“I
want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kind of things
you can’t see from the center.” —Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut was born on Armistice Day, November
11, 1922 in Terre Haute, Indiana. He would go on to become a veteran
of another war whose experience shaped him as a human being and one of the
great iconoclasts of his time.
His death on April
11, 2007 at the age of 84 was, as he predicted, not an emphatic period at the end of a long life, but a
mere semi-colon (he despised
semi-colons.) He died of a brain injury sustained after slipping
and falling in his Manhattan
apartment several days earlier. It was
the kind of comic, anti-heroic departure he could have written himself.
And Vonnegut would have noted the connection to the
announcement in Washington the same
day that all American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan were having their tours in the war zones extended by
another 120 days. He despised the war
and the men who started it. Leaving
behind such brutal stupidity would have been a pleasure for him.
“But I myself feel that our Country, for whose Constitution
I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body
snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been.
What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest,
low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’état imaginable.” (From A Man Without a Country.)
Unitarians
Universalists, in our insecurity, are always
making lists of “greats.” Having
dominated 19th Century American
literature, there is often a kind of desperately wide net thrown to haul in
contemporary writers so as to keep up our cultural bona fides. Vonnegut shows up on these lists.
He was, after all, very publicly avowed Humanist, the
successor to another science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov, as honorary chair of the American Humanist Association. A
Man Without a Country, his last book, was something of a Humanist scream in
a world corrupted by fake Christianity. It was largely assembled from his essays in
the Chicago based socialist magazine In These Times. We all know that Humanism has also found a
home in Unitarian Universalism.
Vonnegut was proud to claim descent from generations of German-American free thinkers, just the sort of folks who found a congenial home
with the radical brand of Unitarianism espoused
by Jenkin Lloyd Jones and the old Western Unitarian Conference at the turn of the 20th Century. Vonnegut’s parents were married by a
Unitarian minister and the family belonged to the congregation in
Indianapolis. Architect Kurt, Sr. even designed a building for
the congregation. Although not much of
church goer later in life, he liked to tell of visiting a Unitarian
congregation and hearing the minister joke about the bells peeling “No Hell! No
Hell!” (surely a Universalist
sentiment.) He sometimes referred to
himself as a Unitarian and was glad to be called to give the prestigious Ware Lecture at the 1986 UUA General Assembly. He was also asked to speak on the occasion of
William Ellery Channing’s 200th
birthday at First Parish in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
But Vonnegut was hard to pin down—and idealist and a cynic,
a humorist who’s satire was tinged with the deepest melancholy of man who had been brought
up to believe in human progress “onward and upward forever” only to witness the
gravest savageries of the 20th Century.
He genuinely believed in the pieties of civics lessons learned at James
Whitcomb Riley School in Indianapolis.
Yet he saw his father, a sensitive and creative architect, ruined by the
Depression, and his mother sink into
mental illness and suicide.
Vonnegut, center, as a German POW in World War II. |
Then it was off to war as an infantry scout for Patton’s
3rd Army. In the confusion of the Battle of the Bulge Vonnegut was
separated from his unit and wandered for several days behind German lines
before being captured. As a prisoner of war, in the defining moment
of his life, he survived the allied firebombing
of the historic city of Dresden and
was put to work collecting and disposing of the incinerated corpses of the old city. This was the central event of one of his most
famous novels, Slaughter House-Five, named for the actual facility in which he
and his fellow prisoners rode out the fire storm. The incident also figures in at least 5 other
novels.
In post-war America he participated in the rush to corporate security when he took a public relations job with General Electric in Troy, New York. The job didn’t
last long, but the bitter experience of corporate corruption, power, and arrogance
lingered. Troy became the Ilium of several Vonnegut novels
beginning with his first novel Player Piano, a savage corporate dystopia. The book was a publishing failure in 1952,
but slowly gained a cult following as paperback
editions followed.
Many of his novels involved organized religion on one hand
and a drive for spiritual honesty on the other.
In Sirens of Titan gave us The
Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.
In Cat’s Cradle it was the transparently fraudulent, but serenely
comforting—and perhaps actually saving—Bokononism. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
even distills what might be called a theology of atonement, forgiveness and
kindness. In it Eliot Rosewater says:
“Hello, babies,
welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer
and cold in the winter. It’s round and
wet and crowded. At the outside, babies,
you’ve go about a hundred years here.
There only one rule that I know of, babies—‘God damn it, you’ve got to
be kind.’ ”
Vonnegut thought so much of that last passage he repeated it
in his swan song A Man Without a Country.
Vonnegut's signature signature. |
He had his heroes. His
fright-wig hair and droopy mustache were surely homage to Mark Twain (for whom he named a son) and Albert Einstein. He admired Abraham Lincoln of whose speech
attacking the Mexican War he wrote
“Holy shit! And I thought I was a writer!”
He paired Jesus and Socialist—and fellow Terre Haute
native—Eugene V. Debs. He liked to quote Debs, “As long as there is
a lower class, I am in it. As long as
there is a criminal element, I am of it.
As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free,” and follow up with
the Beatitudes.
Vonnegut was a fearless opponent of war and injustice—any
war and all injustice. He despised
hypocrisy. He despaired for
humanity. People like that are hard to
come by.
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