God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

By Richard Anderson

Over the past 20 years or so, I must have started a half dozen letters to Kurt Vonnegut to express my admiration for him and my appreciation for his work. But I never sent any of them.

I knew I’d regret it, knew that one of these days, probably sooner rather than later, the aging, chain-smoking, seemingly chronically depressed writer would leave this world and that I’d be sorry I never expressed my respect and love for him and his work. But Vonnegut didn’t strike me as the kind of guy to whom you wrote “fan mail.” And what do you say in a letter to your literary hero, after all?

Yes, he was a hero. As a teenager, when I first read his books, he was heroic because he was vulgar, funny, wacky, crass, sticking it to the establishment. Many of his novels had a whiff of sci-fi to them, peppered, as they were, with stuff about chronosynclastic infandibla and alien creatures who inhabited the fourth dimension. He made up words like “wampeters” and “granfalloons.” His characters had kind of funny names like Kilgore Trout and Malachi Constant.

As I got older, I kept up on Vonnegut’s latest novels and revisited favorites. I read “Cat’s Cradle,” “Sirens of Titan,” “Slapstick,” “Breakfast of Champions” and of course “Slaughterhouse Five” three or four or more times.

But with each subsequent reading, I laughed less and thought more. The characters that hat been funny and wacky struck me more and more as sad and confused, downright pitiful, often. T

he exotic, out-there sci-fi stuff became a sort of short-hand way to reference how not-in-control we humans are, how little we know. The first time I read “Galápagos,” I recall, I laid in bed at night, unable to sleep, thinking about how small we are and how meaningless the things we waste so much of our time pursuing.

Another 10 years down the road, and another round of readings – “Dead-Eye Dick,” “Bluebeard,” “Jailbird,” “Mother Night” – and I found my eyes brimming with tears at the compassion with which Vonnegut regarded his fellow human.

Life may be small and pitiful. People may be confused and pained, may take out their frustration on one another in terrible ways. But in spite of all that there was still reason to smile, to hope, to love.

Vonnegut’s work became for me the classic texts on humanism, and I learned from him that the thing that sets us above other creatures is the ability to forgive. And though we all too often fail to exercise forgiveness, that, too, must be forgiven.

So, now, Mr. Vonnegut has indeed gone – he died last Wednesday at the age of 84, having suffered brain injuries after a fall – and, as I predicted, I’m kicking myself for not having sent any of those letters. I attribute a lot of who I am to Kurt Vonnegut. I wish I had let him know that, but, as he would say, so it goes.
PERMALINK:
God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut | Planet JH News Article: Editorial

Leave a Comment