New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut

D. Simmons

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349379804, 9780230616271
• eBook ISBN: 9780230100817
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Kurt Vonnegut's darkly comic work became a symbol for the counterculture of a generation. From his debut novel, Player Piano (1951) through seminal 1960's novels such as Cat's Cradle (1963) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) up to the recent success of A Man Without A Country (2005), Vonnegut's writing has remained commercially popular, offering a satirical yet optimistic outlook on modern life. Though many fellow writers admired Vonnegut - Gore Vidal famously suggesting that "Kurt was never dull" - the academic establishment has tended to retain a degree of scepticism concerning the validity of his work. This dynamic collection aims to re-evaluate Vonnegut's position as an integral part of the American post-war cannon of literature.

P A R T I

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Vonnegut’s Early Writing (1950–1969)

C H A P T E R 1

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Flabbergasted

Todd Davis

As I write this, today is Kurt Vonnegut’s birthday, the first we’ll celebrate without him, or at least without his body, since he quietly passed into whatever comes after this life last April. I’m sure there’s a joke in there somewhere, one that Kurt would’ve enjoyed, but I’m not ready just yet to laugh in his absence.

I never met him in person; yet, since his death, I’ve missed him like I’d miss a favorite uncle. I imagine there are many folks in the same leaky boat as me, and ever since April we’ve been bailing tears in hopes of passing through this stretch of rough water. What’s the reason for all this mourning among strangers? It’s simple, really: Kurt’s writing made people feel like they belonged to a family of sorts, very much like the folk societies he studied with Robert Redfield and to which he believed we all needed to belong for good mental health and for a feeling of purpose in life. Kurt’s writing and speaking persona—one that I believe was as close to the real thing as possible—was two parts Hoosier hospitality and one part depression-era kindness. Kurt never talked down to his reader and seemed to genuinely believe in the words of his son Mark, which he used as the epigraph for his novel Bluebeard (1987): “We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”

While I was writing Kurt Vonnegut’s Crusade, or How a Postmodern Harlequin Preached a New Kind of Humanism (2006), I made no attempt to contact him. I heard him speak a couple of times in person—once in a gymnasium at William Rainey Harper College just outside of Chicago in Palatine, Illinois, and once at Butler University in Indianapolis. Both times I was among a throng of thousands of adoring fans and had no fear of having an intimate moment with my favorite author. I suppose I didn’t try to correspond with him during the writing of my book because I was afraid everything I loved so dearly about his work might be undone by the person behind the language.

I had read enough Hemingway biographies to know that I could love a writer’s stories without loving the writer himself, and I’d studied enough theory—Wimsatt and Beardsley’s intentional fallacy chief among them—to understand that the writer’s life or intent mattered less in literary study than the work of art itself. Thus, with my sense of intellectual maturity hanging from my shoulders like a doctoral hood, I vowed that I would separate the artist from the work itself and keep my distance from him until some later date.

But Kurt didn’t seem to give a damn for that kind of maturity or intellectual sophistry. In fact, he often confessed to retaining an idealism and a sense of humor best-suited to high school and college students. It’s why he continually argued for artists to be agents of change. As he explained in an interview with Playboy, “My motives are political. I agree with Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini that the writer should serve his society. I differ with dictators as to how writers should serve. Mainly, I think they should be—and biologically have to be—agents of change. For the better, we hope.”

So I wrote my book without consulting the artist, but only the artist’s books and interviews and films, the scholarly detritus that tries to explicate the imaginative vision of this man’s oeuvre. After I was done, I sent the book away to the presses, hoping to get my literary “testimony” into the public’s hands. When I finally did land a contract for the book, however, I had this wrenching feeling in my belly—part anxiety, part wayward-son-desires-a father’s-blessing—that I knew could only be satisfied if the artist himself had a chance to read the manuscript. I’m no saint. I would have published the book whether Kurt approved of it or not. I’d worked long enough and hard enough on the manuscript, and I believed what I wrote was as close to the truth about his stories and his career as I could come. And besides, I wanted tenure.

But I did send him the book, and for a few weeks I metaphorically (and, at times, literally) held my breath, until I received a letter written on stationery from a Saab dealership located in West Barnstable, Massachusetts, and, as the letterhead proclaimed, managed by a fellow named Kurt Vonnegut. I loved that he still had stationery from his failed attempt at the car business in the 1950s and loved even more the kind message and self-portrait he had scribbled to me upon the yellowed paper. Although he said in the note that all he’d “ever tried to do was the easy stuff,” he’d already done the miraculous: He had made a fellow Hoosier believe that what he was trying to do made a difference, if not for other readers of Vonnegut novels, for the artist himself.

Over the next three years, I would find gifts and postcards from Kurt stuffed into my mailbox—once a leather-bound edition of Welcome to the Monkey House (1968) with another self-portrait sketched onto its inside cover and another time a signed artist proof of his pen-and-ink illustration, “Three Kings from Viewpoint of Christchild.” Some writers are falsely self-effacing, seeking to be praised for their modesty as well as their work. This wasn’t the case for Kurt. He literally was flabbergasted—a term he liked to use quite often—at his own success. He was serious and evenhanded when he evaluated his novels. As he said in Palm Sunday (1981), Slapstick (1976) deserves a “D,” Breakfast of Champions (1973) a “C,” and books like God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) and Mother Night (1961) “A’s.” So there was no surprise when his gifts would come in simple envelopes, with nothing to protect them from being wrinkled or crushed by the other mail. (I had to rush the artist proof to a frame shop in order to have it dry-mounted, removing the wrinkles as best I could.)

Despite his prophetic pessimism, Kurt remained committed to random acts of human kindness right up to his death. When I invited him to give the commencement address at our college, he declined, saying in a note that “standing before an audience nowadays, I would find myself quite speechless. Life is indeed about to end, in a hundred years or less, so I stand mute. Game over!” Yet in the face of such a dire prognosis, he would call and leave phone messages for students in my Vonnegut seminar, responding to notes or illustrations we would send him from various assignments, or he would write postcards to them, each name inscribed, admonishing them to “keep up” with “acts of kindness” because they “really matter.” I still scratch my head at how peculiar this all seems. Going through my undergrad- and grad-school years, I never imagined a writer of the stature of Kurt Vonnegut sending a postcard to me or my class, let alone leaving a message on my professor’s voicemail for me and my classmates to listen to.

But this was the beauty of Kurt Vonnegut as an artist and as a human being. He really cared. It was no charade. How human beings acted toward one another and the planet really mattered to him, and, whether the odds looked bad or not, he would not change his behavior and join the crowd, lemminglike, in decadent self-gratification. Kurt was forever explaining that he believed “at least half the people alive, and maybe nine-tenths of them, really do not like this ordeal at all. They pretend to like it some, to smile at strangers, and to get up each morning in order to survive, in order to somehow get through it. But life is, for most people, a very terrible ordeal.” Such observations were part of his anthropological training. It’s the reason he reports in Slaughterhouse-Five that Harrison Starr has chided him for writing an antiwar book, saying that one might as well write an “antiglacier” book. This is, of course, an argument in pragmatism, in moral effectiveness. Kurt was nobody’s fool. He wasn’t convinced that writing an antiwar book like Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) would actually change the course of the world, but he would not allow himself to alter his behavior and the things he believed to be true and right simply because they were not pragmatic or morally effective.

The kindest thing Kurt ever did for me personally—and as you’ve read, he did so many kind things for me and my students—was to take my own writing seriously. Here, I don’t mean my scholarship, but my modest attempts at writing poems. Kurt always addressed me as “The Poet,” something that made me blush. (To be called a poet sounds rather grandiose, an oddity that ought to be earned over a lifetime, a moniker for the dead, perhaps?) Yet, when Kurt would encourage me to show him my poems, it meant the world, it meant not giving up on my writing, because here was a man whose work I admired telling me he admired what I was up to as well. His notes were always brief: “Thanks for the perfect poem about the Patriot Act. I needed one,” or “Particularly like ‘Some Heaven.’ My dad shot rabbits down in Brown County, and I could not enjoy his doing that, although he expected me to,” or “Please keep sending me your poems, which have special resonance for me.”

After my second book of poems, Some Heaven, was published by Michigan State University Press in February 2007, Kurt called me on a Saturday afternoon, late in the month. As usual, his phone call came from out of the blue and caught me off guard. In this particular instance, Kurt told me he had read my book and loved it. He said, “Todd, you should be flabbergasted. You’ve got beautiful poems captured in a beautiful book.” As best I can remember, I stammered and stuttered with his praise and said something about how I needed to get on the road to give readings and try to sell some copies in order to repay Michigan State for the kindness of publishing my work. After my yammering, there was a long pause, and then Kurt told me not to worry so much about it. He said, “You don’t have control over the way a book will sell. You’ve done the good work. You’ve made poems that leave me flabbergasted. In fact, I’m going to go back through the book this afternoon.” And with that, he wished me well and hung up. (In my experience with Kurt on the telephone, he would enter a conversation abruptly and end it just as abruptly.)

The rest of the day I worried that I’d given Kurt the wrong impression. I was “flabbergasted” to have my second book of poems in the world. I was “flabbergasted” that Michigan State had designed such a beautiful book and that another favorite writer, Jim Harrison, had offered a cover blurb. But Kurt’s words kept echoing. He’d given me advice that sounded like a mixture of Hoosier common sense and Buddhism’s refrain to empty oneself of self-concern. I slept fitfully that night and woke early to a raging snowstorm. My family and I were supposed to go to a Penn State women’s basketball game, but with the roads so treacherous, we were bound to the house for a lazy day of reading and perhaps some afternoon sledding.

As I lay in bed, the phone rang. My wife, Shelly, who was downstairs on the couch, picked up at the same time as I did, and before I could say hello, the voice on the other end said, “Hi, this is Kurt.” Shelly was groggy from dozing on and off with her book and assumed that this was our friend, Kurt Engstrom, who we had hoped to meet at the game, not Kurt Vonnegut. She launched into a discussion of the weather and regrets over missing the afternoon together. Ever the gentleman, Kurt apologized for waking her and explained he was another Kurt, not the one she assumed he was. After she hung up, Kurt said he only wished to let me know that upon a second reading of my book, he was even more impressed and wanted to do something about it. “These are real poems, Todd. Important poems. I’m so pleased for you,” he said. Again, I mumbled thanks and then launched into a few sentences about how I hoped he hadn’t misunderstood me the day before and how I was very grateful to the press and to him. He cut in before I could finish making a fool of myself and said, “The reason I called this morning is to ask a favor of you. Would you mind sending me two copies of Some Heaven? I want to give one to my friend John Updike and another to the poetry editor at The New Yorker.” My throat constricted and my heart didn’t so much race as swell five times its size. Somehow I managed to say it would be my greatest pleasure to do so, and with that Kurt told me to have a good day playing in the snow with my boys and hung up.

That was the last time I talked to Kurt. The next day I sent him the books with a note, and a few days later I received from him an artist proof of “A Tree Trying to Tell Me Something,” the perfect picture for someone like me whose poems so often have an oak or elm or serviceberry residing in them. It was signed to the “Altoona Poet” from KV and was dated March 1, 2007. I don’t know if he ever sent my books to John Updike or the poetry editor at The New Yorker, because shortly afterward he fell and hit his head, drifting for a time in a coma before slipping off the obligations of this fleshly world.

It would be silly to say that I don’t care or don’t wonder about the fate of the books I sent to him, about the actions of one of my literary heroes in the final days of his life, but it really is only a curiosity, sort of like writing an antiglacier book when you know it won’t stop the glacier. The fact that Kurt Vonnegut—a man whose reputation as a master of American letters was more than secure—would take the time to write a fledgling writer like myself, to send notes and phone messages to college students who were reading and thinking about his books, leaves me dumbfounded, or as Kurt would say, flabbergasted. I only hope that the ways Kurt reached out to the world—I’m sure there are many people with stories about him just like mine—won’t be forgotten, that some of us will take his example to heart and live our own lives in a way that would make him smile, that would make him laugh hard enough to trigger the smoker’s cough that in the end couldn’t silence him.

WORKS CITED

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report of the Banality of Evil. London: Viking, 1963.

Broer, Lawrence. Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1989.

Davis, Todd. Kurt Vonnegut’s Crusade, or How a Postmodern Harlequin Preached a New Kind of Humanism. New York: State U of New York P, 2006.

Farrell, Susan E. A Critical Companion to Kurt Vonnegut. New York: Facts on File, 2008.

Self, Will. The Book of Dave: A Revelation of the Recent Past and the Distant Future. London: Viking, 2006.

Vonnegut, Kurt. A Man without a Country. New York: Seven Stories, 2005.

———. Bagombo Snuff Box...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I   Vonnegut’s Early Writing (1950–1969)
• Part II   Vonnegut’s Later Writing (1970–2005)
• Part III   Vonnegut and Other Writers
• Contributors
• Index