asked of me, nor will I counsel such.’ You could easily paraphrase this so as to include not just doctors but every sort of scientist, remembering that all sciences have their roots in the simple wish to make people safe and well.

“Your paraphrase might go like this: ‘The regimen I adopt shall be for the benefit of all life on this planet, according to my own ability and judgment, and not for its hurt or for any wrong. I will create no deadly substance or device, though it be asked of me, nor will I counsel such.’

“That might make a good beginning for an oath everyone would gladly take upon graduation from MIT. And there is surely more than that you would gladly swear to. You could take it from there.

“I thank you for your attention.”

What a flop! The applause was polite enough. (There were many Oriental faces out there. Who knows what
they
may have been thinking?) But nobody came up front afterward and said he or she was going to take a shot at writing an oath all technical people would be glad to take. There was nothing in the student paper the next week. It was all over. (If such a speech had been given at Cornell when I was a student there, I would have written an oath that very night whilst talking to myself. Then again, I had had lots of free time, since I was flunking practically everything.)

What makes the students of today so unresponsive? (Only this morning I, an old poop, got a letter asking me if I had any suggestions for a revision of the Pledge of Allegiance, and I answered by return mail: “I pledge allegiance to the Constitution of the United States of America, and the flag which is its symbol, with liberty and justice for all.”) I’ll tell you what makes the students so unresponsive. They know what I will never get through my head: that life is
unserious.
(Why not make Caligula’s horse a Consul?)

Before my great speech to the MIT students I talked to some of them about Star Wars, Ronald Reagan’s belief that laser beams and satellites and flypaper and who-knows-what could be linked together in such a way as to form an invisible dome no enemy missile could penetrate. They didn’t think there was any way it could be made to operate, but they all wanted to work on it anyway. (Why
not
make Caligula’s horse a Consul?)

When I studied anthropology long ago at the University of Chicago, my most famous professor was Dr. Robert Redfield. The idea that all societies evolved through similar, predictable stages on their way to higher (Victorian) civilization, from polytheism to monotheism, for instance, or from the tom-tom to the symphony orchestra, had by then been ridiculed into obscurity. It was generally agreed that there was no such ladder as cultural evolution. But Dr. Redfield said in effect, “Wait just a minute.” He said that he could describe to every fair-minded person’s satisfaction one (and only one) stage every society had passed through or would pass through. He called this inevitable stage and his essay on it “The Folk Society.”

First of all, a Folk Society was isolated, and in an area it considered organically its own. It grew from that soil and no other. The break between the living and the dead was indistinct, and bonds of kinship crisscrossed every which way. There was such general agreement as to what life was all about and how people should behave in every conceivable situation that very little was debatable.

Dr. Redfield gave a public lecture on the Folk Society in the springtime each year. It was popular, I think, because so many of us took it as scientific advice about how to find deep and enduring contentment: join or create a Folk Society. (This was back in the 1940s, remember, long before the communes and flower children and shared music and ideals of my children’s generation.) Dr. Redfield denounced sentimentality about life in Folk Societies, saying they were hell for anyone with a lively imagination or an insatiable curiosity or a need to experiment and invent—or with an irrepressible sense of the ridiculous. But I still find myself daydreaming of an isolated little gang of like-minded people in a temperate climate, in a clearing in a woodland near a lake (an ideal spot, by the way, for a daydreaming maiden to find herself the captrix of a unicorn). My son Mark would help found and bankroll such a commune in British Columbia, and later write about it in
The Eden Express
. (I said in my own
Palm Sunday
that sons try to make their mothers’ impractical dreams for themselves come true. Here was a case of a son’s making his father’s impractical dream come true. It worked OK for a while.)

Realtors commonly imply that to buy or rent a house in such and such a locality will make the sucker eligible for virtually instant membership in a Folk Society. I had something like that in the back of my mind when I quit General Electric and moved to Cape Cod, where I lived for twenty years (Provincetown, then Osterville, then Barnstable). But I had no relatives there, and I wasn’t even an Anglo-Saxon or a descendant of seafarers or colonials. And very few of my ideas, frequently subject to public inspection in magazines and books, coincided with those of my neighbors. So I was as much an outsider when I left as I had been on the day I arrived. (Soon after I arrived I offered my services as a volunteer fireman, since I had been a fireman in Alplaus, New York, outside Schenectady. I might as well have been a freshman at Yale expressing a willingness to join Skull and Bones.)

Nor do I have any illusions that I am in any serious way a part of the picture-perfect village in which I am writing now, which is Sagaponack, Long Island. The Fire Department asks for money in a form letter to my PO box, and I send them some. My nearest neighbor is the painter Robert Dash, who boasts that his hedges are so thick he can’t see anything outside his own property. (Noises can still get through his hedges, though. One time Truman Capote spent the afternoon in my backyard, talking about himself, and Dash told me later that he thought I had been visited by a garrulous maiden aunt.)

(I expected this to be an easy chapter, that most of it would be another piece I wrote for
Architectural Digest
, entitled “Skyscraper National Park.” But that piece turned out to be so badly written that I am surprised they printed it. What made me garble it so, I think, was my undying fantasy that I would be a contented person if only I could become a member of a Folk Society. That is my Holy Grail, and I can’t stop believing, in defiance of all common sense, that it is mine to find somewhere. So this chapter has
filets
cut from the published essay, but they are not set apart by quotation marks, a cumbersome exercise in scholarship. Who cares anyway?)

I spend most of my time in Manhattan, across the street from the yellow house where E. B. White lived for many years. He and his wife Katherine, personifications (you would think) of all that was most cultivated and gracious and witty about Manhattan, bugged out for Maine a few years before I got there. (Maine! Maine? For Pete’s sake. Maine!)

It took a foreigner with whom I had no language in common to describe for me the peculiar ambience of Manhattan. He was the great Turkish novelist Ya?ar Kemal (who resembles a genuinely happy Ernest Hemingway, although he has been jailed again and again for crimes of conscience). He was in New York City for the first time, and he and I walked down Broadway from about Sixtieth Street to SoHo, with many side trips to the east and west. I showed him Edna St. Vincent Millay’s quaint house. I showed him Washington Square and said, “Henry James! Henry James!” (Just as I had exclaimed to him earlier, “Edna St. Vincent Millay! Edna St. Vincent Millay!” Proper names need no translator, although it is unlikely that Ya?ar Kemal had heard of either author.)

I had no idea what the Turk made of it all. But when he got back home (he would soon be back in the hoosegow for the umpteenth time) he wrote me a letter which his translator wife put into English. It said in part, “Suddenly I understood! New York belonged as much to me as to anyone
as long as I was there!”
And there you have the essence of the part of Manhattan I had walked him through, which I in my
Architectural Digest
piece called “Skyscraper National Park.”