Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series)

by Kurt Vonnegut

  If Hamlet hoped to be remembered after he slammed the big door (or after somebody slammed it for him), I am sure he would have said so. Mark Twain (who wrote as though he would have liked to be remembered) said his reputation might outlive his body for at least a little while because he had moralized. (And indeed, his reputation has outlived his body.) I am sure he would have moralized in any case, but he had noticed that (for whatever reason) ancient writings which were still interesting in his day were all moralized. The anthology we call “The Bible” comes to mind. So should Lysistrata by Aristophanes (ca. 448–380 B.C.) and the Second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) and Candide by Voltaire (1694–1778) and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) and The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) and Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters (1869–1950) and Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) and Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) and on and on. So good advice to a young writer who wishes to circumvent mortality might be: “Moralize.” I would add this caveat: “Be sure to sound reader-friendly and not all that serious when doing it.” Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) comes to mind. The sermons of Cotton Mather (1663–1728) do not.

  Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the French fascist (and physician) about whom I wrote in Palm Sunday, may have tried to achieve a little immortality with deliberate, absolutely outrageous immorality. I was talking to Saul Steinberg about Céline once, and I cried out in astonishment that a writer so funny and wise and gifted would intersperse what could have been masterpieces with loathsome attacks on Jews in general and, if you can believe it, jeers at the memory of Anne Frank in particular. “Why, why, why did he have to besmirch the sublimely innocent ghost of Anne Frank?” I said.

  Steinberg pointed his right index finger at my breastbone. He said, “He wanted you to remember him.”

  (Steinberg is perhaps the most intelligent man in New York City. He may also be the most melancholy. He is far, far from home, having been born in 1914 Romania. He thinks the funniest joke in the world is this definition of an Irish homosexual: “A man who likes women more than whiskey.”)

  I don’t care if I am remembered or not when I am dead. (A scientist I knew at General Electric, who was married to a woman named Josephine, said to me, “Why should I buy life insurance? If I die, I won’t care what’s happening to Jo. I won’t care about anything. I’ll be dead.”)

  I am a child of a Great Depression (just like my grandchildren). In a Great Depression any job is a miracle. Back in the 1930s, if somebody got a job there was a big celebration. Around about midnight somebody would finally inquire as to the nature of the job. A job was a job. To me writing books or whatever is just another job. When my cash cows the slick magazines were put out of business by TV, I wrote industrial advertising and then sold cars instead, and invented a new board game, and taught in a private school for fucked-up rich kids, and so on. I didn’t think I owed it to the world or to myself or to anything to get back to writing, if I could. Writing was just a job I’d lost. When a child of a Great Depression loses a job, it is sort of like losing a billfold or a key to the front door. You go get another one.

  (One jocular Great Depression answer to the question about what kind of job you got was, “Cleaning birdshit out of cuckoo clocks.” Another one was, “It’s in a bloomer factory. I’ll be pulling down five thousand a year.”)

  Most people my age and of my social class, no matter what job they held, are retired now. So it seems redundant (even silly) for critics to say, as so many do, that I am not the promising writer I used to be. If they think I am a disappointment, they should see what the passage of time has done to Mozart, Shakespeare, and Hemingway.

  The older my father was (and he died at seventy-two), the more absentminded he became. People forgave him for that, and I think people should forgive me, too. (I never meant anybody any harm, and neither did he.) Toward the end, Father actually called me Bozo several times. Bozo was a wire-haired fox terrier we had when I was a little boy. (Bozo wasn’t even my dog. Bozo belonged to my big brother Bernard.) Father apologized for calling me Bozo. Ten minutes later he called me Bozo again.

  During the last three days of his life (which I did not see) he would look through drawers and in cupboards for some sort of document. It was obviously important to him, but it was also a secret. He wouldn’t tell anybody what it was. He never found it, and neither did we, so we will never know what it was.

  (I can never forget the dying words of the actor John Barrymore, according to Gene Fowler in his Good Night, Sweet Prince: “I am the illegitimate son of Buffalo Bill.”)

  XXI

  Many people feel that humor (professorial drolleries excepted) is a scheme of self-defense which only members of famously maligned and oppressed minorities should be allowed to use. (Mark Twain cast himself as poor white trash.) It must seem very wrong to them that I, an educated, middle-class person of German descent, should joke all the time. As far as they are concerned, I might as well be singing “Ol’ Man River” with tears in my eyes.

  (Saul Steinberg was talking one time about muzhiks, which is to say Russian peasants. I said that I had been a muzhik. “How could you ever have been a muzhik?” he exclaimed. We were sitting by my swimming pool in the Hamptons. I said, “I was a Private in the Army for three wartime years.”)

  In a wide-open seaport like New York City, where persons of all races and degrees of sophistication come (as during the California gold rush of 1849) to find fortune or doom, everybody sizes up everybody else largely on the basis of minute distinctions in race, usually (except where fear or anger is present) without saying so. Thus am I aware when talking to the writer Peter Maas, for example, that he is half Irish and half Dutch, or when talking to Kedikai Lipton (who is “Miss Scarlet” on the box for the Parker Brothers game Clue) that she is half Japanese and half Irish. When I talk to my best friend (now that the purebred Irishman Bernard V. O’Hare has joined the Choir Invisible) Sidney Offit, I am aware that he is Jewish.

  So people must size me up as a German, because that is what I am. (At a bar mitzvah a couple of years ago, the movie director Sidney Lumet asked me if I was Dutch or Danish, and I answered silently but so he could read my lips, “Nazi.” He laughed. I dated some with a really swell Jewish writer when my first marriage was falling apart, and I heard her tell a friend on the telephone that I looked like a Storm Trooper.)

  People ask me how I feel about German reunification, and I reply that most of what we like about German culture came from many Germanys. What we have good reason to hate about it has come from one.

  (What is really scary about Germans in Germany is that they enjoy fighting other white people. When I was a PW, one of our guards who had been shot up on the Russian Front mocked Britain’s imperial military exploits. He said in English, “Them and their Neeger wars.” If he is still alive, and has heard about Grenada and Panama and Nicaragua and so on, he could be laughing at our Neeger wars.)

  The hatred for all things German expressed by Anglos in this country during World War I (before my birth) was so virulent that there were virtually no proudly German institutions still operating (I include my father) when it came time for World War II. German-Americans had become (in self-defense and in embarrassment over Kaiser Wilhelm and then Hitler) the least tribal and most acculturated segment of our white population. (Who was Goethe? Who was Schiller? Ask Casey Stengel or Dwight David Eisenhower.)

  One American in four is descended from German immigrants, but what politician nowadays ponders how to woo the German vote? (That is OK with me.) I am only sorry that the mostly German-American Freethinker movement did not survive the obliteration, since it might have become an extended family for the millions of good Americans who find all the big questions about life unanswered, save by ancient baloney of human manufacture. Before World War I, the Freethinkers had cheerful congregations, and picnics, too, in many parts of this country. If not God, what was there for th
em to serve during their short stay on Earth? Only one thing was left to serve under such circumstances, which was their community. Why should they behave well (which they did), quite certain as they were that neither Heaven nor Hell awaited them? Virtue was its own reward.

  If there were Freethinker Societies today, lonely rationalists, children of the Enlightenment, wouldn’t have to consider throwing away their brains, as though their heads were nothing but jack-o’-lanterns, in their desperate search for spiritual companionship.

  I considered sandbagging the Appendix of this book with a long essay on Freethinking written by my great-grandfather Clemens Vonnegut in Indianapolis at the turn of this corrupt and bloody century. He was no holy man. He was a hardware merchant (“You can get it at Vonnegut’s”) who had done Occidental-style meditation, which consisted of reading books. His essay was as secular a creation as the Hippocratic Oath, which has governed the behavior of decent physicians for millennia. I have deposited copies of the essay in the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress, and let it go at that.

  Here ends (to my astonishment) yet another book written not by somebody else but by me. (When I was living on Cape Cod I had a carpenter build single-handedly a small ell on my house. When it was done he said the most wonderful thing. He said, “How did I ever do that?” Thus does the Universe continue to bloom or fester during its expansion phase. He wasn’t the German mentioned in the Preface, the one who shot himself. He was Ted Adler, German for “eagle,” born in the USA. He fought the Germans in Italy.)

  In my very first book, Player Piano (published a mere thirty-eight years ago, before the perfection of transistors, when machines making human beings redundant were still enormous, doing their thinking with vacuum tubes), I asked a question which is even harder to answer nowadays: “What are people for?” My own answer is: “Maintenance.” In Hocus Pocus, my last book before this one, I acknowledged that everybody wanted to build and nobody wanted to do maintenance. So there goes the ball game. Meanwhile, truth, jokes, and music help at least a little bit.

  (The second-funniest clean joke in the world was told to me personally by the great comedian Rodney Dangerfield. We were in a movie together. He said he had a great-uncle who was admired for his cleanliness. He was the talk of the neighborhood. This old man took six, seven, eight, sometimes as many as twelve baths or showers every day. After he died, his whole funeral cortege went through a car wash on the way to the cemetery.)

  Time to say yet again, “Auf Wiedersehen “

  The person I have particularly in mind when I say that, of course (even though I know that life is a brief interval between black and black), is Bernard V. O’Hare.

  Great-grandfather Clemens Vonnegut concluded his essay on Freethinking with a fragment from his own translation of a poem by Goethe. It seems no bad thing if I follow his example, to wit:

  Subject to eternal,

  Immovable laws,

  We all must fulfill

  The circles of our existence.

  Man alone is able to do

  What’s seemingly impossible.

  He discriminates,

  Chooses and judges;

  He can make the moment last.

  He alone may

  Reward the good,

  Punish the wicked,

  Heal and save,

  Join tO utility all

  That’s erringly rambling.

  Appendix

  WHAT MY SON MARK WANTED ME

  TO TELL THE PSYCHIATRISTS

  IN PHILADELPHIA,

  WHICH WAS ALSO THE AFTERWORD

  TO A NEW EDITION

  OF HIS BOOK THE EDEN EXPRESS

  The events described in The Eden Express took place nearly twenty years ago. Some things have changed. The notion that mental illness has a large biochemical component is no longer very radical. Things have come full circle, to the point where it’s unusual to hear anyone say that mental illness is all mental. The view that going crazy is caused by bad events in childhood and that talk and understanding offer the best hope for a cure seems very out of date. This is a change for the better, although it has by no means brought an end to the shame, blame, and guilt which continue to compound the suffering of the mentally ill and their families.

  The clinical definition of schizophrenia has been changed. Under the old definitions there was considerable ambiguity about what to call people like me. Under the new definitions I would be classified as manic-depressive rather than schizophrenic. I wasn’t sick for very long and I didn’t follow a downhill course, so I did not fit what has now become a definition of someone who is schizophrenic. While it’s tempting to dismiss this as an insignificant change in labels and be more than a little irritated that they went and changed the rules after I went and built a book around the old definitions, I have to admit that this too is probably a positive change. It should mean that fewer people with acute breakdowns will be written off as hopeless. Eventually someone will develop a simple blood test that will sort out who has what disease and what treatments should work. In the meantime we’re stuck with arguing about labels and indirect evidence as the best way we have of approaching useful truths about how to help people.

  There are probably a dozen or so separate diseases responsible for what we now call schizophrenia and manic depression. Until the definitive work is done, many things are plausible and almost anything is possible. This lack of certainty makes mental illness wonderful ground for intellectual speculation and absolute hell for patients and their families.

  At the time I wrote my book I felt that the large doses of vitamins with which I was treated, along with more conventional therapies, had a great deal to do with my recovery. It was my hope that many people diagnosed as schizophrenic would get better if only their doctors would become more open-minded and treat them with vitamins. Since that time I’ve seen people with breakdowns like mine recover every bit as completely as I did, without vitamin therapy. I’ve seen many cases where vitamin therapy didn’t make any difference and a lot of cases like mine where it’s hard to say exactly what did what.

  I continue to feel a great deal of affection for the doctors who treated me. They were good doctors with or without vitamins, which they saw mostly as something that couldn’t hurt and might help.

  What I can no longer continue to do is maintain that vitamins played a major role in my recovery. I have not changed the text of my book, since I think it should stand as I wrote it. I remain very proud of the book, but if I could have one line back I’d delete “The more the vitamins took hold …” (p. 201). I’d also drop the paragraphs dealing with how to find out more about vitamin therapy in the postscript.

  Life has been good to me. I made it into and through medical school and managed to enjoy myself most of the time. I practice pediatrics, which I continue to find very congenial, rewarding work. I have two healthy sons and am still in love with my wife. I’m surprised how much I care about the Red Sox.

  I still think a fair amount about the sixties and trying to be a good hippie. I’m under no illusion that I understand exactly what was going on back then, but there are a few things that need saying. We were not the spaced-out, flaky, self-absorbed, wimpy, whiny flower children in movies and TV shows alleging to depict the times. It’s true that we were too young, too inexperienced, and in the end too vulnerable to bad advice from middle-aged sociopathic gurus. Things eventually went bad, drugs took their toll, but before they went bad, hippies did a lot of good. Brave, honest, and true, and they paid a price. I’m sure no one will ever study it, but my guess is that there are as many disabled and deeply scarred ex-hippies as there are Vietnam vets.

  When all is said and done, the times were out of joint. Adults as much as said that they didn’t have a clue what should be done and that it was up to us, the best, bravest, brightest children ever, to fix things up. We gave it our best shot, and I’m glad I was there.

  COMMENT

  If well-educated hippies like Mark, who were in good he
alth and of military age during the Vietnam War but did not risk their lives and honor in the slaughter, are indeed as scarred as those who fought, their wounds were of a different sort. Chief among these, I will guess, was shame about their membership in a social class (my class) so pandered to by the Government that its young (with a few exceptions) did not have to go to war if they didn’t want to. I myself remember only one face and personality which went with a name on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. They belonged to a physician’s son who was a notorious screwup, whose parents thought he might be straightened out by Army discipline. The boy was back home again in no time, at permanent attention in a body bag.

  I know only one other father, a prosperous potato farmer (on whose tennis court I used to play with Sidney Offit), who lost a son over there. He and his son (whom I did not know) were conventionally patriotic in the manner of almost all Americans during World War II, during which all social classes proudly shared sacrifices and great risks with something approaching equality. They thought it was not only a duty but a privilege for a young man to kill or be killed in time of war. I believed that, and was not mistaken to believe that during World War II. To have asked my parents to connive with politicians so as to get me an assignment well behind the lines would have seemed to me (and later to my children, too, if they had heard about it) unforgivable sleaze, which is to say a case of a conscience committing suicide.

  Mark inherited a World War II conscience (as did O’Hare’s kids, and on and on). So he had to maim if not kill it, if he was to stay out of the Vietnam nightmare, which must have hurt a lot. He, like so many members of his generation, became a man without a country because his Government was behaving in a manner toward the young of its own lower classes, not to mention the Vietnamese, which was not only cruel and hideously wasteful, but as I’ve said so often before, gruesomely ridiculous.