Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

by Kurt Vonnegut

  “It was a grand occasion, but the Vonneguts and Schnulls thought it was all rather vulgar, and did not hesitate to express their disapproval. Some of the town wags, who were familiar with Albert’s ways, in commenting on the huge cost of the bash said: ’What the Hell! Albert probably charged the tab to the brewery, and let the syndicate unwittingly give the party.’ It was a strictly fin de siècle affair.

  “The next year came the First World War and then Prohibition. The curtain fell on a glorious scene—never to be witnessed again.”

  • • •

  “Kurt and Edith’s marriage was a happy and congenial one—as marriages go. At first they were reasonably affluent—had servants, governesses for their children, and lived well. But they were both inclined to be extravagant. They traveled and entertained rather lavishly. If they needed money, they sold securities or borrowed. After Prohibition in 1921 Albert was no longer able to help them.

  “But they had enough economic fat which, with Kurt’s income from his profession, saw them through the twenties. Kurt’s mother, Nannie Schnull Vonnegut, died in 1929 and left Kurt his share of her then modest fortune derived from her father, Henry Schnull. They soon used this up. Kurt had acquired a plot of land on the east side of North Illinois Street at about Forty-fifth Street. Here he designed and built a large and very beautiful brick residence. They sent their older children in the twenties and thirties to private schools; Bernard to Park School, and Alice to Tudor Hall School for girls. Bernard went on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he took his degree of Bachelor of Science and remained to take his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry. He became and remains a distinguished scientist. Alice married James Adams. But by the time K came along to his adolescence, the family was in financial trouble. He knew only the hard times of the 1930s. He was taken out of private school after the third grade, and sent to Public School No. 43 and then Shortridge High School. He was sent to Cornell University with specific instructions not to waste time or money on ’frivolous’ courses, but to give full attention to practical studies, principally physics and chemistry and math.

  “His parents were in straitened circumstances. There was practically no building in the Depression years and Kurt’s professional income vanished. They began to live on their capital which, to a good bourgeois, is a heresy looked upon with horror and usually followed by disaster.

  “It was obvious to them that they could not continue to support so large an establishment. This residence, by then heavily mortgaged, was sold. It still stands and is now the home of Evans Woollen HI, a descendent of a well-known family and a distinguished architect in his own right. With the proceeds of their equity in this property and a few remaining assets, Kurt and Edith then purchased an attractive plot of land in William’s Creek—a suburban development lying about nine miles due north of Monument Circle, to which many of the leading families migrated to escape the deteriorating conditions of the inner city. Here Kurt designed and built in 1941 a somewhat smaller and less pretentious dwelling, but it was well constructed of brick. It was surrounded by tall virginal forest trees—oaks, maples, and elms. It was a most attractive home, was well furnished, and displayed Kurt’s artistic skills. In the basement Kurt had a small shop where he installed a kiln and dabbled in ceramics in which he produced some beautiful pieces. Here the family lived quietly and modestly with but little entertaining or traveling.

  “They continued to invade their diminishing capital. But Kurt had two $1,000 corporate bonds which he had inherited from his mother. Edith, true to her delusions to grandeur, said: ’Let’s take one more trip abroad.’ So they sold the two bonds, went to Paris for three weeks and returned broke. But it was a rate example of ésprit—what the French call panache. It was going out with flair—all banners flying.

  “Meanwhile came the Second World War in December 1941 and once again America was arrayed against Germany. Bernard at twenty-four escaped the draft, but Kurt, Jr., at nineteen was caught. He was enlisted in the army as a private and sent to training camp. This came as a great shock with acute distress to Edith. With her other financial problems the prospect of losing her son in the impending holocaust made her cup of troubles overflow. She became despondent and morose. Wanting money desperately, she attempted to write short stories which she could sell, but it was a futile, hopeless venture; a tragic disillusion. She simply could not see daylight. Kurt, Jr., got leave from his regiment to come home and spend Mother’s Day in May 1944 with his family. During the night before, Edith died in her sleep in her fifty-sixth year on May 14, 1944. Her death was attributed to an overdose of sleeping tablets taken possibly by mistake. Her gross estate was inventoried in probate at $10,815.50. It was all that was left as her share of her grandfather’s fortune and of her father’s residue.

  “She missed by a matter of two months the birth of her first grandchild, the son of her daughter Alice. She would miss seeing twelve grandchildren in all. She missed by seven months the capture of her son K by the Germans in the Batde of the Bulge, and his imprisonment in Dresden until the end of the war.”

  • • •

  “After Edith’s death Kurt lived almost as a recluse, for some ten years. But his sister, Irma Vonnegut Lindener, who was then a resident of Hamburg, Germany, paid him protracted visits—sometimes for months at a time. They were very congenial and deeply attached to each other. She understood his vagaries, respected his privacy and fierce independence, and gave him the only sort of companionship which he would tolerate. They resembled each other in many ways and were deeply empathetic. They were both blond and blue-eyed. They both spoke German fluently and shared their attachment to their German traditions of music and literature. Kurt acquired a sort of skeptical and fatalistic contempt for life—what the Germans call Weltschmerz.

  “As Kurt aged and his fortunes waned, he could not continue to support this last abode of modest elegance. He sold it, and with the pittance left to him, some ten thousand dollars, Kurt then bought a small cottage in the country on a little hill on a winding road just north of Nashville, in Brown County, about twenty-five miles south of Indianapolis. Brown County is still a bucolic community but it has some of the highest hills and loveliest scenery in the Midwest. It is the abode of preference of artists. Here Kurt retired alone and lived in perfect seclusion. He had his books and the phonograph which his sister gave him and upon which he played his favorite recordings of classical music: principally Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, and particularly Richard Strauss. The four last songs of Strauss were his favorites. He played them over and over. They express his mood perfectly.”

  • • •

  “Although he suffered from emphysema, Kurt continued to smoke cigarettes heavily and drank whiskey in moderation. His health deteriorated slowly until it was found that he had a cancer in one of the lobes of his lungs. The surgeons wanted to operate but he wisely declined. As the cancer spread, he became extremely weak and short of breath with lack of oxygen. But he refused to go into a hospital or to remain in bed at home. He would get up in the morning, dress, eat very sparingly, and then lie about on a couch before a comfortable fire reading or listening to his records, quite alone. He had no nurses, was completely self-reliant, and never complained or feared death. Toward the end a faithful devoted old servant—Nelly—came down to look after him. Just before the end he had a trained nurse in attendance as he became bedfast. He died quietly in his sleep on October 1, 1957—quite alone. Two days later his remains were buried in the Vonnegut lot in Crown Hill Cemetery next to his wife Edith and his parents, Bernard and Nanette.”

  • • •

  There ends my Uncle John’s essay, save for a grandiloquent coda not entirely in keeping with the facts. I have left a lot out, but nothing which has a direct bearing on what I myself have become. It is copyrighted.

  The owner of the copyright is Uncle John’s grandson, my second cousin once-removed, William Rauch. He works here in New York now for Mayor Edward Koch. See how we disperse and disperse?


  • • •

  Was I a sad child, knowing how rich my family had been? Not at all. We were at least as well off as most of the people I went to public school with, and I would have lost all my friends if we had started having servants again, and worn expensive clothes again, and ridden on ocean liners and visited German relatives in a real castle, and on and on. Mother, who was half-cracked, used to speak of the time when I would resume my proper place in society when the Great Depression ended, would swim with members of other leading families at the Indianapolis Athletic Club, would play tennis and golf with them at the Woodstock Golf and Country Club. She could not understand that to give up my friends at Public School No. 43, “the James Whitcomb Riley school,” by the way, would be for me to give up everything.

  I still feel uneasy about prosperity and associating with members of my parents’ class on that account.

  Henry David Thoreau said, “I have traveled extensively in Concord.” That quotation was probably first brought to my attention by one of my magnificent teachers in high school. Thoreau, I now feel, wrote in the voice of a child, as do I. And what he said about Concord is what every child feels, what every child seemingly must feel, about the place where he or she was born. There is surely more than enough to marvel at for a lifetime, no matter where the child is born.

  Castles? Indianapolis was full of them.

  • • •

  One of my brother Bernard’s favorite stories is about the farmer who decides to go to have a look at St. Louis, the nearest city. This would be in 1900, say. When he comes back to his farm after a week, he is gaga about all the human activities and machinery he has seen.

  When he is questioned about this famous landmark or that one in St. Louis, it turns out that he knows nothing about them. He makes this confession: “Actually, I never got past the depot.”

  • • •

  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, ER WIRB

  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.”

  3

  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 raiding 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 Hider. 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 Ufe. 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 Churc
hill 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 oudaw 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 MacArthur 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.