Kurt Vonnegut Tribute

 When Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007, Patti Thorn, the Books Editor at the Rocky Mountain News, asked me to write a tribute to the novelist.

********

'Weird uncle' has moved on - Vonnegut, 84, had unique perspective on modern world
Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO) (Published as Rocky Mountain News (CO)) - April 14, 2007
Author/Byline: Duane Davis, Special to the News
Edition: Final
Section: Spotlight
Page: 9SPOTLIGHT

************** 

 Since the 1960s, the arrival of a new novel from Kurt Vonnegut was a little like a visit from your weird uncle, the one who had been in the "war" - World War II, Korea, Vietnam . . . call it what you will, it was wherever hell had opened up and swallowed men whole and spit them back out on the Earth, forever damaged.

You know the uncle. Maybe he had an eye that wobbled uncontrollably, or a crooked arm, a bent leg, or a big dent in his forehead and an ungovernable tongue afflicted with a kind of Tourette's syndrome of obscene fact and brutal honesty. He exhibited not only a willingness, but an actual inability, to say anything but exactly what he had seen in his brush with the awful truth of this world: Everyone dies. And more: that most die badly.

One thing is for sure: He came by this awareness honestly. Born in Indianapolis in 1922, Vonnegut began studying biochemistry at Cornell in 1940 but dropped out to volunteer for military service in 1943. Of his enlistment, Vonnegut wrote, his father commented only, "Good! They will teach you to be neat!"

Taken prisoner by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge, Vonnegut was sent to Dresden, where he worked in a factory making dietary supplements for pregnant women and where, in February of 1945, he was among the few survivors of the Allied firebombing of Dresden that incinerated 135,000 civilians in this non-strategic, nonmilitary target . . . so it goes, indeed.

After the war, Vonnegut dabbled in anthropology at the University of Chicago but failed to take a degree. He worked as a reporter for awhile and then in public relations for General Electric. In the '50s, he started publishing short stories in the slick magazines, mostly gentle satires and not-quite-black (shall we say, halftone?) comedies; not shouts of outrage but soft asides on the absurdities of life in the Eisenhower Era. In 1952 came his first novel, a work of science fiction titled Player Piano, and in its train, dozens more short stories.

All this, though, was just finger exercise for his real work, which began in 1961 with the publication of Mother Night, followed by Cat's Cradle in 1963 and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater in 1965; all of which was capped by Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, this being, I believe, the primary work on which Vonnegut's reputation will rise or fall.

Critics sometimes wonder why Vonnegut was taken up so enthusiastically by the counterculture of the '60s. He made fun of the right things, like bureaucracy, technocracy, and corporate and political exploitation of the weak and helpless, but didn't seem to offer much in the way of radical solutions or answers. His message seemed mundane, even middle-class: be a good boy, don't play with guns, mind your manners.

But of course, that was the point: in the '60s, I loved the various loopy utopias put forth by everyone from Abbie Hoffman to Charles Reich to Buckminster Fuller. I loved them but I didn't particularly believe them. I did, however, believe my weird uncle: he'd been there, he'd been shot at, he'd shot back. To those who pretended to give meaning to the murderous activities of war and human mayhem, Vonnegut gave a big raspberry of cheerful nihilism and anarchic noncompliance. And I loved him for it; and think I always will.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, the narrator says that despite the horrific things the (anti)hero, Billy Pilgrim, has lived through, it occurs to him that, basically, his headstone should read, "Everything Was Beautiful, And Nothing Hurt." The narrator, who is always some version of Vonnegut, adds that the same goes for him too, basically.

The irony here, of course, is that Vonnegut believed that so much could be accomplished by so small a shift of perspective. I'd like to think that somewhere up in the night sky, Vonnegut is now on the planet Tralfamadore with Montana Wildcat demonstrating Earth sex techniques to adoring crowds. Where Everything Is Beautiful, And Nothing Hurts.