K.V. (1922-2007)

So, Kurt Vonnegut is now dead. This feels important, like the ends of lives do. I have not read a word of Vonnegut--excluding three pages of Cat's Cradle I made time for two days ago--since reading Slaughterhouse Five in high school.


Naturally, I'm thinking of the whole deal in terms of its effect on me. I'm thinking that serious men with odd and mysterious intentions have cited Vonnegut as the writer who took a job in public relations to pay the bills. I'm thinking about critical things to say about K.V.'s friend, Joseph Heller, whose novel Catch-22 just received a good salting from my "Comedy in Literature" class. I'm thinking of his pessimism, the element that so many people seem to cherish in his novels, an element of the same stripe that can be found in Heller's Catch-22, Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, and so many other oddly embraceable works of the 1950's and '60's. I'm thinking of all the praise K.V. got/gets, while poor Robert Farina wrote only one iridescent, shattering novel before beefing it on a motorcycle. In short, I'm thinking that I kind of resent K.V., but that is only a fashion I am currently in the midst of shedding.

After all, none of that is K.V.'s fault. Where is all this resentment coming from? What did Kurt Vonnegut ever do to me? Well, perhaps the thing with extra-super-extremely famous writers from around the "Beat Movement" era is that many of their readers believe they speak for them. That is a testament to the power of their writing, plain and simple--but what ferments in such a reader, again, perhaps, is the beautifully assailing notion that he or she has inherited the author's voice, the author's intuition, the author's rightness from the text itself. Anyway, I suppose I am feeling a little stand-offish towards Kurt because of trauma that cannot be attributed directly to him, but rather to many figures wearing gleaming plastic K.V. masks.

The thing is, I love books. I love literature. And I love Kurt Vonnegut. Despite all of the churlish, teenage, antinomian hoo-hah that has grown up around his work, he is one of the silliest, joyful-est, and most wildly creative writers in American literature--and that counts for quite a lot. His crazed fidelity to his unique sense of language is admirable, beautiful, and immensely important to me. This, I think, is what separates him from writers like Heller (who had the same itch in him, I think, but was a little more of a sourpuss about the whole thing), and George Orwell. Those dudes have written great, wide books about pettyness and corruption and greed, and have stated smoothly and beautifully and comically how awful it all is. But, really: every idiot in the world, including me, knows that. Vonnegut knew it, but he knew something else, too.

The other thing is, Vonnegut hated the reception of his book, too. After it was published he vowed never to write another novel and took up playwriting. He was severely depressed, and thought often of committing suicide. Some gut reaction, when I first learned this anecdote, had told me he'd redeemed himself through his shame, his self-destructive urge purifying him in the face of literature. And what a disgusting thought. But now...now what I have to say is: nothing, except that Slaughterhouse Five was one of those books that lets you know what is possible in human life--not the wars or the death or the cruelty, but the book, the possibility for human making. To paraphrase some words from Jerome McGann, it is one of those books that "distracts us to a greater awareness" of the world. Fucken "A."

The science fiction, the sex, the irreverence, the social commentary, the violence, the protest, the moral relevance, etc. etc., is all secondary in Vonnegut's writing to the human voice. And it is a hugely compelling voice. The tone and quality of it, the resonance, the poetic distance between the words and thoughts that came out of it--they are wonderful, wonderful. Vonnegut is featured on ads for the ACLU, and he has spoken at political rallies, anti-war rallies, etc. And really, I couldn't care less. He's got it all here, he doesn't need any more than this, and neither do we:

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies--'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'"


How perfect. How perfect is that? Michael Brownstein: "How many people have said-- could say that?" I mean, Kurt was a writer, and he wrote prose that does what all good prose does. His writing does what George Saunders said about Kevin Moffett's first book, Permanent Visitors: "The best...remind us of the real and only purpose of fiction: to recalibrate the heart." Why am I writing this? I'm defending Vonnegut from myself. And why's that? Something he wrote recalibrated my heart a few years ago, and I couldn't be more grateful.

"Is that what the old girls called karma?"