Kilgore Trout, the writer whose works appear in a Manhattan porn shop in Slaughterhouse-Five, his breakthrough novel from 1969, expresses Vonnegut’s regret for having catered to the lowest common denominator. The lament was perhaps never more acute than while working in Iowa City among literary elites on the manuscript for Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel he intended to write based on his experience as a survivor of the bombing of Dresden and a prisoner there during World War II. The novel’s simple diction, staccato syntax, and truncated paragraphs bear the clear influence of the clipped reportorial language from his days on the Chicago City News Bureau in the late 1940s. “The Dresden book is about the size of The Bobbsey Twins,” he feared, “and reads like a telegram.”13 In it, the protagonist Billy Pilgrim strolls through Times Square where, peering “into the window of a tawdry bookstore,” he finds lowbrow kitsch, “hundreds of books about . . . buggery and murder, and a street guide to New York City, and a model of the Statue of Liberty with a thermometer on it.” He sees “also in the window, speckled with soot and fly shit, four paperback novels by Billy’s friend, Kilgore Trout.”14
Billy enters the store and thumbs through a copy of one of Kilgore Trout’s science fiction novels. He remembers reading it before, especially the scene describing how “the news ticker” reminded all the Earthlings “that the President of the United States had declared National Prayer Week, and that everybody should pray.” In this science fiction dystopia, a self-reflexive parody of Vonnegut’s own bleak visions, church and state are linked through capitalism. “The Earthlings had had a bad week on the market” and “lost a small fortune in olive oil futures.” To their delight, after they “gave praying a whirl . . . Olive oil went up.” Like the profaning of sacred prayer, the democratic function of the press, and the use of the White House for gains on the stock market in Kilgore Trout’s novel, literature itself has been hijacked by the equivalent of pawnbrokers. The loss of the literary establishment to lowbrow culture is metaphorically expressed in how “The bookstore was run by seeming quintuplets, by five short, bald men chewing unlit cigars that were sopping wet.” Vonnegut’s unmistakable guilt for consorting with such media profiteers who “were making money running a paper-and-celluloid whorehouse” overwhelms his Times Square bookstore scene.15
But Vonnegut’s guilt for allowing his work to circulate among such lowly media merchandise was only by association. The store’s owner sees Billy reading a Kilgore Trout novel and tells him, “That ain’t what you want, for Christ’s sake. What you want’s in back,” where the true smut is kept. Vonnegut understood his work to be above what was in back, to have an entirely different set of concerns perhaps only perceptible, or even relevant, to cracked veterans such as Billy Pilgrim. Vonnegut was a veteran himself who had seen the horror of war up close, and longed for a deeper understanding of the afterlife and salvation. Representing Vonnegut’s Constant Reader, Billy does not put down the book and go in back. Instead, he goes to the back of the Kilgore Trout time-travel dystopia to find the truth about salvation, very much motivated for Christ’s sake. Could Jesus save us, he wonders? There he finds the novel’s time traveler climbing on to the cross to detect signs of life in the Messiah as he hangs crucified before the Romans. To his dismay, he discovers, “There wasn’t a sound inside the emaciated chest cavity. The Son of God was dead as a doornail.”16
Vonnegut may have regarded the import of his work, like Kilgore Trout’s, as clearly out of place among the trade paperbacks that crowded the shelves of the Times Square bookstore. But that is precisely how his writing was packaged in the mid-1950s, as seen in its appearance in the twenty-five-cent paperback Tomorrow, the Stars trumpeting “Thrilling Tales of a Time Beyond Tomorrow!” on its cover, and his tale, “The Big Trip Up Yonder” under the imprint of Galaxy Publishing Corporation marketed by his agents, Littauer & Wilkinson.17 Even these yarns distinguish themselves from the rest of the genre, especially through deeper concerns. Those concerns are for the sake of humanity in light of the nation’s mechanization toward war and compromise of religion, press, and literature as it gravitates toward capitalistic greed. Slaughterhouse-Five in many ways represented his first self-conscious attempt at literary authorship, which he originally conceived as a narrative nonfictional account of his experience in Dresden. But he soon found that mode, and even realistic fiction, silenced his voice and stripped him of his creativity. He had indeed become what he had pretended to be as he prophesied in Mother Night—a science fiction writer. But the genre threatened to prevent him from his deeper aspiration to capture the countercultural ethos of his era in serious literature. Vonnegut did not need literature to save him from tawdry kitsch culture, a cesspool that swallows Kilgore Trout’s profoundest insights. Instead he needed to import his science fiction aesthetic—an inescapably popular genre—into a novel of ideas. He produced that novel of ideas, Slaughterhouse-Five, which many regard as his greatest novel, in Iowa City.
As the first true trade genre writer to join the faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Vonnegut felt a sense of outsidership from his first introduction to Engle in 1965. Engle struck him as “a lean, gray-haired slightly crooked Supreme Court Justice dressed like Harry Belafonte,” a curious mix of political cunning and flamboyant show business.18 That year Engle had just been appointed to a six-year term on the National Council of the Arts, which also included John Steinbeck, Ralph Ellison, and Sidney Poitier. Engle distinguished himself on the committee by urging, “We need to spread the businessman’s daring to the field of art.”19 But his definition of art did not include genre fiction. Totally unfamiliar with science fiction, Engle certainly had no agenda to usher writers of popular genre fiction into the program. His own interests were primarily in poetry, which for the Workshop had reached spectacular heights in the 1950s through visiting teaching by Lowell and Berryman, and an extended stay by the perpetually florid Dylan Thomas. The most popular fiction published by a Workshop faculty member before Vonnegut belonged to R. V. Cassill, whose steamy titles were part of the postwar art movement that shattered the divide between high and low art. “Pulp brought a second-hand modernism to mid-century America,” according to Paula Rabinowitz’s powerful study, a new sensibility that erased distinctions between a canonized figure such as Faulkner and smut.20 Dell Publishing, which brought out Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, was known as the largest publisher of pulp and humor magazines, producing one of the most significant lines of comics in the industry. One might have expected Vonnegut to resist signing with such a publisher. Yet their “admixture of high and low was built into the industry,” one that routinely hired “the bright boys from Yale and Princeton.”21
That mix of high and low print culture has deep roots tracing back to the onset of World War II. As Rabinowitz explains, “The paperback as an object and a phenomenon was intimately tied to the war, as American paperback publishers scurried to fill voids opened when shipping books from England ceased after war was declared on Germany in 1939.” Given this surge in paperbacks at the beginning of the war, the industry had been building momentum with exploding sales of original titles and newly “pulped” classics such as Brave New World and The Great Gatsby, now bearing sensationalistic covers inspired by the true-crime genre. During the postwar era, this movement opened the floodgates for “holocaust pulp” or “history pulp” immediately after the conflict ended.22 Had Slaughterhouse-Five continued this dubious tradition two decades later?
Rather than allow others to raise this question at his expense, Vonnegut chose to preempt it, particularly through the delicate ethics of creating entertainment media out of human loss and tragedy. In conversations and interviews, he rehearsed his now famous line confessing his guilt for financially profiting from the tragedy. Jerome Klinkowitz, “one of the first academic fans” of Vonnegut’s work, first heard it in a dinner conversation, and to him it seemed orchestrated at the time.23 It then appeared in an interview in the Paris Review before it finally made its way into the introduction to a
later edition of Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut’s first rehearsal of the line with Klinkowitz was specifically meant to weigh the impact of his complicity in the capitalist infrastructure of popular cultural production. Its successful reception in private signaled to him that it was ready for mass communication in the periodical and book presses. “The raid didn’t end the war one day earlier, didn’t save one life, not of an American soldier, Russian soldier or concentration camp inmate,” he pointed out, reinforcing the pacifist theme of the novel. “Only one person benefitted from the bombing of Dresden,” he said with a long pause. “Me.” The darkness of the sentiment eclipses any potential humor in it. “I got three dollars for every man, woman, and child killed there.”24 By placing it bluntly in the context of the publishing industry and the larger capitalist pursuit of book sales, Vonnegut disclosed his darkest fear, that he had desecrated the memory of the dead and the authorial role.
The confession spoke to his roots in popular fiction, harkening back to his original construction of a power base through strategic communication, first for corporate America, and then as an entrepreneurial journalist and paperback writer. In this way, his work as a “Public Relations Man” for General Electric, from 1949 to 1951, as he listed it on his “Faculty Personnel Data Blank” for the University of Iowa, was crucially connected to his ambivalence about making a living from his fiction as a “Freelance writer” who was “Self-employed” from “ ’51 to present.”25 Commercial sales, most pointedly, had been a major source of income, as he had managed a Saab automobile dealership in West Barnstable, Massachusetts, after resigning from his position at General Electric.26 The Saab dealership position, as one might expect, does not appear on Vonnegut’s Iowa résumé.
Joining the Workshop without graduate academic training and lacking in literary credentials, Vonnegut was “always sensitive to how his material was being received, how his listeners were reacting.” His lectures also were extremely attuned to audience reactions. Klinkowitz remembered how “time and again, I would marvel at how he’d work an audience, giving more of something when it seemed to be succeeding, dropping a topic the moment it threatened to go over like a lead balloon.”27 Evidence of this concern for reception, specifically into the category of literary author, as opposed to genre hack, surfaces in the attitudes of his most loyal students. His past as a Saab dealer and General Electric public relations man haunted him, as he struggled to decouple his public reputation from mass marketing.
Fighting Words
John Irving, Vonnegut’s star student, fiercely defended his mentor’s status as a literary author worthy of his faculty position at the Workshop. One night in an Iowa City poolroom, Vonnegut’s commercial reputation came under scrutiny. The student responsible for what was taken as a galling slur had previously drawn the ire of Irving for claiming boxers could dominate wrestlers. Irving had been a serious wrestler, ranking his coaches with Vonnegut as “the father figures I latched onto in life.” The offending student had been a follower of Nelson Algren, whose fiction Workshop Irving loathed. “I thought he was an asshole . . . a blowhard and a pontificator, but he had some students firmly in his thrall; he was a recruiter”—unlike Vonnegut, who to Irving did not engage in such shameless self-promotion to win the admiration of the graduate students. “Kurt just shuffled around; he didn’t care if you took notice of him or not. He was both a mentor and a teacher. I loved the guy.” Algren himself “used to try and bait me into a fight with him,” Irving remembered of perhaps the most obnoxious participant in the Workshop rivalry between the wrestlers and the boxers. “A boxer can kick the shit out of a wrestler,” Algren sneered at Irving on one occasion.28
So when Algren’s student faced off with Irving, more was at stake than rival mentors. Workshop members were perennially obsessed with “publishing and ‘the market’ for books,” Workshop graduate Eric Olsen remarked. “What was selling? What were the trends?” they wondered. “But then if you worried about trends, you were a commercial hack and shame on you.”29 This was precisely the allegation aimed at Vonnegut, and his most loyal student, Irving, by extension. The cumulative effects of flowing beer and trash talk over cracking billiard balls had all but obliterated social inhibitions. Hoping for an opportunity to prove his boxing skills, Algren’s protégé hurled his most potent insult: “Vonnegut is a science fiction hack.” Wounded deeply, Irving demanded to know if he had “read a single one of Kurt’s books.” “Only the covers,” was the reply. Fighting words, to be sure, in mid-1960s Iowa City.30
Dropping his pool cue in disbelief, Irving shot back an epithet and riveted his eyes on the offender. He slowly approached, crouching in a wrestler’s stance with his hands open in front of him. His opponent raised his fists and began bobbing rhythmically like a boxer. Tables overturned and people scattered, plates and glasses shattering in the tumult. Irving advanced, aware that “I just can’t hit very hard,” but preparing to deploy “the jab-hook combination as a means to get close enough to my opponent so that I can trip him.” With lightning speed, the wiry Irving ducked a wild roundhouse right and with his downward momentum propped himself on one hand and swung out his legs in a flash, cutting down his opponent scythe-like at the ankles. Helpless, Algren’s student crashed to the beer-soaked hardwood floor, his head cracking with a sickening thud. “A wrestling move,” and with the desired result of “convincingly demonstrating—although never to Nelson Algren and not in his presence—that wrestling is superior to boxing.”31
Although not physical, Vonnegut’s own form of retaliation against Algren also deployed deceptive tactics. “I’m awed. You’re one of the few important artists of our time,” he inscribed like a cloying sycophant in a copy of Mother Night, “and the only one I know.” A few weeks later Vonnegut reported to a friend that he had fleeced Algren to the tune of “several thousand bucks in a pot-limit poker game run by racketeers from the Graduate School.” This was one of several instances of how “old Wobbly,” as the frequently tipsy Algren was called, is “fucking up monumentally out here” in ways that included “bobbing the Workshop in newspaper interviews.”32 The score may have been settled in the poolroom and at the poker table. But both triumphs did little to undo Vonnegut’s reputation as a commercial hack. Algren’s protégé’s refusal to look beyond the pulpy covers of Vonnegut’s books for the true nature of his work infuriated Irving precisely because it typified the superficial judgments used to marginalize otherwise worthy talent at the Workshop. In his view, Vonnegut’s writing transcended the science fiction genre conventions represented in its fanboy covers. But the paperback stigma persisted, with more than one student “put off by anything close to science fiction,” according to Workshop alumnus Gary Iorio.33 Irving was one of the few students who had actually read Vonnegut’s novels, mainly because so few were still in print and accessible. “I’d read all his books, which were not easy to find then, and I believed he was underrated—and unfairly categorized as a science fiction writer.”34
Those straining for literary status derided such writing as so much show business and public relations, mass communication for profit rather than art. Besides Irving, John Casey, Gail Godwin, and others in the small cluster of talented students who called themselves the “Vonnegut people,” few Workshop students appreciated him in the early fall of 1965. “Many of my fellow Workshop students,” Irving bitterly recollected, “dismissed him as unworthy of their precious time.” Enrollments reflected his lack of popularity. “It wasn’t hard to get into Kurt’s fiction workshop.”35 Yet obscurity carried a unique advantage, according to his colleague Marguerite Young. Vance Bourjaily, she attested, “would cut my throat if I went over big with students, so I am watchful.”36 Popularity came at the cost of the faculty’s envy, advice that alerted Vonnegut once again to be careful who he pretended to be.
An Author of Distinction
Much of Vonnegut’s efforts in his first year at the Workshop were directed toward establishing his credentials as a legitimate literary au
thor. Toward the end of his second semester at Iowa, in April 1966, Vonnegut furnished the English department chair John Gerber with a copy of the galleys of a glowing review of Player Piano in Harper’s. His rush to send the proofs ahead of publication revealed the urgency of his desire to appear worthy of the prestige of his Workshop faculty position. He knew Gerber held sway as an arbiter of intellect on campus, and thus made a point of sharing his latest feat with an eye toward escaping the science fiction stigma that had followed him since his arrival.
This Harper’s review in particular attested to Vonnegut’s transcendence from the science fiction genre, a point he hoped would verify his credentials for Gerber against claims that Workshop faculty should hold doctorates. The reviewer, Richard Schickel, a renowned biographer of the glamorous Cotton Club jazz singer Lena Horne, articulated perhaps better than Vonnegut ever did himself precisely the dynamic by which to understand him as a serious writer, with a complex relation toward science fiction and humor. Schickel argued, much to Vonnegut’s delight and Gerber’s admiration, that he was not “simply a writer of science fiction, a distinctly déclassé popular genre which no important literary person takes seriously.” Given the quality of his work, he continued, “it became obvious that science was only incidental to his fiction,” and that “a new category” of black comedy now applies to him. This designation of dark humorist “placed him in somewhat more fashionable company, but it did not differentiate him from his peers any more clearly than he had been from his previous ones.” The result, Schickel astutely observed, has given rise to a “Vonnegut cult,” which overlapped with the “Vonnegut people,” the small yet fiercely loyal band led by Irving. Despite such a following, “he has as yet to reach the wide literate audience that an unimitative and inimitable social satirist might reasonably expect to find these days.”37 He deserved a large, sophisticated readership, but it had eluded him thanks to the snap categorizations of science fiction and black comedy. More than this, he was a social satirist of monumental significance to our culture, its progress, and the moral conundrums that threaten it.
A Delicate Aggression Page 24