The moment Kurt Vonnegut entered my life is seared indelibly in my memory. It stands out starkly, like my first period or my first kiss. All of those memories share a common theme: afterwards, my life was forever changed. I was thirteen, and my friend’s unusually permissive mother left me unsupervised in her well-stocked library. I don’t know why I pulled Mother Night off the shelves. The cover was black with a picture of a man in a blue outfit riding a dachshund, but I would not have detected that from the novel’s spine. Whatever guided me to the book, I curled up on the library floor and read the entire thing in one endless afternoon.
It was an electrifying experience start to finish. It was about sex and death and Nazis and spies, which sounds exciting enough, but it was not the subject matter but how the story was told that intrigued me. I had suspected for some time that adults knew The Truth About Everything and were keeping it from me, and now I had the proof in my hands. This book had stared into the face of evil and evil had stared back. Then this book blew a raspberry in evil’s face. It was unflinching, it was hysterical, it was naughty, and it was unforgettable. By the shocking ending in the Israeli jail, I was addicted. Some kids get hooked on drugs, others get hooked on casual sex, I got hooked on Vonnegut.
By high school, I was a total Vonnegut disciple. I started referring to him (as I still do) solely by his first name, as if we were intimate friends. I framed a picture of him and put it on my nightstand. I was ardently devoted to the radical truths he espoused: that most people were lazy and ignorant but deserved love anyway, that life was meaningless but sometimes wonderful, and that “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” In his words, I saw a vision for a more humane, saner, smarter world. That’s not to say I thought he was perfect. Towards the end of his career he became a very cranky old man, and I sometimes felt that he went too far with his contempt for people less intelligent than he. We also had vastly different viewpoints about religion. But then I thought, what do I know? I’m just a snot-nosed high schooler from Texas. He won a Purple Heart in World War II.
I will never forget where I was when I found out that Kurt died. It was in the middle of a very rough spring semester. I signed into my Yahoo mail and there was the headline: Kurt Vonnegut has died. I must have screamed or made some sound, because my roommate called from her room, “I saw it earlier. I wanted to tell you but I figured you already knew.” I don’t know how long I sat there after that. The next few days were a blur. I sleepwalked through my classes, wrote embarrassing, florid poetry more suited for a heartbroken tween than a college junior. One thing that kept running through my head, the thing I tearfully whispered over the phone to my best friend late at night, was that I never wrote him a letter. I never told him how much I loved his books or thanked him for all he had done for me.
The hardest part of losing Kurt, for me, was thinking about what happens after death. Kurt was a confirmed atheist, who once quipped that his favorite joke was to say that someone was up in Heaven. Kurt’s atheism always bothered me, even before his death. After he died, I could no longer avoid the topic or pretend he might change his mind. I had to face my feelings on the subject. I wished that he believed in something—not because I thought being an atheist was a bad thing to be, or because I didn’t understand his reasons for being one. No, what hurt me was the thought that someone who had been through so much (World War II, the suicide of his mother, his sister’s long, painful battle with cancer and his subsequent adoption of her four children) was not able to feel the comfort that I felt from the belief in a benevolent God. I felt he could use the relief of knowing our time here was short, and after death there is eternal peace. Towards the end of his career, Kurt wrote often and longingly about death. It made me so sad to think that his idea of what was coming next was so different from my idea. I guess I had foolishly hoped I would finally get to meet him in Heaven.
In 2012, I made the pilgrimage to the Vonnegut Library in Indianapolis, Indiana. Allegedly, I was in town for the Super Bowl, but that held as little attraction for me as the library did for my fiancé. He dutifully dropped me off downtown and made me promise I would show up at the Lucas Oil stadium in time for the festivities.
The library is a small, unassuming building right in the middle of downtown. There weren’t many people there the day I visited. I chatted with the boy at the door about how much I’d hated the most recent biography and how I’d made my fiancé read Slaughterhouse-5 before I’d agree to marry him. In this sacred place, I felt comfortable opening up to a total stranger. I perused the papers and miscellaneous artifacts seriously, trying to commit each item to memory because this was as close to my idol as I was ever going to get.
As I stood in front of his trusty Smith-Corona, the typewriter that had birthed so much of my personal philosophy, I suddenly and unexpectedly wept. I recalled his quote from Timequake, a response to the question “why bother writing?”
“Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about…you are not alone.”
Kurt had always made me feel that I was not alone, and in that moment, I felt like he was there with me, clucking at me in disapproval over my shoulder as I fell to pieces at the sight of his typewriter behind glass. I felt that he knew, as I did, that life on earth was short. He chose to pursue eternal life not through belief in Heaven, but in the legacy he left behind through his wonderful stories. When I am long gone, my great-great grandchildren will slip away into a corner of a public library and be filled with delight as they read their very first Vonnegut. In a small library in the heartland of America, I realized that it doesn’t matter if Kurt and I agree on what happens after we die. His work taught me (much like my Bible taught me) to focus on how to actually live before we die.
So happy birthday, Kurt. Wherever you are. It doesn’t really matter. You will always be my hero. So it goes.
Tags: birthdays, books, kurt vonnegut, laura sook duncombe, writing
I once hit Kurt Vonnegut with a basketball. True story.
If you think for a minute that we will be satisfied with that brief mention, you are very wrong. GO ON.
Late in his life (I believe) Vonnegut and his wife adopted a daughter, who is a few years older than I am (I haven’t seen her since childhood). We were at the same school and on the same basketball team. None of us were over 5 foot at this point (I think I was about 11 years old, and Daughter Of Vonnegut was maybe 14).
We played a home game against some school and at one point I lost control of the ball. It bounced out of bounds – pretty slowly – and, as we all watched in that time-is-creeping-past sort of way, eventually struck an elderly man with very curly hair on the shoulder. He clearly didn’t even see it coming. It made him jump a little, then he laughed and the referee retrieved it.
The importance of this situation was not communicated to me until years later, when I recognised his photo from a New Yorker issue, made the connection, and stopped breathing for a few minutes.
Thank you.
This was beautiful. I can’t be nearly as eloquent about what he and his writing meant to me, but it’s a lot.
Also I don’t understand this: It made me so sad to think that his idea of what was coming next was so different from my idea. Why do you need to feel that you believe the same thing in order to make a connection with the man? And I’m no Vonnegut scholar, but I’d be willing to bet that a large part of his genius as a writer came from his butting up against the inevitability of death and his surety that there was nothing after. If he’d been a religious man, he probably wouldn’t have created the works that he did, which often deal with the meaninglessness of life and the necessity of living in the moment, and you would never have had this profound connection with him in the first place.
I’m a There Is Nothing But The Void Awaiting Us type myself, but I liked having this different perspective, since we don’t have a lot of people of faith on the site, and I think she comes to a cool place with it in the end. I think you are probably correct in your sense that Vonnegut’s writing is deeply rooted in his lack of faith, however.
Thanks for saying I get to a cool place, Nicole! And baudolina, you’re right about everything you say. I don’t need to feel the same thing in order to make a connection-it was just something that I struggled with. A failing as a human being–but something that I nevertherless honestly felt. I decided to write about it, not because it cast me in an especially good light, but because I believe Kurt was unflinching when he looked at himself, and I wanted to be that as well. Thanks for reading!
Ah, I see – I hadn’t made the connection that this was a former perspective. I guess I would still be interested to hear that broken down a little further (although not necessarily by you) as it’s an idea I have run across before. I like what you say about the unflinching nature of KV’s work and agree that he constantly engaged in relentless self-analysis, in a way that’s more personal than probably anything else I’ve read in fiction.
Thanks for writing and responding – it’s great that this site allows for such good dialogue between its writers and audience! (PS I am also a Greek epic poetry fan.)
Shit, I get sad when I think about the fact that Oscar Wilde never got to watch Oz and become a big fan like me; I TOTALLY get the sorrow of connecting with someone deeply you don’t know and feeling personally affected when you realize a belief or a life experience or something else separates you. Especially when it comes to death, and our ideas about it.
I’m sad that Oscar Wilde never got to try MDMA.
This is a wonderful, perfect tribute. Well done.
Amazing.
That was great. I get so jealous when I read Vonnegut, he has such musical prose. And there’s no door to insight he doesn’t have a skeleton key for.
I cried when he died. Multiple times. Once in a bar sitting next to my (then) boyfriend, who stared at me nervously as though I’d slowly started to sprout a second head out of my left shoulder. Incidentally, the only time I ever saw him cry was when the Red Sox traded Manny Ramirez, and I’m pretty sure I reacted exactly the same way.
I loved this. If I had written a tribute to Kurt 10 years ago, it would have read almost exactly the same. Except my first book was “Cat’s Cradle”.
And I don’t have a husband.
And Kurt was still alive.
So it goes.
“Cat’s Cradle” was my first, too, and I fervently pressed it into the handles of several of my friends afterward. That final, frozen, ice-9 statue image (thumb to heaven!) is like catnip to upstart seventeen-year-olds. Bless that cranky old man.
My first of 2 tattoos is his drawing of a cat’s cradle on the title page. Some people think it’s a paper clip, one person asked if it was an upside-down ironing board. I showed it to Toasties at the meetup. Player Piano is my second favorite of his. A lot of his books blur together in my mind. I’m reading Blue Beard right now and it’s great. I think I only have Galapagos and Mother Night left and I’ll have read all his novels. I really enjoyed Man Without a Country and thought his curmudgeon-ness was understandable; if a person lives to a certain age in this god forsaken world, I can’t imagine having a cheerful disposition without being either insane or a recluse. Anyway I’m digging all the Vonnegut love here, even if I am a day late.
Vonnegut’s zany and surreal world reflects the absurdity of our own and really bent my mind to different modes of thinking. His work has inspired my own visual arts for quite some time and I created a tribute illustration of the author with the help of an old typewriter. You can see it at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2011/11/happy-… and tell me how his work and words also affected you.
Vonnegut was instrumental to my burgeoning atheism (not that he converted me, but the process of “losing” my religion would have been more terrifying if he hadn’t been there first, sharing his own fears and hopes with me). I hope that I’ve never made the mistake of romanticizing him just because we agree on the disposition of our consciousness after death (although I do have a t-shirt with his face on it, the start to my Pantheon of Humanists collection).
This was so good! I’m not on first name terms with Vonnegut, but I remember discovering him my freshman year of college. I plowed through all his books, and, much later, called myself ice-9 all over the internet.
Last month I reread Mother Night. I really miss him!
I love this. Thank you.
No, but the joke was he said it about Isaac Asimov, specifically. “Isaac is up in heaven now.” If that’s not funny and sweet, I don’t know what is. Couple of old cranks. I believe death is indeed the end, but I still imagine them up in heaven together, fit to be tied. Humanist prank heaven!
And now I am sobbing quietly on my couch about Kurt Vonnegut. His books got me through so much, through the darkest parts of my life, and they still do. Outside of my immediate family and a few friends, no other person has had such an impact on my life and worldview as he did.
When he died I was barely 2 weeks into a new job, and yet still spent the entire day sitting in my cubicle, crying and reading a fark.com thread commemorating him.
This was sweet and good and clearly moving, but to weigh in on the afterlife thing: What I love best about Vonnegut is the “everything is nonsense and sucks forever, so just be good to each other” theme he comes back to time and again – his emphasis on kindness and support as a mandatory part of just being a person, with no hope whatsoever of reward or recognition. And any idea of an afterlife, especially one which is good or bad based upon your own actions, fundamentally invalidates what I see as his central message.
I would actually be really interested in reading more about how you reconcile Christianity and Vonnegut, because that seems like a challenge at times!
Thank you for this! It is so good to know about the adolescent lady Vonnegut loving club. I try not to think about it too much because there’s some weird dynamics, but I read Welcome to the Monkey House in junior high (did not, really, understand it, but loved everything anti-authoritarian) and was lost from then onwards. Who Am I This Time? has given me unrealistic expectations for relationships and regional theater.
Ohhh, Mr. Vonnegut. (That’s what I called him in all of my fantasies of running into him on the street, and the letters that I started to write and never finished until it was too late.) I was introduced to Vonnegut by my tenth grade English teacher, who knew thatBreakfast of Champions was exactly what a sarcastic, liberal young atheist stuck in conservative California suburbia needed. I didn’t know about secular humanism then — I didn’t know how to articulate what I believed, that we could be decent, loving humans without any outside religious framework thrust upon us. Reading Timequake completely changed my life, and even as I’ve matured, and come to prefer other writers, I credit Vonnegut with giving voice to my most deeply held truths.
I didn’t have the vocabulary for it, and he gave it to me –that we’re all here to help each other get through this thing together, whatever it is, that people die, so it goes, that while there is a soul in prison, I am not free, and that goddamn it, we’ve got to be kind.
This lovely piece has reminded me of the time I had a 5 hour stopover at an airport and decided to while away the time reading Kurt’s (yes to first name basis ALWAYS) Bluebeard. Cut to me a few hours later hiding behind a bank of indoor shrubbery, weeping my heart out and learning that air travel is emotional enough without adding gorgeously heartbreaking humanist fiction into the mix.
This lovely piece has reminded me of the time I had a 5 hour stopover at an airport and decided to while away the time reading Kurt's (yes to first name basis ALWAYS) Bluebeard. Cut to me a few hours later hiding behind a bank of indoor shrubbery, weeping my heart out and learning that air travel is emotional enough without adding gorgeously heartbreaking humanist fiction into the mix.
At 17, I shouted “take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut!” at someone, and the best person in the world said, “I knew you liked Vonnegut.”
This was true, but only from the Tralfamadorian perspective, as I had not yet had the pleasure at that time.
Many years later, I argued with myself well into the night as to whether I should rent a car I couldn’t afford and drive 24 hours straight, through mountain passes, darkness, and an international border, to hear him speak at a literary festival. It was a last minute kind of thing. I am not a last minute kind of person.
I went.