Remembering Kurt Vonnegut
Updated at 3:00 PM -- Publishers Weekly, 4/12/2007 4:40:00 AM
Though he was best known for books written decades ago--among them Slaughterhouse-Five, Hocus Pocus and Cat's Cradle--Kurt Vonnegut continued to write and speak out on important issues of the day until the final months of his life.
Today, the day after Vonnegut died at the age of 84, members of the literary community are recalling him as an author, social critic and friend."Kurt wrote for everybody. He was the first really important writer in the lives of so many literary people--they fell in love with him when they were 14 and 16," said fellow novelist and longtime friend David Markson (author of Wittgenstein's Mistress, among other books). "You didn't fall in love with Norman Mailer or even Herman Melville at that age. Over the years, it was heartwarming to know he was there all the time. This is a real blow."
Seven Stories Press brought out Vonnegut's last three books: Like Shaking Hands with God; God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian, which sold 50,000 copies in hardcover; and A Man Without a Country, which has sold 225,000 in hardcover and 175,000 in paperback.
Seven Stories publisher Dan Simon, who in recent years accompanied the aging Vonnegut to many interviews, said: "Kurt had a wonderful, tantalizing ability to speak the truth bluntly and wrestle with very dark truths, and yet as a reader, you would come out of an encounter with his work uplifted. It was a mysterious quality he had--he always said that as a writer, he was 'a good date.' Most people spend a lot of their energy closing the door and running like hell from the things Kurt would face straight up. 'We are a scourge on this planet, this species of ours,' he would say, while at the same time he'd give you a sense of the greatness of being human. That's the paradox of Kurt Vonnegut. .He could lead you to a place that was more hopeful and even thoughtful than you might have thought possible. He could tell it like he saw it and in some mysterious way make it bearable."
Angela's Ashes and Teacher Man author Frank McCourt talked to PW about teaching Vonnegut's books: "Yes, I did discuss his books with the kids—especially Slaughterhouse Five and, especially, during the VietNam war. There was always great material in all his books. Then I came across a marvelous commencement speech he had given somewhere when he talked about some kids who’d been arrested for ‘high jinks.’ He told his graduating audience to go forth and engage in high jinks. I don't care what the critics say—he was always a good shot in the arm for anyone trying to write anything. He was to prose what Billy Collins is to poetry. You read these two and you say, Oh, I could do that. Then you try it and you tear your hair out."Author Pete Hamill (his next book, North River is due out from Little, Brown in June) also has fond memories of Vonnegut and a sense of his profound cultural impact: "I knew him from the Village and I knew him from his work and I liked him very much. He was a very funny guy in a wry, ironical way—which is the kind I like. We had odd conversations because he loved comic strips and so did I. So we would talk about comic strips and how they made some guys into writers. And his politics, of course, were basically the politics that a lot of us shared in the ’60s and ’70s. You know, there was a combination of the war in Vietnam, something going drastically wrong with the society, and something going very right with it, with this younger generation. Of course he could talk about those things with the authority of having been bombed in Dresden. He had a sense of what a war really was like, not as some abstraction. He had been there, so his passion about the futility of war was genuine. So that gave him a certain authority during the ’60s that in a way continued for the rest of his life. No accident that at age 82 he had a bestseller, as a literary guy who didn’t apologize for being literary. And without any calculation he ended up still being a voice worth listening to in the time of another American war for our country."
In God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian, published in 2000, Vonnegut writes as "reporter on the afterlife," allowing himself to be strapped to a gurney by his friend Jack Kevorkian and dispatched--round-trip--to the Pearly Gates. His report in the introduction offers up his own epitaph:
So when my own time comes to join the choir invisible or whatever, God forbid, I hope someone will say, "He's up in Heaven now." Who really knows? I could've dreamed all this.
My epitaph in any case? "Everything was beautiful. Nothing hurt."
I will have gotten off light, whatever the heck it is that was going on.
The New York Times published a thorough biographical story today, as did NPR. A strange and moving tribute was posted on Vonnegut's own website.
