Palm Sunday, Welcome to the Monkey House

by Kurt Jr. Vonnegut

  To take an example: I was a private in the United States Army (actually the Army of the United States, since I was a volunteer) for three years. I was one warrior ant in an enormous colony of identical ants, imprisoned in rural areas, and sent finally to an all-male battlefield in a foreign country. How many women eager to fuck me do you suppose I encountered in three long years? I could ask the same question about months and months in my civilian life, and get the same answer: to all practical purposes, none.

  I was talking one time to my friend Robert Penn Warren, a lusty old gentleman and a great poet and novelist, and I asked him about another majestic literary figure, dead, who had been an acquaintance of his. Mr. Warren is seventeen years older than I am. He was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, in 1905. He drew in words an enchantingly Edwardian caricature of the man I had asked about, and he concluded it with a statement which was in no wise a joke. It was meant to have clinical significance. A person versed in psychology and medicine, he seemed to say, would be able to extrapolate an entire syndrome from this one small clue. This was the clue: "He was a masturbator, of course."

  This ended the conversation. I did not protest. I was grateful, though, to remember something far more casual about masturbation which had been said to me with all possible cheerfulness by my friend Milos Forman, the motion picture director.

  "You know what I like about masturbation?" he asked me.

  "What is it you like about it, Milos?" I said.

  "You don't have to talk afterward," he replied.

  I peruse what is at this moment the number one nonfiction best seller in America, written by Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife. It is meant to be a quite universal analysis of the current sexual revolution. According to Talese, women are becoming more hospitable and casual, less discriminating with respect to sexual contacts. I oversimplify but do not entirely misrepresent that supposed revolution if I describe it this way: Whereas an ideal woman in olden times might have given a dusty male wayfarer on the road of life a piece of pie—a modern woman may now give him a hand job or a blow job as well.

  I am sorry, but that is how I read it.

  I do not wish to mock the book, even having said that, for it is to me a secretly deep history of a generation of middle-class American males, my own, which was taught by parents and athletic coaches and scoutmasters and military chaplains and quack doctors and so on to be deeply ashamed of masturbation and wet dreams.

  And the hidden plea in the book is one which first appeared in my eyes when I was fourteen, say, and which has not vanished entirely to this day. It is part of the mystery of me. The plea is addressed by old-fashioned males forever full of jism to any pretty human female, on the street, in a magazine, in a movie—anywhere. The plea is this: "Please, pretty lady, don't make me play with my private parts again."

  IN THE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

  So here I sit on the fourth floor of a town house on the East Side of New York City, the Capital of the World, with a report card on the past thirty years of my life —signed by myself and tacked to the wall. I look at all those grades, some high, some low, and I think that I am like the compulsive gambler who borrowed so much money from me and who could not pay me back: I could not help myself. I have spoken elsewhere of the mentor I had at the University of Chicago, who was so brilliant, who could not find anyone to publish his most audacious work, and who committed suicide. I have not proved how brilliant he was. As I set out to do so now with an example, I am hesitant, not only because I have his reputation in my hands for a moment, but because all the good things he said which I remember were so simple and clear. It has been my experience with literary critics and academics in this country that clarity looks a lot like laziness and ignorance and childishness and cheapness to them. Any idea which can be grasped immediately is for them, by definition, something they knew all the time.

  So it is with literary experimentation, too. If a literary experiment works like a dream, is easy to read and enjoy, the experimenter is a hack. The only way to get full credit as a fearless experimenter is to fail and fail.

  A music critic once regaled a party I attended with a list of composers of serious music in the past. Nobody had heard of any of them, and the critic told us that they were all regarded in their own time as being the greatest composers alive. These were contemporaries of Beethoven and Brahms and Wagner and so on, composers for full orchestras in the Romantic mode.

  We asked him why they weren't admired today. He had made it his business to hear as much of their work as he could, and he had this to say: "It was all gesture." By this he meant that musical promise after musical promise of great themes to come were made, and were not kept. The composers were honored in their own time for the gorgeousness of the promises they made but could not keep. They perhaps made promises which not even an archangel could keep.

  Some of the most imposing literary reputations of my own time, it seems to me, are based on just that sort of promising.

  THE example of my mentor's brilliance:

  Using the Socratic method, he asked his little class this: "What is it an artist does—a painter, a writer, a sculptor—?"

  He already had an answer, which he had put down in the book he was writing, a book which would never be published. But he would not tell us what it was until the end of the hour, and he might discard it entirely if our answers to his question made more sense than his. This was a class composed entirely of veterans of the Second World War in the summertime. The class had been put together in order that we might continue to receive our living expenses from our government when most of the rest of the university was on vacation.

  If any of us came up with good answers, I now have no idea what they might have been. His answer was this: "The artist says, 'I can do very little about the chaos around me, but at least I can reduce to perfect order this square of canvas, this piece of paper, this chunk of stone.''

  Everybody knows that.

  MOST of my adult life has been spent in bringing to some kind of order sheets of paper eight and a half inches wide and eleven inches long. This severely limited activity has allowed me to ignore many a storm. It has also caused many of the worst storms I ignored. My mates have often been angered by how much attention I pay to paper and how little attention I pay to them.

  I can only reply that the secret to success in every human endeavor is total concentration. Ask any great athlete.

  To put it another way: Sometimes I don't consider myself very good at life, so I hide in my profession.

  I know what Delilah really did to Samson to make him as weak as a baby. She didn't have to cut his hair off. All she had to do was break his concentration.

  ABOUT nine years ago I was asked to deliver an address to the American Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters here. I was not then a member, and was terrified. I had left home, and was spending most of my time counting flowers on the wall and watching Captain Kangaroo in a tiny apartment on East Fifty-fourth Street. My friend with the gambling sickness had just cleaned out my bank account and my son had gone insane in British Columbia.

  I asked my wife please not to come, since I was rattled enough as it was. I asked a woman with whom I had been keeping company some not to come, either—for the same reason. So they both came, all dressed up for a fancy execution.

  What saved my life? Pieces of paper eight and a half inches wide and eleven inches long.

  I am sorry for people who have no knack for reducing to seeming order some little thing. More and more people are doing it with film and video tape these days. My chief objection to motion pictures as art is their expensiveness. A filmmaker is like Benvenuto Cellini, who worked with raw materials which were priceless to begin with—with silver and platinum and gold.

  I was born into a house which was designed and built by my father in 1922, the year of my birth. It was so full of treasures that it was like a museum, and it was meant to be inherited by my brother, my sister, or me. I would not like to live there. Edwardian lives of a
sort were conducted there for seven years. That isn't a long period of time, you know. To my parents, who were great lovers of music, it must have been as though a full orchestra had played the first seven bars of a symphony, and then gone home.

  The house I now inhabit was built in this busy seaport by a speculator named L. S. Brooks in 1860-61, at the outbreak of the Civil War. Spiritually, it is as much my house as anyone's, since Brooks built it, along with a lot of other ones just like it in this neighborhood, with no inhabitant in particular in mind.

  The first person who liked it enough to move into it, the way a hermit crab might move into an empty snail shell, was another German, Ferdinand Traud. He was president of the German Free School down at 142 East Fourth Street.

  The Trauds moved out in 1875, and Julius Bruno, a broker, moved in. Julius Bruno moved out in 1887, and Peter Goetz moved in. Peter Goetz moved out in 1891, and Louisa Gerlach moved in. And on and on.

  I myself bought the house eight years ago from Robert Gottlieb, the editor in chief of Alfred A. Knopf, who moved to a house across the street—and Jill Krementz, who is now my wife, and I moved in.

  Jill runs her photographic business out of the bottom floor. I run my writing business out of the top floor. We share the two floors in between.

  THE people in this city have been very friendly to me, although I was born far away. They have uses for strangers who do good work in the arts here, and I have done reasonably good work as a novelist from time to time.

  The most satisfying kindness which has been done me here was an invitation from St. Clement's Episcopal Church, whose congregation includes many actors, to preach on Palm Sunday in 1980. It is the custom of that church, which is also a theater, to have a stranger preach just once a year.

  The altar there is portable, since the front of the church is also a stage. Very few plays would work well with an altar as a fixed centerpiece. So, on the morning I preached, the altar had been trundled temporarily onto a set which was the kitchen of a Manhattan tenement of perhaps sixty years ago or more—before I was born.

  I do not know what play the set was for. I have not asked. I want to imagine that it was for a play about European immigrants to New York City and their children. I was happy to speak from that set as a descendent of immigrants who settled much farther inland, immigrants about whom native New Yorkers often know nothing and imagine the worst.

  I had this to say:

  "I am enchanted by the Sermon on the Mount. Being merciful, it seems to me, is the only good idea we have received so far. Perhaps we will get another idea that good by and by—and then we will have two good ideas. What might that second good idea be? I don't know. How could I know? I will make a wild guess that it will come from music somehow. I have often wondered what music is and why we love it so. It may be that music is that second good idea's being born.

  "I choose as my text the first eight verses of John twelve, which deal not with Palm Sunday but with the night before —with Palm Sunday Eve, with what we might call 'Spikenard Saturday.' I hope that will be close enough to Palm Sunday to leave you more or less satisfied. I asked an Episcopalian priest the other day what I should say to you about Palm Sunday itself. She told me to say that it was a brilliant satire on pomp and circumstance and high honors in this world. So I tell you that.

  "The priest was Carol Anderson, who sold her physical church in order that her spiritual parish might survive. Her parish is All Angels—on West Eightieth, just off Broadway. She sold the church but hung on to the parish house. I assume that most, if not all, of the angels are still around.

  "Now, as to the verses about Palm Sunday Eve: I choose them because Jesus says something in the eighth verse which many people I have known have taken as proof that Jesus himself occasionally got sick and tired of people who needed mercy all the time. I read from the Revised Standard Bible rather than the King James, because it is easier for me to understand. Also, I will argue afterward that Jesus was only joking, and it is impossible to joke in King James English. The funniest joke in the world, if told in King James English, is doomed to sound like Charlton Heston.

  "I read:

  " 'Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. There they made him a supper; Martha served, but Lazarus was one of those at table with him.

  " 'Mary took a pound of costly ointment of pure nard and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair; and the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment.

  " 'But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (he who was to betray him), said, "Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarü and given to the poor?" This he said, not that he cared for the poor but because he was a thief, and as he had the money box he used to take what was put into it. Jesus said, "Let her alone, let her keep it for the day of my burial. The poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me."

  "Thus ends the reading, and although I have promised a joke, there is not much of a chuckle in there anywhere. The reading, in fact, ends with at least two quite depressing implications: That Jesus could be a touch self-pitying, and that he was, with his mission to earth about to end, at least momentarily sick and tired of hearing about the poor.

  "The King James version of the last verse, by the way, is almost identical: ' "For the poor always ye have with you; but you do not always have me."

  "Whatever it was that Jesus really said to Judas was said in Aramaic, of course—and has come to us through Hebrew and Greek and Latin and archaic English. Maybe he only said something a lot like, The poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me.' Perhaps a little something has been lost in translation. And let us remember, too, that in translations jokes are commonly the first things to go. "I would like to recapture what has been lost. Why? Because I, as a Christ-worshiping agnostic, have seen so much un-Christian impatience with the poor encouraged by the quotation, 'For the poor always ye have with you.'

  "I am speaking mainly of my youth in Indianapolis , Indiana. No matter where I am and how old I become, I still speak of almost nothing but my youth in Indianapolis, Indiana. Whenever anybody out that way began to worry a lot about the poor people when I was young, some eminently respectable Hoosier, possibly an uncle or an aunt, would say that Jesus himself had given up on doing much about the poor. He or she would paraphrase John twelve, Verse eight: The poor people are hopeless. We'll always be stuck with them.'

  "The general company was then free to say that the poor were hopeless because they were so lazy or dumb, that they drank too much and had too many children and kept coal in the bathtub, and so on. Somebody was likely to quote Kin Hubbard, the Hoosier humorist, who said that he knew a man who was so poor that he owned twenty-two dogs. And so on.

  "If those Hoosiers were still alive, which they are not, I would tell them now that Jesus was only joking, and that he was not even thinking much about the poor.

  "I would tell them, too, what I don't have to tell this particular congregation, that jokes can be noble. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward—and since I can start thinking and striving again that much sooner.

  "All right:

  "It is the evening before Palm Sunday. Jesus is frustrated and exhausted. He knows that one of his closest associates will soon betray him for money—and that he is going to be mocked and tortured and killed. He is going to feel all that a mortal feels when he dies in convulsions on the cross. His visit among us is almost over—but life must still go on for just a little while.

  "It is again suppertime.

  "How many suppertimes does Jesus have left? Five, I believe.

  "His male companions for this supper are themselves a mockery. One is Judas, who will betray him. The other is t Lazarus, who has recently been dead for four days. Lazarus was so dea
d that he stunk, the Bible says. Lazarus is surely dazed, and not much of a conversationalist—and not necessarily grateful, either, to be alive again. It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.

  "If I had read a little farther, we would have learned that there is a crowd outside, crazy to see Lazarus, not Jesus. Lazarus is the man of the hour as far as the crowd is concerned.

  "Trust a crowd to look at the wrong end of a miracle every time.

  "There are two sisters of Lazarus there—Martha and Mary. They, at least, are sympathetic and imaginatively helpful. Mary begins to massage and perfume the feet of Jesus Christ with an ointment made from the spikenard plant. Jesus has the bones of a man and is clothed in the flesh of a man—so it must feel awfully nice, what Mary is doing to his feet. Would it be heretical of us to suppose that Jesus closes his eyes?

  "This is too much for that envious hypocrite Judas, who says, trying to be more Catholic than the Pope: 'Hey—this is very un-Christian. Instead of wasting that stuff on your feet, we should have sold it and given the money to the poor people.'

  "To which Jesus replies in Aramaic: 'Judas, don't worry about it. There will still be plenty of poor people left long after I'm gone.'

  "This is about what Mark Twain or Abraham Lincoln would have said under similar circumstances.

  "If Jesus did in fact say that, it is a divine black joke, well suited to the occasion. It says everything about hypocrisy and nothing about the poor. It is a Christian joke, which allows Jesus to remain civil to Judas, but to chide him about his hypocrisy all the same.