Kurt Vonnegut's America , livre ebook

KURT VONNEGUT'S
 
AMERICA
Jerome Klinkowitz

The University of South Carolina Press
© 2009 University of South Carolina
Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2009 Paperback edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2010 Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2012
www.sc.edu/uscpress
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12        10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:
Klinkowitz, Jerome.
Kurt Vonnegut's America / Jerome Klinkowitz.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-57003-826-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Vonnegut, Kurt—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Vonnegut, Kurt—Knowledge—United States. 3. United States—In literature. I. Title.
PS3572.O5Z743 2009
813'.54—dc22
2009003440
ISBN 978-1-61117-115-0 (ebook)
For Asa Pieratt, bibliographer at the clambake
CONTENTS
 
Preface
Introduction
Vonnegut Released
Chapter 1 Vonnegut's 1950s
Human Structures
Chapter 2 Vonnegut's 1960s
Apocalypse Redone
Chapter 3 Vonnegut's 1970s
A Public Figure
Chapter 4 Vonnegut's 1980s
Arts and Crafts
Chapter 5 Vonnegut's 1990s
Autobiography and the Novel
Conclusion
Vonnegut Uncaged
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
 
Kurt Vonnegut's America derives from what I was doing in the days following Kurt's death. Knowing that he'd suffered irrecoverable brain injuries in a fall three weeks previous and, after all measures to help him failed, that he'd been taken off life support a few days before, I received the news with a sense of grim inevitability. I'd been mourning for almost a month and knew his loss would be difficult to bear.
But then, within hours of the public announcement, everything came alive. Away from home—I was up in Madison, Wisconsin, doing research on Frank Lloyd Wright—I was hard to reach, but phone messages poured in. National Public Radio, a number of state public-radio networks, CBS News Radio in Los Angeles, the Jim Lehrer NewsHour, even the BBC: everyone wanted something on Kurt Vonnegut. And so I complied, giving what was asked, from thirty-second comments to hour-long discussions. All Things Considered, To the Point, Nightwaves , and many more—the whole roster, it seemed, of public broadcasting that usually figured in my life as background to the day's events. For now, Kurt Vonnegut was the event, and it brought his work to life for me in a way four decades of literary criticism hadn't.
The book at hand was begun right after the last of these radio shows and is written in the style I found comfortable for discussing Kurt's impact on his country. It is personal and critically informal yet rooted in the common dialogue Americans share, especially when considering national matters that touch their own lives. Millions of lives were indeed touched by Vonnegut's works, and it's in the voice I found so natural for All Things Considered and the other discussions in which I took part that this book is written.
Kurt had been expecting death, hoping for its release for some time, outspokenly since having lived longer than did his father. And so my book begins with a treatment of this sense of release, perhaps the last conscious thoughts he had as he toppled off his front steps there on East 48th Street before his head hit the pavement. It ends with a sense of Vonnegut uncaged, the drawing he left as his epitaph.
I'm not a computer person, but friends tell me that empty birdcage, door open, appeared in the Kurt Vonnegut Web site the day after he died. Maybe it's still up there now. Print-oriented folks can see it stamped on the hardcover edition of Timequake , the book that Kurt had declared would be his last novel, and that was. I'm glad he's free. But his influence is still with us, and that's what Kurt Vonnegut's America is about.
My thanks go to all those public-radio outlets that got me going on this project, to André Eckenrode for his helpfulness in tracking internet sources, to the readers who refereed this book for the University of South Carolina Press, and to the University of Northern Iowa, which has always been and probably always will be my sole source of support.
INTRODUCTION
 
Vonnegut Released
Kurt Vonnegut died late in the evening of April 11, 2007, at the age of eighty-four years and five months. Five months precisely—his birth date was November 11, 1922, Armistice Day, as it was called then, when there was only one world war to remember. It was a hallowed occasion throughout the 1920s and 1930s and into the 1940s, until a new world war would steal attention. At eleven minutes after the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of each year, schoolchildren paused from their lessons for a moment of silence. At work and at home, adults would do the same. As a veteran himself, a pacifist but nobly civic in his intent, Vonnegut recalled those ceremonies as subsequent decades effaced them, the event renamed Veterans Day and for a time having its celebration shifted to the closest Monday. It has since been restored to its proper date, which pleased him. Aged veterans of the First World War had told Vonnegut that in 1918, when at this precise minute the gunfire and explosions had suddenly stopped, the silence sounded like the voice of God. Throughout his own career as a writer, he'd tried to give voice to the sentiments behind such memories of an ideal America. And now the living presence of that voice had been silenced.
His last years, the first of this new century, had been difficult for him. After Timequake (1997), his fourteenth novel, itself a struggle to produce, he complained of being tired, of wishing to do no more work. After all, he'd labored on for two decades after conventional retirement age, trying to make things better for an age in which everything seemed to be going wrong. His novel in progress, the story of an old-fashioned comedian, never took satisfactory shape; what survives is its title, If God Were Alive Today. Henceforth people worrying about subsequent atrocities and abominations might use the same sad phrase about Kurt Vonnegut. He'd tried his hardest, but with a nightmare war in Iraq, unchecked global warming, and a sad deterioration in cultural civility, the tasked seemed almost too much.
As for himself, Kurt Vonnegut feared that he'd be forgotten, or at best regarded as a relic of the 1960s. Ironically his death proved how wrong he was. On the morning of April 12, 2007, The Today Show 's Ann Curry announced his passing as a major news item. That evening on NBC Nightly News , Brian Williams treated it with the respect for the passing of a Melville or a Faulkner. The CBS Evening News gave the story of Kurt's death its last seven minutes, a time slot reserved since Walter Cronkite's days for the subject of deepest reflection. Of course, these newspeople had known the man, hosting him on their interview shows whenever he'd have a new novel to promote or be speaking out on an important current issue. They too were of the generation that had read him when they were young, part of the 1960s–70s generation that had propelled Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) to best-sellerdom and enshrined paperbacks of his earlier novels as classics.
But this was not all. That evening, Jon Stewart gave over part of The Daily Show to a clip of Kurt Vonnegut's appearance from late in 2005, and he ended the program on a rare serious note, saying that with this man's death, “The world today is a colder, emptier place.” Sober stuff, especially for a younger generation the author feared was lost, or at least lost to his message. But the message was alive. In the even more outrageous Colbert Report , scheduled to ramp up Jon Stewart's irreverence to a higher, gratingly ridiculous level, host Stephen Colbert restricted his customary biting segue to just five words: “Welcome to the Monkey House!”
That's the title of Vonnegut's 1968 story collection, the satirical tone of which actually paved the way for today's sharper edge of sociopolitical comedy, be it Stewart's, Colbert's, or David Letterman's. Kurt Vonnegut had done the Letterman show in 2005 as well. Indeed he'd become famous all over again with a newly enthralled young audience, thanks to his recently written essays being collected and published as A Man without a Country (2005). Given quiet publication by a small press, it astounded everyone by rocketing to the New York Times best-seller list.
From The Today Show at 7:00 A.M . to The Colbert Report at 11:30 P.M. , Kurt Vonnegut had been the major story of the day. Far from being forgotten or dismissed as depleted, he'd gone out under full sail.
The last book of his published in his lifetime is the right place to start in understanding both the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut. A Man without a Country is a strikingly contemporary work. Its concerns, from international politics and the environment to the nature of our country's leaders presently responsible for these matters, speak to the moment. Yet this very pertinence is based in its author's perspective, which from a man in his eighties is a long one, spanning at least six major eras in America's last one hundred years. For everything Vonnegut says about the events of 2000–2005, especially the troubling unce