Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage

by Kurt Vonnegut

  Nelson Algren lived to be seventy-two (as did my father). I said this about him in an introduction for a new edition of his Never Come Morning (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1987): “According to the diary of my wife Jill Krementz, the young British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie came to our house in Sagaponack, Long Island, for lunch on May 9, 1981. His excellent novel Midnight’s Children had just been published in the United States, and he told us that the most intelligent review had been written by Nelson Algren, a man he would like to meet. I replied that we knew Algren some, since Jill had photographed him several times and he and I had been teachers at the Writers’ Workshop of the University of Iowa back in 1965, when we were both dead broke and I was forty-three and he was fifty-six.

  “I said, too, that Algren was one of the few writers I knew who was really funny in conversations. I offered as a sample what Algren had said at the Workshop after I introduced him to the Chilean novelist José Donoso: ‘I think it would be nice to come from a country that long and narrow.’

  “Rushdie was really in luck, I went on, because Algren lived only a few miles to the north, in Sag Harbor, where John Steinbeck had spent the last of his days, and he was giving a cocktail party that very afternoon. I would call him and tell him we were bringing Rushdie along, and Jill would take pictures of the two of them together, both writers about people who were very poor. I suggested that the party might be the only one that Algren had given for himself in his entire life, since, no matter how famous he became, he remained a poor man living among the poor, and usually alone. He was living alone in Sag Harbor. He had had a new wife in Iowa City, but that marriage lived about as long as a soap bubble. His enthusiasm for writing, reading, and gambling left little time for the duties of a married man.

  “I said that Algren was bitter about how little he had been paid over the years for such important work, and especially for the movie rights to what may be his masterpiece, The Man with the Golden Arm, which made a huge amount of money as a Frank Sinatra film. Not a scrap of the profits had come to Algren, and I heard him say one time, ‘I am the penny whistle of American literature.’

  “When we got up from lunch, I went to the phone and dialed Algren’s number. A man answered and said, ‘Sag Harbor Police Department.’

  “ ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Wrong number.’

  “ ‘Who were you calling?’ he said.

  “ ‘Nelson Algren,’ I said.

  “ ‘This is his house,’ he said, ‘but Mr. Algren is dead.’ A heart attack that morning had killed Algren.

  “He is buried in Sag Harbor—without a widow or descendants, hundreds and hundreds of miles from Chicago, Illinois, which had given him to the world and with whose underbelly he had been so long identified. Like James Joyce, he had become an exile from his homeland after writing that his neighbors were perhaps not as noble and intelligent and kindly as they liked to think they were.

  “Only a few weeks before his death, he had been elected by his supposed peers, myself among them, to membership in the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters—a certification of respectability withheld from many wonderful writers, incidentally, including James Jones and Irwin Shaw. This was surely not the first significant honor ever accorded him. When he was at the peak of his powers and fame in the middle of this century, he regularly won prizes for short stories and was the first recipient of a National Book Award for Fiction, and so on. And only a few years before his death the American Academy and Institute had given him its Medal for Literature, without, however, making him a member. Among the few persons to win this medal were the likes of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.

  “His response to the medal had been impudent. He was still living in Chicago, and I myself talked to him on the telephone, begging him to come to New York City to get it at a big ceremony, with all expenses paid. His final statement on the subject to me was this: ‘I’m sorry, but I have to speak at a ladies’ garden club that day.’

  “At the cocktail party whose prospect may have killed him, I had hoped to ask him if membership in the American Academy and Institute had pleased him more than the medal. Other friends of his have since told me that the membership had moved him tremendously and had probably given him the nerve to throw a party. As to how the seeming insult of a medal without a membership had ever taken shape: This was nothing but a clumsy clerical accident caused by the awarders of prizes and memberships, writers as lazy and absentminded and idiosyncratic in such matters as Algren himself.

  “God knows how it happened. But all’s well that ends well, as the poet said.

  “Another thing I heard from others, but never from Algren himself, was how much he hoped to be remembered after he was gone. It was always women who spoke so warmly of this. If it turned out that he had never mentioned the possibility of his own immortality to any man, that would seem in character. When I saw him with men, he behaved as though he wanted nothing more from life than a night at the fights, a day at the track, or a table-stakes poker game. This was a pose, of course, and perceived as such by one and all. It was also perceived back in Iowa City that he was a steady and heavy loser at gambling, and that his writing was not going well. He had already produced so much, most of it in the mood of the Great Depression, which had become ancient history. He appeared to want to modernize himself somehow. What was my evidence? There he was, a master storyteller, blasted beyond all reason with admiration for and envy of a moderately innovative crime story then appearing in serial form in The New Yorker, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. For a while in Iowa, he could talk of little else.

  “While he was only thirteen years my senior, so close to my own age that we were enlisted men in Europe in the same world war, he was a pioneering ancestor of mine in the compressed history of American literature. He broke new ground by depicting persons said to be dehumanized by poverty and ignorance and injustice as being genuinely dehumanized, and dehumanized quite permanently. Contrast, as if you will, the poor people in Algren’s tales with those in the works of social reformers such as Charles Dickens and George Bernard Shaw, and particularly with those in Shaw’s Pygmalion, with their very promising wit and resourcefulness and courage. Reporting on what he saw of dehumanized Americans with his own eyes day after day, year after year, Algren said in effect, ‘Hey—an awful lot of these people your hearts are bleeding for are really mean and stupid. That’s just a fact. Did you know that?’

  “And why didn’t he soften his stories, as most writers would have, with characters with a little wisdom and power who did all they could to help the dehumanized? His penchant for truth again shoved him in the direction of unpopularity. Altruists in his experience were about as common as unicorns, and especially in Chicago, which he once described to me as ‘the only major city in the country where you can easily buy your way out of a murder rap.’

  “So—was there anything he expected to accomplish with so much dismaying truthfulness? He gives the answer himself, I think, in his preface to this book. As I understand him, he would be satisfied were we to agree with him that persons unlucky and poor and not very bright are to be respected for surviving, although they often have no choice but to do so in ways unattractive and blameworthy to those who are a lot better off.

  “It seems to me now that Algren’s pessimism about so much of earthly life was Christian. Like Christ, as we know Him from the Bible, he was enchanted by the hopeless, could not take his eyes off them, and could see little good news for them in the future, given what they had become and what Caesar was like and so on, unless beyond death there awaited something more humane.”

  My introduction stops here. I knew very little about Algren’s sex life (or about my own, for that matter). I subsequently learned from Deirdre Bair’s Simone de Beauvoir (Summit, 1990) that he helped Miss de Beauvoir achieve her first orgasm. (The only person I ever helped achieve a first orgasm was good old me.) In Iowa City, Algren would refer to her as “Madame Yak Yak” because she had given their relationship so much pu
blicity.

  I wrote an introduction to a collection of short stories by Budd Schulberg, too, and a long salutation for a Festschrift presented to Erskine Caldwell on his eightieth birthday. (He still had three years to go.) I have misplaced copies of both, which is probably just as well. In both, I remember, I exclaimed over the foreshortening of American literary history, in which seeming generations of writers may be separated by less than twenty years. When I set out to be a professional writer of fiction, Irwin Shaw and Nelson Algren and William Saroyan and John Cheever and Erskine Caldwell and Budd Schulberg and James T. Farrell seemed as ancestral as Mark Twain or Nathaniel Hawthorne. But I would come to be friends with all of them. And why not? With the exception of Caldwell, most were about the age of my big brother, Bernard. (I never met John Steinbeck, but I know his widow, Elaine, and she is about my late sister’s age.)

  It is the spectacular violence modern times wreak on culture which accounts for this foreshortening, surely. We are defined by booms and busts, and by wars radically different in mood and purpose and technology. My wife, Jill, covered the Vietnam War as a photographer. To the young people she now does books about, that war might as well have been a thousand years ago.

  Yes, and to me as a schoolboy during the Great Depression, which defined Steinbeck and Saroyan and Algren, World War I, which defined Ernest Hemingway, might also have been a thousand years ago, but I knew his widow, Mary, too, and he was born after (but died sooner than) my Uncle Alex, who went to Harvard because his big brother was at MIT.

  “I did not know Ernest Hemingway,” I told a group of Hemingway scholars convening in Boise, Idaho, a couple of years ago. “He was twenty-three years my senior. He would now be ninety. We were born in the Middle West, we set out to be reporters, our fathers were gun nuts, we felt profoundly indebted to Mark Twain, and we were the children of suicides.

  “I am not aware that he thought much about my own generation of American novelists. Norman Mailer, I know, sent him a copy of The Naked and the Dead, soon after it was published. The package was returned unopened. Hemingway chided Irwin Shaw for having, as he put it, dared to go into the ring with Tolstoy by writing a novel which viewed a war from both sides of the battle lines, The Young Lions. I know of only two members of my generation he praised: Nelson Algren, the Chicago tough guy and friend of boxers and gamblers, and Vance Bourjaily, the hunting enthusiast who was in World War II what Hemingway had been in the first one, a civilian ambulance driver attached to a combat unit.

  “James Jones, author of From Here to Eternity, and a rifleman in peacetime and then in war, told me that he could not consider Hemingway a fellow soldier, since he had never submitted to training and discipline. In the Spanish Civil War and then in World War II, Hemingway took no orders and gave no orders. He came and went wherever and whenever he pleased. He actually hunted German submarines for a while in the Caribbean—in his own boat and of his own accord.

  “He was a reporter of war, and one of the best the world has ever known. So was Tolstoy—who was in addition a real soldier.

  “During World War I, the United States got into the fighting so late that an American with true war stories to tell, and a wound besides, was something of a rarity. Such was Heming way’s situation. He was an even rarer sort of American, again fresh from a battlefield, when he wrote about the Spanish Civil War during the 1930s.

  “But then the coinage of true battle stories by Americans was utterly debased by World War II, when millions upon millions of us fought overseas and came home no longer needing a Hemingway to say what war was like. Joseph Heller told me he would have been in the dry-cleaning business now, if it weren’t for World War II.

  “Heller is, of course, the author of Catch-22, a far more influential book nowadays than A Farewell to Arms or For Whom the Bell Tolls. The key word in this speech is ‘nowadays.’

  “Hemingway was unquestionably an artist of the first rank, with an admirable soul, the size of Kilimanjaro. His choice of subject matter, though, bullfighting and nearly forgotten wars and shooting big animals for sport, often makes him a little hard to read nowadays. Conservation and humane treatment of animals and contempt for the so-called arts of war rank high on most of our agendas nowadays.

  “How many of us can find pleasure nowadays in these words from Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa, reportage, not fiction, describing a lion hunt fifty-three years ago: ‘I knew that if I could kill one alone … I would feel good about it for a long time. I had in my mind absolutely not to shoot unless I knew I could kill him. I had killed three and knew what it consisted in, but I was getting more excitement from this one than the whole trip.’ Imagine boasting of killing three lions, and reporting delight at the prospect of killing a fourth one, nowadays.

  “Vance Bourjaily, admired, as I’ve said, by Hemingway, gave me a rule of thumb about hunting. ‘The bigger the game,’ he said, ‘the more corrupted the soul of the hunter.’ As for the glamour of big game hunting nowadays: It is predicted that the last East African elephant will die of starvation or be killed for its ivory in about eight years.

  “As for bullfighting: It is an enterprise so little admired in this country by most people that it is in fact against the law. I don’t have to say ‘nowadays.’ Bullfighting was against the law here long before the birth of Hemingway. Paradoxically, I find his bullfighting stories among my favorites still. That could be because they are so alien to my own passions and experiences that I can accept them as ethnography, as accounts by an explorer of a society for which I bear no responsibility.

  “Let me hasten to say that no matter how much his choice of subject matter bothers me nowadays, I am always amazed and delighted by the power he discovered in the simplest language. A sample I choose at random from his short story ‘Big Two-Hearted River’: ‘Nick sat down against the charred stump and smoked a cigarette. His pack balanced on the top of the stump, harness holding ready, a hollow molded in it from his back. Nick sat smoking, looking out over the country. He did not need to get his map out. He knew where he was from the position of the river.

  “ ‘As he smoked, his legs stretched out in front of him, he noticed a grasshopper walk along the ground and up onto his woolen sock. The grasshopper was black. As he had walked along the road, climbing, he had started many grasshoppers from the dust. They were all black.’

  “(The grasshoppers were black, of course, because the area had been burned over recently, making black the ideal protective coloration.)

  “No fear of repeating words there. How many of you had teachers who told you never to use the same word twice in a paragraph, or even in adjacent paragraphs? Clearly, that was poor advice. The biggest word in that passage, by the way, is ‘grasshopper.’ Big enough! The strongest word is ‘black.’ Strong enough!

  “I myself, when I teach writing, say that people will not read a story in which nothing much happens. But nothing much happens in two of Hemingway’s most thrilling stories, ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’ and, again, ‘Big Two-Hearted River.’ How is this possible? It is the brush work. If Hemingway had been a painter, I would say of him that while I often don’t like the subjects he celebrates, I sure as heck respect his brush work.

  “Ah me! He is what we call ‘dated’ now. Yes, and we can all expect in this volatile century to find enthusiasms and passions of our years as young adults to become dated, too. What happened to Hemingway has happened or will happen to all of us, writers or not. It can’t be helped, so no person should be scorned when it happens to her or him. The sharks almost always get the big marlins, the big truths we reel in so proudly when we are young.

  “I have named one of the sharks which took a bite out of Hemingway’s marlin: the conservation movement. Another one is feminism. I don’t think I need expand on that. It must be plain to everyone that the Ladies’ Auxiliary for Men Engaged in Blood Sports has been disbanded for quite some time.

  “Ernest Hemingway is still quite famous, although he is not taught much anymore in col
leges and universities. When all is said and done, it is teachers who keep literary reputations alive or let them fade away. For a while there, Hemingway was as imposing as General Motors or The New York Times. Think of that: One human being somehow becoming as majestic as major institutions. Think of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Such is the power sometimes of printed words.

  “We have seen the power demonstrated again very recently and tragically. I refer to the case of Salman Rushdie, who unwittingly made himself with one book the world’s second most famous Moslem and caused an entire nation to declare war to the death on him.

  “A couple of decades ago a lonely novelist embarrassed the Soviet Union as profoundly as would have a great military defeat. I speak of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. But I digress. Stowe’s and Solzhenitsyn’s and poor Salman Rushdie’s importance in the eyes of the world rests in large part on their willingness to oppose certain easily identifiable factions in society. Hemingway seemed just as important for a while without arousing any enemies, without calling for any sort of reforms. His antifascism, on paper anyway, was of an unanalytical, rosy-cheeked-school-boy variety.

  “So whence came the power which made him for a little while as respected as Stowe or Solzhenitsyn or poor Rushdie—or General Motors or The New York Times? I suggest to you that it inhered in his celebration of male bonding at a time when there was a widespread dread here and in Europe of seeming homosexual.

  “The great anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked one time, and she had studied men, women, and children in every sort of society, when it was that men were happiest. She thought awhile, and then she said, ‘When they’re starting out on a hunt with no women or children along.’ I think she was right. Don’t you? Back when war was another sort of hunt, going on the warpath must have induced the same sort of happiness. I will guess further that permission for males to bond with one another, which was given to such an expedition by the women and children, was a principal ingredient of that happiness.