Critique, 51:151158, 2010 Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0011-1619 print/1939-9138 online DOI: 10.

1080/00111610903446195

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: Sermons on the Mount

ROBERT M ORACE

ve got too damned much to say, and the rest will have to wait, wrote twenty-two-year-old Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. to his father on May 29, 1945. That was ve months after being captured during the Battle of the Bulge and three months after the rebombing which killed much of the population of Dresden but which this German-American U.S. soldier, ironically (and later famously), escaped because he had been housed in a former slaughterhouse far below ground. Vonnegut returned home to Indianapolis the same year, married, studied anthropology at the University of Chicago, moved to Schenectady to work in the publicity department at General Electric (where his brother was a research scientist), published his rst story, Report on the Barnhouse Effect (an early shot red across the bows of what Eisenhower would later call the military industrial complex), then moved to Cape Cod to write full-time, although nding it necessary to teach and sell Saabs in order to help support his growing family. (There were his own three children plus the three he adopted when his sister Alice and her husband died within days of each other, she from cancer, he in a freak railway accidentjust the kind of improbable situation found in the ction Vonnegut later wrote.) His rst novel, Player Piano, appeared in 1952. Three paperback originals followedThe Sirens of Titan (1959), Canary in a Cat House (short stories, 1961), and Mother Night (1962)then Cats Cradle (1963), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), and a two-year stint at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. Suddenly, Vonnegut was hot: his previous books were reissued (cloth editions in paperback,
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paperback originals in more reputableand reviewablecloth); he received a three-book contract and a Guggenheim; a second collection of stories, Welcome to the Monkey House, appeared in 1968, then Slaughter-House Five. It was 1969 and nothing would ever be the same for Vonnegut, for American literature, and for a generation of American readers (and literary critics) a full generation younger than Vonnegutthe wars second most famous survivor (Elie Wiesel, author of Night [1960], being the rst). Optometry mourns loss of Kurt Vonnegut sounds like something Vonnegut might have written but is, in fact, the title of an obituary which appeared in the May 15, 2007, Review of Optometrya brief but especially tting one for what Vonnegut did over the course of his fty-seven-year career was what Slaughter-House Fives Billy Pilgrim (graduate of the Ilium School of Optometry and literatures best knownonly?optometrist) believes he is doing when he explains Tralfamadore to his audience: prescribing corrective lenses to Earthling souls. Even as John Gardner barred his entry into the promised land of moral ctionfor a lack of moral vision (and for responding to every death with the same weary, provocatively deadpan so it goes), Scottish writer Alasdair Gray was plagiarizing Vonnegut (and eighty-six others) in his debut novel Lanark, the work generally credited with jump-starting the Scottish renaissance of the 1980s and 90s. More than in its combining of science ction and autobiography, its playing with time and space, and its meeting between protagonist and decidedly fallible author, Lanark resembles Vonneguts work in the innovative way it weds ction and social purpose, attened voice and moral outrage. Although his writing is steeped in the major issues of his own timesspace exploration, the Cold War, the Eichmann trial, and so forthVonneguts career-long critique of America addresses faults that lay far deeper, in the American sub-consciousness itself, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark elds of the republic rolled on under the night, as another midwesterner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, wrote at the end of The Great Gatsby. Often sounding as sardonic as Mark Twains Puddnhead Wilson (it was wonderful to nd America, it would have been more wonderful to miss it) or Twain himself on the damned human race and the United States of Lyncherdom, Vonnegut, a child of the Depression, understood that unlimited wealth was the y in the ointment of an America disabled by pathological self-reliance and samaritrophiathe hysterical indifference to the troubles of those less fortunate than oneself (God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater). The prosperity that used to be a synonym for Paradise (Breakfast of Champions) and that was dependent on the material and technological progress that was GEs most important business (GEs advertising slogan) had (literally) delivered the goods but at the unsustainable cost of making people feel superuous. But I am a storyteller, not a cultural anthropologist, Vonnegut claimed (Palm Sunday). Actually, he was both: the one by inclination, the other by training. Using a prose style that seemed all surface, Vonnegut burrowed deep
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into the American psyche in a way that made his writingso rooted in the corporatizing, suburbanizing, and technologizing of America in the Cold War decades of the 1950s and 1960s (that also preoccupied Vonneguts contemporary, Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling)so illuminating then and still so relevant now. In his nal book, the slim, valedictory A Man without a Country, Vonnegut quotes a letter from a Seattle man who, after enduring post-9/11 airport security, felt that he was living in a world that not even Kurt Vonnegut could have imagined. In fact, he was, as we are, living in exactly the kind of world Vonnegut imagined, where a latter-day Handicapper General Doris Moon Glampers (from Harrison Bergeron) enforces the Patriot Act, where the Super Anti-Gerosone of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, based on the heavily advertised (and completely ineffective) Geritol, has become the hugely protable drug industry that enables so many Americans to live longer so they can nally learn, if they havent already, that in America you really do get what you deserve, i.e., can pay for; where we could have saved the planet but were too doggone cheap; where space exploration, which Vonnegut saw as evidence that earthlings had given up on their planet, continues, with the 2009 launch of the Keppler space telescope (designed to nd habitable earth-like planets) coming just one week after U.S. and Soviet satellites crashed into one another, creating even more space junk oating around a dying planet; where the mere mention of raising taxes on the top ve percent of Americans is enough to raise the specter of class warfare and where Vonneguts ctional depiction in his dystopian rst novel of Americans made to feel useless has become reality, rst in 2005 when an entire city, New Orleans, was left to fend for itself and then in 20082009 when large banks and investment houses are bailed out as retirement funds sink and unemployment and housing foreclosures rise. What a planet! as Eugene Debs Hartke, speaking in 2001, wearily exclaims in Hocus Pocus (1990): There I was in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic TV, with virtually no health services for the poor. Where to go? What to do in an America where nothing could be more un-American [: : : ] than sounding like the Sermon on the Mount. Vonneguts remedy for being treated like something the cat drug in? Extended families, like the folk societies he learned about at the University of Chicago and the articial families that Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain proposes in Slapstick and that Vonnegut created in the 1950s when he adopted his sisters children and also found among fellow writers in PEN and the actors working on his play Happy Birthday, Wanda June. Folk societies and articial families have their downside, of course: the formers hostility towards strangers, the latters tendency to turn into murderous or suicidal cults like the ones led by Charles Manson and the Reverend Jim Jones. The justly starry-eyed rainbow coalition of American humanity that gathered in Washington for Barack Obamas
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inauguration gave way just two months later to what the media described as an enraged citizenry seething over the millions in bonuses paid to the same AIG managers who helped cause the nancial meltdownstrangely reminiscent of the Luddite-like mob that goes on a destructive rampage in Player Piano or the far more implacable mob who vent their fury at the end of Nathanael Wests Hollywood novel, The Day of the Locust. In an age of globalization, when the main connection people feel is to the Internet and where the second most popular activity is roots tourism (pornography being the rst), articial families provide, as Eliot Rosewater says of sci- and porn, fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world. Billy Pilgrim nds just such an impossibly hospitable world on Tralfamadore, living in a well-furnished zoo exhibit with the porn star Montana Wildhack, protected from an outside atmosphere that, like Dresden, is pure cyanide. Lucky them. And lucky us, who have found in Vonneguts ction a similarly hospitable city of words which addresses our concerns in an appealingly blackly humorous way. And lucky Vonnegut, too. From the same 1945 letter to his father: after Dresden, Russian planes strafed and bombed us, killing fourteen, but not me. But not me. Survivors in Vonneguts ction often feel guilty for having survived, for being in some way complicit in or even responsible for the deaths of others: Eliot Rosewater mistakenly killing a fourteen-year-old reman whom military intelligence had led him to believe was a German soldier; Leon Trouts involvement in the early stage of a My Lai-like massacre (Timequake); and Winston Niles Rumfoords orchestrating a massacre in order to achieve peace on earth only to discover that the massacre plays just a bit part in a Tralfamadorian plan to send the word Greetings across the universe. America then and now claimed a higher calling: saving the world. So it goes indeed. According to his friend Howard Zinn, author of The Peoples History of the United States, Vonnegut was gloomy about the ongoing destruction of the planet, but he had faith in the capacity of ordinary beings to resist stupidity. Maybe, maybe not. Reading what Stanley Schatt calls Vonneguts characteristic ambivalence is tricky. To say, as Robert Scholes did, that Vonnegut put bitter coatings on sugar pills is to suggest that his characteristic black humor is a kind of window dressing, like the presence of Kilgore Trouts books in porn shops (where the good stuff is kept in the back) and that the sugar coating, Vonneguts self-confessed intolerable sentimentality, is the real substance of his work. But if we follow this logic, then the pill is really just a placebo and the sentimentality is the real porn, with its vision of an impossibly hospitable world where common decency prevails. As the emasculated Jake Barnes says at the end of Hemingways The Sun Also Rises to the nymphomaniac Brett Ashley after she wistfully mentions what a wonderful life they could have had together, Yes, isnt it pretty to think so. Or, as the Krapp-like narrator of Jailbird, who will accidentally derail a plan to return the giant corporation RAMJAC to its rightful owners, the American people, sardonically says of his younger self, But
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my unagging optimism prevailed. Or as Vonneguts son Mark said: although writing may have been one of the few things that made his father happy, he did not believe that his writing would have much effect on the course of things. Hi ho. It is Vonnegut the optimist who saw himself as that most primitive of early warning systems, the canary in the coalmine, a gangly six-foot-plus Tweety Bird, and alternately as a maker of myths for the young, like Bokonon in Cats Cradle, prophet of harmless balderdash designed to poison young minds with humanity, along the way transforming strangers into an extended family of readers. He created a mod Yoknapatawpha (Jerry Klinkowitzs phrase), a hospitable alternate reality of recurring characters and settings in which he addressed his readers less as a writer than as what he was, a person from Indianapolis: avuncular, self-deprecating and as unassuming and approachable as his signature felt-tip pen drawings. Unlike high modernist T. S. Eliots J. Alfred Prufrock, Vonnegut, a man of self-proclaimed moderate giftedness, did not mind appearing ridiculous, playing the (holy) fool, being a (mere) teller of jokes, a minor art form that (along with sub-literary science ction and like the innovative stand-up comics Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce) he put to more serious purpose. The sci- sections of Slaughter-House Five were little clown acts as the narrative made its not-so-Yellow-Brick-Road way to the rebombing, the pages becoming gradually darker and nally all blackor so Vonnegut had once intended: a kind of visual joke, black humor squared as it were, suggesting the black paintings of Frank Stella and Francisco Goya and George Steiners view that events such as the Holocaust (and Dresden) lay beyond language, beyond representation. Yet Vonnegut not only wrote about the trauma of his own hardly private (yet strangely public, even if not well publicized) holocaust, the restorm of Biblical proportions which consumed Dresden and its people; he wrote about it again and again, not permitting himself or his readers the luxury of forgetting. Vonnegut once was asked, What right do you [a leader of American young people] have to be cynical and pessimistic? Americas most celebrated canary in the coalmine had a right to be cynical and pessimistic, and good reason to be as well, but with that right came self-imposed responsibilities. Vonnegut understood the harm writers could do, even unintentionally: Howard Campbell (like Vonnegut a Jr.) in Mother Night, for example, or Kilgore Trout in Breakfast of Champions. But Vonnegut also knew this: although serving as canary in the coalmine in best-selling books and SRO talks had made him famous, it had not made his country any more just, his countrymen any more inclined to act decently towards one another, or his planet any more livable. After nearly six decades of hammering home the same basic point, Vonnegut may well have wondered whether America in general and his extended family of readers in particular had proven just as Teon-coated (Kathryn Humes phrase) as his characters and whether he may indeed have been guilty either of making his
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readers cynical and pessimistic or of providing them with nothing more than a cheap holiday in social consciousness. Perhaps he even felt at times the way the Nazi ofcer did that he and Bernard OHare discovered in a barn at wars end, the one who says, I have just wasted the last ten years of my life. The joke, such as it is, would have been on Vonnegut, who by then (Timequake) had devoted more than four decades to prescribing corrective lenses to Earthling souls. Of course, Vonnegut liked a good joke and admired the midwestern humorists Kim Hubbard and Booth Tarkington, even the blackly humorous Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain, and comic duos Bob and Ray, and above all Laurel and Hardy, who are just too sweet to survive in this world and are in terrible danger all the time. Many of the saddest moments in Vonneguts ction involve comic scenes gone terribly wrong. Rosewaters John Wayne-like derring-do is James Thurbers Walter Mitty done up in slasher (or Twilight Zone) drag; Greetings is the punch line to the cosmic joke made at Rumfoords expense; German guards seeing for the rst time that the smoldering moonscape that had been Dresden, their home, looked like a silent lm of a barbershop quartet. So long forever, they might have been singing, old fellows and pals. So long forever ; an eight-year old boy misses the destruction of Hiroshima the way Buster Keatons Johnny Gray misses the Confederate Army eeing behind him while he chops wood in The General: When the bomb dropped, he was playing soccer during school recess. He chased the ball into a ditch at one end of the playing eld. He bent over to pick up the ball. There was a ash and wind. When he straightened up, his city was gone and he was alone. He was alone. So are all of Vonneguts main characters and so is Vonnegut himself in the photo taken by his second wife, Jill Krementz, that appears on the back cover of A Man without a Country. It shows Vonnegut, from behind, looking as rumpled as ever but strangely small, gazing at the ocean, alone in the gathering darkness. In this essay, no Vonnegut work has been singled out as more important or better than the others because to do so, in a tribute like this anyway, not only would run counter to his egalitarian politics and equally egalitarian voice and style, but also to his weaving individual works into a larger extended family of ctions. It would leave the work alone in the gathering darkness; it would be akin to thinking the unthinkable, of Laurel without Hardy. Plus, if youve read one Vonnegut book, youve read them all, or will. They go down so easily, those sugar pills with their bitter, brightly colored coatings. For the near blind you must write large, Flannery OConnor claimed. Vonnegut not only wrote large, in broad cartoon-like strokes; he wrote what is essentially the same story over and over so that in the end his work is like the huge painting in which Bluebeards Rebo Karabekian tries to record everything he saw the day World War II ended, giving even the smallest, otherwise indistinguishable human gures his or her own story. Vonnegut is the last American writer with any claim to the title William Dean Howells bestowed on Mark Twain, the Lincoln of our Literature, the one who
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tried hardest to free us from our lack of concern for others and for our planet, the one who wanted us to dream other dreams and better, as Twain had Little Satan say in The Mysterious Stranger, the work Twain could neither nish nor stop writing (and re-writing). Vonnegut persisted in a different way, not unlike Eugene Debs (another Hoosier!), ve times the Socialist Partys candidate for President, to whom Hocus Pocus is dedicated and whose best known words appear on the little gravestone that Vonnegut drew for the novels dedication page: While there is a lower class I am in it. While there is a criminal element I am of it. While there is a soul in prison I am not free. In Vonneguts nal novel, Timequake, his slightly ctionalized self says,
In recent years Ive found it prudent to say before quoting Debs that he is to be taken seriously. Otherwise many in the audience will start to laugh. They are being nice, not mean, knowing I like to be funny. But it is also a sign of these times that such a moving echo of the Sermon on the Mount can be perceived as outdated, wholly discredited horsecrap. Which it is not.

In Cats Cradle a son secretly follows his Albert Schweitzer-like father into the woods until they reach the mountain of corpses, people whom the father could not save from the plague devastating the island the way that ice-nine will devastate the planet. Some day all of this will be yours, the father says, perhaps to his son, perhaps to no one in particular. Decades later, Vonneguts son Mark, having become an author and famous doctor helping others get through the schizophrenia for which he had been hospitalized, said, Father, we are here to help each other get through this, whatever it is. Its a line that, like Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do, Vonnegut might well have spoken himself, the nal solution to the problem of all the mischief and misery caused by humans (particularly Americans) whose brains are too big and whose hearts too small. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. helped us get through this, whatever it is, and he helps us still. Like another architects son, Donald Barthelme, he tried hard to make every architects dream come true, which is a dwelling such as no one has ever seen before, but which proves to be eminently habitable, which is pretty much what Eugene Debs wanted too.

DAEMEN C OLLEGE A MHERST, N EW YORK

FURTHER READING
Allen, William, ed. Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1988. Klinkowitz, Jerome. The Vonnegut Effect. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2004. VOL. 51, NO. 2 157

Klinkowitz, Jerome, and John Somers, eds. The Vonnegut Statement: Original Essays on the Life and Work of Kurt Vonnegut. New York: Delacort Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1973. Marvin, Thomas F. Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood, 2002. Merrill, Robert, ed. Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. Morse, Donald E. Novels of Kurt Vonnegut: Imagining Being an American. Westport: Praeger, 2003.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert Morace teaches at Daemen College in Amherst, New York. His publications include John Gardner: Critical Perspectives (co-edited with Kathryn VanSpanckeren, 1982), John Gardner: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography (1984), The Dialogic Novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge (1989), Irvine Welshs Trainspotting (2001), and a study of the Irvine Welsh phenomenon published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2007.

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