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| Kurt Vannegut and some of his work. |
“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 Indianapolis, Indiana. He would go on to become a veteran of
another war and the 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.
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| Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. and his family, wife Edith, eldest son Bernard, and daughter Alice. Kurt, Jr. would arrive in 1922 shortly after this picture was taken. The family came from a long line of German Free thinkers and the family attended the Indianapolis Unitarian Church for which architect Kurt Sr. designed a building. |
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.
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| Kurt Vonnegut as a young soldier. He dropped out of Cornell to join the Army. |
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.
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| About a year before his death Vonnegut and his second wife Jill Krementz in 2006, about a year before his death. |
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.
