From the Moleskine, 3/29/07, "Prepare eulogy for Kurt Vonnegut."
Upon hearing how bummed I was at Vonnegut's passing, my cousin laughed at me, "Are you kidding? The motherfucker lived to be 84, with all his marbles! He was just on the Daily Show, Donika... I mean, he was appreciated in his lifetime, no sorry, for the entirety of his career! What more could you ask for?" I capitulated, but began to dwell on some of Vonnegut's most unique qualities, now lost to humanity. "Oh, no doubt," he softened, "he was definitely a credit to the race, a real peace loving guy, and he endured the bombing of Dresden. His is a life to be celebrated, for sure, and fuck anyone who says otherwise."
As much as something two weeks ago told me to brace myself for Vonnegut's death, and as much as I have long agreed with my cousin, I'm still unready to properly commemorate him. A thread in his honor on the Rudius board is pretty precious in its remembrances, and something really jumps out from them. So many people cite junior high and high school as the age at which they discovered Vonnegut, and also cite how much he changed their perception of fancy writing. My first experience with him was through Great Books and "Harrison Bergeron." (Does anyone else remember Great Books?) "Harrison Bergeron" spoke tenderly to anyone who's ever felt at once isolated and invincible by the things that made them different.* Basically anyone who's ever been 14. According to the responses on the messageboard, and PhilaLawyer's tribute, this effect went a long way to hook people into reading.
Junior high through high school are key ages for determining whether or not one becomes a reader. This is widely acknowledged, but there is a dearth of books appropriate for kids that age. There's The Catcher in the Rye, The Outsiders, This Boy's Life, The Lord of the Rings... OK, so that's a pretty fun start, but when you consider the catalogue of accessible and appropriate books for people over 18 and under 12, you can't help but recognize that there's a gap in between. There's a reason the titles I listed are so fiercely beloved and defended by their devotees, and it's not just that the stories and styles resonated, but rather that they opened a whole world of reading to them. Most books for adolescents insult their intelligence with cutesiness or set off their bullshit detectors with a 'mature' intricacy that suggests importance, but that young people still have the purity of character to regard as vanity. The most human truths, you know at that age more than any other, are quite simple.
"Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what."
- Bruce Weigl, "The Impossible"
This is an aesthetic principle Vonnegut had clearly mastered. A few years after reading "Harrison Bergeron," I reacquainted myself with Vonnegut through Cat's Cradle. So cleanly written and approachable, it nonetheless quietly invoked my burgeoning scientific training, desanitized my academic perceptions of war, religion, and politics, and made me a little more comfortable with the subject of sex. That may be another part of his appeal to young people-- he's one of the few adults who strides over sex with no embarrassment, aside from the inherent silliness of our animal nature and human sentimentality splayed out in one fleshy moment. Not a bad way for a sixteen-year-old girl to start thinking about it. In that way, he was like the kindly uncle who always gave it to you straight and interacted with the complex, brooding parts of yourself everyone else explained away by hormones and social changes. In Jon Stewart's fawning Daily Show introduction he said of Vonnegut, "as an adolescent he made my life bearable." Young readers feel both respected and challenged by Vonnegut, a rare treatment for teenagers, so the tenacious loyalty is understandable. But they may also start to think, "Hey, maybe not all writers are these Moby Dick spouting assholes..." (or in my case, "Rime of the Ancient Mariner assholes." I dislike you, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I dislike you a lot.) If for nothing else, Vonnegut should be appreciated as an ambassador to writing at one of the most critical ages for wooing readers.
This leads me to why I suspect Vonnegut is not as respected as he should be in literary circles. The academic's stock and trade is specialized knowledge, something so arcane and hard won (and often narrow) that very few bother learning it. Vonnegut is so accessible that you can indeed 'get him' as early as age 12, and there's no shadowy territory to carve out for oneself. Everyone's read him. Everyone loves at least one thing by him. Everyone has an opinion, and most of them are qualified enough to have one. It flies in the face of academic specialty to go back to something that made sense ten years ago, before you majored in anything.
But I think this ignores the larger picture, which is that precisely because Vonnegut's so ubiquitous, he should be more closely examined. While the idea of the unappreciated artist is romantic, let's face it, many of our current classics were pop culture at one time. We know them because they were germane enough to the common ethic that they survived through generations and wars and relocations and plagues and such nonsense. Vonnegut stands to endure that same lasting influence, and has contributed in ways that do have a bit of intellectual cache. Aside from The Diary of Anne Frank, I really can't think of another first hand account of WWII as compelling, credible and candid as Slaughterhouse Five, and it involved time travel. Yeah, I know, there are quite a few books you could nominate, but to discount his as anything even slightly less than historically and artistically laudable would be plainly dishonest.
Not long before I graduated from college, Timequake was released, and in my persistent fiscally vegetative state, I checked it and Breakfast of Champions out of my local library. Revisiting Breakfast of Champions proved the elasticity of his work, how it bounces on notions that are silly at 17 and springs back on concepts that are taunting at 22. What was once dirty and giddy was now prescient and wise:
The girl with the greyhound was an assistant lighting director for a musical comedy about American history, and she kept her poor greyhound, who was named Lancer, in a one-room apartment fourteen feet wide and twenty-six feet long, and six flights of stairs above the street level. His entire life was devoted to unloading his excrement at the proper time and place. There were two proper places to put it: in the gutter outside the door seventy-two steps below, with the traffic whizzing by, or in a roasting pan his mistress kept in front of the Westinghouse refrigerator.
Lancer had a very small brain, but he must have suspected from time to time, just as Wayne Hoobler did, that some kind of terrible mistake had been made.
- Breakfast of Champions, Chapter 18
Five years earlier, I giggled at the beaver illustration in this book, but this time I thought I had just been handed the best advice I'd yet heard about the adult world ahead of me. Reading Timequake made me consider the same things my cousin expressed over the phone. How lovely for Vonnegut (almost ten years ago!) that he lived long enough to begin reconciling himself with his work, to have the luxury of wrapping up his illustrious career on his terms. How sensitive of him to free his characters, and how clear the depth of his personal investment in them, more than many people have with the real people in their lives. It made me think about how I wanted to direct my existence-- how much time I might really have to kill on Earth and what can be accomplished if it's used well. I decided to milk corporate America for a while, then move to NY, go back to school, give writing a go... the whole hipster deal. And hey, while I was in the state, maybe I'd find out where Vonnegut lives and stop by. To apologize for his lack of academic recognition, though I don't think it's something he'd much prize. Maybe just to thank him for making my adolescence bearable.
Kurt Vonnegut, I meant to stalk you, and am sorry that I never got around to it, even though I apparently knew two weeks ago you were going to die. Also, sorry for not giving you notice on that. Usually when someone like you dies, we lament how unappreciated they were, or how they went before their time, or how their addictions consumed them or their genius alienated them. Yet you managed to acquire just about the right amount of fame and fans, exercise just about the right combination of humility and responsibility to humanity, apply just the right commitment to gravity and folly, and extract just about the right number of years to fart around. What made you different saved you in life and stamped an almost impossible perfection on your death. You couldn't have written the narrative of Kurt Vonnegut better, and it's one I'm sure you would agree we should celebrate.
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* We have a running joke at Rudius that we are the Island of Misfit Toys. Frighteningly, later the week that joke started I got this entry from PhilaLawyer.
** There's no reference to this footnote above, I just wanted to point out how Twain-like Vonnegut was in both his professional approach and personal demeanor. Thank you.
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