Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) (23 page)

Meanwhile, of course, back home (from the viewpoint of the CARE people), the forces of Beelzebub were waging racist and classist political campaigns, and taking over and liquidating businesses and natural resources, and looting pension funds, insurance companies, and savings banks, and putting a greater percentage of our citizens in jails and prisons than even the Soviet Union or the Republic of South Africa. (Some beacon of liberty we are to the rest of the world!)

I said to the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., one time, “If you had to say that the world was divided into only two kinds of people, not counting the sexes, what would they be?” It took him maybe ten seconds before replying, “Roundheads and Cavaliers.” (I thought that was a swell answer. I am a Roundhead. Xanthippe is a Cavalier.) I said to the graphic artist Saul Steinberg one time, “There are some novelists I can hardly talk to. It is as though we were in two very unlike professions, like podiatry and deep-sea diving, say. What do you think is going on?” He replied, “It is very simple. There are two types of artists, neither superior to the other. One responds to life itself. The other responds to the history of his or her art so far.” (Jill and I are both artists of the first sort, which could be why we got married. We are both barbarians, too ignorant to respond to the histories of our arts so far.)

Yes, and I, having just finished reading William Styron’s short and elliptical account of his recent attack of melancholia,
Darkness Visible
(a suicide attempt may or may not have been involved), am now prepared to say that suicidal persons can be divided into two sorts. Styron’s sort blames the wiring and chemistry of his brain, which could easily fit into a salad bowl. My sort blames the Universe. (Why mess around?) I don’t offer this insight as yet another joke (“Why is cream more expensive than milk?”). It is my serious belief that those of us who become humorists (suicidal or not) feel free (as most people do not) to speak of life itself as a dirty joke, even though life is all there is or ever can be.

We do, doodily do, doodily do, doodily do
What we must, muddily must, muddily must, muddily must:
Muddily do, muddily must, muddily do, muddily must,
Until we bust, bodily bust, bodily bust, bodily bust.

(The summer of 1990 is just about finished, and so is this book. Christmas will be at our throats before we know it. My big brother Bernard says that the Christmas season makes him feel as though somebody were beating him in the face with a bladder.)

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, when he sorts through the possible consequences of his doing himself in with a bare bodkin (sleeping pills and automobile exhaust and .357 Magnums were then unavailable), does not ponder the grief and confusion he might cause many who would still be alive. He was, after all, not only a close friend of Horatio and beloved by darling Ophelia, but the future King of Denmark. (The more recent abdication of Edward VIII from the Throne of England for the love of a gimlet-eyed divorcée from Baltimore comes to mind. My fellow novelist Sidney Zion said in mixed company at supper recently, anent Edward VIII, that blowjobs accounted for the history of the world so far. Some people are so
frank
nowadays!)

If Hamlet hoped to be remembered after he slammed the big door (or after somebody slammed it for him), I am sure he would have said so. Mark Twain (who wrote as though he would have liked to be remembered) said his reputation might outlive his body for at least a little while because he had moralized. (And indeed, his reputation has outlived his body.) I am sure he would have moralized in any case, but he had noticed that (for whatever reason) ancient writings which were still interesting in his day were all moralized. The anthology we call “The Bible” comes to mind. So should
Lysistrata
by Aristophanes (ca. 448–380
B.C
.) and the Second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) and
Candide
by Voltaire (1694–1778) and
Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) and
The Theory of the Leisure Class
by Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) and
Spoon River Anthology
by Edgar Lee Masters (1869–1950) and
Gulliver’s Travels
by Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) and
Modern Times
by Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) and on and on. So good advice to a young writer who wishes to circumvent mortality might be: “Moralize.” I would add this caveat: “Be sure to sound reader-friendly and not all that serious when doing it.”
Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) comes to mind. The sermons of Cotton Mather (1663–1728) do not.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the French fascist (and physician) about whom I wrote in
Palm Sunday
, may have tried to achieve a little immortality with deliberate, absolutely outrageous immorality. I was talking to Saul Steinberg about Céline once, and I cried out in astonishment that a writer so funny and wise and gifted would intersperse what could have been masterpieces with loathsome attacks on Jews in general and, if you can believe it, jeers at the memory of Anne Frank in particular. “Why, why, why did he have to besmirch the sublimely innocent ghost of Anne Frank?” I said.

Steinberg pointed his right index finger at my breastbone. He said, “He wanted
you
to remember him.”

(Steinberg is perhaps the most intelligent man in New York City. He may also be the most melancholy. He is far, far from home, having been born in 1914 Romania. He thinks the funniest joke in the world is this definition of an Irish homosexual: “A man who likes women more than whiskey.”)

I don’t care if I am remembered or not when I am dead. (A scientist I knew at General Electric, who was married to a woman named Josephine, said to me, “Why should I buy life insurance? If I die, I won’t care what’s happening to Jo. I won’t care about anything. I’ll be dead.”)

I am a child of a Great Depression (just like my grandchildren). In a Great Depression any job is a miracle. Back in the 1930s, if somebody got a job there was a big celebration. Around about midnight somebody would finally inquire as to the nature of the job. A job was a job. To me writing books or whatever is just another job. When my cash cows the slick magazines were put out of business by TV, I wrote industrial advertising and then sold cars instead, and invented a new board game, and taught in a private school for fucked-up rich kids, and so on. I didn’t think I owed it to the world or to myself or to anything to get back to writing, if I could. Writing was just a job I’d lost. When a child of a Great Depression loses a job, it is sort of like losing a billfold or a key to the front door. You go get another one.

(One jocular Great Depression answer to the question about what kind of job you got was, “Cleaning birdshit out of cuckoo clocks.” Another one was, “It’s in a bloomer factory. I’ll be pulling down five thousand a year.”)

Most people my age and of my social class, no matter what job they held, are retired now. So it seems redundant (even silly) for critics to say, as so many do, that I am not the promising writer I used to be. If they think I am a disappointment, they should see what the passage of time has done to Mozart, Shakespeare, and Hemingway.

The older my father was (and he died at seventy-two), the more absentminded he became. People forgave him for that, and I think people should forgive me, too. (I never meant anybody any harm, and neither did he.) Toward the end, Father actually called me Bozo several times. Bozo was a wire-haired fox terrier we had when I was a little boy. (Bozo wasn’t even my dog. Bozo belonged to my big brother Bernard.) Father apologized for calling me Bozo. Ten minutes later he called me Bozo again.

During the last three days of his life (which I did not see) he would look through drawers and in cupboards for some sort of document. It was obviously important to him, but it was also a secret. He wouldn’t tell anybody what it was. He never found it, and neither did we, so we will never know what it was.

(I can never forget the dying words of the actor John Barrymore, according to Gene Fowler in his
Good Night, Sweet Prince
: “I am the illegitimate son of Buffalo Bill.”)

Many people feel that humor (professorial drolleries excepted) is a scheme of self-defense which only members of famously maligned and oppressed minorities should be allowed to use. (Mark Twain cast himself as poor white trash.) It must seem very wrong to them that I, an educated, middle-class person of German descent, should joke all the time. As far as they are concerned, I might as well be singing “Ol’ Man River” with tears in my eyes.

(Saul Steinberg was talking one time about muzhiks, which is to say Russian peasants. I said that I had been a muzhik. “How could you ever have been a muzhik?” he exclaimed. We were sitting by my swimming pool in the Hamptons. I said, “I was a Private in the Army for three wartime years.”)

In a wide-open seaport like New York City, where persons of all races and degrees of sophistication come (as during the California gold rush of 1849) to find fortune or doom, everybody sizes up everybody else largely on the basis of minute distinctions in race, usually (except where fear or anger is present) without saying so. Thus am I aware when talking to the writer Peter Maas, for example, that he is half Irish and half Dutch, or when talking to Kedikai Lipton (who is “Miss Scarlet” on the box for the Parker Brothers game Clue) that she is half Japanese and half Irish. When I talk to my best friend (now that the purebred Irishman Bernard V. O’Hare has joined the Choir Invisible) Sidney Offit, I am aware that he is Jewish.

So people must size me up as a German, because that is what I am. (At a bar mitzvah a couple of years ago, the movie director Sidney Lumet asked me if I was Dutch or Danish, and I answered silently but so he could read my lips, “Nazi.” He laughed. I dated some with a really swell Jewish writer when my first marriage was falling apart, and I heard her tell a friend on the telephone that I looked like a Storm Trooper.)

People ask me how I feel about German reunification, and I reply that most of what we like about German culture came from many Germanys. What we have good reason to hate about it has come from one.

(What is really scary about Germans in Germany is that they enjoy fighting other
white
people. When I was a PW, one of our guards who had been shot up on the Russian Front mocked Britain’s imperial military exploits. He said in English, “Them and their Neeger wars.” If he is still alive, and has heard about Grenada and Panama and Nicaragua and so on, he could be laughing at
our
Neeger wars.)

The hatred for all things German expressed by Anglos in this country during World War I (before my birth) was so virulent that there were virtually no proudly German institutions still operating (I include my father) when it came time for World War II. German-Americans had become (in self-defense and in embarrassment over Kaiser Wilhelm and then Hitler) the least tribal and most acculturated segment of our white population. (Who was Goethe? Who was Schiller? Ask Casey Stengel or Dwight David Eisenhower.)

One American in four is descended from German immigrants, but what politician nowadays ponders how to woo the German vote? (That is OK with me.) I am only sorry that the mostly German-American Freethinker movement did not survive the obliteration, since it might have become an extended family for the millions of good Americans who find all the big questions about life unanswered, save by ancient baloney of human manufacture. Before World War I, the Freethinkers had cheerful congregations, and picnics, too, in many parts of this country. If not God, what was there for them to serve during their short stay on Earth? Only one thing was left to serve under such circumstances, which was their community. Why should they behave well (which they did), quite certain as they were that neither Heaven nor Hell awaited them? Virtue was its own reward.

If there were Freethinker Societies today, lonely rationalists, children of the Enlightenment, wouldn’t have to consider throwing away their brains, as though their heads were nothing but jack-o’-lanterns, in their desperate search for spiritual companionship.

I considered sandbagging the Appendix of this book with a long essay on Freethinking written by my great-grandfather Clemens Vonnegut in Indianapolis at the turn of this corrupt and bloody century. He was no holy man. He was a hardware merchant (“You can get it at Vonnegut’s”) who had done Occidental-style meditation, which consisted of reading books. His essay was as secular a creation as the Hippocratic Oath, which has governed the behavior of decent physicians for millennia. I have deposited copies of the essay in the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress, and let it go at that.

Here ends (to my astonishment) yet another book written not by somebody else but by me. (When I was living on Cape Cod I had a carpenter build single-handedly a small ell on my house. When it was done he said the most wonderful thing. He said, “How did I ever
do
that?” Thus does the Universe continue to bloom or fester during its expansion phase. He wasn’t the German mentioned in the Preface, the one who shot himself. He was Ted Adler, German for “eagle,” born in the USA. He fought the Germans in Italy.)

In my very first book,
Player Piano
(published a mere thirty-eight years ago, before the perfection of transistors, when machines making human beings redundant were still enormous, doing their thinking with vacuum tubes), I asked a question which is even harder to answer nowadays: “What are people for?” My own answer is: “Maintenance.” In
Hocus Pocus,
my last book before this one, I acknowledged that everybody wanted to build and nobody wanted to do maintenance. So there goes the ball game. Meanwhile, truth, jokes, and music help at least a little bit.

(The second-funniest clean joke in the world was told to me personally by the great comedian Rodney Dangerfield. We were in a movie together. He said he had a great-uncle who was admired for his cleanliness. He was the talk of the neighborhood. This old man took six, seven, eight, sometimes as many as twelve baths or showers every day. After he died, his whole funeral cortege went through a car wash on the way to the cemetery.)