Palm Sunday, Welcome to the Monkey House

by Kurt Jr. Vonnegut

  That was nothing new.

  I write this in October of 1976, and it so happens that only two nights ago I saw a screening of Marcel Ophul's new documentary on war crimes, "The Memory of Justice," which included movies, taken from the air, of the Dresden raid—at night. The city appeared to boil, and I was down there somewhere.

  I was supposed to appear onstage afterwards, with some other people who had had intimate experiences with Nazi death camps and so on, and to contribute my notions as to the meaning of it all.

  Atrocities celebrate meaninglessness, surely. I was mute. I did not mount the stage. I went home.

  The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is.

  One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I'm in.

  THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION

  So I left my first wife and Cape Cod home forever in 1971. All our children save for the youngest, Nanette, had lit out for the Territory, so to speak. I became a soldier in what many were calling a sexual revolution. My departure itself was so sexual that a French name for orgasm describes it to a tee. It was a "little death."

  There were similar little deaths going on all around me, of course, and that continues to be the situation today. In the case of long marriages, such departures really are make-believe dying, a salute to a marriage in its good old days, sheepish acknowledgment that the marriage could have been perfect right up to the end, if only one partner or the other one had managed to die peacefully just a little ahead of time. Can I say this without seeming to praise death? I hope so. I am praising literature, I think—praising stories that satisfy because they end where they should, before they stop being stories.

  I left the house and all its furnishings and the car and the bank accounts behind, and taking only my clothing with me, I departed for New York City, the capital of the World, on a heavier-than-air flying machine. I started all over again.

  As for real death—it has always been a temptation to me, since my mother solved so many problems with it. The child of a suicide will naturally think of death, the big one, as a logical solution to any problem, even one in simple algebra. Question: If Farmer A can plant 300 potatoes an hour, and Farmer B can plant potatoes fifty percent faster, and Farmer C can plant potatoes one third as fast as Farmer B, and 10,000 potatoes are to be planted to an acre, how many nine-hour days will it take Farmers A, B, and C, working simultaneously, to plant 25 acres? Answer: I think I'll blow my brains out.

  IF the story of an American father's departure from his hearth is allowed to tell itself, if it is allowed to wag tongues when he isn't around, it will tell the same story it would have told a hundred years ago, of booze and wicked women.

  Such a story is told in my case, I'm sure.

  Closer to the truth these days, in my opinion, is a tale of a man's cold sober flight into unpopulated nothingness. The booze and the women, good and bad, are likely to come along in time, but nothingness is the first seductress—again, the little death.

  To the middle-class wives and children across this land whose male head of household has recently departed, learn the truth of his present condition from yet another great contemporary poem by the Statler Brothers, "Flowers on the Wall":

  I keep hearing you're concerned

  About my happiness.

  But all the thought you've given me

  Is conscience, I guess.

  If I were walkin' in your shoes

  I wouldn't worry none.

  While you 'n' your friends are worryin'

  'Bout me

  I'm havin' lots of fun:

  Countin' flowers on the wall,

  That don't bother me at all,

  Playin' solitaire till dawn

  With a deck of fifty-one,

  Smokin' cigarettes and watchin'

  Captain Kangaroo.

  Now don't tell me

  I've nothin' to do.

  Tonight I dressed in tails

  Pretending I was on the town;

  Long as I can dream it's hard to

  Slow this swinger down. So please don't give

  A thought to me,

  I'm really doin' fine,

  And you can always find me here,

  I'm havin' quite a time:

  Countin' flowers on the wall,

  That don't bother me at all,

  Playin' solitaire till dawn with a deck of fifty-one,

  Smokin' cigarettes and watchin'

  Captain Kangaroo.

  Now don't tell me

  I've nothin' to do.

  It's good to see you,

  I must go,

  I know I look a fright;

  Anyway my eyes are not

  Accustomed to this light.

  And my shoes are not

  Accustomed to this hard concrete,

  So I must go back to my room

  And make my day complete:

  Countin' flowers on the wall,

  That don't bother me at all,

  Playin' solitaire till dawn

  With a deck of fifty-one,

  Smokin' cigarettes and watchin'

  Captain Kangaroo.

  Now don't tell me

  I've nothin' to do.

  © Copyright 1965, 1966 by Southwind Music.

  THIS was written by Lew DeWitt, the only one of the four Statler Brothers to have been divorced. It is not a poem of escape or rebirth. It is a poem about the end of a man's usefulness.

  The man understands that his wife deserves the tragic dignity of being a widow now.

  OR so he feels.

  And much of what any human being feels is oceanic. The wife of a man counting the flowers on the wall may not yearn so much to be a widow, and yet the culture in which the man is floating may be telling him that it is right for her to yearn for that.

  He is no longer needed as a father, and no longer useful as a soldier who could stop a bullet winging toward his loved ones, and he has no hope for being honored for his wisdom, for it is well understood that people only become more tiresome as they grow old.

  The man is experimenting with the Christian idea of heaven without actually dying, and more and more women, of course, are doing it, too. In heaven, you see, or so the childish dream goes, people are liked and honored simply for having been alive. They don't have to have any utility up there.

  The man counting flowers on the wall has no appreciable utility anymore. He probably wasn't all that good in earning money even when he was in his prime. What is he waiting for?

  For an angel to knock on his door. Angels love anybody who has simply been alive.

  IT seems to me that the most universal revolutionary wish now or ever is a wish for heaven, a wish by a human being to be honored by angels for something other than beauty or usefulness.

  The women's liberation movement of today in America, in its most oceanic sense, is a wish by women to be liked for something other than their reproductive abilities, especially since the planet is harrowingly overpopulated. And the rejection of the Equal Rights Amendment by male state legislators is this clear statement by men, in my opinion: "We're sorry, girls, but your reproductive abilities are about all we can really like you for."

  The truth.

  THERE are other hard truths about the old and those without friends and those without skills or capital, and on and on.

  No angel knocked on my door while I was counting flowers on the wall, but an old friend with the gambling sickness was quick to find me. He had never borrowed anything from me, but now my turn had come. He told me of a family emergency, and asked for a sum that was just about the size of the little grubstake I had built. I ran into him about five years later, and he told me that he scarcely thought of anything but the day when he could pay me back with interest.

  And people rea
ched me by mail, most often asking me to read this or that new novel and write some words of praise for the jacket.

  No book had been published in the past ten years for which I had not written a blurb.

  But then an old friend wrote a book so bad that even I, crossing my eyes and ransacking it from end to end, could find nothing in it which could be mistaken for even a winsome sort of imbecility. So I declined to write a blurb. This may have been a major turning point in my life.

  It was a crisis in the life of another writer, too, it turned out. He had written a blurb for the book I had spurned. He called me up in the middle of the night, long distance and sounding as though he had just swallowed Drano. "My God," he said, "you just can't leave me on that book jacket all alone."

  AND so on. Somewhere in there my son Mark went crazy and recovered. I went out to Vancouver and saw how sick he was, and I put him in a nut house. I had to suppose that he might never get well again.

  He never blamed me or his mother, as I have said before. His generous wish not to blame us was so stubborn that he became almost a crank on the subject of chemical and genetic causes of mental illness. Talk therapy made sense as poetry but not as a means to a cure, he thought.

  But now, as a physician, as an open-minded scientist, he has delivered himself into the hands of a talk therapist, blabbing his head off about Jane and me and his sisters and his cousins and all that, I hope, and finding it hilariously beneficial.

  Hooray.

  There will be talk about how people wronged him. It's about time. It's about time.

  EVERYTHING is about time.

  Yes, and somewhere in there I looked in on George Roy Hill while he made a motion picture based on a novel of mine, Slaughterhouse-Five.

  There are only two American novelists who should be grateful for the movies which were made from their books. I am one of them. The other one? Margaret Mitchell, of course.

  THE Eastern Seaboard's intellectual ranks will probably always require one woman to be so brilliant, supposedly, that everybody else is scared to death of her. Mary McCarthy used to hold that job. Susan Sontag has it now.

  Susan Sontag approached me at a party one time. I was petrified. What brilliant question would she ask me, and what would be my pip-squeak reply?

  "How did you like the movie they made of Slaughter-House-Five?' she said.

  "I liked it a lot," I confessed.

  "So did I," she said.

  How sweet and easy that was, and what a great motion picture Slaughterhouse-Five must really be!

  THERE was a depression going on in the movie industry in Hollywood back then. Only two pictures were being made, both based on works of mine. The other one was Happy Birthday, Wanda June.

  This movie, starring Rod Steiger and Susannah York, turned out so abominably that I asked that my name be taken off it. I had heard of other writers doing that. What could be more dignified?

  This proved to be impossible, however. I alone had done the thing the credits said I had done. I had really written the thing.

  YES, and it wasn't the only bad job I ever did. I have graded my separate works from A to D. The grades I hand out to myself do not place me in literary history. I am comparing myself with myself. Thus can I give myself an A-plus for Cat's Cradle, while knowing that there was a writer named William Shakespeare. The report card is chronological, so you can plot my rise and fall on graph paper, if you like:

  Player Piano

  B

  The Sirens of Titan

  A

  Mother Night

  A

  Cat's Cradle

  A-plus

  God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

  A

  Slaughterhouse-Five

  A-plus

  Welcome to the Monkey House

  B-minus

  Happy Birthday, Wanda June

  D

  Breakfast of Champions

  C

  Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons

  C

  Slapstick

  D

  Jailbird

  A

  Palm Sunday

  C

  WHAT has been my prettiest contribution to my culture? I would say it was a master's thesis in anthropology which was rejected by the University of Chicago a long time ago. It was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun. One must not be too playful.

  The thesis has vanished, but I carry an abstract in my head, which I will here set down. The fundamental idea is that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a given society's stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads.

  In the thesis, I collected popular stories from fantastically various societies, not excluding the one which used to read

  Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post. I graphed each one. Anyone can graph a simple story if he or she will crucify it, so to speak, on the intersecting axes I here depict:

  "G" stands for good fortune. "I" stands for ill fortune. "B" stands for the beginning of a story. "E" stands for its end.

  The late Nelson Rockefeller, for example, would be very close to the top of the G-I scale on his wedding day. A shopping-bag lady waking up on a doorstep this morning would be somewhere nearer the middle, but not at the bottom, since the day is balmy and clear.

  A much beloved story in our society is about a person who is leading a bearable life, who experiences misfortune, who overcomes misfortune, and who is happier afterward for having demonstrated resourcefulness and strength. As a graph, that story looks like this:

  Another story of which Americans never seem to tire is about a person who becomes happier upon finding something he or she likes a lot. The person loses whatever it is, and then gets it back forever. As a graph, it looks like this:

  An American Indian creation myth, in which a god of some sort gives the people the sun and then the moon and then the bow and arrow and then the corn and so on, is essentially a staircase, a tale of accumulation:

  Almost all creation myths are staircases like that. Our own creation myth, taken from the Old Testament, is unique, so far as I could discover, in looking like this:

  The sudden drop in fortune, of course, is the ejection of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

  Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," in which an already hopelessly unhappy man turns into a cockroach, looks like this:

  But could my graphs, when all was said and done, be useful as anything more than little visual comedies, cartoons of a sort? The University of Chicago asked me that, and I had to ask myself that, and I say again what I said at the beginning: that the graphs were at least as suggestive as pots or spearheads.

  But then I had another look at a graph I had drawn of Western civilization's most enthusiastically received story, which is "Cinderella." At this very moment, a thousand writers must be telling that story again in one form or another. This very book is a Cinderella story of a kind.

  I confessed that I was daunted by the graph of "Cinderella," and was tempted to leave it out of my thesis, since it seemed to prove that I was full of shit. It seemed too complicated and arbitrary to be a representative artifact—lacked the simple grace of a pot or a spearhead. Have a look:

  The steps, you see, are all the presents the fairy godmother gave to Cinderella, the ball gown, the slippers, the carriage, and so on. The sudden drop is the stroke of midnight at the ball. Cinderella is in rags again. All the presents have been repossessed. But then the prince finds her and marries her, and she is infinitely happy ever after. She gets all the stuff back, and then some. A lot of people think the story is trash, and, on graph paper, it certainly looks like trash.

  But then I said to myself, Wait a minute—those steps at the beginning look like the creation myth of virtually every society on earth. And then I saw that the stroke of midnight looked exactly like the unique creation myth in the Old Testament. And then I saw that the rise to bliss at the end was identical with the expectation of redemption
as expressed in primitive Christianity.

  The tales were identical.

  I was thrilled to discover that years ago, and I am just as thrilled today. The apathy of the University of Chicago is repulsive to me.

  They can take a flying fuck at the moooooooooooooooon.

  AND, my goodness, haven't we come far afield from the stated subject of this chapter, which is the sexual revolution? I have spoken elsewhere of how neophyte writers, and even some old poops in the field, will veer away from subjects which alarm them. Just look how far I myself have veered away from the subject of sex. There is little that is genuinely sexual in telling a great university to take a flying fuck at the moooooooooooooooon.

  Am I too much of a sissy to discuss anal intercourse, aphrodisiacs, armpits, bidets, birth control, bisexuality, bondage, buttocks, chastity belts, circumcision, clitorises, condoms, dildoes, discipline, ejaculation, feathers, femoral intercourse, fetishes, foursomes, frigidity, genitals, hair, hair-trigger trouble, impotence, karezza, kisses, and so on? I have lifted this list from the index of The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to Love Making (illustrated), edited by Alex Comfort, M.B., Ph.D. (Crown, 1972). Actually, I feel quite free to discuss any and all of those matters, and even to laugh some while doing so.

  What isn't congenial is an admission that I have been forced to be celibate for long periods of time. I search the index of The Joy of Sex in vain for "celibacy," which happens to be the most common human sexual adventure, and which could be illustrated nicely by a page as white as a snowdrift.