(Not That You Asked) (6 page)

My own parents came of age during the 1960s. Both were early, vocal opponents of the war in Vietnam. My father helped undergraduates organize antiwar protests at Stanford, where he had taken a job on the faculty of the medical school. He was later arrested himself for taking part in a protest at a nearby air force base. His teaching contract was not renewed. What I am trying to convey here is that I am descended from people who suffered for their beliefs. I arrived at college eager to do the same thing.

BUT WESLEYAN WASN’T
exactly what I was expecting. It was, to be ruthless and candid, the world capital of Entitled Sanctimony, the kind of place where students staged protests to demand divestment from South Africa, then headed over to the dining hall to stuff themselves full of ice cream, where the lower-class toughs who played hockey and joined frats were considered dangerous misogynists, where kids in carefully torn polo sweaters gathered to chant grave, humanist slogans, then dispersed to drop acid on Foss Hill, where noblesse oblige had mutated into a kind of desperate narcissistic accessory.

I did my best to fit in, to obey, for instance, the elaborate protocols surrounding gender and race nomenclature.
⁷
But it was impossible to ignore certain facts, such as that most black students wanted nothing to do with white students, and that the residents of Middletown regarded the lot of us as spoiled brats. I spent a few winter afternoons camped on the corners of Main Street, handing out pamphlets on nuclear disarmament, which the locals accepted politely, then deposited in the nearest trash can.

It was also impossible to ignore the affluence of my classmates. They had new cars and elaborate stereo systems and Park Avenue apartments stuffed with high art. They spent vacations at beach houses and in tennis clubs, and their ease in these exotic precincts struck me hard; these were people born on the banks of what Vonnegut called the Money River.

I don’t mean to make my classmates sound like dolts. They were trying to care about the world, however indulgently. My scorn for them was an expression of my own guilt. I couldn’t shake the benighted notion that the best way to honor the family legacy was to suffer for my beliefs.

SO I WASHED DISHES
in the cafeteria. I volunteered at a mental health facility. I endured the routine miseries of the unpaid internship. And I read Vonnegut voraciously, through the long, muggy summer evenings, dripping sweat onto the pages of my yellowed paperbacks.

He was the one guy who cut through the bullshit. He understood that our essential crisis was not one of policy but morality, individual greed, inconsideration, suicidal self-regard. He was mad as hell, but—unlike my classmates—he found the absurd comedy within his fury. He didn’t write quiet little novels about bourgeois plight. He wrote about what we college students called, always with that frisson of knowing dread,
the real world.
In Vonnegut, I found a path back to the political ideals of my family.

But my Vonnegut mania was about more than politics. His books filled me with a terrible personal longing. I had grown up in a family beset by sorrow and had come to believe, unconsciously, that the world was a broader reflection of this sorrow, that it was my job to save the place, that only by banishing pain would my own joy become permissible. Vonnegut operated on the same absurd, sentimental assumptions. He regarded civilization as a failed family, curable only by the reestablishment of clans in which members felt duty-bound to love one another. Happy families. He wrote about them over and over. They became his utopia, then mine as well.

NOW COMES
a difficult confession.

To this point, I have made myself sound every bit the loyal Vonnegut disciple. But by the middle of my senior year, I felt vaguely ashamed of my thesis, and specifically that it was about Vonnegut.

I had discovered Bellow by then;
Henderson the Rain King
had ripped my head off. In my upper-level classes, we were studying
The Iliad
and
The Inferno
and
Lear.
My classmates were using phrases like “transcendental signifier”—and they meant it. My pal Steve Metcalf was writing his thesis about
Ulysses,
which struck me as perhaps the most sophisticated thing one could do on earth, aside from being James Joyce himself.

I began telling people that my thesis was about
authorial presence in the modern text,
that it was about John Barth and Milan Kundera, though, in the end, I devoted five pages to these authors. I renounced Vonnegut. He became another childish pleasure I would now have to hide from the world. (Others included candy consumption, a weakness for prog rock, and a tendency to conduct imaginary discussions with my twin brother.)

THE VONNEGUT APOSTASY.

It happens to thousands of readers every year. They reach a point in their lives where they turn away from Vonnegut, toward authors who offer a greater complexity of prose, a more nuanced version of the world, whose authorial mission entails an examination of individual consciousness rather than collective fate. I would wager that Vonnegut is the least acknowledged influence in modern letters.

In my case, I should admit that vanity, not boredom, was the culprit. I felt that my worship of Vonnegut marked me as somehow lacking in depth, which, as an English major at an elite liberal arts college, was the one thing I wanted to project. Copping to Vonnegut made me feel like a dork.

The feeling has lasted a long time.

I am
still
embarrassed to admit how much Vonnegut meant to me. When I am asked to name favorite books or authors, I gravitate toward the ones that look the most respectable on paper, and leave Vonnegut off the list.

But it’s more than embarrassment, I think. It has something to do with the way artists absorb influence. They tend to focus on those figures whom they discover later in life, when they have some coherent self-concept and the vocabulary to articulate the conscious facets of their admiration. It was easy enough for me to identify Bellow as an inspiration because I read him thinking:
This man is my inspiration!
Vonnegut got into the groundwater before my ambition took root.

In this sense, as I’ve suggested, he was more like a parent. And what was the reward for all his hard work? He got taken for granted.

VONNEGUT’S BOOKS
remain critically underappreciated. But I don’t really give a shit about critical appreciation. As a measure of cultural influence, it turns out to matter a lot less than an expensive hairstyle. The real issue here isn’t his role as an author, but as a prophet.

I’m in no position to lecture anyone on biblical matters, as I find the Holy Books to be wishful poetry for the most part. But I do know the basic plot of the prophetic books:
Prophet warns people to shape up. People don’t listen. Prophet winds up howling in hole.
This is the plot of Vonnegut’s life.

People may regard him as a literary legend and all the rest of that glitzy stuff, but nobody with any sort of power has heeded his call.

One wonders now where our leaders got the idea that mass torture would work to our advantage in Indochina. It never worked anywhere else. They got the idea from childish fiction, I think, and from a childish awe of terror.

Vonnegut wrote this thirty-five years ago.

LET ME OFFER
one more Vonnugget before I move on to the literary excavation that closes this wobbly triptych:

I now believe that the only way in which Americans can rise above their ordinariness, can mature sufficiently to rescue themselves and to help rescue their planet, is through enthusiastic intimacy with works of their own imaginations.

This is Vonnegut in a wildly optimistic mood.

In darker moments, he has expressed an equally convincing belief that our greatest works of literature will amount to nothing more than toilet paper. This has been, as far as I can tell, the central existential struggle of his life: Does what I do
matter
?

I CAN’T BLAME
him for his doubts. Vonnegut has now been writing for nearly half a century. He has been preaching the same line as Jesus on the Mount: humility, pacifism, intolerance for all forms of human suffering.

During the late sixties, he might even have believed that America was going to right itself. Instead, he has watched the country fall under the spell of leaders who demand nothing from us but the indulgence of our darkest impulses. He has watched his fellow citizens shrink before his eyes, become idolaters of convenience, screen addicts, brutes who cheer for death and call themselves patriots. He has watched the popular press, and the so-called opposition, cower before their moral duties.

And so we come (at last) to the point. Why, after twenty years, am I taking up with Vonnegut again? The cynical answer would be because he will soon be gone. That is getting it all exactly backwards. I am writing about Vonnegut now not because he is leaving us, but because we have left him.

Part Three

He may have been a genius,

as mutants sometimes are

I
don’t imagine you’ve ever tried to gain access to the Reading Room at Indiana University’s Lilly Library, but I am here to tell you that security there stops just short of the cavity search. No food or drink allowed. No writing instruments. No cameras. You are given a locker for your possessions and instructed to walk over to a padded door. There is a click. You now have 1.5 seconds to open the door. If you fail to open the door you are led outside and shot in the head.

WHY WAS I
at the Lilly Library? I was there because Kurt Vonnegut had asked me to go see his papers, during our heart-stopping encounter in Hartford. Or okay, maybe it wasn’t really a request. Maybe it was more like a brushoff. Fine.

The fact remained: I did need to drive my wife from Southern California to Boston. And Indiana was, more or less,
on the way.
And thus, I had forced her to rise at 5:30
AM
.
¹
and to drive with me from the lush suburbs of St. Louis, where the lots are the size of football fields, through the corn prairies of downstate Illinois as they came greenly awake at dawn, and onto Route 46 with its quiet procession of church and farm, its gleaming brown soil, and finally into Bloomington.

It was high summer, broiling, and the campus was swarming with incoming freshmen, their faces illuminated by the coming liberation into that kingdom of sports and pizza and cheap beer and—right, sorry!—higher education. They moved about in nervous eager packs, well-fed American youths, the boys dribbling invisible basketballs, the girls heavily deodorized and whispering, That is so, like,
whatever.

KURT VONNEGUT, JR.,
was born on November 11, Armistice Day, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, the youngest child of a prominent local architect. His mother, Edith, would later kill herself. Her maiden name was Lieber, which means
love
in German.

According to an exhaustive family history prepared by an anonymous relative, all eight of Vonnegut’s great-grandparents were part of the vast migration of Germans to the Midwest between 1820 and 1870. The name Vonnegut derives from a distant paternal relation who had an estate
—ein gut—
on the river Funne, in Westphalia. The name was changed upon immigration, because Funnegut sounded too much like “funny gut.”

You can trust me when I tell you that Vonnegut’s forebears were not comic forces. Here is a direct quote from his great-great-grandfather Jacom Schramm:

It appears human weakness makes it impossible to sustain a republic on this earth for any length of time, and the majority of people need, necessarily, a driving leader without whom they will inevitably wind up in chaos. Nevertheless, the Americans are still very proud of their freedom, even though they are the worst of slaves, and there is sure to be a bloody revolution before a monarchic government can gain a foothold here.