• • •
I scarcely know any of the few Vonneguts still living in Indianapolis, and my own children will know and care about them as much as I know or care about my German relatives. Things fall apart.
There is a Bernard Vonnegut in Albany. That’s my brother, I believe. And there is a Peter Vonnegut there, who is Bernard’s son, and who is a librarian, and who married a woman named Michi Minatoya, who, like Iku Matsu Moto, is of Japanese ancestry. They have two children, Carl Hiroaki Vonnegut and Emiko Alice Vonnegut, my brother’s only grandchildren. They, too, are, among other things, de St. Andrés. Strange and nice.
• • •
There is a Dr. Mark Vonnegut in Brookline, Massachusetts. That’s my son, I believe.
I am proud of Mark, and I praised him and drew on his experience in this manner at a meeting of the Mental Health Association in New Jersey in Morristown on June 4, 1980:
“The title of this speech in your programs is ’Must We Do without References?’ Please cross that out, in case you want to remember later on what really happened here. The new title is Tear and Loathing in Morristown, New Jersey,’ and I want you all to know how safe I feel up here. If I go crazy, you will know all the latest things to do about it. I will be out of the nuthouse and back on the streets in no time, coked to the gills on Thorazine.
“The tide in your programs is a typographical error anyway. It should have been ’Must We Do without Reference Points?’ You might want to add that word ’Points’ to the original tide before you cross the whole thing out, which reminds me of a very funny story. There was a man in a restaurant, and he called the waiter over, and he said, ’Waiter—there is a needle in my soup.’ And the waiter said to him, ’Oh sir, I am so sorry. That is a typographical error. It should have been a noodle.’
“When I thought I was going to talk about reference points, I had in mind the fixtures in a simpler and more stable civilization than what we have today. Examples: Shakepeare’s Hamlet, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn—the Great Wall of China, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Sphinx. These few works of art used to be enormous monuments in the minds of public school graduates in every corner of this country. They have now been drowned in our minds, like Atlantis, if you will, by the latest sensations on television and radio, and in our motion picture palaces and People magazine.
“Time was when a worker in the mental health field in America would have a few reference points in common with a native-born maniac, could begin a therapeutic conversation with comments on the smile of the Mona Lisa, say. It was a beginning. But nowadays, I would think, a therapist has to be prepared to discuss in depth Beach Blanket Bingo or The Texas Chainsaw Murders or Howdy Doody or Romper Room or Walter Cronkite—and just on and on and on. Farrah Fawcett-Majors. No subject of conversation lives much longer than a lightning bug these days. I have a son who is a gag writer on the West Coast, and he wrote what he thought was a very funny skit about Howdy Doody. I had to explain to him that there were millions of Americans older and younger than he was, who did not know or care who Howdy Doody was. He was shattered. When he was seven years old, Howdy Doody was God to him.
“But I have scrapped that particular speech, as I say. I didn’t have the brains to pull it off It was too ambitious—not only for me but for lunch at a New Jersey motel. So I have decided to talk instead about how honored I am to be here. If some of you are taking notes, you should write that down: ’Honored to be asked to speak on mental health’—something like that.
“I don’t know why you invited me. Perhaps it is because my son Mark went insane. He is not the gag writer. That is another son. The one who went insane is well now. He graduated from Harvard Medical School a year ago, and is an intern in Boston now. He, too, is a magnificent speaker. He loves to ask an audience of workers in the mental health field, ’How many of you have ever taken Thorazine?’ Almost no hands go up, and my son the doctor gives a little smile, and he says: ’It won’t hurt you. You really ought to try it sometime, just to get an inkling, anyway, of what your patients are going through.’
“Your organizers asked me what degrees I held. Even if I were a trapeze artist, they would have to ask me that, I guess. So I ransacked the drawers of my bedside table for documents. I found a long-lost pair of cuff links, unfortunately only gold-plated. I found a snapshot of my sister Alice when she was only sixteen. She died here in New Jersey at the age of forty-one, and not in the best of mental health. I found a diploma from the University of Chicago, which is west of here. It declared that I had earned a master’s degree in anthropology. I looked up the word in a dictionary. It turned out to be the study of man.
“At the University of Chicago so long ago, I had to select a specialty from these five fields in anthropology: archaeology, cultural anthropology, ethnology, linguistics, and physical anthropology. I chose cultural anthropology, since it offered the greatest opportunity to write high-minded balderdash. Culture, of course, is every object and idea which has been shaped by men and women and children, and not by God. Cultural anthropology is a broad specialty, you might say. I never heard of a cultural anthropologist who came down with claustrophobia.
“It was that damn fool diploma which made me believe for a moment that I could speak to you as an expert on culture, about that bed of Procrustes which maladjusted persons find so uncomfortable. My one son Mark found it so uncomfortable that he tried to beat his brains out on it, and had to be put in a padded cell. Really. That is how cracy he was. He would have tried to kill himself with a Stradivarius violin, if there had been one around—or the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or Walter Cronkite’s mustache.
“But I am a storyteller, not a cultural anthropologist, no matter what the diploma says. And I am not even the best storyteller in my own family when it comes to the relationship of culture to mental health. My son Mark is the best storyteller in that area. He wrote an excellent book about going crazy and recovering. It is called The Eden Express. Mark remembers everything. His wish is to tell people who are going insane something about the shape of the roller coaster they are on. It helps sometimes to know the shape of a roller coaster. How many of you here have taken Thorazine?
“Mark has taught me never to romanticize mental illness, never to imagine a brilliant and beguiling schizophrenic who makes more sense about life than his or her doctor or even the president of Harvard University. Mark says that schizophrenia is as ghastly and debilitating as smallpox or rabies or any other unspeakable disease you care to name. Society cannot be blamed, and neither, thank God, can the friends and relatives of the patient. Schizophrenia is an internal chemical catastrophe. It is a case of monstrously bad genetic luck, bad luck of a sort encountered in absolutely every sort of society—including the Australian aborigines and the middle class of Vienna, Austria, before the Second World War.
“Plenty of other writers at this very moment are writing a story about an admirable, perhaps even a divine schizophrenic. Why? Because the story is wildly applauded every time it is told. It blames the culture and the economy and the society and everything but the disease itself for making the patient unwell. Mark says that is wrong.
“As his father, though, I am still free to say this, I think: I believe that a culture, a combination of ideas and artifacts, can sometimes make a healthy person behave against his or her best interests, and against the best interests of the society and the planet, too.
“I have made up a story about that for this moment, and for this audience in this motel. It goes like this:
“There is this psychiatrist, you see. He is a colonel in the German SS in Poland during World War Two. His name is Vonnegut. That is a good German name. Colonel Vonnegut is supposed to look after the mental health of SS people in his area, which includes the uniformed staff at Auschwitz.
“Colonel Vonnegut has a skull and crossbones on his hat. Ordinarily, when an SS man wants to express his love for a woman, he gives
her a skull and crossbones to wear. But Colonel Vonnegut is in love with an SS woman, and she already has skulls and crossbones of her own. So he sends her candy instead.
“But that is not the major crisis in the story. The most moving part is when a young, idealistic SS lieutenant comes to Vonnegut for help. His name is Dampfwalze. Dampjwalze means ’steamroller.’ Vonnegut means nothing. Ask any critic on The New York Review of Books.
“Lieutenant Dampfwalze, who could be played by Peter O’Toole, feels that he can’t cut the mustard anymore on the railroad platform at Auschwitz, where boxcars of people are unloaded day after day. He is sick and tired of it, but he has the wisdom to seek professional help. Dr. Vonnegut is an eclectic worker in the field of mental health, incidentally, a pragmatic man. He is a little bit Jungian, a little bit Freudian, a little bit Rankian—and so on. He has an open and inquiring mind.
“Actually, he cures Dampfwalze with megavitamins, the same things that cured my son. The Nazis haven’t received nearly the credit they deserve for pioneering megavitamin therapy.
“So Dampfwalze is ready to return to duty. His eyes are shining again. His appetite is good. He sleeps like a baby every night. And he asks Dr. Vonnegut how serious his illness had been.
“Dr. Vonnegut tells him that, if Dampfwalze hadn’t recognized nature’s little danger signals early and put himself into the hands of modern medicine, he might have tried to shoot Adolf Hitler by and by. That is how sick he was.
“And the moral of that story, I think, is that a society, on occasion, can be the worst possible describer of mental health.
“I thank you for your attention.”
• • •
Three of my six children are adopted nephews. They have retained their original name, the most original of all names, which is Adams. My first wife and I adopted them after, within a period of only twenty-four hours, their father drowned when his commuter train went off an open drawbridge in New Jersey and then their mother died of cancer in a hospital. Their mother was my only sister, and her death had been expected for quite a while.
There was a fourth Adams brother, an infant, who was adopted by a first cousin of his father in Birmingham, Alabama.
They were orphaned in September of 1958, nearly twenty-two years ago as I write. I came down from Cape Cod at once to run their house in Rumson, New Jersey. They held a meeting at which I was not present. They came downstairs together with a single demand: that they be kept together along with their dogs. One of the dogs, a sheep dog named Sandy, would become the closest friend I have ever had.
• • •
James Adams, the oldest of the orphans, as we continue to call them, was then fourteen. He is now thirty-six, the age I was when Jane and I adopted him. He attended college briefly, then became a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru, and then a goat farmer in Jamaica, and is now a cabinetmaker in Leverett, Massachusetts.
He is married to Barbara D’Arthanay, a former New England schoolteacher who lived and worked with him for several years on his goat farm on a mountaintop in Jamaica. They are as uninterested in social rank and property as was Henry David Thoreau.
They have given me a grandchild. The area in which they are raising that child consists largely of farmlands being recaptured by the wilderness. The name of the child resonates with the innocent imperialism of earlier white colonists. Her name is India Adams.
God watch over India Adams in the untamed American wilderness.
• • •
A tale from Jim’s bachelor days:
Jim went down the Amazon with two friends on a raft after he left the Peace Corps. One night, while the raft was tied up near Manaus, the old rubber boom town in Brazil, a speedboat came alongside. At the wheel was Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Soviet poet. He had Brazilian friends along. He asked in English if he and his party could come aboard the raft for drinks. In exchange, he said, he would give his hosts a perfect name for their raft.
So there was some drinking on the raft, and fighting for some reason broke out between Yevtushenko and Jim.
So the party was over, and the visitors got back in their speedboat. Just before they cast off, Yevtushenko said: “I have not forgotten my promise. You should call your raft The Huckleberry Finn.”
Years later I myself would meet Yevtushenko, and I would ask him if the story was true.
“Ah!” he said. “Ah! That was your son? He is a very bad boy!”
Small world.
• • •
Steven Adams was eleven when we adopted him, the same age as my natural son Mark. He was the least dependent of the lot, being a superb athlete and having joined an alternative family long before his parents died, the worldwide family of coaches and teammates and competitors everywhere. Coaches on Cape Cod, just like the coaches in New Jersey, greeted him like a long-lost son.
Steve arrived on Cape Cod wearing a jacket with this emblazoned on the back: “New Jersey Little League All-Stars.” Further introductions were unnecessary.
He went to Dartmouth, where he studied English literature and played end. He is in Los Angeles now, a professional writer of comedy for television shows. He is thirty-three and has never married, and he runs a lot.
I know Steve least well of all my children, since, to his credit, he has had the least need of me. At the same time, he is the only one who has chosen to become what I am, which is a full-time writer. His work now is entirely comical. As far as I know, he will not begin a piece unless it promises to lead him at once to a joke of some kind. He is well paid for unseriousness. If he ever became serious, he would lose his job.
His job also requires him to ignore all he learned at Dartmouth of history and literature and philosophy and what have you, and to joke only about matters with which his audience is familiar, recent television commercials, celebrities of the moment, big-grossing motion pictures of the past year, extraordinarily popular records, political figures in the news incessantly, and on and on. This must become tiresome.
He is the most rootless of my children, and the one most likely to drift away. If he reproduces, his children, in California, perhaps, will never find out, probably, unless they read this book, that they are de St. Andrés and have second cousins named Carl Hiroaki Vonnegut and Emiko Alice Vonnegut and on and on.
• • •
Steve’s younger brother Kurt Adams, nine years old when we adopted him, also lives in Leverett, near his brother Jim. Kurt was the first of the brothers to settle there. He is thirty-two now, and a pilot for Air New England, and a builder on speculation of beautiful post-and-beam houses which are entirely heated by wood stoves. He lives in such a house himself. He is married to an excellent artist named Lindsay Palermo. So far, they have not had a child.
Kurt is the only canny business person of the lot. He is of modest means, but he makes satisfying gains on small investments. He has a little victory garden of dollars that he tends.
The rest do not care for money games. They cannot pay attention—any more than my father or mother or sister could, than my brother can.
This is a matter of genetics, I think. People are born caring or not caring about managing money well.
We are all experiments in enthusiasms, narrow and preordained. I write.
• • •
My brother is an enthusiast for the scientific study of thunderstorms. My late sister was born to be an enthusiast for painting and sculpture, but resisted. She said, very wisely, in my opinion, “Just because you have talent, it doesn’t mean that you have to do something with it.”
• • •
There is a fourth Adams brother. He was an infant when his mother died. He was adopted by a first cousin of his father in Birmingham, Alabama, a judge. His mother died before she could have any influence over his character, and yet his attitudes toward life are identical with hers—and his jokes. His name is Peter Nice.
He talks of settling in Leverett—to be near his brothers, who are more like him than anyone else in the world.
&n
bsp; • • •
When we adopted the Adamses, two of our natural children got artificial twins. Steve Adams was the same age as Mark Vonnegut. Kurt Adams was the same age as Edith Vonnegut. This was purely delightful for Edith, who took her new twin to “Show and Tell” at the Barnstable Elementary School. She got two more strong older brothers, as well. For Mark, the benefits of a family merger weren’t so apparent at once. He was no longer the oldest child and the only male child—and so on.
• • •
All the children remain close these days, and think of themselves as genuine brothers and sisters. They are lucky to have so many interested and responsive relatives. There are many affectionate reunions a year in the big old house on Cape Cod where they were raised together. They were such a formidable gang when they were young that one policeman became a specialist in their habits and haunts. He had a lovely name, and always left his blue flasher on when he parked in our yard. His name was Sergeant Nightingale.
Whenever Sergeant Nightingale came to interrogate this child or that one, the flasher on his cruiser splashed our house with blue as it went around and around.
Nobody ever went to prison, though.
Nobody ever dealt dope.
• • •
There was only one really fancy auto smashup. Mark rolled and totaled a Volkswagen Microbus with about eight people in it. It scattered people out along the shoulder of the road the way a saltshaker will scatter salt. People flew out through the sun roof, out through the side doors, out through the tailgate. Mark was the last one to fly out. He landed on his feet, and found himself facing oncoming traffic like a football lineman.
Nobody was killed or seriously hurt, thank God.
Jim Adams was not the only one of my children to come close to actual combat with a major literary figure. About the time Jim and Yevtushenko were menacing each other on the Amazon, Mark Vonnegut was considering a fight with Jack Kerouac in our kitchen on Cape Cod. These confrontations even took place in the same time zone, but in different hemispheres.
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