Kurt Vonnegut Remembered
Zinn, Howard
Kurt Vonnegut Remembered It Seems to Me Howard Zinn Kurt Vonnegut, who died recently at eighty-four, liked to quote Eugene Debs, when Debs addressed the judge who sentenced him to ten years in...
...and British planes turned the city into an inferno, causing the deaths of perhaps 100,000 people...
...Heller's novel Catch-22 has the wild humor and dead seriousness of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, both bittercomic commentaries on war, uninhibited by all the romanticization of the "Good War...
...But he could get past the bitterness, too...
...entrance into the First World War: "Your honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on Earth...
...And you couldn't get into heaven unless you had handled well the business opportunities which God had offered you...
...Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead...
...When the newspapers were full of alarms about Iran possibly developing a nuclear bomb, Kurt sent me a copy of a very short letter he wrote to The New York Times: "I know of only one nation that has dropped nuclear bombs on innocent people...
...His last one, Timequake, is part novel, part memoir...
...In Timequake, he tells of a woman who wrote to him, saying she was pregnant and wondered if it was a mistake to bring a baby into a world so bad...
...When he phoned, there was always something specific on his mind, an event in the news, or, one time, the death of his friend Joseph Heller, whom Kurt affectionately called "a holy clown...
...I knew God would never come near such a place...
...Hapgood is jailed, then brought before a judge who asks him: "Mr...
...while there is a soul in prison, I am not free...
...In Jailbird, he has one of his characters, a concentration camp survivor named Ruth, reply to a question: Had she ever sought the consolations of religion in the concentration camp...
...The Times did not print the letter...
...He answered this way: "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, although most people don't care about them...
...After that, we would talk on the phone from time to time...
...He was an agnostic for whom socialism was godliness and Christ was a radical organizer, and the Bible, whatever dubious passages it might have, also saw all God's creatures as equal...
...Hapgood, why would a man from such a distinguished family and with such a fine education choose to live as you do...
...Y the words of Eugene Debs and Mark Twain...
...The word granfaloon is now known to millions of his readers...
...He had a rich telephone voice: "Hello, this is Kurt Vonnegut...
...He would send graphics that he would dash off with his pithy, outrageous comments, and they hang in my study...
...The sun was an angry little pinhead...
...And to those who had failed to make the most of these opportunities, the experts would deny admittance, saying: And there you were, asleep at the switch again.' Albert Einstein, it turns out, has missed all sorts of opportunities to invest in stocks and make millions, and he cannot get into Heaven...
...A karass, on the other hand, is a group of people who may not know one another but who are connected in a very human way, because "a karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries...
...It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful...
...Kurt was class-conscious to the bone...
...So did the Nazis...
...Kurt Vonnegut Remembered It Seems to Me Howard Zinn Kurt Vonnegut, who died recently at eighty-four, liked to quote Eugene Debs, when Debs addressed the judge who sentenced him to ten years in prison for protesting U.S...
...What could be a more important achievement...
...In his book Jailbird, he tells of Powers Hapgood (a real person), who graduated from Harvard but becomes a labor organizer and leads a strike against an RCA plant in New Jersey...
...Kurt Vonnegut was often asked why he bothered writing...
...Sometime in the '60s, Kurt Von-negut's fourth novel was published and became a huge success...
...Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals...
...Howard Zinn is the author, most recently, of "A Power Governments Cannot Suppress...
...He has been a wonderful correspondent to both of us...
...No," she said...
...He is told, 'There you were, asleep at the switch again.' Kurt Vonnegut's novels became more personal, more pointedly political...
...In this struggle of life you will find more love and you will be loved...
...Kurt Vonnegut had a profound hatred of war...
...He was gloomy about the ongoing destruction of the planet, yet had faith in the capacity of ordinary human beings to resist stupidity...
...Kurt Vonnegut and I became friends about ten years ago, when he phoned me, out of the blue...
...Perhaps you, dear reader, are or can become a saint for her sweet child to meet...
...In the same book, Kurt Vonnegut quotes Nicola Sacco's last letter to his thirteen-year-old son, Dante, just days before Sacco's execution: "Help the weak ones that cry for me, help the persecuted and the victim, because they are your better friends...
...In Jailbird, Vonnegut is amused at the pretensions of capitalism, the assumption that cleverness in business will get you into heaven...
...This was Cat's Cradle, which by 1980 had gone through fifty-one printings...
...while there is a criminal element, I am of it...
...We had things in common: the Second World War, bombing, books, the future of the world...
...I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me was the saints I met, people behaving unselfishly and capably...
...In the book, his alter ego is an innocent young American named Billy Pilgrim, who emerges from the meat locker the day after the bombing and sees a sky black with smoke...
...We were lucky enough to meet him when in early 2003 he read in New York at the 92nd St...
...We had lunch one day in Manhattan a few blocks from the midtown brownstone where he lived with his wife, the photographer Jill Krementz...
...Roslyn wrote to a friend after learning of Kurt's death: "The loss of Kurt Vonnegut is profound in our lives...
...I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it...
...He could not abide the slaughter in Vietnam, or the hypocrisy of the United States government holding on to thousands of nuclear weapons while creating hysteria about any other nation that might develop one...
...foreign policy...
...It means an artificial assemblage of people, "a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done" He gives as examples: "the Communist Party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows-and any nation, anytime, anywhere...
...They turned up in the most unexpected places...
...He spoke at rallies against the Vietnam War, against the first Gulf War in 1991, and was agonized by the present war in Iraq...
...That's a damn good piece you wrote on Machiavelli and U.S...
...Because of the Sermon on the Mount, sir...
...He was terrific...
...Hiroshima and Nagasaki were never far from his mind...
...Its flights of fancy, in which were buried delicious nuggets of wisdom, caught the imagination of a whole generation...
...He asks: "Should the nation's wealth be redistributed...
...Hapgood replies: "Why...
...He has a story within his story, written by a favorite character of his, Kilgore Trout, called "Asleep at the Switch...
...They understood God better than anyone...
...The stones were hot...
...He didn't do e-mail but loved to talk on the telephone and to write letters...
...It's about a huge reception center outside the Pearly Gates-filled with computers and staffed by people who have been certified public accountants or investment counselors or business managers back on Earth...
...they are the comrades that fight and fall as your father and Bartolo [Vanzetti] fought and fell yesterday for the conquest of the joy of freedom for all the poor workers...
...For Christ's sake, let's help more of our frightened people get through this thing, whatever it is...
...We talked about the need, beyond this war, to abolish all wars, whatever the reason...
...So it goes...
...Kurt expressed his agnosticism through wry humor, laced with bitterness...
...Sometime after that my wife, Roslyn, with whom he had become telephone friends, received from him a large framed print of a 1924 Kathe Kollwitz painting showing a young person with a hand raised to the sky, crying out "Nie wieder Krieg" ("No More War...
...Hence his admiration for Debs, the Socialist...
...Faithless custodians of capital [are] making themselves multimillionaires and multibillionaires, while playing beanbag with money better spent on creating meaningful jobs, and training people to fill them, and raising our young and retiring our old in surroundings of respect and safety...
...One Christmas Eve, Ruth offers a toast: "Here's to God Almighty, the laziest man in town...
...He did not hesitate to create a new vocabulary...
...You are not alone.'" Millions and millions of people, all over the world, reading him, do not feel alone...
...Slaughterhouse-Five came out of Vonnegut's experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden, trapped-fortu-nately-in a meat locker underground as U.S...
Vol. 71 • June 2007 • No. 6
