Lotsa luck!
The great critic H. L. Mencken, himself a German-American, but living all his life in Baltimore, Maryland, confessed that he had difficulty in concentrating on the novels of Willa Cather. Try as he might, he couldn't really care a whole lot about Czech immigrants in Nebraska.
Same problem.
I will say for the record that my grandfather Albert Lieber's first wife, Alice, nee Barus, namesake of my sister Allie, died giving birth to her third child, who was Uncle Rudy. Mother was her first. The middle child was Uncle Pete, who flunked out of MIT, but who nonetheless sired a nuclear scientist, my cousin Albert in Del Mar, California. Cousin Albert reports that he has just gone blind.
It isn't radiation that has made cousin Albert blind. It is something else, which could have happened to anybody, in or out of science. Cousin Albert himself has sired a non-nuclear-type scientist, a computer whiz.
As Kilgore Trout used to exclaim from time to time, "Life goes on!"
The point I want to make is that Mother's father, the brewer, Republican big shot, and neo-aristocratic bon vivant, married a violinist after his first wife died. She turned out to be clinically bughouse. Face it! Some women are! She hated his kids with a passion. She was jealous of his love for them. She wanted to be the whole show. Some women do!
This female bat out of hell, who could play a fiddle like nobody's business, abused Mother and Uncle Pete and Uncle Rudy so ferociously, both physically and mentally, during their formative years, before Grandfather Lieber divorced her, that they never got over it.
If there had been a significant body of potential book-buyers who might care about rich German-Americans in Indianapolis, it would have been a piece of cake for me to bang out a roman-fleuve demonstrating that my grandfather in fact murdered my mother, albeit very slowly, by double-crossing her so long ago.
"Ting-a-ling, you son of a bitch!"
Working title: Gone With the Wind.
When Mother married my father, a young architect in moderate circumstances, politicians and saloonkeepers and the cream of Indianapolis German-American society gave them a treasure trove of crystal and linens and china and silver, and even some gold.
Scheherazade!
Who could doubt then that even Indiana had its own hereditary aristocracy, with useless possessions to rival those of horses' asses in the other hemisphere?
It all seemed like a lot of junk to my brother and my sister and our father and me during the Great Depression. It is now as widely dispersed as the Class of 1940 of Shortridge High School.
Auf Wiedersehen.
42
I always had trouble ending short stories in ways that would satisfy a general public. In real life, as during a rerun following a timequake, people don't change, don't learn anything from their mistakes, and don't apologize. In a short story they have to do at least two out of three of those things, or you might as well throw it away in the lidless wire trash receptacle chained and padlocked to the fire hydrant in front of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
OK, I could handle that. But after I had a character change and/or learn something and/or apologize, that left the cast standing around with their thumbs up their asses. That is no way to tell a reader the show is over.
In my salad days, when I was green in judgment, and never having asked to be born in the first place, I sought the advice of my then literary agent as to how to end stories without killing all the characters. He had been fiction editor of an important magazine, and a story consultant for a Hollywood studio as well.
He said, "Nothing could be simpler, dear boy: The hero mounts his horse and rides off into the sunset."
Many years later, he would kill himself on purpose with a twelve-gauge shotgun.
Another friend and client of his said he couldn't possibly have committed suicide, it was so out of character.
I replied, "Even with military training, there is no way a man can accidentally blow his head off with a shotgun."
Many years earlier, so long ago that I was a student at the University of Chicago, I had a conversation with my thesis advisor about the arts in general. At that time, I had no idea that I personally would go into any sort of art.
He said, "You know what artists are?"
I didn't.
"Artists," he said, "are people who say, 'I can't fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!' "
About five years after that, he did what Hitler's Minister of Propaganda and his wife and their kids did at the end of World War Two. He swallowed potassium cyanide.
I wrote a letter to his widow, saying how much his teachings had meant to me. I did not get an answer. It could be that she was overwhelmed with grief. Then again, she may have been sore as hell at him for taking the easy way out.
This very summer, I asked the novelist William Styron in a Chinese restaurant how many people on the whole planet had what we had, which was lives worth living. Between the two of us, we came up with seventeen percent.
The next day I took a walk in midtown Manhattan with a longtime friend, a physician who treats every sort of addict at Bellevue Hospital. Many of his patients are homeless and HIV-positive as well. I told him about Styron's and my figure of seventeen percent. He said it sounded about right to him.
As I have written elsewhere, this man is a saint. I define a saint as a person who behaves decently in an indecent society.
I asked him why half his patients at Bellevue didn't commit suicide. He said the same question had occurred to him. He sometimes asked them, as though it were an unremarkable part of a diagnostic routine, if they had thoughts of self-destruction. He said that they were almost without exception surprised and insulted by the question. An idea that sick had never entered their heads!
It was about then that we passed an ex-patient of his who was toting a plastic bag filled with aluminum cans he had gathered. He was one of Kilgore Trout's "sacred cattle," somehow wonderful despite his economic uselessness.
"Hi, Doc," he said.
43
Question: What is the white stuff in bird poop? Answer: That is bird poop, too.
Art or not ?
So much for science, and how helpful it can be in these times of environmental calamities. Chernobyl is still hotter than a Hiroshima baby carriage. Our underarm deodorants have eaten holes in the ozone layer.
And just get a load of this: My big brother Bernie, who can't draw for sour apples, and who at his most objectionable used to say he didn't like paintings because they didn't do anything, just hung there year after year, has this summer become an artist!
I shit you not! This Ph.D. physical chemist from MIT is now the poor man's Jackson Pollock! He squoozles glurp of various colors and consistencies between two flat sheets of impermeable materials, such as windowpanes or bathroom tiles. He pulls them apart, et voila! This has nothing to do with his cancer. He didn't know he had it yet, and the malignancy was in his lungs and not his brain in any case. He was just farting around one day, a semi-retired old geezer without a wife to ask him what in the name of God he thought he was doing, et voila! Better late than never, that's all I can say.
So he sent me some black-and-white Xeroxes of his squiggly miniatures, mostly dendritic forms, maybe trees or shrubs, maybe mushrooms or umbrellas full of holes, but really quite interesting. Like my ballroom dancing, they were acceptable. He has since sent me multicolored originals, which I like a lot.
The message he sent me along with the Xeroxes, though, wasn't about unexpected happiness. It was an unreconstructed technocrat's challenge to the artsy-fartsy, of which I was a prime exemplar. "Is this art or not?" he asked. He couldn't have put that question so jeeringly fifty years ago, of course, before the founding of the first wholly American school of painting, Abstract Expressionism, and the deification in particular o
f Jack the Dripper, Jackson Pollock, who also couldn't draw for sour apples.
Bernie said, too, that a very interesting scientific phenomenon was involved, having to do, he left me to guess, with how different glurps behave when squoozled this way and that, with nowhere to go but up or down or sideways. If the artsy-fartsy world had no use for his pictures, he seemed to imply, his pictures could still point the way to better lubricants or suntan lotions, or who knows what? The all-new Preparation H!
He would not sign his pictures, he said, or admit publicly that he had made them, or describe how they were made. He plainly expected puffed-up critics to sweat bullets and excrete sizable chunks of masonry when trying to answer his cunningly innocent question: "Art or not?"
I was pleased to reply with an epistle which was frankly vengeful, since he and Father had screwed me out of a liberal arts college education: "Dear Brother: This is almost like telling you about the birds and the bees," I began. "There are many good people who are beneficially stimulated by some, but not all, manmade arrangements of colors and shapes on flat surfaces, essentially nonsense.
"You yourself are gratified by some music, arrangements of noises, and again essentially nonsense. If I were to kick a bucket down the cellar stairs, and then say to you that the racket I had made was philosophically on a par with The Magic Flute, this would not be the beginning of a long and upsetting debate. An utterly satisfactory and complete response on your part would be, 'I like what Mozart did, and I hate what the bucket did.'
"Contemplating a purported work of art is a social activity. Either you have a rewarding time, or you don't. You don't have to say why afterward. You don't have to say anything.
"You are a justly revered experimentalist, dear Brother. If you really want to know whether your pictures are, as you say, 'art or not,' you must display them in a public place somewhere, and see if strangers like to look at them. That is the way the game is played. Let me know what happens."
I went on: "People capable of liking some paintings or prints or whatever can rarely do so without knowing something about the artist. Again, the situation is social rather than scientific. Any work of art is half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking at you. Does he or she have a reputation for seriousness, for religiosity, for suffering, for concupiscence, for rebellion, for sincerity, for jokes?
"There are virtually no respected paintings made by persons about whom we know zilch. We can even surmise quite a bit about the lives of whoever did the paintings in the caverns underneath Lascaux, France.
"I dare to suggest that no picture can attract serious attention without a particular sort of human being attached to it in the viewer's mind. If you are unwilling to claim credit for your pictures, and to say why you hoped others might find them worth examining, there goes the ball game.
"Pictures are famous for their humanness, and not for their pictureness."
I went on: "There is also the matter of craftsmanship. Real picture-lovers like to play along, so to speak, to look closely at the surfaces, to see how the illusion was created. If you are unwilling to say how you made your pictures, there goes the ball game a second time.
"Good luck, and love as always," I wrote. And I signed my name.
44
I myself paint pictures on sheets of acetate with black India ink. An artist half my age, Joe Petro III, who lives and works in Lexington, Kentucky, prints them by means of the silk-screen process. I paint a separate acetate sheet, again in opaque black, for each color I want Joe to use. I do not see my pictures, which I have painted in black alone, in color until Joe has printed them, one color at a time.
I make negatives for his positives.
There may be easier, quicker, and cheaper ways to create pictures. They might leave us more time for golf, and for making model airplanes and whacking off. We should look into that. Joe's studio looks like something out of the Middle Ages.
I can't thank Joe enough for having me make negatives for his positives after the little radio in my head stopped receiving messages from wherever it is the bright ideas come from. Art is so absorbing.
It is a sopper-upper.
Listen: Only three weeks ago at this writing, on September 6th, 1996, Joe and I opened a show of twenty-six of our prints in the 1/1 Gallery in Denver, Colorado. A local microbrewery, Wynkoop, bottled a special beer for the occasion. The label was one of my self-portraits. The name of the beer was Kurt's Mile-High Malt.
You think that wasn't fun? Try this: The beer, at my suggestion, was lightly flavored with coffee. What was so great about that? It tasted really good, for one thing, but it was also an homage to my maternal grandfather Albert Lieber, who was a brewer until he was put out of business by Prohibition in 1920. The secret ingredient in the beer that won a Gold Medal for the Indianapolis Brewery at the Paris Exposition of 1889 was coffee!
Ting-a-ling!
That still wasn't enough fun out there in Denver? OK, how about the fact that the name of the owner of the Wynkoop Brewing Company, a guy about Joe's age, was John Hickenlooper? So what? Only this: When I went to Cornell University to become a chemist fifty-six years ago, I was made a fraternity brother of a man named John Hickenlooper.
Ting-a-ling?
This was his son! My fraternity brother had died when this son was only seven. I knew more about him than his own son did! I was able to tell this young Denver brewer that his dad, in partnership with another Delta Upsilon brother, John Locke, sold candy and soft drinks and cigarettes out of a big closet at the top of the stairs on the second floor of the fraternity house.
They christened it Hickenlooper's Lockenbar. We called it Lockenlooper's Hickenbar, and Barkenhicker's Loopenlock, and Lockenbarker's Loopenhick, and so on.
Happy days! We thought we'd live forever.
Old beer in new bottles. Old jokes in new people.
I told young John Hickenlooper a joke his dad taught me. It worked like this: His dad would say to me, no matter where we were, "Are you a member of the Turtle Club?" I had no choice but to bellow at the top of my lungs, "YOU BET YOUR ASS I AM!"
I could do the same thing to his dad. On some particularly solemn and sacred occasion, such as the swearing in of new fraternity brothers, I might whisper to him, "Are you a member of the Turtle Club?" He would have no choice but to bellow at the top of his lungs, "YOU BET YOUR ASS I AM!"
45
Another old joke: "Hello, my name is Spalding. No doubt you've played with my balls." It doesn't work anymore because Spalding is no longer a major manufacturer of athletic equipment, just as Lieber Gold Medal Beer is no longer a popular recreational drug in the Middle West, and just as the Vonnegut Hardware Company is no longer a manufacturer and retailer of durable and eminently practical goods out that way.
The hardware company was put out of business fair and square by livelier competitors. The Indianapolis Brewery was shut down by Article XVIII of the United States Constitution, which declared in 1919 that the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors was against the law.
The Indianapolis humorist Kin Hubbard said about Prohibition that it was "better than no liquor at all." Intoxicating liquors did not become lawful again until 1933. By then, the bootlegger Al Capone owned Chicago, and Joseph P. Kennedy, father of a murdered-President-to-be, was a multimillionaire.
At the daybreak that followed the opening of Joe Petro III's and my show in Denver, a Sunday, I awoke alone in a room in the oldest hotel there, the Oxford. I knew where I was and how I had gotten there. It wasn't as though I had been drunk as a hooty-owl on Grandfather's beer the night before.
I dressed and stepped outside. Nobody else I could see was up yet. There were no moving vehicles. If free will had chosen to kick in again at that moment, and I had been off balance and so fallen down, nobody would have run over me.
The best thing to be when free will kicks in, probably, is a Mbuti, a Pygmy in a rain forest in Zaire, Africa.
Two hun
dred yards from my hotel was the husk of what used to be the throbbing heart of the city, its turgid auricles and ventricles. I mean its passenger railroad station. It was completed in 1880. Only two trains a day stop there now.
I myself was antique enough to remember as terrific music the hissing and rolling thunder of steam locomotives, and their mournful whistles, and the metronomic clicks of wheels on joints in the rails, and the apparent rise and fall, thanks to the Doppler effect, of the pitch of warning bells at crossings.
I remembered labor history, too, because the first effective strikes by American working people for better pay, and more respect, and safer working conditions, were called against the railroads. And then against owners of coal mines and steel mills and textile mills, and on and on. Much blood was shed in what appeared to most members of my generation of American writers to be battles as worth fighting as any against a foreign enemy.
The optimism that infused so much of our writing was based on our belief that after Magna Carta, and then the Declaration of Independence, and then the Bill of Rights, and then the Emancipation Proclamation, and then Article XIX of the Constitution, which in 1920 entitled women to vote, some scheme for economic justice could also be devised. That was the logical next step.
And even in 1996, I in speeches propose the following amendments to the Constitution:
Article XXVIII: Every newborn shall be sincerely welcomed and cared for until maturity.
Article XXIX: Every adult who needs it shall be given meaningful work to do, at a living wage.
What we have created instead, as customers and employees and investors, is mountains of paper wealth so enormous that a handful of people in charge of them can take millions and billions for themselves without hurting anyone. Apparently.
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