Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

by Kurt Vonnegut

  Would you like an introduction?

  • • •

  What stories I must have to tell in Indianapolis about all these celebrities! Not really. Most writers are not quickwitted when they talk. Novelists in particular, as I have said before, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears. The good ones do.

  Some people say that my friend Gore Vidal, who once suggested in an interview that I was the worst writer in the United States, is witty. I myself think he wants an awfiil lot of credit for wearing a three-piece suit.

  • • •

  After meeting all these people, I have only a single shapely anecdote to tell. It took place at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where I taught in the famed Writers’ Workshop in 1965 and 1966. My most famous colleagues were the novelists Vance Bourjaily, Nelson Algren, and Richard Yates, and the Chilean José Donoso, and the poets George Starbuck, James Tate, Marvin Bell, Donald Justice—and the poet-founder of the Workshop, of course, who is Paul Engle.

  Among those students of ours who would really amount to something as writers by and by, incidentally, were Jane Barnes and John Casey and Bruce Dobler and Andre Dubus and Gail Godwin and John Irving and Jonathan Penner.

  So Algren and Donoso and I were new arrivals, and we went together to the first autumn meeting of the English department, against whose treasury our paychecks were drawn. We thought we should be there. Nobody had told us that lecturers in the Writers’ Workshop traditionally ignored all such bureaucratic, sesquipedalian sniveling and obfuscation.

  So Algren and Donoso and I were going down a staircase afterward. Algren had come late, and so had sat separate from Donoso and me. He and Donoso had never met before, so I introduced them on the staircase, explaining to Algren that Donoso was from Chile, but a graduate of Princeton University.

  Algren shook Donoso’s hand, but said nothing to him until we reached the bottom. He at last thought of something to say to a Chilean novelist: “It must be nice,” he said, “to come from a country that long and narrow.”

  • • •

  Are many novelists schizophrenic—at least marginally so? Do they hallucinate, seeing and hearing things that healthy people cannot sense? Do they turn disordered perceptions into gold in the literary marketplace? If writers are usefully crazy, what is the medical name for their disease? Or, if writers themselves aren’t lunatics, perhaps a lot of their ancestors were.

  The psychiatric department of the University of Iowa’s hospital, it turns out, has wondered some about these questions, which have their roots in folklore. It has taken advantage of the large numbers of reputable writers who come to Iowa City, usually down on their luck, to teach at the Writers’ Workshop. So they have questioned us about our mental health and about that of our ancestors and siblings, too.

  It is apparent to them, I am told, that we are not hallucinators, nor are many of us descended from those who saw or heard things which weren’t really there. Overwhelmingly, we are depressed, and are descended from those who, psychologically speaking, spent more time than anyone in his or her right mind would want to spend in gloom.

  • • •

  I would add that novelists are not only unusually depressed, by/and large, but have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetics consultants at Bloomingdale’s department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.

  • • •

  I heard a Frenchman in a Madison Avenue bookstore say in English the other day that nobody in America had produced a book in forty years or more. I knew what he meant. He was talking about planetary literary treasures on the order of Moby Dick or Huckleberry Finn or Leaves of Grass or Walden, say. I had to agree with him. No book from this country during my lifetime (1922-?) has been in scale with Ulysses or Remembrance of Things Past or The Tin Drum or One Hundred Years of Solitude or A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch.

  Still, now that I contemplate all the Americans on my list of friends, I wish the Frenchman were here so that I could say to him frostily: “You are quite right, mon-sewer, we have not produced a book. All we poor Americans could do was produce a literature.”

  • • •

  And here is how I spoke well of my friend Joseph Heller’s contributions to that literature in The New York Times Book Review of Sunday, October 6, 1974:

  The company that made a movie out of Joseph Heller’s first novel, Catch-22, had to assemble what became the 11th or 12th largest bomber force on the planet at the time. If somebody wants to make a movie out of his second novel, Something Happened, he can get most of his props at Bloom-ingdale’s—a few beds, a few desks, some tables and chairs.

  Life is a whole lot smaller and cheaper in this second book. It has shrunk to the size of a grave, almost.

  Mark Twain is said to have felt that his existence was all pretty much downhill from his adventures as a Mississippi riverboat pilot. Mr. Heller’s two novels, when considered in sequence, might be taken as a similar statement about an entire white, middle-class generation of American males, my generation, Mr. Heller’s generation, Herman Wouk’s generation, Norman Mailer’s generation, Irwin Shaw’s generation, Vance Bourjaily’s generation, James Jones’s generation, and on and on—that for them everything has been downhill since World War II, as absurd and bloody as it often was.

  Both books are full of excellent jokes, but neither one is funny. Taken together they tell a tale of pain and disappointments experienced by mediocre men of good will.

  Mr. Heller is a first-rate humorist who cripples his own jokes intentionally—with the unhappiness of the characters who perceive them. He also insists op dealing with only the most hackneyed themes. After a thousand World War II airplane novels had been published and pulped, he gave us yet another one, which was gradually acknowledged as a sanely crazy masterpiece.

  Now he offers us the thousand and first version of The Hucksters or The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.

  There is a nattily dressed, sourly witty middle-management executive named Robert Slocum, he tells us, who lives in a nice house in Connecticut with a wife, a daughter, and two sons. Slocum works in Manhattan in the communications racket. He is restless. He mourns the missed opportunities of his youth. He is itchy for raises and promotions, even though he despises his company and the jobs he does. He commits unsatisfying adulteries now and then at sales conferences in resort areas, during long lunch hours, or while pretending to work late at the office.

  He is exhausted.

  He dreads old age.

  Mr. Heller’s rewriting of this written-to-death situation took him 12 years. It comes out as a monologue by Slocum. Nobody else gets to talk, except as reported by Slocum. And Slocum’s sentences are so alike in shape and texture from the beginning to the end of the book, that I imagined a man who was making an enormous statue out of sheet metal. He was shaping it with millions of identical taps from a ball-peen hammer.

  Each dent was a fact, a depressingly ordinary fact.

  “My wife is a good person, really, or used to be,” says Slocum near the beginning, “and sometimes I’m sorry for her. She drinks during the day and flirts, or tries to, at parties we go to in the evening, although she doesn’t know how.”

  “I have given my daughter a car of her own,” he says near the end. “Her spirits seem to be picking up.”

  Slocum does his deadly best to persuade us, with his tap-tap-tapping of facts, that he is compelled to be as unhappy as he is, not because of enemies or flaws in his own character, but because of the facts.

  What have these tedious facts done to him? They have required that he respond to them, since he is a man of good will. And responding and responding and responding to them has left him petrified with boredom and drained of any capacity for joyfulness, now
that he is deep into middle age.

  Only one fact among the millions is clearly horrible. Only one distinguishes Slocum’s bad luck from that of his neighbors. His youngest child is an incurable imbecile.

  Slocum is heartless about the child. “I no longer think of Derek as one of my children,” he says. “Or even as mine. I try not to think of him at all. This is becoming easier, even at home when he is nearby with the rest of us, making noise with some red cradle toy or making unintelligible sounds as he endeavors to speak. By now I don’t even know his name. The children don’t care for him either.”

  Mr. Heller might have here, or at least somewhere in his book, used conventional, Chekhovian techniques for making us love a sometimes wicked man. He might have said that Slocum was drunk or tired after a bad day at the office when he spoke so heartlessly, or that he whispered his heartlessness only to himself or to a stranger he would never see again. But Slocum is invariably sober and deliberate during his monologue, and does not seem to give a damn who hears what he says. Judging from his selection of unromantic episodes and attitudes it is his wish that we dislike him.

  And we gratify that wish.

  Is this book any good? Yes. It is splendidly put together and hypnotic to read. It is as clear and hard-edged as a cut diamond. Mr. Heller’s concentration and patience are so evident on every page that one can only say that Something Happened is at all points precisely what he hoped it would be.

  The book may be marketed under false pretenses, which is all right with me. I have already seen British sales promotion materials which suggest that we have been ravenous for a new Heller book because we want to laugh some more. This is as good a way as any to get people to read one of the unhappiest books ever written.

  Something Happened is so astonishingly pessimistic, in fact, that it can be called a daring experiment. Depictions of utter hopelessness in literature have been acceptable up to now only in small doses, in short-story form, as in Franz Kafka’s ’The Metamorphosis,” Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” or John D. MacDonald’s “The Hangover,” to name a treasured few. As far as I know, though, Joseph Heller is the first major American writer to deal with unrelieved misery at novel length. Even more rashly, he leaves his chief character, Slocum, essentially unchanged at the end.

  A middle-aged woman who had just finished Something Happened in galleys said to me the other day that she thought it was a reply to all the recent books by women about the unrewardingness of housewives’ lives. And Slocum does seem to argue that he is entitled to at least as much unhappiness as any woman he knows. His wife, after all, has to adapt to only one sort of hell, the domestic torture chamber in Connecticut, in which he, too, must writhe at night and on weekends, when he isn’t committing adultery. But he must go regularly to his office, where pain is inflicted on all the nerve centers which were neglected by the tormentors at home.

  (The place where Slocum works, incidentally, is unnamed, and its products and services are undescribed. But I had a friend of a friend of an acquaintance ask Mr. Heller if he minded naming Slocum’s employers. Mr. Heller replied with all possible speed and openness, “Time, Incorporated.” So we have a small scoop.)

  Just as Mr. Heller is uninterested in tying a tin can to anything as localized as a company with a familiar name, so is he far above the complaining contests going on between men and women these days. He began this book way back in 1962, and there have been countless gut-ripping news items and confrontations since then. But Heller’s man Slocum is deaf and blind to them. He receives signals from only three sources: his office, his memory and home.

  And, on the basis of these signals alone, he is able to say, apparently in all seriousness: “The world just doesn’t work. It’s an idea whose time is gone.”

  This is black humor indeed—with the humor removed.

  Robert Slocum was in the Air Force in Italy during World War II, by the way. He was especially happy there while demonstrating his unflagging virility to prostitutes. So it was also with John Yossarian, the hero of Catch-22, whose present whereabouts are unknown.

  There will be a molasses-like cautiousness about accepting this book as an important one. It took more than a year for Catch-22 to gather a band of enthusiasts. I myself was cautious about that book. I am cautious again.

  The uneasiness which many people will feel about liking Something Happened has roots which are deep. It is no casual thing to swallow a book by Joseph Heller, for he is, whether he intends to be or not, a maker of myths. (One way to do this, surely, is to be the final and most brilliant teller of an oft-told tale.) Catch-22 is now the dominant myth about Americans in the war against fascism. Something Happened, if swallowed, could become the dominant myth about the middle-class veterans who came home from that war to become heads of nuclear families. The proposed myth has it that those families were pathetically vulnerable and suffocating. It says that the heads of them commonly took jobs which were vaguely dishonorable or at least stultifying, in order to make as much money as they could for their little families, and they used that money in futile attempts to buy safety and happiness. The proposed myth says that they lost their dignity and their will to live in the process.

  It says they are hideously tired now.

  To accept a new myth about ourselves is to simplify our memories—and to place our stamp of approval on what might become an epitaph for our era in the shorthand of history. This, in my opinion, is why critics often condemn our most significant books and poems and plays when they first appear, while praising feebler creations. The birth of a new myth fills them with primitive dread, for myths are so effective.

  Well—I have now suppressed my own dread. I have thought dispassionately about Something Happened and I am now content to have it shown to future generations as a spooky sort of summary of what my generation of nebulously clever white people experienced, and what we, within the cage of those experiences, then did with our lives.

  And I am counting on a backlash. I expect younger readers to love Robert Slocum—on the grounds that he couldn’t possibly be as morally repellent and socially useless as he claims to be.

  People a lot younger than I am may even be able to laugh at Slocum in an affectionate way, something I am unable to do. They may even see comedy in his tragic and foolish belief that he is totally responsible for the happiness or unhappiness of the members of his tiny family.

  They may even see some nobility in him as an old soldier who has been brought to emotional ruin at last by the aging process and civilian life.

  As for myself: I can’t crack a smile when he says, ostensibly about the positions in which he sleeps, “I have exchanged the position of the fetus for the position of the corpse.” And I am so anxious for Slocum to say something good about life that I read hope into lines meant to be supremely ironical, such as when he says this: “I know at last what I want to be when I grow up. When I grow up I want to be a little boy.”

  What is perhaps Slocum’s most memorable speech mourns not his own generation but the one after his, in the person of his sullen, teen-age daughter. “There was a cheerful baby girl in a high chair in my house once,” he says, “who ate and drank with a hearty appetite and laughed a lot with spontaneous zest; she isn’t here now, and there is no trace of her anywhere.”

  We keep reading this overly long book, even though there is no rise and fall in passion and language, because it is structured as a suspense novel. The puzzle which seduces us is this one: Which of several possible tragedies will result from so much unhappiness? The author picks a good one.

  I say that this is the most memorable, and therefore the most permanent variation on a familiar theme, and that it says baldly what the other variations only implied, what the other variations tried with desperate sentimentality not to imply: That many lives, judged by the standards of the people who live them, are simply not worth living.

  • • •

  Was it unethical of me to review a book by a friend of mine for The New York Ti
mes? I did not know Heller all that well back then. We had taught at City College together, and had exchanged greetings in the halls. If I had known him well, I would have refused the assignment.

  But then, after I accepted it, I rented a summer house close to his on Long Island—and I got to know him better and better at precisely the time I was reviewing Something Happened. He was especially concerned, it turned out, about who was going to do that job for the Times.

  I told him that I had heard a strong rumor, one which satisfied him entirely, that the Times had hired Robert Penn Warren, who was, even as we spoke, probably ransacking the book for its deepest meanings in his leafy hideaway in Vermont.

  • • •

  As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.