(Not that You Asked)

by Steve Almond

  A month later, while uncharacteristically cleaning my car, I came upon the ad for the Connecticut Forum, which was taking place the very next evening. I was no longer suffering under the delusion that I would be able to contact Vonnegut directly. And thus, a notion now took root inside my pointy little head: I had to go see Kurt Vonnegut. I had to drive down to Hartford and ask him for an interview. I became convinced this would be my one and only shot at a face-to-face. The man was eighty-three years old. He had been smoking those Pall Malls (unfiltered) for longer than my parents have been alive. To put it indelicately: He would soon be dead.

  THE CONNECTICUT FORUM event was sold out, naturally. But my friend Catherine, who appears to know every person of consequence in Hartford, managed to finagle me a ticket. And not just to the panel, but to the cocktail reception and dinner beforehand, at which the authors would be appearing.

  I spent all that Friday composing a brief letter of introduction2 and rehearsing what I would say to Vonnegut. I bought a special envelope, one that would fit into his pocket. I got a haircut. For the first time in years, I had a pair of pants dry-cleaned.

  ABOUT THE HAIRCUT: It was the worst of my adult life. I had asked my stylist Linda to make sure the bangs weren’t too long, as I didn’t like the idea of looking shaggy for Vonnegut. I wanted him to be able to see my eyes, and specifically the nobility shining forth from them. But Linda left the bangs about a half-inch short and boxy at the corners. I looked like a Beatle, if you can imagine the Beatles reuniting for a tour at age forty and returning (ill-advisedly) to the moptop look.

  ANOTHER IRRELEVANT DETAIL: On the way down to Hartford I was pulled over by a cop for eating a ham sandwich.

  It is illegal to eat pork on Connecticut byways.

  I ARRIVED IN Hartford in an addled state. It did not help that I was attending what I would call a corporate event. Honestly, I had no idea what the Connecticut Forum was. But it was immediately apparent they have a lot of money. As soon as Catherine and I arrived at the venue we started to encounter people who had that unmistakable sheen of prosperity: tailored suits, jewelry, the subtle dermal cross-hatchings of a ski tan.

  We got talking to one such couple in the elevator.

  “Are you all Vonnegut fans?” I asked.

  “Not really,” the man said. He was probably in his midfifties. “I’ve never read any of his books.”

  “None of them? Not even Slaughterhouse-Five?”

  He shook his head.

  “What about Joyce Carol Oates?”

  “What has she written?” he asked pleasantly.

  AND THIS IS WHAT I mean by a corporate event. Most of the people at this cocktail/dinner thingee were there not because they were fans of the authors, but because it was a way of supporting the arts, being a good corporate citizen.

  Being a good corporate citizen means shaving an infinitesimal portion from your profits—profits that have skyrocketed as the government has dedicated itself to the financial aggrandizement of the private sector while virtually eliminating public funding for the arts (forget the poor)—and politely tossing it at programs like the Connecticut Forum, where lots of well-heeled patrons can experience the joys of literature or, at least, a literary dog and pony show, along with noshing on some truly excellent hors d’oeuvres.

  I’m sounding angry here. What I felt in talking with these folks in the elevator was something closer to despair.

  THE COCKTAIL RECEPTION was in a massive lobby. I staked out a spot near the table with the Kurt Vonnegut sign and gulped a glass of wine and said hello to my official hosts, the good people of Bank of America. They were all incredibly nice. This is one of the characteristics of the rich: If you are dressed properly, and don’t appear to want their money, they are incredibly nice.

  After a while, one of the guys in our circle said, “Isn’t that him?” We all turned and there was Kurt Vonnegut, shuffling toward his little table. I had never seen Vonnegut in any form other than his author photo. I expected a towering figure with a froth of brown curls. But gravity had tamped him down; his famous curls were ashy and shorn.

  We forget what the truly old look like in this culture, because we tuck them away in group homes when they start to look too scary.3. Vonnegut was terribly frail. The flesh had shrunk away from his eyes and gathered in folds above his collar. He stared out at the room full of strangers and sighed.

  “That’s so sad!” Catherine said. “He’s going to sit there and nobody is going to go up and talk to him.”

  It was sad. For about thirty seconds, none of us could work up the nerve to approach Kurt Vonnegut. He was such a legend, so much larger than life in the minds of his fans, and here he was, revealed as a mere mortal, closer to tortoise than god.

  This was my big chance. I needed to move. But I couldn’t do it. My whole plan felt suddenly absurd. Pushy. Or worse than pushy—grabby. I didn’t want to be just one more person grabbing at the guy. This would dishonor my status as a true fan. By the time I’d decided I was being a ninny (twenty-four seconds later) a young couple had walked up to him, and this set off a kind of Brownian surge. He was immediately enveloped by people, all of whom wanted to speak with him at the same time.

  A bald fellow at the back of the scrum shouted out, “Hey Kurt! I was in your house in Cape Cod back in 1969! Your nephew invited me to a party.”

  “Is that so?” Vonnegut’s voice was faint and wheezy.

  Someone asked about his kids and he ticked off their names. “Mark went crazy,” he said, referring to his eldest son. “But he’s okay now. He wrote a fine book.”

  “Eden Express!” said a woman with a camera. “I almost brought my copy.”

  Vonnegut coughed delicately. He looked pleased.

  An eager-looking blond woman asked him what he thought of George W. Bush.

  “He makes me wish Nixon were still president,” Vonnegut muttered.

  “Who do you think was the greatest president in your lifetime?”

  “I was fortunate to have lived during the reign of a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” He added, to no one in particular, “It was the polio that made him compassionate, you know. Being sick like that.”

  “You look great,” someone else said.

  “Nonsense,” he said.

  A pretty girl with auburn hair stepped shyly into Vonnegut’s view.

  “This girl came all the way from California to see you!” the blond woman exclaimed.

  “Why would you do that, my dear? It’s sunny in California!”

  The girl was trembling a little. She wore a white blouse that framed her breasts. There was a moment of suspense while she stood, flushed, struggling to speak. “I wanted to thank you,” she stammered. “Reading your work was what made me start to think for myself.”

  Vonnegut gazed at her. There was nothing lascivious in his eyes. He was merely sipping at her beauty. She radiated transference. It was as if Vonnegut were her father, some idealized version, which, of course, he was.

  BY THE TIME I worked up the nerve to approach him, Vonnegut looked wiped, so I didn’t waste any time.

  “I’ve been asked to write a biography of you,” I said.

  “By whom?” he said.

  It was a fair question, and I did what any self-respecting young fiction writer would do in this situation: I fictionalized. “Giroux & Schuster.”

  Vonnegut sighed. “I’ve heard nothing about it. My papers are collected at the Indiana University library. You are welcome to go look at them.”

  And that, as far as he was concerned, was that. He wasn’t defensive, exactly. But he declined to look at me. I felt like a traveling salesman being shown the door.

  “What I was hoping is that you might want to be interviewed.”

  Vonnegut gazed mournfully at his knuckles, as if hoping to discover a lit cigarette between two of them.

  I handed him my letter. He inspected the envelope briefly—such a lovely envelope!—and slipped it into his coat pocket.

 
The end.

  WAS I BUMMED? I was bummed as hell. My one chance to meet Vonnegut had been such a bust, such a nothing.

  Then again, the guy was eighty-three years old. He was in Hartford, Connecticut. He had five hundred people coming at him. I wasn’t going to get much. So we moved on to dinner, which consisted of large hunks of cow and a wedge of chocolate cake.

  I was seated at the table with Jennifer Weiner. I didn’t know her work, only that she was regarded as a popular chick lit author. She made a great point of proclaiming how honored and humbled and baffled she was to be part of a panel with Oates and Vonnegut. Little old her! It wasn’t that hard to figure out, really: She was the fizzy pop culture component.

  THE PANEL ITSELF was deeply strange, in the way that only a literary panel can be strange, which is to say the logical result of foisting together three socially maladroit loners before a large crowd of gawkers. The authors made no mention of each other’s work. They didn’t respond to one another’s ideas. They weren’t very nice to each other, actually. The most stunning example of this antagonism came less than half an hour in. Vonnegut was lamenting the destructive capacities of humankind, listing specific atrocities (the Holocaust, Nagasaki, the Roman Games) when Oates cut him off.

  “What sex—excuse me, Kurt—what sex is doing all this bad stuff?”

  Vonnegut looked confused. He hadn’t expected to be interrupted, nor had he quite heard Oates.

  “What?”

  “Which sex is doing all this stuff?” Oates asked again, in a chiding tone.

  It was an astounding moment.

  Here was Kurt Vonnegut, who had fought in the Second World War, who had been a POW during the firebombing of Dresden, who had converted that experience into one of the most powerful antiwar novels ever published, who had spent his entire life as an artist decrying the horror of war, who, as a citizen, had protested against Vietnam (and all the foul wars that would follow it), who has been, in short, the most celebrated and influential literary pacifist of the twentieth century.4. And rather than let him speak to a group of 2,700 well-heeled Hartfordians, Oates was trying to paint him as a warmongering hypocrite because he…had a penis. She sounded like a freshman-year feminist, drunk on her own sanctimony.

  Vonnegut offered a joke in response, something about how men made war because they were better at science. Harvard had done a study. He was trying to lighten the mood. Oates was not amused.

  If Vonnegut were less a gentleman, he might have suggested to Oates that aggression is a compulsion that transcends gender. As evidence, he might have pointed out to the crowd that Oates had just released a collection, Female of the Species, in which the protagonist of every single story is a female killer.

  I DON’T MEAN to play Vonnegut as the helpless victim here. He looked irritable throughout. And he seemed too tired to mask his feelings. He reminded me of my grandfather Irving in his final years. The word often used is “crotchety,” which boils down to impatience with the bullshit that passes for social nicety.

  At one point, for instance, the moderator asked him about Bush’s State of the Union speech, specifically his notion that America is addicted to oil.

  “That certainly isn’t a thought he could have by himself,” Vonnegut responded. The audience exploded into laughter. But Vonnegut wasn’t joking. “Everything that distinguishes our era from the dark ages—since we still have plagues and torture chambers—is what we’ve been able to do with petroleum, and that is going to end very soon.” He stared out into the audience. “I think the world is ending,” he said softly. “Our own intelligence tells us we’re perfectly awful animals, that we’re tearing the place apart and should get the hell out of here.”

  A thudding silence ensued.

  The moderator turned to Jen Weiner and asked if she had a more hopeful message to offer the audience.

  Weiner looked a bit panicked. “Wow,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting to have to deliver a message about humanity tonight.”

  “Well, leave,” Vonnegut murmured.

  I DON’T THINK Vonnegut meant to be cruel. He was simply taken aback that any author would sit before a packed house of fellow citizens and have nothing to say on the subject. More so, that she would act offended at the notion that she should have something to say.

  Nonetheless, the damage was done. Weiner spent the rest of the panel sniping at Vonnegut. Unfortunately, Weiner is one of those people deeply invested in the idea that her body contains no mean bones. So her attacks were of the throw-a-rock-but-hide-your-hand variety. She made a joke about Vonnegut wanting to kick her off the stage. She asked him why he would offer advice to high school kids if he felt the world was ending. She expressed shock that Vonnegut had any children.5.

  So he was getting it from both sides now.

  AS IT TURNED OUT, Vonnegut needn’t have bothered chiding Weiner. She did a bang-up job of revealing herself to the crowd. Her most emphatic statement of the night was about how great it was to hang out on the set of In Her Shoes, the movie they made from one of her books. And how she actually got to meet Cameron Diaz. And how super excited she was to be meeting Cameron, but all she could think to say is, “Where’s Justin?” which is totally funny if you happen to know that Cameron Diaz is totally dating the singer Justin Timberlake!

  I REALIZE THAT I’m being harsh toward Oates and Weiner, and I realize that my motives may be questioned. I feel protective of Vonnegut. He alone seemed to grasp that the panel was a rare chance for writers to speak about what they actually do, and why it might matter. He was compulsively honest with the crowd—about his fears, his doubts, even his own motives. This is why I found the conduct of his colleagues so odious. They weren’t just petty or vain. They were disingenuous.

  Oates, for instance, insisted her famous infatuation with violence had nothing to do with her own internal life. Instead, she offered a wistful account of her upbringing on a farm with lots of animals and a river flowing past. She sounded like Laura Ingalls Wilder, not a woman who has made her nut channeling serial killers.6.

  VONNEGUT WAS ALSO the only author who seemed burdened by the state of the human race, and the American empire in particular. He kept making these big, clanging statements. The crowd had no idea what to do. Our citizens aren’t used to having their fantasies punctured. We don’t mind watching guys like Jon Stewart josh around about that silly war in Iraq, or global warming. But when someone actually points out that our species is goose-stepping toward extinction—without a comforting laugh line at the end—things get uncomfortable.

  Far from offering support, his co-panelists played him as a cranky doomseeker.7. Neither one had much to say about the moral crises facing this country. Oates spoke of her stories as if they were merely problems of language to be solved, an oddly bloodless attitude given her preoccupation with, well, blood. Weiner seemed most interested in meeting really cool celebs. These were the two authorial personas on display: the geeky genius whose art is hermetically sealed off from the vulgarities of the real world, and the crowd-pleaser slavish after shiny morsels of fame.8 Vonnegut, in his belief that artists should serve as instruments of destiny, was utterly alone.

  As the first half of the evening drew to a close, Weiner and Oates made a beeline for the wings. Vonnegut rose to his feet with great deliberation. He took a cautious first step, to avoid tripping over his microphone wire. Then he began a long, shuffling trip across the empty stage. “Oh, no,” the woman next to me said tenderly. “He’s all by himself!”

  AFTER INTERMISSION came questions from the audience.

  Someone asked, “What is the political responsibility of a writer?”

  Vonnegut responded, “We need to say what political responsibility does an American have.”

  Someone asked, “What’s the single most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”

  Vonnegut said, “My Lord, that’s a tough question, because there’s so much beauty, really; it’s what keeps me going in life, is just glimpsing beauty all the time. I s
uppose the most beautiful thing, though you can’t see it exactly, is music.”

  Someone asked what his essential topic was.

  Vonnegut said, “I write again and again about my family.”

  Toward the end, a girl named Mary asked Vonnegut, “Can you sum up your philosophy of life in two sentences? And will you go to the prom with me? It is my senior year.”

  It was the kind of setup Vonnegut should have knocked out of the ballpark. But he looked exhausted. More than that, he looked heartbroken. This is what Weiner and Oates seemed unable to grasp: The man was heartbroken.

  Not sexist. Not cranky. Heartbroken.

  He had spent his entire life writing stories and essays and novels in the naked hope that he might redeem his readers. As grim and dystopic as some of those books were, every one was written under the assumption that human beings are capable of a greater decency. And not because of God’s will, that tired old crutch. But because of their simple duty to others of their kind.

  Now, in the shadow of his own death, he was facing the incontrovertible evidence that his life’s work had been for naught. Right before his eyes, Americans had regressed to a state of infantile omnipotence. They drove SUVs and cheered for wars on TV and worshipped the beautiful and ignorant and despised the poor and brushed aside the science of their own doom. They had lost interest in their own consciences, and declined to make the sacrifices that might spare their very own grandchildren.

  “My philosophy of life?” Vonnegut said. “I haven’t a clue.”

  “What about the prom?” the moderator said, hopefully.

  Vonnegut made a crack about the girl being jailbait.

  IT WAS A LAUGH LINE, and some people did laugh. But there was a terrible disappointment in the moment: Vonnegut, for all his gifts of compassion, was failing in a simple act of generosity.