Tag: Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut on Loneliness, Old Age, and the Extended Family

 

I have always admired  Kurt Vonnegut’s unique, ineffably sane take on the destructive history of the 20th century.


In the remarkable documentary, Kurt Vonnegut:  Unstuck in Time, filmmaker Robert B. Weide interviews Kurt Vonnegut and intersperses their witty chats with old home movies provided by Kurt’s older brother, Bernard Vonnegut, photos of family and friends, his children’s reminiscences, Kurt at his high school reunion, love letters, accounts of his two marriages, high school plaques with names of men he knew who died in World War II, and historic footage of wars and other events. 


 Vonnegut grew up in a huge extended family in Indianapolis, Indiana: there were at least 30 Vonneguts in the Indianapolis phone book.  He underwent his share of trauma later:  he was a Prisoner of War during World War II, who survived the fire-bombing of Dresden because he was imprisoned at night in a slaughterhouse.  Later, while working in the PR department of GE,  he discovered that  GE was creating machines that would do men’s jobs and replace them in the workplace.  He quit to become a short story writer and novelist.

Vonnegut’s jokes are so outrageous that I fear he would offend today’s milquetoast audiences.  College students were once his biggest supporters, but I’m not sure they “get” satire anymore.

Here’s a witty, heartbreaking Vonnegut quote from the documentary.

My books are about loneliness and people being driven out of the Garden of Eden.  The world’s full of lonesome old people.  And when trouble comes they call either the police or the fire department.  Lonesome?  Dial 911.  And I say, Get an extended family.


In Slapstick, he makes similar observations. The hero, Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, runs for President of the United States on the radical platform of “Lonesome No More!”  He promises to provide every American with a huge, supportive extended family.  But first, because there is a fuel shortage, he has to burn Nixon’s papers from the National Archives to generate electricity so the computers can assign new middle names to the citizens.   (The middle name will identify your new family of tens of thousands of people.) 


I guess the critics didn’t like his attack on the loneliness of the nuclear family:  Vonnegut himself says he never got nastier reviews.   But in this darkly comic post-apocalyptic novel, Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain is working for the good of the crumbling American society.


. What I love about Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, or do I mean Vonnegut?, is that he laughs in the darkness.

And so we will vote for Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain in the next election.  We love his ideas!

Weekend Reading: Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slapstick”

                    



Kurt Vonnegut is our weirdest great American comic writer, and if you’re looking for a laugh, you will marvel at his wit and acumen even as he chronicles the most horrific events of the twentieth century.  His most famous novel is Slaughterhouse-Five, which describes Billy Pilgrim’s survival of the fire-bombing of Dresden (based on Vonnegut’s own experience) and Billy’s subsequently coming unstuck in time. But Cat’s Cradle and Timequake are funnier and lighter, and I much prefer them.

I recently read and enjoyed  Kurt Vonnegut’s best-selling post-apocalyptic comedy, Slapstick (1976), which received the worst reviews of any of Vonnegut’s novels.  Vonnegut wrote, “The reviewers…actually asked critics who had praised me in the past to now admit in public how wrong they’d been.  I felt as though I were sleeping upright in a German box car again.”  
 
In Slapstick, Vonnegut apparently went too far for the critics, though not too far for me: I do appreciate satire.  Vonnegut’s description of American society in the post-apocalyptic future – which occurs a bit later, but not much later, than now, or perhaps in a parallel time – satirizes American politics, the National Archives, American loneliness, the nuclear family, the fossil fuel shortage, and The Green Death, a pandemic. 
 
The energy crisis is acute when the narrator, Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, is elected President of the United States.  He has run on the platform of the eradication of American loneliness. His political slogan was,  LONESOME NO MORE!  Everybody could relate to that.

But how do you obliterate loneliness?  Swain plans to assign new middle names to each citizen.  These computer-generated middle names will automatically align them with a new extended family – tens of thousands of people who will be committed to caring for its members – as opposed to the too-often neglectful nuclear family.

But when Swain is elected, he has to figure out first how to generate electricity.


The fuel shortage was so severe when I was elected, that the first stiff problem I faced after my inauguration was where to get enough electricity to power the computers which would issue the new middle names.

I ordered horses and soldiers and wagons of the ramshackle army I had inherited from my predecessor to haul tons of papers from the National Archives to the powerhouse.  These documents were all from the administration of Richard M. Nixon, the only President who was ever forced to resign.


 Vonnegut is very funny about Nixon:  he says that Nixon and his cronies weren’t really criminals, they were just lonely.  And so they wanted to commit crimes so they could belong to a crime family.  Vonnegut adds, The National Archives are full of papers about political crimes committed by lonely politicians.

 The structure of Slapstick is odd, as so much of Vonnegut’s work is. Vonnegut says this novel is as close as he’s ever come to writing an autobiography.  It’s what life feels like to him. In his autobiographical prologue, he says he prefers “common decency” to love, and examines the importance of the extended family in his own life and that of his brother.

Chapter 1 begins not in medias res (in the middle of things), but in ultimas res (the end of things).  Swain, now very old and long retired from office, is living on the first floor of the Empire State building with his teenage granddaughter and her lover.  The Green Death has wiped out much of the populsyion. Sickness and disasters are widespread and living conditions are primitive.  The King of Michigan is at war.  Swain’s  granddaughter was lucky that people helped her reach New York safely.


Swain is writing his memoirs, though he doesn’t know for whom:  the young can no longer read or write.    Born in New York City, Swain and his twin sister, Eliza Mellon Swain, were “monsters” from birth, black-haired giants with the features of adults, not Mongoloids, but born with out-of-the-ball-park high intelligence.  He explains, “We were something new.  We were Neanderthaloids.”


 Their beautiful, rich parents were repulsed by their children, and for years hid them away in an isolated house.  The twins could literally put their heads together and solve any problem:  math, science, linguistic, psychological, creative, you name it.  And so a cruel psychologist evaluated the twins and decided to separate them:  their IQs dropped  considerably when they were apart, and thus the psychologist felt secure and brilliant again.

Meanwhile, the Chinese had learned to miniaturize themselves  to solve the food shortage. Part of the formula came from a paper written by the twins when they were children. 


Swain  has the humor and intelligence to know he cannot control the future.  That is for his granddaughter, Melody, and her generation to figure out.

Genius has had its day.


Perhaps my favorite part of the book is the prologue.  Here is an excerpt.

On Reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Nonfiction: Transcendental Meditation & Politics

Years ago, after my husband helped his parents move into a condo, he brought home a boxed set of Vonnegut that had belonged to his siblings.  The girls had, rather touchingly, divided the books and inscribed their names, along with the dates of their graduation, on the flyleaf.   When I came across this set the other day, I intended to read  Breakfast of Champions, but the cover fell off, so so I read Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons instead.  (In case you want to know what the title means, it refers to concepts in his novel Cat’s Cradle.  My post is here.)

Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, published in 1974,  is a brilliant collection of essays, magazine pieces, and speeches. And I have to say, Vonnegut’s witty, charming, sometimes indignant and angry nonfiction may be his best work. Vonnegut always sees the larger picture, which is difficult for the rest of us to do.  He is also a moralist, but not in a way that interferes with the pleasure of reading. 

In my favorite essay, “Yes, We Have No Nirvana,” he manages to be both sympathetic and sarcastic about Transcendental Meditation.  His wife and eighteen-year-old daughter practiced it enthusiastically, so he investigated it for Esquire in 1968.   At the Maharishi’s  press conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Vonnegut finds the Maharishi likable, even adorable, but does not believe in the technique.  He notes its appeal to celebrities like Mia Farrow and the Beatles, and the astounding publicity and media attention. While Vonnegut was in Cambridge, Mia Farrow was initiated by the Maharishi in his hotel room; Vonnegut notes that his wife and daughter “had to make do with a teacher in the apartment of a Boston painter and jazz musician who meditates.”

Like Vonnegut, I was unwilling to pay money for a mantra, and some of my friends walked out of the lecture in disbelief when they learned they had to pay. According to  Vonnegut, who deems himself “too lazy” to  meditate, one must first attend boring lectures, be interviewed by the meditation teacher, and then bring gifts of fruit, flower, and a fee to the teacher to complete the process and get a mantra.

Vonnegut thinks it is harmless but  a sop for the middle class.  He writes, “This new religion (which-is-not-a-religion-but-a-technique) offers tremendous pleasure, opposes no institutions or attitudes, demands no  sacrifices or outward demonstrations of virtue, and is risk free.  It will sweep the world as the planet dies–as the planet is surely dying–of poisoned air and water.”

So much of the charm of this collection has to do with Vonnegut’s style and quirky criticism.  In “Excelsior!  We’re Going to the Moon.  Excelsior,” he expresses cynicism about the importance of  the moon landing and believes the money could be better spent on cleaning up “the smoke and the sewage and trash”  on Earth  and disposing of military weapons.  In “Why They Read Hesse,” he writes about the romantic appeal to the young of Hermann Hesse’s romantic novels, which became best-sellers  in the ’60s and ’70s. 

 Let me leave you with a quote from one of the best essays,  “In a Manner That Must Shame God Himself”(Harper’s Magazine). Vonnegut imagines the thoughts of visitor from another planet on  the American people in 1972.

“The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people do not acknowledge this.  They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.

“Both imaginary parties are bossed by Winners.  When Republicans battle Democrats, this much is certain:  Winners will win.

“The Democrats have been the larger party in the past–because their leaders have not been as openly contemptuous of Losers as the Republicans have.

“Loser can join imaginary parties.  Losers can vote.”

Really glad I read this book.  A great way to rediscover Vonnegut.

Hiroshima and Madness in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle”

  • I was not a science fiction geek in the late 1960s.  None of us long-haired wire-rim-bespectacled compulsive readers were. Then a friend’s older brother introduced us not only to Procul Harum but to Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.  After a recent rereading of Cat’s Cradle, I had to wonder: is it science fiction at all? And was this friend’s brother, whom I barely remember, a member of our karass?   But you only know what a karass is if you’ve read Cat’s Cradle.

In Vonnegut’s comical post-modern novel,  the narrator, John, aka Jonah, is worried, with good reason, about the end of the world. He is comforted by the (fictitious) religion of  Bokanism, which teaches that human beings are divided into teams (the karass) to do God’s will. 

“If you find your life tangled up with somebody else’s life for no very logical reason,” writes Bokonon, “that person may be a member of your karass.”

The karass is a mysterious force.  When John was a younger man–“two wives ago, 250,000 cigarettes ago, 3,000 quarts of booze ago”–he planned to write a book called The End of the World.   He wanted to know what prominent Americans were doing on the day the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The three adult children of the late Nobel Prize-winning Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the inventors of the atom bomb, remember little about that day but paint a frightening portrait of their father as a scientific sociopath.  Hoenikker had no conscience nor concern about how science was used:  the day he died he created another lethal substance called Ice-nine (which killed him).  It freezes liquids and everyone who touches it.  Bizarrely, his children divided the chips of Ice-nine in mason jars and thermoses after they found him frozen dead in his wicker chair.  

Vonnegut effortlessly manipulates the many threads (or should I say strings?)  of this philosophical dystopian comedy. The chapters are short, the writing witty, the sentences have a snappy rhythm, and the narrative is broken up with letters, poems, and Bokononist quotes.   On the first page, John says he has converted to Bokanism but is resigned to not knowing all the members of his karass.

Be that as it may, I intend in this book to include as many members of my karass as possible, and I mean to examine all strong hints as to what on Earth we, collectively, have been up to….

About my karass, then.

It surely includes the three children of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the so-called “Fathers” of the first atom bomb.  Dr. Hoenikker himself was no doubt a member of my karass, though he was dead before my sinookas, the tendrils of my life, began to tangle with those of his children.

The End of the World turns into a different book after a magazine editor sends John to  a little-known island in the Caribbean, St. Fernando, where Bokanism is practiced.  And, coincidentally, all three of the Hoenikker children are there: Frank, a hobby shop employee on the run from the mob, is now a general and the future president of St. Fernando; Newt, a midget who dropped out of Cornell to have an affair with a Russian spy midget, paints very dark paintings; and Cordelia, an exceptionally tall women who married  a former colleague of her father’s, is thrilled to get out of Indiana.  Unfortunately, they have  ice-9 with them.  

If you wonder if human beings are stupid enough to end the world with atom bombs or other lethal substances, you might as well stop worrying and start living.   Vonnegut believes they will.  

But, fortunately, he has a wry sense of humor.  The survivors, including John, are all Hoosiers (natives of Indiana, as was Vonnegut).    

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