Vonnegut obit

Thanks, Eric.

Why does Vonnegut endure so well?

The novelist's style was part political panel, part stand-up routine,
railing against horrors without losing his satiric bite.
By Carlin Romano
Philadelphia Inquirer Book Critic


Like his character Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut came
"unstuck in time" when he died Wednesday at 84.
So he went.

Now he belongs to the obit writers, until they hand him back to literature.

For a writer to become an icon takes time, and 84 years is more than enough.
Memorializers the day after spoke of Vonnegut's send-up in novel after novel
of America's obsession with technology, materialism and power, his creative
mentoring of younger '60s rebels, his evolution as a genre-busting, original
comic voice (though Vonnegut traced his style in that department to Laurel
and Hardy and Buster Keaton).

The arc of Vonnegut's career received full attention - gangly Indiana kid
with writerly and journalistic ambitions, distraught PR man for General
Electric, frustrated freelance short-story writer and "sci-fi" author sick
of being ghettoized, then the breakout, flower-power hero of
Slaughterhouse-Five, the instant literary voice of an alienated generation.

Less focus extended to the "Why?" question. Why does Vonnegut endure so
well? Why do all his novels remain in print?

Like his hero Mark Twain, Vonnegut united three American bents that often
split off from one another in European culture and literature -
antiauthoritarianism, a playful attitude toward it, and open-hearted
solidarity toward all innocent others, regardless of class.

Vonnegut's main genre, like that of many American writers back to Benjamin
Franklin, was the joke. In his case, they came out as novels, such as The
Sirens of Titan (1959), in which aliens mess up history because a spaceship
needs a spare part.

Characters like ne'er-do-well writer Kilgore Trout and self-loathing
philanthropist Eliot Rosewater ("Goddamn it, you've got to be kind") took on
Vonnegut's ethos. If poet Robert Frost declared in his epitaph that he had
"a lover's quarrel with the world," Vonnegut conducted a lifelong kibitzing
session with it - part political panel, part stand-up routine, railing
against the horrors of the world without losing his satiric bite.

To really understand Kurt Vonnegut, though, you needed to know how many
terrible things happened to him. Vonnegut grew up in a family devastated by
the Depression. His mother committed suicide on Mother's Day 1944.

On Feb. 13 and 14, 1945, Vonnegut found himself a prisoner of war in a
meat-locker bunker in Dresden, where he experienced the worst firebombing of
World War II. One of only seven American survivors, he was assigned to
collect thousands of German bodies. (The experience haunted Vonnegut his
whole life - he wrote about it in seven separate books.)

In 1958, Vonnegut's brother-in-law and sister Alice died the same week - the
brother-in-law first in a train wreck, his sister days later from cancer - a
catastrophe to which Vonnegut responded by adopting their three children. (A
lifelong optimist imprisoned in the body of a pessimist, he was the father
of seven children in all.)

Bad luck reached even into his respectable old age. In 2000, Vonnegut nearly
died from a fire in his Manhattan townhouse that destroyed virtually all of
his personal papers. In light of such patterned misery, it surprised few
that Kurt Vonnegut contemplated suicide, and unsuccessfully tried it once.

He wrote in a speech to the American Psychiatric Association: "You cannot be
a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed."

That perhaps explains why Vonnegut's leaps of inventiveness satisfied so
many, why his political stilettos estranged so few. Readers intuited that
they arose not from mischief, or the smugness of a later figure such as
Michael Moore, but out of pain and empathy - out of Dresden.

To intellectuals and writers on the Left, Vonnegut served as an artistic
demigod, unwaveringly sure of the malevolence of conservatives. To those who
didn't share his politics, he still exuded an insouciance that appealed
beyond ideology.

Gore Vidal, one of the last of Vonnegut's towering contemporaries, remarked
on his death that "[O]ur generation of writers didn't go in for imagination
very much." That made Vonnegut a treasured exception.

Vonnegut will also be remembered as an American aphorist of note. One of his
best-known appears in Mother Night: "We are what we pretend to be, so we
must be careful about what we pretend to be."

He liked speaking to college students and teenagers because he believed we
should "catch people before they become generals and senators and
presidents," try to "poison their minds with humanity."

Late in life, Vonnegut's political pronouncements became more caustic, yet
still with a droll twist. Hated Bush administration figures, he declared,
amounted to "upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography."

Yet in a comment to Rolling Stone that might have astonished the Vonnegut of
the '70s, his alter ego of the 21st century quipped, "Honestly, I wish Nixon
were president. Bush is so ignorant."

You had to laugh.
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Contact book critic Carlin Romano at 215-854-5615 or cromano@phillynews.com.
Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/carlinromano

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