(Not That You Asked) (5 page)

“They just did a group photo, but I wasn’t anywhere close to Kurt,” she said.

“I made sure to get myself right next to him,” Susan said. “I could see that’s all we were going to get.”

A thousand bucks for a few minutes of jittery small talk? It sounded like a Bush fundraiser.

But then Susan told a little story, in her soft Texan accent, that took a little of the edge off my gloom.

“I followed him, you know. Every time he went to have a cigarette. I just followed him and bummed a cigarette and we sat there talking. He was totally cool, too. Totally on top of it. They wouldn’t let us smoke inside and it was too cold outside, so you know what we did? We got in one of those things, those doors that spin around—”

“A revolving door?”

“Yeah. We got in one of the compartments and he pushed it around till there was just a crack. It was pretty warm in there and we could just blow the smoke outside.”

IT WAS A MISERABLE
night for driving. The rain had dissolved into fog, which draped the bare winter trees; my head was still spinning. Focusing on that image—Vonnegut and pretty young Susan puffing away like a couple of truants—helped me feel a little less hopeless. This made no sense. Vonnegut has been killing himself for years, or trying to, with those unfiltered Pall Malls.

But something occurred to me as I sped through that dirty shroud of fog, something Vonnegut has been trying to explain to the rest of us for most of his life. And that is this: Despair is a form of hope. It is an acknowledgment of the distance between ourselves and our appointed happiness.

At certain moments, it is reason enough to live.

Part Two

If you really want to hurt your parents and you don’t have enough nerve to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.

I
t is an odd and disquieting experience to read the undergraduate thesis you wrote eighteen years ago, not unlike finding photographs of yourself dressed up as a member of Flock of Seagulls. (I am not suggesting here that I ever dressed up like a member of Flock of Seagulls; I am merely using what we in the lit business call an
analogy.
)

Nonetheless, I cannot proceed any further without some mention of the document. I have read it twice in the past week and am therefore ready to enumerate its major intellectual conclusions:

1. Kurt Vonnegut
rules.

2. You should totally read his books.

3. I will never be an academic.

I WOULD ALSO LIKE
to reassure those of you concerned that I may not have used the verb
adumbrate
frequently enough in my thesis. In fact, I found occasion to use the verb three times in the first thirty pages alone: “More fundamentally, I hope through this investigation to adumbrate Vonnegut’s unorthodox conception of author/text/reader relations.” My thesis is full of sentences like this.

ONE OF THE FUNNEST
things about rereading the thesis is tallying up all the critics and authors I pretended to have read, but hadn’t. A partial list would include James Joyce, Stendhal, Cervantes, Twain, Leslie Fiedler, Ortega y Gasset,
¹
Northrop Frye, Rubin,
²
and Wayne Booth.
³

Whom, then,
did
I read?

I read Vonnegut. I read his novels. I read his stories. I read his essays. I read his interviews. I read his commencement speeches. Had his shopping lists been made available, I would have read those. I also quoted him at length. Approximately one-third of the thesis word count is Vonnegut. I did this mostly because I was, and remain, stupendously lazy. But it is also true (as I shrewdly noted back then) that Vonnegut has not attracted much formal criticism. The foremost commentator on Vonnegut is Vonnegut himself.

MY THESIS WAS
not a total wash. It was merely a partial wash. But it also had what I believe the Chief Curator has referred to as “a certain plucky undergraduate charm.”

I was interested in the ways Vonnegut makes himself known in his fiction—writing prefaces to his novels, introducing himself as a character—and how these interventions affected what I called, rather grandly, “the fictional contract.”

My best crack at a summary of the thesis ran like so:

Many novelists and critics take as their credo the following sentence from James Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

“The artist, like the God of Creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

My thesis might be thought of as an attempt to explore what happens when a writer steps forward and, in full view of the audience, bites his nails frantically.

I do not remember having read
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
and have grave doubts as to whether I ever did, but I do remember taking extraordinary pride in having come up with this last bit.

The thesis also included a term of my very own invention:
realismo.
⁴
Realismo, as I defined it, entailed “both the reality claims made by the author
and
their acceptance by the reader.” I am sorry to inform you that this quite obviously brilliant formulation has not, as yet, found its place within the parlance of the lit crit crowd.

As if I even care.

AND WHILE WE’RE
bashing those dweebs, let me mention, as a significant furthermore, that people read mostly for emotional reasons, not ideas. They seek a chance to experience the feelings inside themselves—lust, shame, agony—for which daily life offers no outlet. The more openly obsessed our narrator is, the better. (Consider Humbert and the thousand eyes wide open in his eyed blood.)

From this perspective, my thesis turns out to be perfectly fascinating, not for its facile notions about authorial presence, but for the moony allegiance it expresses toward Vonnegut. It was a love letter, for God’s sake!
⁵
A chance for me to pronounce my adoration for Vonnegut, to defend his style, to advocate for him in what I took to be the court of academic opinion.

TWO DECADES LATER,
I can see the thesis as something even more excruciatingly personal: an artistic prospectus. I was explaining to myself, often explicitly, the sort of writer I wished to become.

The main thing was that Vonnegut made an
impact
on readers. He wasn’t one of those recluses who hid behind coy fictional guises. Every sentence he wrote, every character, was stamped in his image. He came clean on the page as a guy losing his shit. Like in that famous opening chapter of
Slaughterhouse-Five,
the image of Vonnegut lying in bed, sleepless, drunk-dialing his old war buddies and stinking of mustard gas and roses.

He was honest about why he wrote, too. He copped to that central (if rarely mentioned) impulse of the writing life: He wanted attention. He spoke bluntly, courageously, about prevailing injustices, not just on the page, but in public. He was funny, self-deprecating, easy to read, a (gasp) populist. He wanted to speak to everyone and he wanted everyone to shape the hell up. He hated rich people and warmongers and fanatics. He didn’t pretend not to care.

AND THAT’S NOT ALL
.

Vonnegut was an atheist.

(So was I!)

Vonnegut was a Scorpio.

(So was I!)

Vonnegut was a youngest child.

(So was I!)

Vonnegut viewed film and television as enemies of human progress.

(So did I!)

Vonnegut hated literary critics.

(So did I!)

Vonnegut even seemed to intuit the emotional crises in my life: that I felt exiled by my family, simultaneously disgusted and humiliated by the world of men, desperate for human comfort. He spoke of loneliness constantly. He characterized writers as people “who feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.”

He was, to summarize, not just my role model, but my shrink.

I AM NOT SUGGESTING
that I recognized my own motives in writing about Vonnegut. Of course I didn’t—I was a college student.

But it was more than that. I wasn’t a writer. I had no concept (aside from Vonnegut) of what a writer might be. I didn’t take a single creative writing class at Wesleyan. Instead, I became what one of my classmates called, not unkindly, a “campus cartoon character.” I undertook a variety of extracurricular activities. I edited the newspaper (so did Vonnegut!). I was a sports broadcaster for the college radio station.
⁶
I was a resident adviser. I sang in a gospel choir. I raced around our lovely campus asking, with my every gesture and deed, the same question:
What will the story of my life be?

I DON’T ESPECIALLY
like thinking about my college years. They were a bleak era for me, and a bleak era for the country. Ronald Rea gan had just won his second term in a landslide, and the staggering cruelties advocated by what has come to be known as the conservative movement were very much in vogue. Greed was good, facts were stupid things, Jesus was in, personal sacrifice was out, the nation was beginning a long, slow decline into moral disassociation.

The details were straight out of a B movie. Astrologers were setting the agenda upstairs at the White House, while a gang of nutty neocons trashed the basement, running guns to Iran and funneling the cash to the death squads (the term “terrorists” was not yet in vogue) who opposed a legally elected government in Nicaragua.

I had no idea what to do about any of this. I felt guilty and pissed off all the time. I listened to “I Will Dare” by the Replacements 12,000 times. I took a class called Nuclear War. My final project was a newspaper report that detailed the destruction of my hometown by a hydrogen bomb.

BOOM.

THE VONNEGUT PASSAGE
that haunted me throughout my college years is one of the few not quoted in my thesis. It comes from a curious little essay called “Biafra: A People Betrayed,” in his 1974 collection
Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons.
Vonnegut is reporting from the small African nation of Biafra, whose beleaguered citizens are bracing for a genocidal invasion by the Nigerian army.

He writes,

What did we eat in Biafra? As guests of the government, we had meat and yams and soups and fruit. It was embarrassing. Whenever we told a cadaverous beggar, “No chop,” it wasn’t really true. We had plenty of chop, but it was all in our bellies.

I had never read so ruthless and candid a summary of the relationship between the fed and starving of this world. Vonnegut was writing not only about injustice, but the peculiar American talent for self-deception (his own included), for espousing laudable beliefs just so long as you don’t have to live up to them.

TO UNDERSTAND WHY
this passage hit me so hard will require some family background. My mother was born and raised in the Bronx. Her mother, Annie Rosenthal, was an elementary school teacher in Harlem. Her father, Irving, was an actuary. Both were members of the Communist Party. My grandmother was eventually asked to testify about her activities before the New York Board of Education. She took an early retirement instead. Secrecy and fear pervaded their apartment.