YR581 Burnt My Beans!

Madge,

You mentioned Kurt Vonnegut’s death in passing on one of your recent podcasts, and I thought you might enjoy the following article I found.

Here’s some choice quotes:

“”I’ve been smoking Pall Mall unfiltered cigarettes since I was 12 or 14. So I’m going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company who manufactures them. And do you know why?”
“Lung cancer?” I offered.

“No. No. Because I’m 82 years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me. Instead, their cigarettes didn’t work. Now I’m forced to suffer leaders with names like Bush and Dick and, up until recently, Colin.” ”

and

“”Honestly, I wish Nixon were president,” Vonnegut laments. “Bush is so ignorant. And I don’t like idiotic, impulsive people. He’s not a capable human being. The war in Iraq shows that he’s a phony Christian. Remember what William Shakespeare taught us a long time ago, ‘The devil can cite Scripture for his [own] purpose.’ ”
He asks me if I know why President Bush is so pissed off at Arabs? I shrug no. “They brought us algebra,” he laughs. “Also the numbers we use, including the symbol for nothing. Zero.””

Here’s the article: (from http://www.bordersmedia.com/features/pages/vonnegut_brinkley.asp )

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“Life Is No Way to Treat an Animal”: Remembering Kurt Vonnegut
By Douglas Brinkley

“I’m Jeremiah and I’m not talking about God being mad at us,” novelist Kurt Vonnegut says with a straight face, gazing out the windows of the parlor of his Manhattan brownstone. “I’m talking about us killing the planet as a life support system with gasoline. What’s going to happen is, very soon, we’re going to run out of petroleum, and everything depends on petroleum. And there goes the school buses. There goes the fire engines. The food trucks will come to a halt. This is the end of the world. We’ve become far too dependent on hydrocarbons, and it’s going to suddenly dry up. You talk about the gluttonous Roaring Twenties. That was nothing. We’re crazy, going crazy, about petroleum. It’s a drug like crack cocaine. Of course the lunatic fringe of Christianity is welcoming the end of the world as the rapture. So I’m Jeremiah. It’s going to have to stop. I’m sorry.”

For the most part, this sort of apocalyptic outburst is to be expected from Vonnegut who, after all, in his futuristic novel Cat’s Cradle (1963) created Ice-9, a lethal chemical which obliterates earth incrementally, like the “great door of heaven being closed softly.” The naïve protagonist of the novel—a character named John/Jonah—actually struggles to write a book titled The Day the World Ended. (Cat’s Cradle also includes a hilarious faux religion known as Bokonoism, whose religious text begins with the sentence, “All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”) In Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut—published by University Press of Mississippi—he even dismisses the notion that his 14 novels and dozens of short stories have a long shelf-life, saying, “Anybody with any sense knows the whole solar system will go up like a celluloid collar by-and-by.” Add to that doomsday scenario Vonnegut’s notorious bouts of chronic depression, daily doldrums, and suicidal longings, and you get a literary Cassandra of the first order.

In the annals of American literature Vonnegut has been categorized as a “black humorist”—a post-Hiroshima novelist who encouraged readers to laugh at the ghastly absurdity of the modern condition. More than any other fiction writer Vonnegut has been unafraid to peer into the apocalyptic abyss of our lives. Ever since he rose to prominence during the 1960s, Vonnegut—with his Twainian mop of curly hair, bushy German beerhall mustache, and soothsayer smirk—has been dubbed a prose shaman with a trickbag full of preposterous Dr. Seussian characters. Harper’s deemed him an “unimitative and unimitable social satirist” while the New York Times anointed him the “laughing prophet of doom.”

On this day, though, as Vonnegut sipped coffee and his tiny white dog, Sugar, yapped in the background, there was no wry amusement or social satire in his repertoire. No. There was only burning dissent about the way hyper-technology and global capitalism were usurping the last gasps of goodness from honest laborers’ lives. And he was dead serious. But then Vonnegut started coughing, clearing his throat of phlegm, grasping for a half-smoked pack of Pall Malls laying on a coffee table. He quickly lit up. His wheezing ceased. I asked him whether he worried that cigarettes were killing him. “Oh yes,” he answered. “I’ve been smoking Pall Mall unfiltered cigarettes since I was 12 or 14. So I’m going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company who manufactures them. And do you know why?”

“Lung cancer?” I offered.

“No. No. Because I’m 82 years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me. Instead, their cigarettes didn’t work. Now I’m forced to suffer leaders with names like Bush and Dick and, up until recently, Colin.”

* * *

A self-proclaimed agnostic, Vonnegut is inflicted with the “Gasoline Blues” and “Bushfluenza”. He longs for the days of real leaders like F.D.R. or Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. “Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by honest research and excellent scholarship and investigative reporting,” he believes. “They want to put us back on the snake oil standard.”

Still his well honed, jocular instinct has not diminished with time. When it comes to reliable comedic genius, you have to reach back to the pages of Ambrose Bierce to find a sustained literary voice so paradoxically imbued with both tragedy (genocide, racism, militarism, loneliness, disease) and comedy (slapstick, gallows one-liners, glib repartée, shtick, vaudeville). And here is the amazing part: Vonnegut somehow morphs these different currents into not only the same book or chapter or page but in the same sentence. He achieves this hocus-pocus by always reversing expectations. His prose-style is slap and back off, slap and back off, like ocean water trapped between bulkheads. As a writer, Vonnegut, who uses simple sentences and short paragraphs to hold his readers’ attention, is never dull. Repetitive, yes. Too cutesy at times, sure. But he is a page-turner, no question about it.

Take, for example, his novel Mother Night (1952), where murderous Nazis engage in ping-pong matches and Hitler memorizes the Gettysburg Address. Or, even more absurdly, he has Nazi thug Adolph Eichmann composing his autobiography in an Israeli jail cell. At one juncture Eichmann asks his fellow prisoner, “Do you think a literary agent is absolutely necessary?” To which the incarcerated man replies, “For book club and movie sales in the United States of America, absolutely.” Vonnegut is a master of practical jokes, for making people respond emotionally to something that isn’t going on.

Vonnegut pulls us by our lapels and insists that we’re all collectively culpable for hideous crimes against our fellow humans. In Vonnegut’s novel Deadeye Dick (1982), his concerns are on display. It’s the story of a neutron bomb scientist’s 10-year-old son, Rudy Walz. The boy accidentally kills a pregnant woman by blasting his father’s gun out of a window. The novel suggests that scientists who place nuclear weapons in the hands of politicians are just as irresponsible as the scientist father who lets a young child have access to a firearm. “I wasn’t to touch anything on this planet, man, woman, child, artifact, animal, vegetable, or mineral,” the character Rudy believes, “since it was likely to be connected to a push-pull detonator and an explosive charge.”

All these tragic-comedic-contrarian moral concerns come together in Vonnegut’s 1969 antiwar masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five. The novel, written in just six weeks, is largely autobiographical, complemented with a heavy dose of science fiction. Billy Pilgrim, the principal character of Slaughterhouse is unstuck in time as he journeys across significant moments of his life including a visit to the planet Tralfamadore and the bombing of Dresden. “World War II made war reputable because it was a just war,” Vonnegut believes. “I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. You know how many other just wars there have been? Not many. And the guys I served with became my brothers. If it weren’t for World War II, I’d now be the garden editor of the Indianapolis News. I wouldn’t have moved away.”

Raised in Indiana during the Great Depression Vonnegut studied chemistry at Cornell University. While in college he was editor of the Cornell Daily Sun, writing three columns a week. Then he enlisted in the U.S . Army hoping to help destroy the Third Reich. Captured by the Nazis at the Battle of the Bulge, the 21-year-old American Infantry Private First Class became a POW and was sent to Dresden, in Germany. Suddenly, on February 13, 1945, the Allies decided to drop new incendiary bombs on the city. Massive fireballs engulfed the largely civilian population, killing approximately 135,000 people. Whole city blocks were reduced to lava-hot rubble in mere minutes. It was a raging inferno like the world had never seen, the worst massacre in European history. Dresden had nearly as high of a civilian death toll as Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Vonnegut, however, along with six other American POWs, survived. Ironically, the Nazis had placed them in a cool underground meatpacking storage cellar known as Slaughterhouse Five. “We didn’t get to see the firestorm,” Vonnegut later wrote. “We heard the bombs walking around up there. Now and then there would be a gentle shower of calcimine. If we had gone above to take a look, we would have been turned into artifacts characteristic of firestorms; searing pieces of charred firewood two or three feet long—ridiculously small human beings, or jumbo fried grasshoppers, if you will. The stench was like roses and mustard gas.”

When Vonnegut emerged from hiding and surveyed the annihilation he was numb. “Utter destruction,” he recalls. “Carnage unfathomable.” The Nazis put him to work gathering lifeless bodies for mass burial. “As prisoners of war, we dealt hands-on with dead Germans, digging them out of there and taking them to a huge funeral pyre,” Vonnegut explains. “But there were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Nazis sent in guys with flamethrowers. All these civilians’ bodies were burned to ashes.”

World War II ended and Vonnegut came back to Indiana a Purple Hearted hero. But the ghosts of Dresden haunted him. (He also had the 1944 suicide of his mother to psychologically grapple with). And he made a pact with the cosmos to never forget Dresden. The grotesque fire-bombing is a theme in at least eight books: Mother Night; God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; Slaughterhouse-Five; Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons; Slapstick; Palm Sunday; and Bluebeard. Yes, the Nazis were the mega-villains but, in the end, Vonnegut’s anger and despair was laid on the evil doorstep of the whole damn human race.

Like most returning veterans, Vonnegut struggled to get his life back on track. For a while he opened a Saab dealership on Cape Cod. Then he worked as an advertising executive for General Electric in Schenectady, New York, watching new-fangled machines manufacture “toys of the future” with monstrous mechanized efficiency. “The word automation hadn’t been created yet,” Vonnegut recalls. “What I saw occurring at G.E. was the end of the working individual. Machines were soon to run our lives.” That was enough. He turned Luddite and decided to dedicate his life to writing. A letter that he wrote his father on October 28, 1949—now housed in his archive at the University of Indiana-Bloomington—earmarks the beginning of his abandonment of corporate shilling:

Dear Pop—
I sold my first story to Collier’s. Received my check ($750 minus a 10% agent’s commission) yesterday noon. It now appears that two more of my works have a good chance of being sold in the near future.

I think I’m on my way. I’ve deposited my first check in a savings account and, if I sell more, will continue to do so until I have the equivalent of one year’s pay at G.E. Four more stories will do nicely, with cash to spare (something we never had before). I will then quit this goddamn nightmare job, and never take another so long as I live, so help me God. I’m happier than I’ve been for a good many years.

Love

* * *
Since Dresden transformed Vonnegut into being a card-carrying pacifist it’s not surprising that he disdains everything about the Iraq war. “Honestly, I wish Nixon were president,” Vonnegut laments. “Bush is so ignorant. And I don’t like idiotic, impulsive people. He’s not a capable human being. The war in Iraq shows that he’s a phony Christian. Remember what William Shakespeare taught us a long time ago, ‘The devil can cite Scripture for his [own] purpose.’ ”

He asks me if I know why President Bush is so pissed off at Arabs? I shrug no. “They brought us algebra,” he laughs. “Also the numbers we use, including the symbol for nothing. Zero.”

These days Vonnegut claims to be just a “farting around master”—the occupation which, in fact, people, he believes, were put on earth to do. Farting around for Vonnegut these days is a smorgasbord-like affair. Last year, Seven Stories Press released the meditation entitled A Man Without a Country—about being an octogenarian alive in Bushworld.

Unpublished poems abound, most poking fun at “W” and the geeky Radical Right. Take, for example, “Neo-Cons”:

I feel as though we have been invaded
by body-snatchers or Martians.
Sometimes I wish we had been.
Isn’t it time somebody investigated
Yale University?
Besides humor, Vonnegut takes great solace from music. “It makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it,” he muses. “Even military bands, although I am a pacifist, always cheer me up. And I really like Strauss and Mozart and all that. You must realize that the priceless gift that African Americans gave us musically is now almost the only reason many foreigners still tolerate us. That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is ‘the blues.’
The function of the artist is to make people like life better than they have before,” Vonnegut believes. “When I’ve been asked if I’ve ever seen that done, I say ‘Yes, the Beatles did it.’ ” A few years back Vonnegut—for a single performance—sang scat at a Phish gig on Long Island. He also recently composed a libretto for Stravinsky’s “Soldier Story” (performed by Steppenwolf in Chicago), based on the infamous termination of Private Eddie Slovak in 1954, the only U.S. soldier executed for cowardice since the Civil War.

And he has recorded the musical CD “Tock Tick” with him reading lyrics taken directly from Slaughterhouse-Five. He has stalled finishing If God Were Alive Today—or so he claims. “I’ve given up on it,” Vonnegut jokes. “It won’t happen.” As for his tombstone epitaph, he wants it to read: “The only proof he needed of existence was music.”

What is really occupying Vonnegut’s time, however, and has been for the past 13 years, is his full-bore commitment to painting and drawing. Memorable Vonnegut characters like Kilgore Trout and Billy Pilgrim and the Tralfamadorians are now frameable visuals. “Both my father and grandfather were Indiana painters and architects,” Vonnegut explains. “So you might say being an artist is our family business.” Lately Vonnegut has teamed up with Kentucky printmaker Joe Petro III of Origami Express to execute over 200 silk-screen images.

Some are tributes to artists like Dali and Pollock. Others come from his novels, particularly Cat’s Cradle, Slaughter-House Five and Breakfast of Champions. “I paint or draw pictures, and Joe makes prints of some of them one by one, color by color, by means of the time-consuming archaic silk-screen process, practiced by almost nobody else,” he explains. “The process is so painstaking and tactile, almost ballistic, that each print Joe makes is a painting in its own right.”

Ever since 1972 Vonnegut has been married to Jill Krementz, his second wife, a top-notch photojournalist who specializes in author portraits. She works in the basement of their New York home while Vonnegut holes up on the second floor. The house décor is Hoosier simplicity personified—i.e. pale floral sitting chairs, corner piano, idyllic landscape lithographs, throw carpet, and antique dolls. Family consumes a great deal of the Vonneguts’ time. Between them they have nine children and 16 grandchildren scattered around the East Coast.

And although Vonnegut hasn’t published a major novel since Bluebeard, nearly 20 years ago, a flood of letters arrives daily from his international fans, many searching for advice in the angst-ridden post-9/11 world. A Seattle teenager, for example, wrote Vonnegut about the indignation he experienced at an airport when a quasi-strip search occurred. Amused by the letter, Vonnegut wrote back: “The shoe thing at the airports and Code Orange and so on are world-class practical jokes, all right,” Vonnegut concurred. “But my all-time favorite is one the holy, antiwar clown Abbie Hoffman (1936-1989) pulled off during the Vietnam War. He announced that the new high was banana peels taken rectally. So then FBI scientists stuffed banana peels up their asses to find out if it was true or not.”

But Kurt Vonnegut is clearly weary. “Like they say, I’m 82 and homeless,” he says. “It was the same way when World War II ended. The Army kept me on because I could type, so I was typing other people’s discharges and stuff. And my feeling was, ‘Please, I’ve done everything I was supposed to do. Can I go home now?’ That’s what I feel right now. I’ve written books. Lots of them. Please, I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do. Can I go home now? I’ve wondered where home is? It’s when I was in Indianapolis when I was nine years old. Had a dog, a cat, a brother, a sister.”

After a few hours of fine conversation, Vonnegut and I headed out for Lasagne Ristorante, his favorite nearby eatery. We walked down 3rd Avenue in suffocating heat, the air pollution level felt lethal and for a couple minutes, Vonnegut just kept coughing. Perspiration beads formed on our brows. Vonnegut’s good humor dissipated. He was back on his “Perils of Oil” soapbox, insinuating that the evil slime had gushed into our lives via the River Styx, courtesy of Hades. “Evolution is a mistake,” he says in disgust. “Humans are a mistake. We have destroyed our entire planet over transportation, whoopee. The Bush administration says it’s conducting a war against drugs? Then let them bust the Oil Lobby. Talk about an awful, destructive substance. You pump this gas stuff into your car and you can zoom a hundred miles an hour, kill pets, and shatter the atmosphere to smithereens.”

And then, after an awkward silence, the Dresden survivor offers a philosophical one-liner. “Life,” he says, “is no way to treat an animal.” And then, for some reason, we both burst out laughing.

We’ll publish the second part of Doug Brinkley’s article on Kurt Vonnegut in an upcoming issue of the Borders Shortlist.

Douglas Brinkley is professor of history at Tulane University and the author of several books, including The Unfinished Presidency, The Boys of Pointe du Hoc, and The Great Deluge. A contributing editor at Vanity Fair and an in-house historian for CBS News, he lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.