He'd live in the library, while he stayed in New York, that was--he'd thought that in a few weeks, when it got really hot, he might strike north. He had always meant to spend a summer in Canada. His surface car would probably never last the trip, but the Museum of Ancient Vehicles had been glad to bestow half a dozen of the bicycles from their exhibits upon him. After all, he was, in effect, a museum piece himself and so as worth preserving as the bicycles; moreover, bicycles are difficult to pack for an interstellar trip. With reasonable care, these might last him his lifetime....
But he had to have a permanent residence somewhere, and the library was an elegant and commodious dwelling, centrally located. New York would have to be his headquarters, for all the possessions he had carefully amassed and collected and begged and--since money would do him no good any more--bought, were here. And there were by far too many of them to be transported to any really distant location. He loved to own things.
He was by no means an advocate of Rousseau's complete return to nature; whatever civilization had left that he could use without compromise, he would--and thankfully. There would be no electricity, of course, but he had provided himself with flashlights and bulbs and batteries--not too many of the last, of course, because they'd grow stale. However, he'd also laid in plenty of candles and a vast supply of matches.... Tins of food and concentrates and synthetics, packages of seed should he grow tired of all these and want to try growing his own--fruit, he knew, would be growing wild soon enough.... Vitamins and medicines--of course, were he to get really ill or get hurt in some way, it might be the end ... but that was something he wouldn't think of--something that couldn't possibly happen to him....
For his relaxation he had an antique hand-wound phonograph, together with thousands of old-fashioned records. And then, of course, he had the whole planet, the whole world to amuse him.
He even had provided himself with a heat-ray gun and a substantial supply of ammunition, although he couldn't imagine himself ever killing an animal for food. It was squeamishness that stood in his way rather than any ethical considerations, although he did indeed believe that every creature had the right to live. Nonetheless, there was the possibility that the craving for fresh meat might change his mind for him. Besides, although hostile animals had long been gone from this part of the world--the only animals would be birds and squirrels and, farther up the Hudson, rabbits and chipmunks and deer ... perhaps an occasional bear in the mountains--who knew what harmless life form might become a threat now that its development would be left unchecked?
A cat sitting atop one of the stately stone lions outside the library met his eye with such a steady gaze of understanding, though not of sympathy, that he found himself needing to repeat the by-now almost magic phrase to himself: "Not in my lifetime anyway." Would some intelligent life form develop to supplant man? Or would the planet revert to a primeval state of mindless innocence? He would never know and he didn't really care ... no point in speculating over unanswerable questions.
He settled back luxuriously on the worn cushions of his car. Even so little as twenty years before, it would have been impossible for him--for anyone--to stop his vehicle in the middle of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue purely to meditate. But it was his domain now. He could go in the wrong direction on one-way streets, stop wherever he pleased, drive as fast or as slowly as he would (and could, of course). If he wanted to do anything as vulgar as spit in the street, he could (but they were his streets now, not to be sullied) ... cross the roads without waiting for the lights to change (it would be a long, long wait if he did) ... go to sleep when he wanted, eat as many meals as he wanted whenever he chose.... He could go naked in hot weather and there'd be no one to raise an eyebrow, deface public buildings (except that they were private buildings now, his buildings), idle without the guilty feeling that there was always something better he could and should be doing ... even if there were not. There would be no more guilty feelings; without people and their knowledge there was no more guilt.
A flash of movement in the bushes behind the library caught his eye. Surely that couldn't be a fawn in Bryant Park? So soon?... He'd thought it would be another ten years at least before the wild animals came sniffing timidly along the Hudson, venturing a little further each time they saw no sign of their age-old enemy.
But probably the deer was only his imagination. He would investigate further after he had moved into the library.
Perhaps a higher building than the library.... But then he would have to climb too many flights of stairs. The elevators wouldn't be working ... silly of him to forget that. There were a lot of steps outside the library too--it would be a chore to get his bicycles up those steps.
Then he smiled to himself. Robinson Crusoe would have been glad to have had bicycles and steps and such relatively harmless animals as bears to worry about. No, Robinson Crusoe never had it so good as he, Johnson, would have, and what more could he want?
For, whoever before in history had had his dreams--and what was wrong with dreams, after all?--so completely gratified? What child, envisioning a desert island all his own could imagine that his island would be the whole world? Together Johnson and the Earth would grow young again.
No, the stars were for others. Johnson was not the first man in history who had wanted the Earth, but he had been the first man--and probably the last--who had actually been given it. And he was well content with his bargain.
There was plenty of room for the bears too.
KURT VONNEGUT
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, a city he would later use in his novels as a symbol of American values.
Kurt Sr. was one of the most prominent architects in the city, and his wife, Edith, was the daughter of a wealthy Indianapolis brewer. Kurt Jr. was the youngest of their three children, along with middle child Alice and first-born Bernard.
The fortunes of the family changed dramatically during the Depression when Kurt Sr. saw his architectural business disappear. He had to sell the family home and take young Kurt out of private school, the Orchard School where, in kindergarten, Kurt had met Jane Cox, who eventually became his wife.
This radical change in economic circumstances caused Kurt Sr. virtually to give up on life and Edith to become addicted to alcohol and prescription drugs. Kurt Jr.’s lifelong pessimism clearly had its roots in his parents’ despairing response to being blindsided by the Depression.
The teen years
At Shortridge High, Vonnegut wrote for the student paper, The Echo, and he continued his interest in journalism at Cornell, becoming managing editor of the student paper, The Sun. Vonnegut would be influenced all his writing life by the simple rules of journalism: Get the facts right, compose straightforward declarative sentences, know the audience. Vonnegut studied chemistry at Cornell but later confessed he was a “lousy student.”
When World War II broke out, Vonnegut was 16; at 20, he entered the army and was shipped off to Europe, where he almost immediately was captured by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge.
World War II
He was sent as a POW to Dresden. On February 13, 1945, British and American bombers destroyed the city by dropping high explosives followed by incendiary bombs. The resulting firestorm turned the non-militarized city into an inferno that killed up to 60,000 civilians. Vonnegut and his fellow POWs survived by accident only because they were housed some 60 feet underground in a former meat locker and slaughterhouse.
Vonnegut’s job for weeks after the bombing was to gather up and burn the remains of the dead. His experience at Dresden marked him for life and eventually resulted in his literary masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five.
Yet another sorrow of the war years was his mother’s suicide by drug overdose in 1944.
Marriage, family and novels
After the war, Vonnegut married Jane Cox. They had their first child, Mark.
Vonnegut took an advertising job at General Electric to support his family and
began writing short fiction on the side. Kurt and Jane had two more children, Edith and Nanette, and Vonnegut redoubled his efforts to publish his stories.
In 1952, his dystopian apprentice novel Player Piano was published. Vonnegut’s beloved sister Alice Adams died of cancer in 1957, just two days after her husband had been killed in a freak commuter train crash. Kurt and Jane took in three of Alice’s children, doubling the size of their family overnight. It became more imperative for Vonnegut to bring in more money.
Within 10 years following the arrival of the Adams boys, the short-story market was drying up and Vonnegut turned his attention to novels. He published the whimsical sci-fi epic The Sirens of Titan, the spy novel Mother Night, the fanciful anthropological satire of religion Cat’s Cradle, a critique of economic injustice, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and, in 1969, his Dresden novel, Slaughterhouse-Five.
In these books, Vonnegut mastered his trademark black comic voice, making his audience laugh despite the horrors he described. He had already developed a cult following of college students, but he broke through to a mass audience with Slaughterhouse-Five and the excellent film version of the novel that soon followed. By the early 1970s, Vonnegut was one of the most famous living writers on earth.
The 1970s
Yet, the 1970s proved a difficult time for Vonnegut. After his children grew up and left home, his long marriage to Jane fell apart. He moved alone from Cape Cod to New York City, became withdrawn and depressed and suffered from writer’s block. His son, Mark, suffered a bipolar disorder breakdown early in the decade, but recovered to write a book about it called The Eden Express.
Not surprisingly, the disintegration of families became a major theme in Vonnegut’s two novels in the middle 1970s, Breakfast of Champions andSlapstick. While not altogether successful as fiction, these books helped Vonnegut work through the emotional problems that had plagued him since childhood.
In the 1980s, Vonnegut entered a second major phase of his career. His 1979 marriage to photographer Jill Krementz formalized their relationship of several years, and the social realist novels Jailbird, Deadeye Dick andBluebeard showed a remarkable resurgence of Vonnegut’s career after the critical backlash he had suffered in the 1970s.
Galapagos was a brilliant look at Vonnegut’s concerns that the “oversized human brain” was ironically leading mankind to possible extinction. Vonnegut also published his third major collection of essays, Palm Sunday.
Speaking for our freedoms
Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Vonnegut acted as a powerful spokesman for the preservation of our Constitutional freedoms, for nuclear arms control and for the protection of the earth’s fragile biosphere.
As the new century began, Vonnegut continued to try to be, as he said, “a responsible elder in our society,” decrying the militarization of our county after the terrorist attacks of 2001.
In his last novel, Timequake, and his last collection of essays, A Man without a Country, Vonnegut powerfully expressed his sense that corporate greed, overpopulation and war would win out in the end over simple humanity. As he ruefully apologized to those who would come after him, “We could have saved the world, but we were just too damned lazy.”
Kurt Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007, after a fall on the steps of his New York brownstone. He was mourned the world over as one of the great American writers of the second half of the 20th century.
The Big Trip Up Yonder, by Kurt Vonnegut
If it was good enough for your grandfather, forget it ... it is much too good for anyone else!
Gramps Ford, his chin resting on his hands, his hands on the crook of his cane, was staring irascibly at the five-foot television screen that dominated the room. On the screen, a news commentator was summarizing the day's happenings. Every thirty seconds or so, Gramps would jab the floor with his cane-tip and shout, "Hell, we did that a hundred years ago!"
Emerald and Lou, coming in from the balcony, where they had been seeking that 2185 A.D. rarity--privacy--were obliged to take seats in the back row, behind Lou's father and mother, brother and sister-in-law, son and daughter-in-law, grandson and wife, granddaughter and husband, great-grandson and wife, nephew and wife, grandnephew and wife, great-grandniece and husband, great-grandnephew and wife--and, of course, Gramps, who was in front of everybody. All save Gramps, who was somewhat withered and bent, seemed, by pre-anti-gerasone standards, to be about the same age--somewhere in their late twenties or early thirties. Gramps looked older because he had already reached 70 when anti-gerasone was invented. He had not aged in the 102 years since.
"Meanwhile," the commentator was saying, "Council Bluffs, Iowa, was still threatened by stark tragedy. But 200 weary rescue workers have refused to give up hope, and continue to dig in an effort to save Elbert Haggedorn, 183, who has been wedged for two days in a ..."
"I wish he'd get something more cheerful," Emerald whispered to Lou.
* * * * *
"Silence!" cried Gramps. "Next one shoots off his big bazoo while the TV's on is gonna find hisself cut off without a dollar--" his voice suddenly softened and sweetened--"when they wave that checkered flag at the Indianapolis Speedway, and old Gramps gets ready for the Big Trip Up Yonder."
He sniffed sentimentally, while his heirs concentrated desperately on not making the slightest sound. For them, the poignancy of the prospective Big Trip had been dulled somewhat, through having been mentioned by Gramps about once a day for fifty years.
"Dr. Brainard Keyes Bullard," continued the commentator, "President of Wyandotte College, said in an address tonight that most of the world's ills can be traced to the fact that Man's knowledge of himself has not kept pace with his knowledge of the physical world."
"Hell!" snorted Gramps. "We said that a hundred years ago!"
"In Chicago tonight," the commentator went on, "a special celebration is taking place in the Chicago Lying-in Hospital. The guest of honor is Lowell W. Hitz, age zero. Hitz, born this morning, is the twenty-five-millionth child to be born in the hospital." The commentator faded, and was replaced on the screen by young Hitz, who squalled furiously.
"Hell!" whispered Lou to Emerald. "We said that a hundred years ago."
"I heard that!" shouted Gramps. He snapped off the television set and his petrified descendants stared silently at the screen. "You, there, boy--"
"I didn't mean anything by it, sir," said Lou, aged 103.
"Get me my will. You know where it is. You kids all know where it is. Fetch, boy!" Gramps snapped his gnarled fingers sharply.
Lou nodded dully and found himself going down the hall, picking his way over bedding to Gramps' room, the only private room in the Ford apartment. The other rooms were the bathroom, the living room and the wide windowless hallway, which was originally intended to serve as a dining area, and which had a kitchenette in one end. Six mattresses and four sleeping bags were dispersed in the hallway and living room, and the daybed, in the living room, accommodated the eleventh couple, the favorites of the moment.
On Gramps' bureau was his will, smeared, dog-eared, perforated and blotched with hundreds of additions, deletions, accusations, conditions, warnings, advice and homely philosophy. The document was, Lou reflected, a fifty-year diary, all jammed onto two sheets--a garbled, illegible log of day after day of strife. This day, Lou would be disinherited for the eleventh time, and it would take him perhaps six months of impeccable behavior to regain the promise of a share in the estate. To say nothing of the daybed in the living room for Em and himself.
"Boy!" called Gramps.
"Coming, sir." Lou hurried back into the living room and handed Gramps the will.
"Pen!" said Gramps.
* * * * *
He was instantly offered eleven pens, one from each couple.
"Not that leaky thing," he said, brushing Lou's pen aside. "Ah, there's a nice one. Good boy, Willy." He accepted Willy's pen. That was the tip they had all been waiting for. Willy, then--Lou's father--was the new favorite.
Willy, who looked almost as young as Lou, though he was 142, did a poor job of concealing his pleasure. He glanced shyly at the daybed, which would become his, and from which Lou and Emerald would have to move back into the hall, back to the worst spot of all by the bathroom door.
Gramps missed none of the high drama he had authored and he gave his own familiar role everything he had. Frowning and running his finger along each line, as though he were seeing the will for the first time, he read aloud in a deep portentous monotone, like a bass note on a cathedral organ.
"I, Harold D. Ford, residing in Building 257 of Alden Village, New York City, Connecticut, do hereby make, publish and declare this to be my last Will and Testament, revoking any and all former wills and codicils by me at any time heretofore made." He blew his nose importantly and went on, not missing a word, and repeating many for emphasis--repeating in particular his ever-more-elaborate specifications for a funeral.
At the end of these specifications, Gramps was so choked with emotion that Lou thought he might have forgotten why he'd brought out the will in the first place. But Gramps heroically brought his powerful emotions under control and, after erasing for a full minute, began to write and speak at the same time. Lou could have spoken his lines for him, he had heard them so often.
"I have had many heartbreaks ere leaving this vale of tears for a better land," Gramps said and wrote. "But the deepest hurt of all has been dealt me by--" He looked around the group, trying to remember who the malefactor was.
Everyone looked helpfully at Lou, who held up his hand resignedly.
Gramps nodded, remembering, and completed the sentence--"my great-grandson, Louis J. Ford."
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One Page 285