Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) (24 page)

Time to say yet again,
“Auf Wiedersehen “

The person I have particularly in mind when I say that, of course (even though I know that life is a brief interval between black and black), is Bernard V. O’Hare.

Great-grandfather Clemens Vonnegut concluded his essay on Freethinking with a fragment from his own translation of a poem by Goethe. It seems no bad thing if I follow his example, to wit:

The events described in
The Eden Express
took place nearly twenty years ago. Some things have changed. The notion that mental illness has a large biochemical component is no longer very radical. Things have come full circle, to the point where it’s unusual to hear anyone say that mental illness is all mental. The view that going crazy is caused by bad events in childhood and that talk and understanding offer the best hope for a cure seems very out of date. This is a change for the better, although it has by no means brought an end to the shame, blame, and guilt which continue to compound the suffering of the mentally ill and their families.

The clinical definition of schizophrenia has been changed. Under the old definitions there was considerable ambiguity about what to call people like me. Under the new definitions I would be classified as manic-depressive rather than schizophrenic. I wasn’t sick for very long and I didn’t follow a downhill course, so I did not fit what has now become a definition of someone who is schizophrenic. While it’s tempting to dismiss this as an insignificant change in labels and be more than a little irritated that they went and changed the rules after I went and built a book around the old definitions, I have to admit that this too is probably a positive change. It should mean that fewer people with acute breakdowns will be written off as hopeless. Eventually someone will develop a simple blood test that will sort out who has what disease and what treatments should work. In the meantime we’re stuck with arguing about labels and indirect evidence as the best way we have of approaching useful truths about how to help people.

There are probably a dozen or so separate diseases responsible for what we now call schizophrenia and manic depression. Until the definitive work is done, many things are plausible and almost anything is possible. This lack of certainty makes mental illness wonderful ground for intellectual speculation and absolute hell for patients and their families.

At the time I wrote my book I felt that the large doses of vitamins with which I was treated, along with more conventional therapies, had a great deal to do with my recovery. It was my hope that many people diagnosed as schizophrenic would get better if only their doctors would become more open-minded and treat them with vitamins. Since that time I’ve seen people with breakdowns like mine recover every bit as completely as I did, without vitamin therapy. I’ve seen many cases where vitamin therapy didn’t make any difference and a lot of cases like mine where it’s hard to say exactly what did what.

I continue to feel a great deal of affection for the doctors who treated me. They were good doctors with or without vitamins, which they saw mostly as something that couldn’t hurt and might help.

What I can no longer continue to do is maintain that vitamins played a major role in my recovery. I have not changed the text of my book, since I think it should stand as I wrote it. I remain very proud of the book, but if I could have one line back I’d delete “The more the vitamins took hold …” (p. 201). I’d also drop the paragraphs dealing with how to find out more about vitamin therapy in the postscript.

Life has been good to me. I made it into and through medical school and managed to enjoy myself most of the time. I practice pediatrics, which I continue to find very congenial, rewarding work. I have two healthy sons and am still in love with my wife. I’m surprised how much I care about the Red Sox.

I still think a fair amount about the sixties and trying to be a good hippie. I’m under no illusion that I understand exactly what was going on back then, but there are a few things that need saying. We were not the spaced-out, flaky, self-absorbed, wimpy, whiny flower children in movies and TV shows alleging to depict the times. It’s true that we were too young, too inexperienced, and in the end too vulnerable to bad advice from middle-aged sociopathic gurus. Things eventually went bad, drugs took their toll, but before they went bad, hippies did a lot of good. Brave, honest, and true, and they paid a price. I’m sure no one will ever study it, but my guess is that there are as many disabled and deeply scarred ex-hippies as there are Vietnam vets.

When all is said and done, the times were out of joint. Adults as much as said that they didn’t have a clue what should be done and that it was up to us, the best, bravest, brightest children ever, to fix things up. We gave it our best shot, and I’m glad I was there.

If well-educated hippies like Mark, who were in good health and of military age during the Vietnam War but did not risk their lives and honor in the slaughter, are indeed as scarred as those who fought, their wounds were of a different sort. Chief among these, I will guess, was shame about their membership in a social class (my class) so pandered to by the Government that its young (with a few exceptions) did not have to go to war if they didn’t want to. I myself remember only one face and personality which went with a name on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. They belonged to a physician’s son who was a notorious screwup, whose parents thought he might be straightened out by Army discipline. The boy was back home again in no time, at permanent attention in a body bag.

I know only one other father, a prosperous potato farmer (on whose tennis court I used to play with Sidney Offit), who lost a son over there. He and his son (whom I did not know) were conventionally patriotic in the manner of almost all Americans during World War II, during which all social classes proudly shared sacrifices and great risks with something approaching equality. They thought it was not only a duty but a privilege for a young man to kill or be killed in time of war. I believed that, and was not mistaken to believe that during World War II. To have asked my parents to connive with politicians so as to get me an assignment well behind the lines would have seemed to me (and later to my children, too, if they had heard about it) unforgivable sleaze, which is to say a case of a conscience committing suicide.

Mark inherited a World War II conscience (as did O’Hare’s kids, and on and on). So he had to maim if not kill it, if he was to stay out of the Vietnam nightmare, which must have hurt a lot. He, like so many members of his generation, became a man without a country because his Government was behaving in a manner toward the young of its own lower classes, not to mention the Vietnamese, which was not only cruel and hideously wasteful, but as I’ve said so often before, gruesomely ridiculous.

Mark did not like it here, nor should he have liked it. So although he was no longer subject to military service, or running from anything but a power structure (like the one today) shamelessly rigged in favor of his own race and economic and intellectual class, he went to Canada. All this is in
The Eden Express.
A sequel (and I hope he will write one, because he is such a good writer) would tell of his recovering sufficiently from a crack-up to go through Harvard Medical School and become a middle-aged pediatrician and saxophonist with two kids of his own, in group practice on the edge of Boston. (The nurses at Massachusetts General Hospital recently named him their favorite pediatrician, and among his young patients was a grandson of my late friend Bernard Malamud.)

Mark’s only crime against his government, and the only crime committed by Abbie Hoffman and so many others of that generation during the Vietnam War, was a sublimely Jeffersonian form of treason. It was disrespect.

I subtitled a novel of mine about World War II
The Children’s Crusade
. But the average age of an American corpse in my war was an unchildlike twenty-six. In the Vietnam War your average American corpse was six years younger. So were the four antiwar demonstrators who were shot dead by the National Guard (draft-dodgers in uniform) at Kent State University in Ohio in 1970. Because the most visible of the antiwar protesters, who included many returned Vietnam veterans, were so young, all they stood for could be dismissed by their enemies as symptoms of immaturity. They were attempting to save lives and resources, but their appearance and manners (and music, and excitement and confusion about sex) made them unfit, so went the argument, for such a serious role.

I memorialized this prejudice in a plot scheme for a short story (never written) to be called “The Dancing Fool.” I included the plot in a novel, and it goes like this:

“A flying-saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented, and how cancer could be cured. Zog brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap-dancing. Zog landed at night in Connecticut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap-dancing, warning people about the terrible danger they were in. The head of the house brained him with a golf club.”

If Abbie Hoffman had been my son, I would have told him that he was doing the right thing while the Vietnam War was going on. I would have warned him, too, that he was putting his life on the line for his countrymen.

At the end of a war soldiers who have become war buddies lie to one another and say they will keep in touch. Kurt and I, however, did not lie, and we have managed to be completely unsuccessful in avoiding one another since then.

This is somehow true, although before the war we had nothing in common in our backgrounds except that we were about the same age and smoked too much. What we have in common now derives unhappily from the war and happily from our relationship as old and close friends.

I first met Kurt when assigned by the Army to participate in a specialized training program which brought us together at Alabama Polytechnic Institute in Auburn, Alabama. The Army Specialized Training Program was shelter for the preppies of World War II. But it terminated prematurely, and we were transferred to the Infantry. And because neither of us understood maps or had any sense of direction, we were put to work as reconnaissance scouts. This is explanation enough as to the circumstances of our capture.

Our captors told us that “for you the war is over” and sent us to Dresden.

We lived in a slaughterhouse. In the firebombing of that city by persons we thought were friends it proved to be the best house in town.

We went back to Dresden after the war. I don’t believe that either of us really expected to find it there or to discover that it existed in the first place. But, and in spite of our training as reconnaissance scouts, find it we did, albeit in a somewhat different form from the Jewel City of our memory.

It was uncomfortable being there the first time and it was uncomfortable being there the second time.

Except in generalities, we never presently talk about Dresden or the war. This probably is because when together we laugh too much.

We laughed excessively on our return to Dresden, hysterical laughter, I believe.

Both of us agreed that we could still smell the smoke and some other things.

We didn’t spend much time there.

Russia was also part of our itinerary. We didn’t spend much time there, either.

In some reviews Kurt has been characterized as a black humorist. Those reviewers wouldn’t know black humor from Good Friday. They don’t know that what they read is only his reaction to the sight of the world gone mad and rushing headlong toward Dresden to the hundredth power.

And they miss his message, in which he pleads that world governments found their rule on something more akin to the Sermon on the Mount than the preachings of those who lead the world to Armageddon.

There is certainly nothing wrong with a man like that. And if such thinking constitutes black humor, it’s too bad there is not an epidemic of it.

I am glad Kurt and I did not die.

And I would go back to Dresden with him again.