Can Kurt Vonnegut be the Poet for the Nones?

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. with coffee and bear.

In previous generations those who harbored doubts and reservations about organized religion—we called them Free Thinkers and Humanists—were often drawn to atheism.  And the Millennials come of age when just as the New Atheists—mostly Boomers and Gen Xers—are making a lot of noise and attracting attention.  Some, of course, will, join in the crusade that not only refutes God, but makes war upon myth and mocks believers.   But most find the New Atheists bitter, overzealous, and the flip side of the coin to fundamentalists refusing any dialogue or giving any quarter in a religious war.

The Nones of this generation are less cocksure and more respectful of a variety of opinion and expression, universalists with a small u.  They favor a kinder, gentler humanism that leaves rooms for wonder and awe—think Carl Sagan and the current rock star Neil deGrasse Tyson.  They also look to a humanism with a giving heart and warm concern for humanity.

Just who might be the poet for these folks?  If they haven’t discovered him on their own, I might point out Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

“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, Jr.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 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 on the steps of his Manhattan apartment several days earlier.  It was the kind of comic, anti-heroic departure he could have written himself.

Vonnegut in later life used variations of this to illustrate his books and to sign letters and autographs.

Untitled

From a Letter to Knox Burger, 1961

Two little good girls
Watchful and wise —
Clever little hands
And big kind eyes —
Look for signs that the world is good,
Comport themselves as good folk should.
They wonder at a father
Who is sad and funny strong,
And they wonder at a mother
Like a childhood song.
And what, and what
Do the two think of?
Of the sun
And the moon
And the earth
And love.

—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Requiem

“When the last living thing
Has died on account of us,
How poetical it would be
If Earth could say,
In a voice floating up
Perhaps
From the floor
Of the Grand Canyon,
‘It is done.’
People did not like it here.”

—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

And Vonnegut even left explicit advice to aspiring scribblers everywhere.

Vonnegut’s Eight Rules for Writing

• Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
• Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
• Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
• Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
• Start as close to the end as possible.
• Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the audience may see what they are made of.
• Perform to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
• Give your audience as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Audience should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the bottom of the page.

—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

And so it goes.

Beloved Brit Bard Penned Protests

A.E. Houseman--young scholar and poet.

A.E. Houseman, born March 26, 1859 in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, England was one of the great classical scholars of his era and is among the most beloved British poets of the late 19th and early 20h Centuries.  His poetry was lauded for its lyricism and emotional intensity.

Acknowledged at an early age as a brilliant scholar and awarded school prizes for his precocious poetry, he won an open scholarship to St John’s College, Oxford, where he studied the classics.  To everyone’s amazement and his own humiliation  Houseman managed to fail his final examinations and be denied graduation.  That made the academic career he had anticipated and coveted impossible.

Instead he went to London where his college roommate and adored friend Moses Jackson got them both minor sinecures in the Patent Office.  The two lodged together again until 1885 when Houseman finally took his own rooms.

Despite these circumstances Houseman pursued the difficult path of an independent scholar and published landmark work on Horace, Propertius, Ovid, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles.  He became known as the leading practitioner of textual analysis.  When the sheer magnitude of his accomplishments became undeniable, University College London offered him a professorship in 1892.  He thereafter specialized solely in Latin poetry. 

In 1911 he finally made the academic big time when he was given the  Kennedy Professorship of Latin at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained for the rest of his life.

All the while he continued to write poetry, but considered it a completely secondary to his academic pursuits.  Also quite different.  Poetry, he believed should appeal to emotions rather than to the intellect.  Thus his verse provided an emotional outlet otherwise unavailable to a man described by a friend as “descended from a long line of maiden aunts.”

A Shropshire Lad, 1932 edition,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Shropshire Lad was published in 1896 but has become a British cultural treasure never out of print and rivaling Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese in perineal popularity.  He published a second collection Last Poems in 1922 which contained dramatic verse grappling with the huge losses of a generation of young men in the Great War.  After his death in 1936 his brother Laurence Housman issued a posthumous collection, More Poems  and a few other poems have been found and printed since.  Americans know him mostly as the author of the widely anthologized To and Athlete Dying Young and When I Was One and Twenty..

But within Houseman’s poems are clued to two public secrets—either of which could have landed in him in prison, destroyed his reputation, and made him a reviled outcast like Oscar Wilde.  Both of those secrets began at Oxford.  First, he utterly rejected Christianity and embraced an atheism that was contemptuous to God, clergy, and church.  Second was the realization of his homosexuality and his life-long unrequited love for his heterosexual roommate Moses Jackson who eventually decamped to India to avoid his declarations of love.

Moses Jackson, Houseman's unrequited love and roommate at Oxford and in London.

Houseman salted his work with subtle—and sometimes not-so-subtle protest verse rooted in these two realities.

This one seems prescient today….

Easter Hymn

If in that Syrian garden, ages slain,

You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain,

Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright

Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night

The hate you died to quench and could but fan,

Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.

But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by,

At the right hand of majesty on high

You sit, and sitting so remember yet

Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat,

Your cross and passion and the life you gave,

Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.

—A.E. Houseman

This protest to the bigotry of Christian presumption to make moral laws for other like him who reject orthodoxy and convention was inspired by the ugly fate of Oscar Wilde.

XII

The laws of God, the laws of man,

He may keep that will and can;

Not I: let God and man decree

Laws for themselves and not for me;

And if my ways are not as theirs

Let them mind their own affairs.

Their deeds I judge and much condemn,

Yet when did I make laws for them?

Please yourselves, say I, and they

Need only look the other way.

But no, they will not; they must still

Wrest their neighbour to their will,

And make me dance as they desire

With jail and gallows and hell-fire.

And how am I to face the odds

Of man's bedevilment and God’s?

I, a stranger and afraid

In a world I never made.

They will be master, right or wrong;

Though both are foolish, both are strong.

And since, my soul, we cannot fly

To Saturn nor to Mercury,

Keep we must, if keep we can,

These foreign laws of God and man.

—A.E. Houseman

And this stark fragment rose from the blood and mud of France.

from More Poems, XXXVI

Here dead lie we because we did not choose

To live and shame the land from which we sprung.

Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;

But young men think it is, and we were young.

—A.E. Houseman