Vonnegut in Fact

The Public Spokesmanship of Personal Fiction

Jerome Klinkowitz

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781611171273
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria norteamericana

Insights into Vonnegut's extensive nonfiction as a key to understanding innovation in his novels

Vonnegut in Fact offers a thorough assessment of the artistry of Kurt Vonnegut, known not only as the best-selling author of Slaughterhouse-Five, Timequake, and a dozen other novels, but also as the most widely recognized public spokesperson among writers since Mark Twain. Jerome Klinkowitz traces the emergence of Vonnegut's nonfiction since the 1960s, when commentary and feature journalism replaced the rapidly dying short story market.

Offering close readings and insightful criticism of Vonnegut's three major works of nonfiction, his many uncollected pieces, and his unique manner of public speaking, Klinkowitz explains how Vonnegut's personal visions developed into a style of great public responsibility that mirrored the growth of his fiction. Klinkowitz views his subject as a gentle manipulator of popular forms and an extremely personable figure; what might seem radically innovative and even iconoclastic in his fiction becomes comfortably avuncular and familiarly American when followed to its roots in his public spokesmanship.

Chapter One

EMERGING FROM ANONYMITY

At the beginning of 1969 Kurt Vonnegut was forty-six years old and the author of five novels, two short-story collections, forty-six separately published short stories (in magazines as familiar as Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post), and twenty feature essays and reviews. However, he was almost totally unknown—unknown in public terms, that is. With his more than half a million words in print, editors knew him—but as a professional pigeonholed as doing science fiction or selling to the slicks rather than as a major voice in American culture. True, much of his production was undertaken, by necessity, in commercial fashion. Rejected stories with a technical theme were shuttled off to the nickel-a-word venues of Argosy and Worlds of If; when the family magazine markets dried up, he found he could make the same money by outlining paperback originals, which is how some of his most important novels were conceived; and to support himself and his large family by his writing he undertook review assignments on far from literary topics. But compared to other major writers at similar stages in their careers, Kurt Vonnegut at midpoint was laboring in virtual obscurity, writing fiction and fact alike that were not having any public impact beyond a moment’s entertainment and another month’s expenses met.

Beginning in March of 1969, all that changed. With the publication of his sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut found himself in unlikely places: as the lead item in the most prominent national book reviews and as a major presence on the best-seller lists of these same newspapers and journals. Quality alone is rarely the distinguishing factor in such attention. In Vonnegut’s case, subsequent scholarship has shown that Cat’s Cradle and Mother Night are as significant achievements as Slaughterhouse-Five, yet the former never outsold its first printing of six thousand copies and received just a few passing reviews, while the latter’s debut as a paperback original meant no media coverage at all, a fate shared with The Sirens of Titan, another work now considered central to the Vonnegut canon. Rather, as any publicist will testify, getting reviewed by major critics on the front pages of book sections is a privilege mostly reserved for the country’s best-known authors. Getting there as an unknown is a rare achievement indeed, the reasons for which merit close study.

A correlation exists between the first two major reviews of Slaughterhouse-Five: each was written by a critic who had heard Vonnegut speak to audiences, and who had been, moreover, deeply impressed by the personal voice in the author’s fictive statement. Not that public speaking was Kurt Vonnegut’s chosen profession; rather, his talk at Notre Dame University’s Literary Festival (as heard by Granville Hicks) and his two-year lectureship at the University of Iowa (where Robert Scholes was a colleague) were stopgap measures to generate some income after his customary publishing markets had either closed (as in the case of Collier’s and the Post) or ceased to respond. Those who have met him know he is a quiet person much protective of his privacy; for him, public speaking is a nervous chore. More than once he has observed of a lecture that instead of courting laughs and easy applause he should be at home doing his real work, writing novels. But with the relative failure of his fifth novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, to make much headway in 1965, novel writing was no longer an option, and so Vonnegut accepted a teaching position at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and booked speeches at literary festivals and library dedications around the country as ways of matching the modest income his short stories and paperback originals had generated before.

This was what was known to Granville Hicks in 1969, when the venerable old critic (who had made his initial mark as a commentator on socially radical literature of the Great Depression era) was faced with introducing an unknown author to his readers in the Saturday Review.¹ The new novel itself, Slaughterhouse-Five, was an equally difficult topic, for its innovative format was worlds away from the realistic, sociologically based fiction Hicks had championed for nearly half a century. Therefore the critic began discussing what he did know: that the year before he and a student audience at Notre Dame had heard Kurt Vonnegut deliver “as funny a lecture as I had ever listened to.” Given what Vonnegut then had in print—a few paperback editions gaudily dressed as space opera—his audience might have expected the wooly ruminations of a science fiction writer. But after hearing him speak, no one present could mistake Kurt Vonnegut for a Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov, or even for his affectionately drawn portrait of the perennially misunderstood SF hack, Kilgore Trout. “What he really is,” Hicks announced, “is a sardonic humorist and satirist in the vein of Mark Twain and Jonathan Swift.” Twain and Swift, of course, are remarkable as two of the English language’s great public writers, spokesmen who addressed the crucial issues of their day in the most direct manner and in the most personably appropriate voice. There was much of that same quality in Vonnegut, Hicks learned in the audience that night, and he encountered it again in the pages of Slaughterhouse-Five, in which the same real-life person speaks directly to the reader in chapters 1 and 10.

Science Fiction, Hicks realized, was at least a tangential concern in the author’s earlier work: Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, and God Bless You, Mr. Rose-water had made great fun of the worship of science and technology; misfunctions of both were responsible for catastrophes of plot and hilarities of incident, not to mention a dim overview of human strivings toward a mechanical ideal. But Slaughterhouse-Five was more autobiographically revealing. “Now we can see,” Hicks revealed, “that his quarrel with contemporary society began with his experiences in World War II, about which he has at last managed to write a book.” From here Hicks went directly to Vonnegut’s most personal statement to the reader, his confession that “I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time.” From Vonnegut’s admission of problems in writing his book, Hicks proceeds to the second key factor: that “All this happened, more or less,” another personal confession that violates even more seriously the convention that an author must maintain a certain distance from his or her work. It is this personal relationship that makes the novel interesting. It is, in fact, the only thing the book truly has, since its purported subject, the fire-bombing of Dresden late in World War II, is something “Vonnegut never does get around to describing.” What matters is that “Like Mark Twain, Vonnegut feels sadness as well as indignation when he looks at the damned human race,” and in Slaughterhouse-Five he has found a vehicle for expressing that very personal view. “There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre,” the author tells his publisher; yet as Granville Hicks reads what Vonnegut offers in place of such conclusive statements, “I could hear Vonnegut’s mild voice, see his dead pan as he told a ludicrous story, and gasp as I grasped the terrifying implications of some calm remark.” The reaction, then, is to a public spokesman: one who not only addresses himself to a topic of great common interest, but who fashions his own reaction as an expression of what he feels should be the socially and culturally responsible view.

Even more instrumental in presenting Kurt Vonnegut’s new novel to the public was Robert Scholes’s front-page coverage in the New York Times Book Review.² Personal articulation of a common cause was the first thing Scholes pointed out—“Kurt Vonnegut speaks with the voice of the ‘silent generation,’ and his quiet words explain the quiescence of his contemporaries”—and, like Granville Hicks, the reviewer was familiar with the author, having been his colleague at the University of Iowa as recently as the 1965–1967 academic years. To Scholes, Vonnegut’s message was a simple one, its testimony an act of witness. The novel’s speaking voice is plain and simple, suiting its message that one had best be kind and unhurtful because “Death is coming for all of us anyway, and it is better to be Lot’s wife looking back through salty eyes than the Deity that destroyed those cities of the plain in order to save them.”

Because he sees himself in his act of witnessing as Lot’s wife, the author of Slaughterhouse-Five judges himself a failure. Robert Scholes thinks not, but feels that “Serious critics have shown some reluctance to acknowledge that Vonnegut is among the best writers of his generation” because he is “too funny and too intelligent for many, who confuse muddled earnestness with profundity.” Yet it is his plain and honest approach, which cuts through the obscuring technicalities of morals and philosophies, that allows “the crudest deeds” to be “done in the best causes,” while writers whose language and approach are immensely more sophisticated find it impossible to convince their readers that “our problems are not in our institutions but ourselves.”

Accompanying Robert Scholes’s review was a background piece on Vonnegut himself by another former Iowa colleague, C. D. B. Bryan.³ Like Scholes, Bryan made much of the author’s personal qualities, especially his “quiet, humorous, well-mannered and rational protests against man’s inhumanity to man” as forming “an articulate bridge across the generation gap.” Bryan reinforced this personal sense by crowding his piece with intimacies, including references to Vonnegut struggling to support his family by selling what he could to the commercial magazines and reportedly earning “what I would have made in charge of the cafeteria at a pretty good junior-high school,” another folksy comment intended to make the reader feel as familiar and comfortable with the man as Bryan did.

Getting page 1 of the New York Times Book Review is no small accomplishment; having page 2 devoted to a personality piece is even more impressive, prompting one to ask why a generally unknown author such as Kurt Vonnegut would receive such treatment by the nation’s leading review medium. One reason was the author’s own persistence in making those commercial sales that kept his family supported by at least middle-class standards. One of the publications for which Vonnegut undertook relatively servile duties was the Times Book Review itself, reporting not a fancy best-seller or important intellectual work but rather one of the greatest challenges to a reviewer’s imagination possible, The Random House Dictionary.⁴ What does one say about a dictionary, Vonnegut might have asked himself. In fact, his response is generated by a series of questions he asks himself as he pages through the volume’s front matter and ponders what linguists argue about when debating each other’s standards for inclusion or exclusion. “Prescriptive, as nearly as I could tell, was like an honest cop, and descriptive was like a boozed-up war buddy from Mobile, Ala.”—such was his way of putting the editors’ theoretics into terms simple and familiar enough for himself and his readers. To emphasize the shared nature of this discovery, Vonnegut reported how it emerged from conversations with two of his coworkers at Iowa, Bob Scholes and Richard Yates. But rather than sounding academic, Vonnegut’s quest seemed no more complicated than simply pondering the problem, asking the guys at work about it, and then presenting his conclusion in as clear and simple and personally meaningful a way as possible.

“I find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too,” Vonnegut recalled several years later, “when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am.”⁵ Such is the persona he used in the dictionary review and in most other essays he was writing at the time. One, “Science Fiction,”⁶ also appeared in the Times Book Review and was reprinted by its editor in a volume of especially convincing personal statements. Here Vonnegut made sense of SF enthusiasts’ mania to include everyone from Kafka to Tolstoy as a science fiction writer by remarking that “It is as though I were to claim that everybody of note belonged fundamentally to Delta Upsilon, my own lodge, incidentally, whether he knew it or not. Kafka would have been a desperately unhappy D.U.” As in the dictionary piece, Vonnegut ranges far (by mentioning Kafka and Tolstoy as SFers), brings things back in (by talking of his own fraternity), and then makes his point by unexpectedly uniting the two (Kafka making a wretched brother of Delta Upsilon). Like the approaches of other great public speakers in the American vernacular vein—Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, and Will Rogers—Kurt Vonnegut makes his point by shaping his public message in the most personally familiar terms.

That Vonnegut’s public spokesmanship had an infectiously personal quality to it extends to his circumstances of publication, even as those circumstances, in the case of his breakthrough book, Slaughterhouse-Five, encompass all that business with his friends in Iowa City and folksy appearances in the front pages of the New York Times Book Review. The novel itself begins with the author’ own commentary on how he came to write the book, including not just its struggles of composition but the role of publisher Seymour Lawrence in bringing it to press. For his part, Lawrence revealed that what caught his attention and prompted him to buy this unknown author’s next three books sight unseen was The Random House Dictionary review—and not just because it was brightly and amusingly written, but because it had some of its fun at the expense of Random House’s Bennett Cerf, for whom Lawrence had once been a rather exasperated vice president.⁷

The circle becomes complete when Vonnegut delivers the typescript of Slaughterhouse-Five, in which an actual occurrence in the book’s production becomes a moment in the reader’s experience of that same text. But what lies within the larger sweep of this circle, this arc of experience that stretches from an Indiana childhood through wartime service and a writer’s career on the East Coast all the way back to a temporary teaching post in the Midwest where not just Slaughterhouse-Five but also those essays on science fiction and The Random House Dictionary were conceived? Before reaching the best-seller list (for the first time in his life) in Spring 1969, Kurt Vonnegut left abundant evidence of where he was heading: five novels plus all those short stories, essays, and reviews provide much for the reader to consider. But just as it was the supposedly mundane occasion of a dictionary review that brought him to the attention of Seymour Lawrence and includes so many clues to the nature of his literary genius, so does a surviving lecture from these years indicate what it was in his speaking style that impressed Granville Hicks and actually forecast the structural mode of Slaughterhouse-Five.

On November 21, 1967, Vonnegut appeared at Ohio State University to deliver a talk entitled “Address: To Celebrate the Accession of The Two Millionth Volume in the Collections of the Libraries of The Ohio State University.” Later on, there would be many such speeches, all of them getting major media attention—on June 29, 1970, in the wake of his bestsellerdom and campus fame (during days of massive campus unrest), his commencement speech at Bennington College was reported as the lead item in Time magazine.⁸ But in 1967 Kurt Vonnegut was yet to be discovered, and was in fact often misunderstood—in this case by the ceremony’s organizer, Professor Matthew J. Bruccoli, who was following William F. Buckley’s lead at National Review (where Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron” was reprinted on November 16, 1965) in assuming that the author was an outspoken political conservative.

Kurt Vonnegut, of course, was and is anything but a right-wing activist, and at Columbus one finds him taking great delight in confounding expectations.⁹ He begins, just as he would in speeches after he had become famous, by warning listeners not to expect a coherent, conventionally delivered lecture. He explains that this is because he has found out there is a world of difference between sticking to a written text and interacting with a live audience. Therefore, he cautions, his audience should be ready for anything and everything, his lecture notes being just one of several texts to be flipped through and referred to in the manner of comedian Mort Sahl paging through a daily newspaper and improvising comments at random. This contrast between the formality of presenting a university lecture and the casualness of Vonnegut’s approach suggests another dichotomy, one that becomes both the theme and structure of his address: the irony of having him, a college drop-out, speaking at such an august academic occasion in honor of the library acquiring its two millionth book.

It was World War II that took Kurt Vonnegut out of college, but the speaker prefers to show himself as a fugitive from the rules of formal education. Instead, he says, he wound up having to educate himself. This meant that he did his browsing for books in bus stations instead of university libraries, something that gets him his first big laugh: that it would be more appropriate, as he suggests, for him to be dedicating a new Greyhound terminal today. On such newsstands he discovered what the times had branded as tawdry fare: gaudily packaged paperbacks by D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, respectable editions of which continued to be banned until the Supreme Court decisions just the year before. This fascination with “dirty books” will make several appearances and is an early indication of how what the author introduces as an offhand joke seemingly tangential to the topic will become absolutely central to his enlightening argument and surprising yet convincing conclusion.

The first legacy of such an apparently shabby self-education, however, is the irony of this self-styled college dropout becoming a professor in the University of Iowa’s postgraduate creative writing program, something he had been for the past two years. How did this person without so much as an undergraduate degree manage to teach master’s and doctoral level students? His hope was to follow a friend’s advice and not tell the class everything he knew in the first hour. An hour proved not to be the problem—after three minutes, Vonnegut explains, he was out of material. What that material was he now repeats at Ohio State, giving a quick chalk talk on the nature of storytelling derived from his anthropology thesis on the fluctuation between good and evil in simple tales—a thesis that had been rejected by the University of Chicago after the war, preserving his degree-less status.

The trick is to draw two axes and between the vertical of “good fortune/bad fortune” and the horizontal of the hero or heroine’s progress to map the rise and fall in conditions. The result is comically reductive: that narratives as simple as “Cinderella” and as complex as Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” work essentially the same: that is, by measuring the protagonist’s experiences in trying to distinguish the good news from the bad news. The moral is a simple one but effective in reflecting back on the speaker’s situation—not just that high and low literature share the same structures, but that such patterns can be explained by a dropout chemistry major who had studied anthropology on the G.I. Bill.

As Vonnegut would refine this speech in future years, the nature of fluctuations...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction The Private Person as Public Figure
• Chapter One Emerging from Anonymity
• Chapter Two Short-Story Salesmanship
• Chapter Three The Road to Wampeter
• Chapter Four Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons
• Chapter Five Palm Sunday
• Chapter Six Fates Worse than Death
• Chapter Seven A Public Preface for Personal Fiction
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index