Recently my son, who’s in high school, was lamenting about having to read a “stupid” book for English class. When I asked what the book was, expecting “Johnny Tremain” or “Pilgrim’s Progress”, I was shocked to hear “In Cold Blood”. I told him I loved that book, that I had read it several times in my adult life, and I hoped that he would give it a chance.
It got me thinking about another book I had encouraged him to read, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Breakfast of Champions”, which I discovered when I was his age and loved. He read it on my encouragement, and pronounced it “weird”. I think Vonnegut himself would have loved that critique. When I asked if he’d like to read any other books by Vonnegut, he declined, much to my dismay.
At my birthday celebration last week, some friends game me two books, one of which was “Armageddon In Retrospect – And Other New and Unpublished Writings on War and Peace” by Kurt Vonnegut. Published after the author’s death, it includes a truly Vonnegutian introduction by Kurt’s son Mark, complete with blithe descriptions of serious matters (In describing the fall which his aged father suffered which incapacitated him, Mark writes “Two weeks later he fell, hit his head, and irreversibly scrambled his precious egg.”), as well as personal insights into life as the son of one of America’s most darkly humorous writers.
I first read Kurt Vonnegut Jr. while in high school, thanks to my 11th grade English teacher. Instead of handing out a reading list from which to write reports, he encouraged us to locate and submit suggested books on our own. He had the right to refuse our entries, of course, but he never rejected any on my list, two of which were by Vonnegut. I read “Breakfast of Champions” first, and then immediately moved on to “Slaughterhouse Five”. That was all it took for me to be hooked. In the ensuing months and years, I read everything which Kurt published. He was, for me, the pre-eminent American author of my lifetime, someone who’s prose made me laugh out loud while sitting there in wonderment that I could be laughing about descriptions of horrific events like the bombing of Dresden.
Kurt’s writings were always a study in contrasts. Casually describing his mother’s suicide by drinking Drano, juxtaposing a bewildered young prisoner of war’s experience trying to find suitable clothing while simultaneously describing finding scores of burned old men, women and children in the insufficient bomb shelters of the “open city” of Dresden. The list goes on and on. It was easy to see Kurt as a cynic, the things he personally experienced would shatter lesser mortals.
Likewise, I found the cast of characters in Kurt’s novels to be fascinating, with the common trait of complexity. Most were flawed in very serious ways, some ignorant, some evil, most had a sense of resignation about them. Kilgore Trout. Eliot Rosewater. Billy Pilgrim. Montana Wildhack. As I read I became curious about how a writer creates, how names are chosen, stories are developed, and most of all, how often the stories, technically labeled “fiction” in Vonnegut’s case, mirrored his own life. Were these characters all part of Vonnegut in some way? Certainly Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist in “Slaughterhouse Five” lived the experience of WWII prison camp and the bombing of Dresden as Kurt himself had done. I doubt if Kurt had been transported to another planet however, to live in a zoo with a porn star named Montana Wildhack.
Reading this latest book brought back a flood of memories about discovering Vonnegut’s unique writing – his blend of humor and sadness, his treatment of difficult subjects in ways I’d never experienced. I’m saddened that my kids don’t show an interest in discovering him themselves, but I chalk it up to yet another example of the generation gap. I’d like to pry those damn “Twilight” books out of my daughter’s hands and replace them with “The Sirens of Titan” or “God Bless You Mr. Rosewater”, but I’m a realist.
And so on.
