Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) (3 page)

“From that study I extrapolate this rough rule, a very approximate rule, to be sure: You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed.

“A rule we used to be able to extrapolate from cultural history, one which doesn’t seem to work anymore, is that an American writer had to be an alcoholic in order to win a Nobel Prize—Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, John Steinbeck, the suicide Ernest Hemingway. That rule no longer works, in my opinion, because artistic sensibilities are no longer regarded in this country as being characteristic of females. I no longer have to arrive at this lectern drunk, having slugged somebody in a bar last night, in order to prove that I am not what was a loathsome creature not long ago, which is to say a homosexual.

“Elie Wiesel made his reputation with a book called
Night,
which is about the horrors of the Holocaust as witnessed by the boy he used to be. I made my reputation with a book called
Slaughterhouse-Five,
which is about a British and American response to that Holocaust, which was the firebombing of Dresden—as witnessed by the young American Infantry Private First Class I used to be. We both have German last names. So does the man who invited me here, Dr. Dichter. So do most of the famous pioneers in your profession. It would not surprise me if a plurality of us here, Jews and Gentiles alike, did not have ancestors who were citizens of the German or Austro-Hungarian Empire, which gave us so much great music and science and painting and theater, and whose remnants gave us a nightmare from which, in my opinion, there can never be an awakening.

“The Holocaust explains almost everything about why Elie Wiesel writes what he writes and is what he is. The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am. I am sure you are miles ahead of me in thinking of a thousand clinical reasons for this being true. I didn’t give a damn about Dresden. I didn’t know anybody there. I certainly hadn’t had any good times there before they burned it down. I had seen some Dresden china back home in Indianapolis, but I thought then and still think now that it’s mostly kitsch. There is another wonderful gift from German-speaking people, along with psychoanalysis and
The Magic Flute
: that priceless word
kitsch.

“And Dresden china isn’t made in Dresden anyway. It’s made in Meissen. That’s the town they should have burned down.

“I am only joking, of course. I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations, which is one reason two good women so far have been very sorry on occasion to have married me. Every great city is a world treasure, not a national treasure. So the destruction of any one of them is a planetary catastrophe.

“Before I was a soldier I was a journalist, and that’s what I was in Dresden—a voyeur of strangers’ miseries. I was outside the event. Elie Wiesel, seeing what he saw—and he was just a boy, and I was a young man—was the event itself. The fire-bombing of Dresden was quick, was surgical, as the military scientists like to say, fitting the Aristotelian ideal for a tragedy, taking place in less than twenty-four hours. The Holocaust ground on and on and on and on. The Germans wanted to keep me alive, on the theory that they might be able to trade me and my captured comrades for some of their own someday. The Germans, aided and abetted, of course, by like-minded Austrians and Hungarians and Slovaks and French and Ukrainians and Romanians and Bulgarians and so on, wanted Elie Wiesel and everyone he had ever known, and everyone remotely like him, to die, as his father would die, of malnutrition, overwork, despair, or cyanide.

“Elie Wiesel tried to keep his father alive. And failed. My own father, and most of the rest of my friends and loved ones, were safe and sound in Indianapolis. The proper prescription for the fatal depression which killed Elie Wiesel’s father would have been food and rest and tender loving care rather than lithium, Thorazine, Prozac, or Tofranil.

“I hold a master’s degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago. Students of that branch of poetry are taught to seek explanations for human comfort or discomfort—wars, wounds, spectacular diseases, and natural disasters aside—in culture, society, and history. And I have just named the villains in my books, which are never individuals. The villains again: culture, society, and history—none of them strikingly housebroken by lithium, Thorazine, Prozac, or Tofranil.

“Like most writers, I have at home the beginnings of many books which would not allow themselves to be written. About twenty years ago, a doctor prescribed Ritalin for me, to see if that wouldn’t help me get over such humps. I realized right away that Ritalin was dehydrated concentrate of pure paranoia, and threw it away. But the book I was trying to make work was to be called
SS Psychiatrist
. This was about an MD who had been psychoanalyzed, and he was stationed at Auschwitz. His job was to treat the depression of those members of the staff who did not like what they were doing there. Talk therapy was all he or anybody had to offer back then. This was before the days of—Never mind.

“My point was, and maybe I can make it today without having to finish that book, that workers in the field of mental health at various times in different parts of the world must find themselves asked to make healthy people happier in cultures and societies which have gone insane.

“Let me hasten to say that the situation in our own country is nowhere near that dire. The goal here right now, it seems to me, is to train intelligent, well-educated people to speak stupidly so that they can be more popular. Look at Michael Dukakis. Look at George Bush.

“I think I was invited here mostly because of what happened to my dear son Mark Vonnegut, now Dr. Vonnegut. He had a very fancy crack-up, padded-cell stuff, straitjacket stuff, hallucinations, wrestling matches with nurses, and all that. He recovered and wrote a book about it called
The Eden Express,
which is about to be reissued in paperback by Dell, with a new Afterword by him. You should have hired him instead of me. He would have been a heck of a lot cheaper, and he knows what he is talking about.

“He speaks well. When he lectures to mental health specialists, he always asks a question at one point, calling for a show of hands. I might as well be his surrogate and ask the same question of you. A show of hands, please: How many of you have taken Thorazine? Thank you. Then he says, ‘Those who haven’t tried it really should. It won’t hurt you, you know.’

“He was diagnosed, when I took him to a private laughing academy in British Columbia, where he had founded a commune, as schizophrenic. He sure looked schizophrenic to me, too. I never saw depressed people act anything like that. We mope. We sleep. I have to say that anybody who did what Mark did shortly after he was admitted, which was to jump up and get the light bulb in the ceiling of his padded cell, was anything but depressed.

“Anyway—Mark recovered sufficiently to write his book and graduate from Harvard Medical School. He is now a pediatrician in Boston, with a wife and two fine sons, and two fine automobiles. And then, not very long ago, most members of your profession decided that he and some others who had written books about recovering from schizophrenia had been misdiagnosed. No matter how jazzed up they appeared to be when sick, they were in fact depressives. Maybe so.

“Mark’s first response to news of this rediagnosis was to say, ‘What a wonderful diagnostic tool. We now know if a patient gets well, he or she definitely did not have schizophrenia.’

“But he, too, unfortunately, will say anything to be funny. A more sedate and responsible discussion by him of what was wrong with him can be found in the Afterword to the new edition of his book. I have a few copies of it, which I hope somebody here will have xeroxed, so that everyone who wants one can have one.

“He isn’t as enthusiastic about megavitamins as he used to be, before he himself became a doctor. He still sees a whole lot more hope in biochemistry than in talk.

“Long before Mark went crazy, I thought mental illness was caused by chemicals, and said so in my stories. I’ve never in a story had an event or another person drive a character crazy. I thought madness had a chemical basis even when I was a boy, because a close friend of our family, a wise and kind and wryly sad man named Dr. Walter Bruetsch, who was head of the State’s huge and scary hospital for the insane, used to say that his patients’ problems were chemical, that little could be done for them until that chemistry was better understood.

“I believed him.

“So when my mother went crazy, long before my son went crazy, long before I had a son, and finally killed herself, I blamed chemicals, and I still do, although she had a terrible childhood. I can even name two of the chemicals: phenobarbital and booze. Those came from the outside, of course, the phenobarbs from our family doctor, who was trying to do something about her sleeplessness. When she died, I was a soldier, and my division was about to go overseas.

“We were able to keep her insanity a secret, since it became really elaborate only at home and between midnight and dawn. We were able to keep her suicide a secret thanks to a compassionate and possibly politically ambitious coroner.

“Why do people try so hard to keep such things a secret? Because news of them would make their children seem less attractive as marriage prospects. You now know a lot about my family. On the basis of that information, those of you with children contemplating marriage might be smart to tell them: Whatever you do, don’t marry anybody named Vonnegut.

“Dr. Bruetsch couldn’t have helped my mother, and he was the greatest expert on insanity in the whole State of Indiana. Maybe he knew she was crazy. Maybe he didn’t. If he did know she was crazy after midnight, and he was very fond of her, he must have felt as helpless as my father. There was not then an Indianapolis chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, which might have helped. One would be founded by my father’s only brother, Alex, who was an alcoholic, in 1955 or so.

“There—I’ve told you another family secret, haven’t I? About Uncle Alex?

“Am I an alcoholic? I don’t think so. My father wasn’t one. My only living sibling, my brother, isn’t one.

“But I am surely a great admirer of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Gamblers Anonymous, and Cocaine Freaks Anonymous, and Shoppers Anonymous, and Gluttons Anonymous, and on and on. And such groups gratify me as a person who studied anthropology, since they give to Americans something as essential to health as vitamin C, something so many of us do not have in this particular civilization: an extended family. Human beings have almost always been supported and comforted and disciplined and amused by stable lattices of many relatives and friends until the Great American Experiment, which is an experiment not only with liberty but with rootlessness, mobility, and impossibly tough-minded loneliness.

“I am a vain person, or I would not be up here, going ‘Blah, blah, blah.’ I am not so vain, however, as to imagine that I have told you anything you didn’t already know—except for the trivia about my mother, my Uncle Alex, and my son. You deal with unhappy people hour after hour, day after day. I keep out of their way as much as possible. I am able to follow the three rules for a good life set down by the late writer Nelson Algren, a fellow depressive, and another subject of the study of writers made at the University of Iowa. The three rules are, of course: Never eat at a place called Mom’s, never play cards with a man named Doc, and most important, never go to bed with anybody who has more troubles than you do.

“All of you, I am sure, when writing a prescription for mildly depressed patients, people nowhere as sick as my mother or my son were, have had a thought on this order: ‘I am so sorry to have to put you on the outside of a pill. I would give anything if I could put you inside the big, warm life-support system of an extended family instead.’ “

That was the end of my speech to all those mental health workers in Philadelphia. They said afterward that I had
shared,
and that they hadn’t expected me to
share
(i.e., to spill the beans about myself and my own family). I had with me copies of my son’s own comments on his scary case, which I passed out to anyone interested. They can be found as well in the Appendix to this book, where I have put a lot of other stuff which, if not so segregated, might slow us down. (I have also sped things up by putting digressions, asides, non sequiturs, dialyses, epicrises, meioses, antiphrases, and so on in parentheses.)

When my mother went off her rocker late at night, the hatred and contempt she sprayed on my father, as gentle and innocent a man as ever lived, was without limit and pure, untainted by ideas or information. I have seen and heard hatred that pure coming from women maybe ten times since she died on Mother’s Day in 1944 (about a month before D Day). I don’t think the hatred has much to do with the particular man who gets it. Father surely didn’t deserve it. Most likely, it seems to me, it is a response to aeons of subjugation, although my mother and all the other women who have displayed it for my supposed benefit were about as enslaved as Queen Elizabeth or Cleopatra.

My theory is that all women have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside, but my mother had too much of it. When the clock struck midnight (and we really did have a grandfather clock which struck the hours with authority), out it came. For her it was like throwing up. She had to do it. Poor soul! Poor soul!

This is a self-serving theory, insinuating that Father and I did not deserve to be so hated. Forget it. When I was in Prague about four years before the Artists overthrew the Communists, a local writer told me that Czechs love to build elaborate theories so closely reasoned as to seem irrefutable and then, self-mockingly, to knock them down. I do that, too. (My favorite Czech writer is Karel Čapek, whose magical essay on literature I have thrown into the Appendix as proof that I am correct to be so charmed by him.)

But to get back to the thing between my father and my sister, the unicorn and the maiden: Father, no more a Freudian than Lewis Carroll, made Alice his principal source of encouragement and sympathy. He made the most of an enthusiasm they had in common, which was for the visual arts. Alice was just a girl, remember, and aside from the embarrassment of having a unicorn lay its head in her lap, so to speak, she was traumatized mainly by having every piece of sculpture or picture she made celebrated by Father as though it were Michelangelo’s
Pietà
or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In later life (which was going to last only until she was forty-one) this made her a lazy artist. (I have often quoted her elsewhere as saying, “Just because people have talent, that doesn’t mean they have to
do
something with it.”)