Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

by Kurt Vonnegut

  I knew Kerouac only at the end of his life, which is to say there was no way for me to know him at all, since he had become a pinwheel. He had settled briefly on Cape Cod, and a mutual friend, the writer Robert Boles, brought him over to my house one night. I doubt that Kerouac knew anything about me or my work, or even where he was. He was crazy. He called Boles, who is black, “a blue-gummed nigger.” He said that Jews were the real Nazis, and that Allen Ginsberg had been told by the Communists to befriend Kerouac, in order that they might gain control of American young people, whose leader he was.

  This was pathetic. There were clearly thunderstorms in the head of this once charming and just and intelligent man. He wished to play poker, so I dealt some cards. There were four hands, I think—one for Boles, one for Kerouac, one for Jane, one for me. Kerouac picked up the remainder of the deck, and he threw it across the kitchen.

  It was then that Mark came in, unexpectedly home for a weekend from Swarthmore College, where he was a religion major. He was also a middleweight wrestler in very good shape. He wore a full beard and a work shirt and blue jeans, and carried a duffel bag. Everything about his costume and even his posture might have been inspired by Kerouac’s books.

  The moment Kerouac saw him, Kerouac stood and looked him over smolderingly from head to toe. The calm before a fight settled dankly over the room.

  “You think you understand me,” said Kerouac to Mark. “You don’t understand me at all. You want to fight about it?” Mark said nothing, not knowing who Kerouac was or what he was so mad about.

  Kerouac praised himself as a fighter, asked Mark if he really thought he was man enough to take him on.

  Mark understood this much, anyway: that he might really have to fight this person. He didn’t want to, but then again, he wouldn’t have minded fighting him all that much.

  But then Kerouac sat back down in his chair heavily, shaking his head and saying over and over again, “Doesn’t understand me at all.”

  Later on that night, after Kerouac and Boles left, Mark and I talked some about Kerouac, who was then completing his seventeenth and last book. He would die very soon.

  It turned out that Mark had never read Kerouac.

  • • •

  And Mark is a physician now, married to Pat O’Shea, a schoolteacher, and they have one son, Zachary Vonnegut, the firstborn of my grandchildren, now three years old, and the only one so far to carry on my own curious last name. Mark is the first Vonnegut in America to be a healer, and only the second one to earn a doctor’s degree of any sort. My brother Bernard, of course, has a doctor’s degree in chemistry.

  And Conrad Aiken, the poet, the one time I met him, told me that a child will compete with its father in an area where the father is weak, in an area where the father mistakenly believes himself to be quite accomplished. Aiken himself did this, by his own account. His father was a Renaissance man, a surgeon, an athlete, something of a musician, something of a poet, and on and on. Aiken said that he himself became a poet because he realized that his father’s poetry really wasn’t very good.

  So what am I, if I believe that, to make of myself as mirrored in my own children, who cheerfully compete in every area, including writing, in which I have ever dabbled while they were watching? I played chess a little, and now all of them can beat me at chess. I painted and drew some, and now Jim Adams and Mark Vonnegut and Edith Vonnegut and Nanette Vonnegut can all paint and draw circles around me. Desperately, this old man is going to have a one-man show of his drawings this fall, but they’re no damn good.

  Yes, and I carpentered some, so now Jim Adams and Kurt Adams and Steve Adams and Mark Vonnegut can all do cabinet work. And on and on.

  Mark has written a first-rate book. Edith has not only written but illustrated a first-rate book.

  I noodled around some on the piano and the clarinet, so Steve Adams now composes his own music and performs with his guitar in cabarets, and Mark plays saxophone and a little piano in a jazz band composed entirely of physicians, and on and on.

  This is terrible.

  • • •

  I find that I want to protect the privacy of my two daughters, and so will talk about them very little. Nanette and Edith are both gifted artists. Both have found the life of an artist a lonely one. Edith has determined that loneliness is not too high a price to pay. Nanette is becoming a nurse who will make pictures for fun.

  • • •

  And meanwhile the man-made weather of politics and economics and technology will blow them this way and that.

  • • •

  What is my favorite among all the works of art my children have so far produced? It is perhaps a letter written by my youngest daughter Nanette. It is so organic! She wrote it to “Mr. X,” an irascible customer at a Cape Cod restaurant where she worked as a waitress in the summer of 1978. The customer was so mad about the service he had received one evening, you see, that he had complained in writing to the management. The management posted the letter on the kitchen bulletin board.

  Nanette’s reply went like this:

  Dear Mr. X,

  As a newly trained waitress I feel that I must respond to the letter of complaint which you recently wrote to the ABC Inn. Your letter has caused more suffering to an innocent young woman this summer than the inconvenience you experienced in not receiving your soup on time and having your bread taken away prematurely and so on.

  I believe that you did in fact receive poor service from this new waitress. I recall her as being very flustered and upset that evening, but she hoped that her errors, clumsy as they were, would be understood sympathetically as inexperience. I myself have made mistakes in serving. Fortunately, the customers were humorous and compassionate. I have learned so much from these mistakes, and through the support and understanding of other waitresses and customers in the span of only one week, that I feel confident now about what I am doing, and seldom make mistakes.

  There is no doubt in my mind that Katharine is on her way to becoming a competent waitress. You must understand that learning how to waitress is very much the same as learning how to juggle. It is difficult to find the correct balance and timing. Once these are found, though, waitressing becomes a solid and unshakable skill.

  There must be room for error even in such a finely tuned establishment as the ABC Inn. There must be allowance for waitresses being human. Maybe you did not realize that in naming this young woman you made it necessary for the management to fire her. Katharine is now without a summer job on Cape Cod, and school is ahead.

  Can you imagine how difficult it is to find jobs here now? Do you know how hard it is for many young students to make ends meet these days? I feel it is my duty as a human being to ask you to think twice about what is of importance in life. I hope that in all fairness you will think about what I have said, and that in the future you will be more thoughtful and humane in your actions.

  Sincerely,

  Nanette Vonnegut.

  14

  JONATHAN SWIFT MISPERCEIVED

  IS IT POSSIBLE FOR A MAN of my eminence to write so badly that he is rejected? Yes, indeed. It takes some doing, though. As my own vanity publisher, I intend to thrust one such fizzle into our culture anyway. It is an essay on Jonathan Swift, which I submitted as a preface for a new edition of Gulliver’s Travels.

  The publisher’s objection was that I had sentimentalized Swift, having failed, apparently, to have read any detailed accounts of his Ufe and character. Here is how I did it:

  “Go, traveler,” says his epitaph in Latin, “and imitate, if you can, one who strove with all his strength to champion liberty.” Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), an Anglican priest, wrote this about his own long life. He is buried beside his wife in Dublin’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where he was dean for his final thirty-two years. It was in Dublin that he wrote Gulliver’s Travels, a book as enduring as any cathedral. The appointment to St. Patrick’s had disappointed him. He had hoped for a bishopric in England. Be that as it may, he became, a
ccording to Swift scholar Ricardo B. Quintana, “Dublin’s foremost citizen and Ireland’s great patriotic dean.” In our own thin-skinned and solemn society, it would be impossible for such a ferocious satirist to become the head of a cathedral and a treasured public man.

  He began to write Gulliver’s Travels when he was about my age, which is fifty-four. He finished it when he was sixty. He was already recognized as one of the most bitterly funny writers of his or any time. His motives were invariably serious, however, and I now suggest that Gulliver’s Travels can be read as a series of highly responsible sermons, delivered during a crisis in Christian attitudes, one that is far from over yet. The crisis is this, in my opinion: It simply will not do for adult Christians to think of themselves as God’s little lambs anymore.

  Swift died before the invention of the steam engine or the iron plow—or of the Constitution of the United States, for that matter. But he was aware of microscopes and telescopes and the calculus, and Harvey’s theories about the circulation of human blood, and Newton’s laws of motion, and all that. There were certainly strong hints around that the natural orders of things, so long so stubborn and mysterious, might in fact be wonderful clocks which could be tinkered with, which might even be taken apart and reassembled. Human reason was in the process of assuming powers to change life such as only armies and disasters had possessed before. So Dublin’s first citizen found it urgent that we take an unsentimental look, for the good of the universe, at the great apes that were suddenly doing such puissant thinking. Lambs, indeed!

  In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift sets such high standards for unsentimentality about human beings that most of us can meet those standards only in wartime, and only briefly even then. He shrinks us, urinates on us, expands us and peers into all our nauseating apertures, encourages us to demonstrate our stupidity and mendaciousness, makes us hideously old. On paper he subjects us to every humiliating test that imaginative fiction can invent. And what is learned about us in the course of these Auschwitzian experiments? Only this, according to Swift’s hero, Captain Gulliver: that we are disgusting in the extreme. We can be sure that this is not Swift’s own opinion of us, thank God—for, before he allows Gulliver to declare us no better than vomit, he makes Gulliver insane. That has to be the deepest meaning of Gulliver’s adoration of horses, since Swift himself had no more than average respect for those dazed and skittish animals. Gulliver is no longer the reliable witness he was in Chapter I.

  I had a teacher in high school who assured me that a person has to be at least a little insane to harp on human disgustingness as much as Swift does. And Swift harps on it long before Gulliver has gone insane. I would tell that teacher now, if she were still alive, that his harping is so relentless that it becomes ridiculous, and is meant to be ridiculous, and that Swift is teaching us a lesson almost as important as the one about our not being lambs: that our readiness to feel disgust for ourselves and others is not, perhaps, the guardian of civilization so many of us imagine it to be. Disgust, in fact, may be the chief damager of our reason, of our common sense—may make us act against our own best interests, may make us insane.

  Swift does not develop this theme, but the history of the past hundred years or so has surely done it for him. What is it that has allowed civilized human beings to build and operate death camps? Disgust. What has encouraged them to bomb undefended cities, to torture prisoners, to beat up their own spouses and children, to blow out their own brains? Disgust. Yes. In my opinion, Gulliver’s Travels is a remarkable effort to inject us with an overdose of disgustedness, and thus to immunize us from that most dangerous disease.

  This Book-of-the-Month Club edition of Gulliver’s Travels is based on the Oxford University Press edition of 1971, which was edited by Paul Turner, Lecturer in English Literature at Oxford. That edition has what this one lacks: an introduction and hundreds of fascinating notes by him. I recommend that edition to all who want the pleasure of relating the tale to Swift’s own adventures and times, and who would like help in speculating as to the plausibleness of Captain Gulliver’s endless lies. Mr. Turner tells us, for example: “The scale of Lilliput is one inch to a foot of the ordinary world. Mogg mentions [F. Mogg, Scientific American, Vol. CLXXIX, 1948] some biological difficulties: a Lilliputian would have room for far fewer cortical cells (so far less intelligence) than a chimpanzee; his head would be too small to carry useful eyes; and he would need eight times as many calories per ounce of body-weight as a full-scale man needs—twenty-four meals a day instead of three.” As for the giants of Brobdingnag, he refers to Mogg again, who “calls a sixty-foot man ’an engineering impossibility.’ The skeleton would need considerable modification to support the weight (about ninety tons): shorter legs, smaller head, thicker neck, and larger trunk (to accommodate adequate internal organs to power such a huge machine).” And so on.

  The justification for publishing an edition as naked of notes as this one is, of course, is that the author, like all authors, wished his book to be loved for itself alone. If the ghost of Jonathan Swift is among us, it must resent terrifically my own Yahoolike intrusion here. I apologize. Next to my being in this volume at all, my most serious offense is failing to convey how much rage and joy and irrationality must have gone into the creation of this masterpiece. In praising the sanity of Gulliver’s Travels, I have made it sound altogether too sane.

  15

  JEKYLL AMD HYDE UPDATED

  LEE GUBER, the Broadway producer, became a friend of mine when we served on the New York State Council for the Arts. During the summer of 1978 he asked me to write a modern version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for the musical stage. The original, by the way, is a tiny thing, no more than sixty pages. There is very little characterization in the original, which is surprisingly sketchy and sparsely populated. It was the first piece of writing for which Stevenson was paid.

  I never got paid for my version. I consider it excellent, if a little slapdash and short. It is called The Chemistry Professor, and it goes like this:

  THE TIME: THE PRESENT, SPRINGTIME.

  THE PLACE: SWEETBREAD COLLEGE, A SMALL, LIBERAL-ARTS INSTITUTION OUTSIDE PHILADELPHIA.

  SCENE 1: THE COLLEGE GATE, NOON.

  [At the rise: A chorus of male and female students is discovered, desperately unhappy, making extravagant demonstrations of grief Aparticularly pretty and scatterbrained coed is named KIMBERLY. Her studious boyfriend is named SAM. Each person has afresh copy of the student newspaper, which has told them that the college is bankrupt, and will probably close forever.]

  KIMBERLY: I can’t stand it!

  SAM: What kind of a world is this, where a thing like this can happen?

  STUDENT 1: What a rotten, stinking society this is!

  [And so on. The cries become more musical and the milling more formal, so that a song and dance about outrageous fortune materializes. No mention has yet been made, however, as to what the misery is all about. The number ends with the students strewn about in poses of dejection.]

  STUDENT 1: I feel like getting drunk.

  SAM: What good would that do?

  STUDENT 1: At least I could throw up.

  KIMBERLY: You always do.

  [SALLY CATHCART, a Judy Garland look-alike, enters boisterously in cheerleading garb, carrying pom-poms high. She has not heard the news.]

  SALLY: Hey, gang—what’s there to be so blue about? It’s springtime!

  KIMBERLY: Where have you been, Sally?

  SALLY: Cheerleading practice. [A sample cheer] With an S, with a W, with an E, E, T! With a B, with an R, with an E, A, D! Sweetbread! Sweetbread! Sweetbread!

  SAM: The college is bankrupt, Sally.

  SALLY: Oh, no!

  SAM: [Handing her a paper] It’s in the Daily Pancreas.

  KIMBERLY: They wouldn’t dare print it, if it weren’t true.

  SALLY: [Reading] “Bankrupt! Closing its doors forever in two weeks’ time.” The most innocent college in the world.

  SAM:
Drop your pom-poms, Sally. Nothing to cheer for here anymore.

  SALLY: I won’t drop them yet, Sam—but I’ll carry them low.

  CHORUS: [Singing as one, a rich chord]

  Lowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

  [JERRY RIVERS, a Mickey Rooney look-alike and president of the student body, enters with his stepfather, FRED LEGHORN, shrewd hayseed king of the mechanized chicken industry.]

  SAM: Hey—it’s Jerry Rivers, the president of the student body.

  JERRY: Gang—this is my mother’s fifth and possibly final husband, Fred Leghorn, the largest producer of chickens in the world.

  SALLY: DO you ever get tired of chickens, Mr. Leghorn?

  LEGHORN: Anybody who is tired of chickens is tired of life.

  SAM: You hear about the bankruptcy, Jerry?

  JERRY: Yeah. I keep wondering what an ordinary bunch of kids like us can do.

  [JERRY puts his hands behind his back, does a tap dance as he ponders the problem. He stops, speaks to the chorus.]

  JERRY: YOU kids got any ideas?

  [Members of the chorus put their hands behind their backs and duplicate his steps in unison. They stop and sing the next line with a gorgeous choral effect.]

  CHORUS: [Singing] What can ordinary kids like us do about anything?

  LEGHORN: Maybe you could have a cake sale.

  SALLY: Mr. Leghorn—couldn’t you give us a few million buckaroonies or so?

  LEGHORN: I came down here to see what this stepson of mine was getting for ten thousand dollars a year, and I must say I’m not overwhelmed with respect. It looks like Disneyland without the rides to me.

  KIMBERLY: But we’re your nation’s future!

  LEGHORN: That’s what I mean.

  JERRY: Wait a minute! I’ve got it! We’ll put together a Broadway musical with all the talent we’ve got right here!