Palm Sunday, Welcome to the Monkey House

by Kurt Jr. Vonnegut

  MY father had few gifts for getting along famously with me. That's life. We did not spend much time together, and conversations were arch and distant. But Father's younger brother, Uncle Alex, a Harvard graduate and life insurance salesman, was responsive and amusing and generous with me, was my ideal grown-up friend.

  He was also then a socialist, and among the books he gave me, when I was a high school sophomore, was Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. I understood it perfectly and loved it, since it made low comedy of the empty graces and aggressively useless possessions which my parents, and especially my mother, meant to regain someday.

  IT will be noted that my mother attempted to be what I have in fact become—which is a professional writer.

  It used to be a fairly reliable rule of American middle-class life that a son could be expected to try hard, with his own life, to make some of his disappointed mother's dreams come true. This may no longer be the case. Things change.

  UNCLE John's coda to the history of my family is this:

  "In reviewing K's ancestors for four generations it is highly significant that there was not a weakling, nor even a mildly psychotic or neurotic individual in the lot. Taken together they provided K with a rich bank of genes upon which to draw. How this genetic background was influenced by K's adolescent conditioning is for him to say. But with respect to his ancestors who came to America from their homeland, let him observe the counsel of the poet Goethe:

  'WAS DU ERERBET VON DEINEN VATERN HAST, ERWIRB ES; UM EST ZU BESITZEN.'

  "WE WILL LET HIM TELL HIS OWN STORY."

  The German quotation means this, and I take it seriously: "Whatever it is that you have inherited from your father, you are going to have to earn it if it is to really belong to you."

  WHEN I LOST MY INNOCENCE

  AND my story seems to be this to me: I left Indianapolis, where my ancestors had prepared so many comforts and privileges for me, because those comforts and privileges were finally based on money, and the money was gone.

  I might have stayed if I had done what my father had done, which was to marry one of the richest women in town. But I married a poor one instead. I might have stayed if my father had not told me this: be anything but an architect. He and my older brother, who had become a chemist, urged me to study chemistry instead. I would have liked to be an architect, and an architect in Indianapolis at that. I would have become a third-generation Indianapolis architect. There can't be very many of those around.

  But Father was so full of anger and sorrow about having had no work as an architect during the Great Depression that he persuaded me that I, too, would be that unhappy if I studied architecture.

  So I entered Cornell University in 1940 as a chemistry student. I had in high school been an editor of The Shortridge Daily Echo, one of two high school dailies in the country at the time, so I also qualified easily for the staff of The Cornell Daily Sun.

  The children now running the Sun invited me to speak at their annual banquet in Ithaca, New York, on May 3, 1980. The Sun, by the way, a corporation entirely separate from the university, will be one hundred years old when this book is published—in 1981.

  This doddering alumnus, who drinks no more, had this to say above the rattling of the ice cubes:

  "Good evening, fellow Americans.

  "You should have invited a more sentimental speaker, I think. This is surely a sentimental occasion, and I am sentimental about faithful dogs sometimes, but that is as far as it goes.

  "The most distinguished living writer who was also a Sun man is, of course, Elwyn Brooks White of the class of 1921. He will be eighty-one on July eleventh of this year. You might want to send him a card. His mind is as clear as a bell, and he is not only sentimental about dogs but about Cornell.

  "I myself liked only two things about this place: the Sun and the horse-drawn artillery. Yes—there was horse-drawn artillery here in my time. I suppose I should tell you how old I am, too. I will be fifty-eight in November of this year. You might want to send me a card, too. We never hooked up the horses to caissons, because we knew that was no way to frighten Hitler. So we just put saddles on the horses, and pretended we were at war with Indians, and rode around all afternoon.

  "It was not Cornell's fault that I did not like this place much, in case some alumni secretary or chaplain is about to burst into tears. It was my father's fault. He said I should become a chemist like my brother, and not waste my time and his money on subjects he considered so much junk jewelry—literature, history, philosophy. I had no talent for science. What was infinitely worse: all my fraternity brothers were engineers.

  "I probably would have adored this hellhole, if I had been allowed to study and discuss the finer things in life. Also: I would not have become a writer.

  "I eventually wound up on academic probation. I was accelerating my course at the time—because of the war. My instructor in organic chemistry was my lab partner in biochemistry. He was fit to be tied.

  "And one day I came down with pneumonia. It is such a dreamy disease. Pneumonia used to be called 'the old people's friend.' It can be a young person's friend, too. All that you feel is that you are sleepy and that it is time to go. I did not die, so far as I know—but I left Cornell, and I've never come back until now.

  "Good evening, fellow Cornellians. I am here to congratulate The Cornell Daily Sun on its one-hundredth anniversary. To place this event in historical perspective: the Sun is now forty years younger than the saxophone, and sixty years older than the electric guitar.

  "It was a family to me—one that included women. Once a week we allowed coeds to put together a woman's page, but I never got to know any of them. They always seemed so burned up about something. I never did find out what it was. It must have been something over at the sorority house.

  "I pity you Sun people of today for not having truly great leaders to write about—Roosevelt and Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek and Stalin on the side of virtue, and Hitler and Mussolini and Emperor Hirohito on the side of sin.

  "Oh, sure, we have another world war coming, and another great depression, but where are the leaders this time? All you have is a lot of ordinary people standing around with their thumbs up their ass.

  "Here is what we must do, if glamour is to be restored to those who lead us into catastrophes, out of catastrophes, and then back into catastrophes again: We must outlaw television and set an example for our children by worshiping the silver screens in motion picture palaces every week.

  "We should see moving and talking images of leaders only once a week in newsreels. This is the only way we can get leaders all balled up in our heads with movie stars again.

  "When I was a freshman here, I didn't know or care where the life of Ginger Rogers ended and the life of General Douglas Mac Arthur began. The senior senator from California was Mickey Mouse, who would serve with great distinction as a bombardier in the Pacific during the Second World War. Commander Mouse dropped a bomb right down the smokestack of a Japanese battleship. The captain of the battleship was Charlie Chan. Boy, was he mad.

  "What a shame that there are so many young people here who never saw J. Edgar Hoover on the silver screen. This was a man fourteen feet high who could not be bribed. Imagine a man who loved this country so much that he could not be bribed, except for some minor carpentry on his house. You can't adore such integrity without the magic of the silver screen.

  "Was the Sun any good when I was here? I don't know, and I am afraid to find out. I remember I spelled the first name of Ethel Barrymore 'E-T-H-Y-L' one time—in a headline.

  "In preparation for this event, I had lunch last week with the best editor in chief I worked under here. That was Miller Harris, who is one year older than I am. I would sure hate to be as old as he is. I wouldn't mind being as old as E. B. White, if I could actually be E. B. White. Miller Harris is president of the Eagle Shirtmakers now. I ordered a shirt from him one time, and he sent me a bill for one one-hundred-forty-fourth of a gross.

>   "He said at lunch that the Sun in our day was without question the finest student paper in the United States of America. It would be nice if that were true. Eagle shirts, I know, are the greatest shirts in the world.

  "I was shattered, I remember, during my sophomore year here, when a world traveler said that Cornell was the forty-ninth greatest university in the world. I had hoped we would at least be in the high teens somewhere. Little did I realize that going to an only marginally great university would also make me a writer.

  "That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time. I spent an awful lot of time here buying gray flannel. I never could find the right shade.

  "I finally gave up on gray flannel entirely, and went to the University of Chicago, the forty-eighth greatest university in the world.

  "Do I know Thomas Pynchon? No. Did I know Vladimir Nabokov? No. I know and knew Miller Harris, the president of Eagle Shirtmakers.

  "Well—I am more sentimental about this occasion than I have so far indicated. We chemists can be as sentimental as anybody. Our emotional lives, probably because of the A-bomb and the H-bomb, and the way we spell 'Ethel,' have been much maligned.

  "I found a family here at the Sun, or I no doubt would have invited pneumonia into my thorax during my freshman year. Those of you who have been kind enough to read a book of mine, any book of mine, will know of my admiration for large families, whether real or artificial, as the primary supporters of mental health.

  "And it is surely curious that I, as an outspoken enemy of the disease called loneliness, should now remember as my happiest times in Ithaca the hours when I was most alone.

  "I was happiest here when I was all alone—and it was very late at night, and I was walking up the hill after having helped to put the Sun to bed.

  "All the other university people, teachers and students alike, were asleep. They had been playing games all day long with what was known about real life. They had been repeating famous arguments and experiments, and asking one another the sorts of hard questions real life would be asking by and by.

  "We on the Sun were already in the midst of real life. By God, if we weren't! We had just designed and written and caused to be manufactured yet another morning newspaper for a highly intelligent American community of respectable size—yes, and not during the Harding administration, either, but during 1940, '41, and '42, with the Great Depression ending, and with World War Two well begun.

  "I am an agnostic as some of you may have gleaned from my writings. But I have to tell you that, as I trudged up the hill so late at night and all alone, I knew that God Almighty approved of me."

  I make my living as a writer in New York City, the capital of the world, and am, so far as I know, now the only person from Indianapolis who is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Until last year, there were two of us. The other one was Janet Planner, who, writing under the name of "Genet," was The New Yorker's Paris correspondent for thirty years or more. I got to know her some in recent years, and once wrote in a book I gave her, "Indianapolis needs you!"

  She read that, and she said to me, "How little you know."

  She used to know my father, too, when she was a young woman—before she lit out for the sunrise and never went home again. Her family in Indianapolis was best known for the mortuaries some of its members ran.

  Janet Planner was the most deft and charming literary stylist Indianapolis has so far produced, and the one who came closest to being a planetary citizen, too. She was not a local writer. Neither was she, like another Hoosier writer, Ernie Pyle, a globe-trotting rube.

  So when she died here in New York, I wanted to make sure that her native city knew about it. I telephoned the city desk of The Indianapolis Star, a morning paper being put to bed. Nobody in the city room had ever heard of her. Neither was anybody much interested when I told of all she had done.

  But then I found a way to excite them, to get them to run a front page obituary, which was a rewrite of the obituary that had appeared in that morning's New York Times.

  What did the trick? I told them that she was somehow related to the people who ran the funeral homes.

  I myself will get an obituary in an Indianapolis paper when I die because I am related to people who used to own a chain of hardware stores. The chain was wrecked by discount stores after the Second World War. It had a manufacturing division, which made door hardware, and that was bought by a conglomerate. It beat the mortuary business, at any rate.

  I used to work in the main store of the Vonnegut Hardware Company in the summertime, when I was high school age. I ran a freight elevator. I made up packages in the shipping room, and so on. I liked what we sold. It was all so honest and practical.

  And I discovered only the other day how sentimental I still was about the hardware business—when I was asked by one Gunilla Boethius of Aftonbladet, a Swedish newspaper, to write for one thousand crowns a short essay on this subject: "When I Lost My Innocence."

  On May 9, 1980, I wrote this letter:

  Dear Gunilla Boethius—

  I thank you for your letter of April 25, received by me only this morning.

  An enthusiasm for technological cures for almost all forms of human discontent was the only religion of my family during the Great Depression, when I first got to know that family well. It was religion enough for me, and one branch of the family owned the largest hardware store in Indianapolis, Indiana. I still do not believe that I was wrong to adore the cunning devices and compounds on sale there, and when I feel most lost in this world, I comfort myself by visiting a hardware store. I meditate there. I do not buy anything. A hammer is still my Jesus, and my Virgin Mary is still a cross-cut saw.

  But I learned how vile that religion of mine could be when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The date of that event can be found in almost any good reference book. How profound had my innocence been? Only six months before, as a captured American foot soldier, I had been in Dresden when it was burned to the ground by a purposely set firestorm. I was still innocent after that. Why? Because the technology which created that firestorm was so familiar to me. I understood it entirely, and so had no trouble imagining how the same amount of ingenuity and determination could benefit mankind once the war was over. I could even help. There was nothing in the bombs or the airplanes, after all, which could not, essentially, be bought at a small hardware store.

  As for fire: Everybody knows what you do with unwanted fire. You put water on it.

  But the bombing of Hiroshima compelled me to see that a trust in technology, like all the other great religions of the world, had to do with the human soul. I will bet you the one thousand crowns you have offered me for this piece that every one of the tales of lost innocence you receive will embody not only the startling discovery of the human soul, but of how diseased it can be.

  How sick was the soul revealed by the flash at Hiroshima? And I deny that it was a specifically American soul. It was the soul of every highly industrialized nation on earth, whether at war or at peace. How sick was it? It was so sick that it did not want to live anymore. What other sort of soul would create a new physics based on nightmares, would place into the hands of mere politicians a planet so "destabilized," to borrow a CIA term, that the briefest fit of stupidity could easily guarantee the end of the world?

  It is supposed to be good to lose one's innocence. I do not read them, but I think that is what my novels say, so it must be true. I, for one, now know what is really going on, so I can plan more shrewdly and be less open to surprise. But my morale has been lowered a good deal, so I am probably not any stronger than I used to be. Since Hiroshima, I have increased my amperes but decreased my volts, and wound up with the same number of watts, so to speak.

  It is quite awful, really, to realize that perhaps most of the people around me find lives in the service of machines so tedious and exasperating that they would not mind much, even if they have
children, if life were turned off like a light switch at any time. How many of your readers will deny that the movie Dr. Strangelove was so popular because its ending was such a happy one?

  I am invited to all sorts of neo-Luddite gatherings, of course, and am sometimes asked to speak. I had this to say between rock and roll numbers at an antinuke rally in Washington, D.C., on May 6, 1979:

  "I am embarrassed. We are all embarrassed. We Americans have guided our destinies so clumsily, with all the world watching, that we must now protect ourselves against our own government and our own industries.

  "Not to do so would be suicide. We have discovered a brand-new method for committing suicide—family style, Reverend Jim Jones style, and by the millions. What is the method? To say nothing and do nothing about what some of our businessmen and military men are doing with the most unstable substances and the most persistent poisons to be found anywhere in the universe.

  "The people who play with such chemicals are so dumb!

  "They are also vicious. How vicious it is of them to tell us as little as possible about the hideousness of nuclear weapons and power plants!

  "And, among all the dumb and vicious people, who jeopardizes all life on earth with hearts so light? I suggest to you that it is those who will lie for the nuclear industries, or who will teach their executives how to lie convincingly —for a fee. I speak of certain lawyers and communicators, and all public relations experts. The so-called profession of public relations, an American invention, stands entirely disgraced today.

  "The lies we have been fed about nuclear energy have been as cunningly handcrafted as the masterpieces of Benvenuto Cellini. They have been a damned sight better built, I must say, than the atomic energy plants themselves.