never before have i been a tease
about a dead person I’ve interviewed, but now is the time. Let’s see how smart you are about the history of big ideas.
For starters: This former Earthling, although not quite twenty, published an idea as persistent in the minds of thinking people today as Pasteur’s germ theory, say, or Darwin’s theory of evolution, or Malthus’s dread of overpopulation.
Hint number two: Breeding will tell. This incredibly precocious writer’s mother was a famous writer, too. Some of her books were illustrated by none other than William Blake! Imagine having one’s book illustrated by William Blake! Her most passionate subject: the right of women to be treated as the equals of men.
My mystery dead person’s father was a writer, too, an anti-Calvinist preacher who wrote, most memorably, “God himself has no right to be a tyrant.”
Who were the friends of such distinguished parents? William Blake and Thomas Paine, and William Wordsworth to name a few.
Hint number three: This person was married to a celebrity, as famous for the romantic disorder of his life as for his poetry. He inspired the suicide of his first wife, for example. As Romantically as you please, he drowned when he was only thirty.
Give up? I spoke in Heaven today to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author, again before she was twenty, of the most prescient and influential science fiction novel of all times: Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus. That was in 1818, a full century before the end of the First World War—with its Frankensteinian inventions of posion gas, tanks and airplanes, flame throwers and land mines, and barbed-wire entanglements everywhere.
I hoped to get Mary Shelley’s opinions of the atomic bombs we dropped on the unarmed men, women, and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and promise to try again. This time, though, she would only rhapsodize about her parents, who were, of course, William and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and about her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his friends and hers, John Keats and Lord Byron.
I said many ignorant people nowadays thought “Frankenstein” was the name of the monster, and not of the scientist who created him.
She said, “That’s not so ignorant after all. There are two monsters in my story, not one. And one of them, the scientist, is indeed named Frankenstein.”
This is Kurt Vonnegut in Huntsville, Texas, signing off.
i have returned from heaven,
having interviewed the poet Dr. Philip Strax, S-T-R-A-X. He died at the age of ninety on the same day as the baseball player Joe Dimaggio, and was the author of this charming couplet:
Tis better to have love and lust
Than let our apparatus rust.
Author of three volumes of poetry, Philip Strax was also a radiologist. He refined the use of x-rays, previously useful mainly for looking at bones, so they could detect malignancies in the soft tissue of breasts. The number of women’s lives extended by early detection of cancers, thanks to mammograms, in baseball terms might be called thousands upon thousands of R.B.I., or runs batted in.
The turning point in his career as a physician, if not as a poet, was the death of his beloved wife Gertrude at the age of only thirty-nine. She was killed by breast cancer detected too late. Every moment of his professional life thereafter was devoted to fighting that disease: what a success!
I found him at the edge of a crowd of frenzied angels who wanted their feathers autographed by Dimaggio. I said that his glowing obituary in the NewYork Times indicated that he was extraordinarily fond of women, and they of him. He recited these unabashedly feminist lines of his own composition:
Let us remind our poor men folk in deed and song:
There are two types of men in this womanly world:
Those who know they are weak,
Those who think they are strong.
This is Kurt Vonnegut, in the indispensable company of Jack Kevorkian, who has saved my life a hundred times now, signing off until the next time. Ta ta.
it is late in the afternoon
of February 3, 1998. I have just been unstrapped from a gurney following another controlled near-death experience in this busy execution chamber in Huntsville, Texas.
For the first time in my career, I was actually on the heels of a celebrity as I made my way down the blue tunnel to Paradise. She was Carla Faye Tucker, the born-again murderer of two strangers with a pick-axe. Carla Faye was completely killed here, by the State of Texas, shortly after lunch time.
Two hours later, on another gurney, I myself was made only three-quarters dead. I caught up with Carla Faye in the tunnel, about a hundred fifty yards from the far end, near the Pearly Gates. Since she was dragging her feet, I hastened to assure her that there was no Hell waiting for her, no Hell waiting for anyone. She said that was too bad because she would be glad to go to Hell if only she could take the governor of Texas with her. “He’s a murderer, too,” said Carla Faye. “He murdered me.”
Dr. Jack Kevorkian supervises my trip to near death and back. Your reporter from the Afterlife has to sign off now. Jack and I have been asked to vacate the lethal injection facility, which must be prepared for yet another total execution. Speaking for both of us, I now say, ta-ta.
unfortunately, the recent
legal difficulties of Jack Kevorkian in Michigan, which is to say his conviction for murder one, have brought what I hope is a temporary halt to the near-death experiences he has been giving me. In order to provide some filler between WNYC’s appeals for money, I have interviewed a person who is still alive.
He is science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout. I asked him how he felt about what happened in Kosovo, Serbia. I tape-recorded his reply, but his upper plate came unstuck again and again. For the sake of clarity, I repeat in my own voice what he said.
And I quote:
NATO should have resisted the nearly irresistable temptation to be entertainers on television, to compete with movies by blowing up bridges and police stations and factories and so on. The infrastructure of the Serb tyranny should have been left unharmed in order to support justice and sanity, should they return. All cities and even little towns are world assets. For NATO to make one unliveable is to cut off its nose to spite its face, so to speak.
Show business!
The homicidal paranoia and schizophrenia of ethnic cleansing does its worst quickly now, almost instantly, like a tidal wave or volcano or earthquake—in Rwanda and now Kosovo, and who knows where else? The disease used to take years. One thinks of the Europeans killing off the Aborigines in the Western Hemisphere, and in Australia and Tasmania, and the Turks’ elimination of Armenians from their midst—of course the Holocaust, which groundon and on from 1933 to 1945. The Tasmanian genocide, incidentally, is the only one of which I’ve heard which was one-hundred-percent successful. Nobody on the face of the Earth has a native Tasmanian as a forebear!
As is now the case with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, there is a new strain of the ethnic-cleansing bacterium that makes conceivable remedies of the past seem pathetic or even absurd. In every case nowadays: too late! The victims are practically all dead or homeless by the time they are first mentioned on the six o’clock news.
All that good people can do about the disease of ethnic cleansing, now always a fait accompli, is to rescue the survivors. And watch out for Christians!
This is Kurt Vonnegut, signing off.
my career in post-mortem journalism,
dear listeners, almost certainly ends today. No sooner had Jack Kervorkian unstrapped me from my gurney, and I sat up and prepared to tell of my interview in Heaven with the late Isaac Asimov, than Jack was hustled out of here in handcuffs—to answer a murder charge in Michigan. Irony of ironies! This purported murderer has saved my life more than a dozen times! With Jack gone, this lethal-injection facility no longer feels like a home away from home to me.
Forgive my mixed emotions, then, as I mourn the misery of one friend, Jack, who is still alive, while rejoicing in the relative well-being of another—Isaac Asimov, who di
ed of kidney and heart failure, age seventy-two, eight years ago.
When on Earth, Isaac, my predecessor as honorary president of the American Humanist Association, was the most prolific American writer of books who ever lived. He wrote nearly five hundred of the things—to my measly twenty so far, or to Honoré de Balzac’s eighty-five. Sometimes Isaac wrote ten published volumes in a single year! These weren’t only prize-winning science fiction. Many were scholarly popularizations of Shakespeare and biochemistry and ancient Greek history, and the Bible and relativity, and on and on.
Isaac has a Ph.D. in chemistry from Columbia, and was born in Smolensk, in the former Soviet Union, but was raised in Brooklyn. He hated flying, and never read Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Joyce or Kafka, according to his obituary in the NewYork Times. “I am a stranger,” he once wrote, “to twentieth-century fiction and poetry.”
“Isaac,” I said, “you should be in the Guinness Book of Records.”
And he said, “To be immortalized along with a rooster named ‘Weirdo,’ who weighed twenty-two pounds and killed two cats?”
I asked him if he was still writing, and he said, “All the time! If I couldn’t write all the time, this would be hell for me. Earth would have been a hell for me if I couldn’t write all the time. Hell itself would be bearable for me, as long as I could write all the time.”
“Thank goodness there is no Hell,” I said.
“Enjoyed talking to you,” he said, “but I have to get back to work now—on a six-volume set about cockamamie Earthling beliefs in an Afterlife.”
“I myself would cheerfully settle for sleep,” I said.
“Spoken as a true humanist, he said, becoming more antsy by the second.
“One last question,” I begged. “To what do you attribute your incredible productivity?”
Isaac Asimov replied with but a single word: “Escape. And then he appended a famous statement by the similarly prolific French writer Jean-Paul Sartre:
“Hell is other people.”
THE END
KURT VONNEGUT (1922–2007) was among the few grandmasters of twentieth-century American letters, one without whom the very term American literature would mean much less than it does now. Vonnegut’s other books from Seven Stories Press include the national bestseller A Man Without a Country and, with Lee Stringer, Like Shaking Hands with God: A Conversation About Writing.
NEIL GAIMAN has written acclaimed books for both adults and younger readers, and has won many major awards, including the Hugo and Nebula. His novel The Graveyard Book was the only book to win both the Newbery (US) and Carnegie Medal (UK). His Times bestselling books include Coraline and Stardust (both adapted into films), American Gods, and Anansi Boys. His comics series The Sandman was described by the Los Angeles Times as “the greatest epic in the history of comic books.
SEVEN STORIES PRESS is an independent book publisher based in NewYork City, with distribution throughout the United States, Canada, England, and Australia. We publish works of the imagination by such writers as Nelson Algren, Russell Banks, Octavia E. Butler, Ani DiFranco, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Coco Fusco, Barry Gifford, Hwang Sok-yong, Peter Plate, Lee Stringer, and Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few, together with political titles by voices of conscience, including the Boston Women’s Health Collective, Noam Chomsky, Angela Y. Davis, Human Rights Watch, Derrick Jensen, Ralph Nader, Loretta Napoleoni, Gary Null, Project Censored, Ted Rall, Barbara Seaman, Alice Walker, Gary Webb, and Howard Zinn, among many others. Seven Stories Press believes publishers have a special responsibility to defend free speech and human rights, and to celebrate the gifts of the human imagination, wherever we can. For additional information, visit www.sevenstories.com.
God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian Page 3