Lonesome No More

13 April 2007



Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007

The biggest lie ever written was “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.” The greatest truth was “We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard ... and too damn cheap.” Both came from the pen of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. who passed away this week at the age of 84. Fans of his will remember his wit and creativity, and his detractors . . . did he have any?

Born on November 11, 1922 (ironically on Armistice Day), Mr. Vonnegut described himself as a “fourth-generation German-American religious skeptic Freethinker.” He studied at Cornell before joining the US Army to fight the Nazis. During the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans captured him, and he spent the rest of his war in Dresden. On the night of February 13, 1945, Allied bombing raids created a firestorm that killed at least 35,000. Mr. Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners survived having been confined three stories underground in a slaughterhouse (Slaughter House Number Five). “The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am,” he wrote in Fates Worse Than Death. Perhaps.

Gore Vidal, one of his contemporaries, said, “He was imaginative; our generation of writers didn’t go in for imagination very much. Literary realism was the general style. Those of us who came out of the war in the 1940s made sort of the official American prose, and it was often a bit on the dull side. Kurt was never dull.” Tom Wolfe said, “There was never a kinder and, at the same time, wittier writer to be with personally. He was just a gem in that respect. And as a writer, I guess he’s the closest thing we had to a Voltaire. He could be extremely funny, but there was a vein of iron always underneath it, which made him quite remarkable.” And one not-terribly anonymous writer will never forget a smile from Mr. Vonnegut on East 34th Street in response to a “hello” that came out choked and garbled..

What Mr. Vonnegut understood that most other authors don’t is the genuine rarity of a true villain. To him, almost everyone was a victim of one sort or another, and the bad guys were really cultural boundaries, historical happenstance and social rigidity. His characters were anything but ideals from central casting. Billy Pilgrim, who was unstuck in time in Slaughter House Five, was a lonely bumbler caught up in the mess of World War II. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater’s protagonist Eliot Rosewater appears as an alcoholic, and obese volunteer fireman and a trustee of a philanthropic foundation. Dwayne Hoover in Breakfast of Champions is a well-to-do car salesman who just happens to be going mad – “bad chemicals” are the culprit.

For a long time, Mr. Vonnegut considered himself past ready to die, including a suicide attempt in the 1980s (a job he said he had botched). His heavy tobacco habit may have been another manifestation of a self-destructive impulse (survivor’s guilt from Dresden?). A couple of years ago, he told the AP in an interview, “I’m suing a cigarette company because on the package they promised to kill me, and yet here I am.” On another occasion, he noted, “When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon.” Like Mr. Hemingway, Mr. Vonnegut’s career was an exclamation point.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.


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