HJHOP Flashback: "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt"

This is something that I wrote back when we lost Kurt Vonnegut. I reread it tonight, and it struck me as probably one of the better things that I have written at HJHOP. So, I inflict it upon you again.

When George Harrison died, I was surprised by how upset I was. During the inevitable retrospectives on the local oldies station, I was simply overwhelmed, when I listened to his solo work, by his contribution to the Beatles' sound. After John Lennon died (man, I'm glad I wasn't old enough to understand that when it happened), the job of being the smart one fell onto the quiet one's shoulders.

Yesterday, humanists lost a great friend and champion of the cause, Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007). We was from Indianapolis, the son of an architect and the brother of a meteorologist. (His brother, incidentally, once wrote a scientific paper about the possibility of determining the strength of a tornado by measuring the percentage of feathers ripped off of chickens. It could have come from a Vonnegut novel.) Born on Armistice Day, Vonnegut was a member of the 106th Infantry Division, a green unit that had just been sent up to the Ardennes, a relatively quiet part of the line in order to adjust to combat. Vonnegut was a scout, piddling about as close as he could to the enemy without getting killed and reporting what he heard and saw to Intelligence. His division took the brunt of the German attack in the Battle of the Bulge and was the only American Division wiped off of the Table of Organization during the war: there were not enough soldiers left to rebuild it. Vonnegut was captured and spent the rest of the war as a POW.

During this period, he was transferred to Dresden, the Florence of the Elbe, it was called, where in February 1945, Allied bombers armed with incendiaries triggered a firestorm. Tens of thousands of people were killed; most of these did not burn to death but suffocated when the fire consumed all of the oxygen. The only reason Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners survived was because he was sealed in an airtight underground meat locker of a slaughterhouse, which was the damnedest thing, really. Vonnegut emerged from that locker and to find that the world was simply gone. In his semi-autobiographical novel Timequake, he reports that "When I got home from [World War II], my uncle Dan clapped me on the back and bellowed, 'You're a man now!' I damn near killed my first German." He returned from the war deeply disillusioned: he had gone into the war with the understanding that the Germans were the bad guys who killed innocents without mercy.

Vonnegut wrote many books, many of them depopulated by global disasters: in Player Piano it's a bombing; in Galapagos, it's a pandemic; in Cat's Cradle it's Ice-9, a weapon of human devising; in Slaughterhouse-Five, the aliens from Tralfamadore have always and will always have destroyed the universe while testing a new energy source. So it goes.

I first encountered Vonnegut when I was in high school, when my English class read God Bless You, Mr Rosewater. It was the story of Eliot Rosewater, son of a senator and heir to the Rosewater fortune. Eliot came home from the war, where he had inadvertently killed a young fireman, and decided to spend his money helping people who were otherwise unlovable. Naturally, Rosewater's family thought that his concern for his fellow man was evidence of his insanity and threatened his status as heir to the family fortune. The irony appealed to me greatly as a teenager, as did his willingness to sprinkle his prose with phrases like "old fart" and "bitchy flibbertigibbet." Goddamn, I'm going to miss that.

Even if I had never read another Vonnegut novel, I would have remembered one line, which encapsulated for me so much of what it means to be a successful human. When I met my twin niece and nephew for the first time, I said what I consider to be a secular prayer over them, a benediction penned by Vonnegut in God Bless You, Mr Rosewater. "Hello, babies," I said. "Welcome to earth. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies--God damn it, you've got to be kind." I later found out that my youngest brother had mumbled the same thing over the twins when he met them.

As I have pursued my doctorate, several of the authors whom I examine in my dissertation have died. Joseph Heller died during my M.A. program. William Manchester died during my Ph.D. coursework. Now Kurt Vonnegut, who I secretly hoped might one day get a peek of the dissertation, as I try to complete the damned thing. Chapter by chapter, I am killing off the greatest generation. Sorry. Norman Mailer better watch out!

In January 1991, the Weekend Guardian submitted a series of questions to Vonnegut which he answered. One of them was: "How would you like to die?" Vonnegut's answer: "In an airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro." No such luck. Vonnegut died from injuries he suffered in a fall at home. He was a tough bastard: a few years ago, he suffered serious burns in a fire at his apartment. I always thought that his Pall-Malls would do him in, honestly. I'm sort of glad that they didn't. He survived one of the greatest engineered conflagrations of the last century and he died from a bump on the head. Life is so strange. I think that fascinated Vonnegut.

Vonnegut, in his later years, long after his star figured prominently in the American Literary firmament, Vonnegut published a number of his essays and lectures in a series of collections. His latest was last year's A Man Without a Country, which is, according to Amazon.com, #106 in sales. Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1968, is at #42.

So, Kurt is up in heaven now. I believe that the planet he leaves behind is a slightly better one for his having been here.

HJ