Write to Life

Reviewing a biography of Kurt Vonnegut has prompted more thinking about the difficulties if not impossibility of writing to the highest standards while being a decent human being who is fair to others.  Vonnegut's biography is one of several literary exposes recently (of Joseph Heller, J.D. Salinger, and Hemingway again) that emphasize how bad they were at life.  Hemingway as a phony macho, a self-promoting liar, etc.  Heller as a bad father, and Vonnegut as a sad and bitter man, who betrayed friends, abused one wife (and was abused by another), and scared children.  He, like the others, was not like his public image.  That's the big revelation supposedly.

(I should say immediately that there is plenty of counterevidence in this biography of Vonnegut's kindnesses, loyalty, etc.  But on the whole it seems to emphasize the flaws.)

Vonnegut brings this topic to me in a peculiarly personal way.  I was in precisely the generation of young readers in the late 60s that made him famous, and my admiration was as a writer as well as a reader.  Vonnegut had taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop just a few years before I entered there.  My fiction teacher in my senior year of college had been one of his students.  So the evocation of that place and that time in this biography has particular resonance.

Those years turned out to be the tail end of an era--roughly Hemingway to Vonnegut and Heller--in which the novelist was an important and influential figure.  This was also a time that people drank a lot, especially writers.  And they smoked a lot, especially writers.  It was during the sexual revolution so-called, and before the consciousness-raising--and that's what it was--prompted by the womens movement.  But even within the context where drinking, smoking and philandering was common--and even more expected among writers-- there was behavior that stood out as troubling, awful, even scary.  So even before Iowa (at a few writing conferences, or on campus during writers visits) I had seen professional writers behaving badly.  I saw writers who were abusive drinkers, sexual predators, liars and cowards. What I didn't see I heard, because writers could also be vicious gossips.

So even as I saw some of these writers as role models, I was troubled.  The drinking and smoking was just exhausting and debilitating,  though it was a long time before I gave it up, as it could occasionally lead to some memorably wild evenings, as when I found myself playing blues piano with novelist Vance Bourjaily on slide trombone. But patterns of deceit bothered me, and cruelty repulsed me, and frightened me.  I didn't want to become that.  Then there were the questions of irresponsibility.

Some of this behavior made me lose respect for these writers, and question the validity of their work.  I think that's inevitable, even at a distance-- when you read that writers were cruel, it casts a  pall over the writing.  But as a reader, it's ultimately the words on the page that make the difference in our lives.  As a writer, a beginning writer, it raises questions of identity, and what kind of a life is possible.

For even though character flaws are involved, the necessities of writing itself come into play.  I also learned from writing how hard it is to maintain a balance. The world being created on the page is a very different world from the one populated by real people, in which actions have actual consequences that can't be corrected in the next draft. I know a writer now, with several very well-respected novels, who said he gave up writing novels because it was too hard on his family and his relationships. The sensitivity required of a writer writing leaves a painful vulnerability to reality, while the discipline and standards of writing so intensely can feed a monstrous impatience with the world, for its imperfections and shoddy standards, as well as its conspiracy designed to destroy your concentration.

Despite my call-me-irresponsible bravado, that question of responsibility, and doubts that I could be a writer and also responsible, was a major reason I never married.  Mostly it was my inability to be financially responsible while still pursuing a vocation as a writer, but that alone was so hard that it became overwhelming to consider adding house and children.  (Vonnegut knew this--he used to say that one reason there are so many gay men in the arts is that it takes so long to establish a career, marriage and family is unaffordable.)  But there was also the doubt that I could be emotionally and personally responsible to relationships and to my writing.  So this is in part why I fell into that statistically insignificant class of hetero men who never married.

I saw what the costs to a family might be.  In being reminded of those days, I realized that I was in that particular career track, which through a combination of my own actions and the actions of women who saw all this more clearly than I did, I left.

In the end I suppose the joke was on me, for I didn't have much success, especially success on the page, especially in my most cherished forms of fiction and plays.  I'll never know what my refusal to sacrifice others to my writing struggles contributed to that, but less than a fierce and selfish dedication to that writing above all may well have contributed.  I expect it still does.

It's not that I've been the height of responsibility, far from it. And as a factor in my failures this may be a self-serving delusion. But when I look back on what the writer's life was supposed to be and sometimes was, I'm glad I dodged that bullet.  Like a lot of my accomplishments, this one is of what I didn't do, of pain not caused.

 To some extent that was a road deliberately not taken.  And to perhaps a greater extent, it remains so.  I suppose if I still felt my gift was so great I'd make different choices.  And I don't presume to judge those whose accomplishments are greater.  Even at a distance, I found the Vonnegut biography shockingly reductive.  What's in it (if its proportionately true) may be another side of the story, but it isn't the whole story.  He may have been different in life than he was in interviews and books, but the interviews and books are a big part of the story.  Maybe no writer can live up to the ideals in the work, in the wit and inspiration of the words.  But we can share those ideals and aspirations.

This is an early demonstration of a graph of storytelling that Vonnegut refined--but not a lot--over the years.  It's about four minutes long.

Update: In the comments, Robert Z notes that November 11 is Kurt Vonnegut's birthday, and that a Vonnegut Museum is opening this week. Here's the hotlink.

Second Update: Here's the New York Times story on the opening.

Why I thought of Kurt Vonnegut when I was in the U. library looking for something else entirely I don't know. But I did, and I found two fairly obscure books which contain interviews with him. One is a very slim volume called Like Shaking Hands With God (Seven Stories Press), which is actually two dialogues with another writer, Lee Stringer, who wrote about his experience as a homeless man in New York and earlier in his life in his book, Grand Central Winter. Vonnegut championed his work, and the two did a public conversation in 1998 and continued it privately, though recorded and again with a questioner named Ross.

A couple of statements struck me, which I'd like to record here. The first was from Stringer actually, who was talking about our fast-paced and results-oriented culture. "I guess in that kind of environment it is difficult for what we call literature to exist because a book is not all that practical a thing in the short term. It's probably infinitely practical in the long term."

Several times the discussion turned to Stringer's efforts to write his second book. Stringer was working through knowing too much about the book business that he didn't know the first time, and it was getting in the way. In the private conversation, Vonnegut insisted that he didn't really have to write another book. "All a writer has to do is write one book, and you did that."

This might seem odd from a writer who wrote so much, but Vonnegut was sincere (backed by statements he made on other occasions, which I'll get to eventually in this--let's dub it now--Vonnegut on writing thread.) And as someone who has been trying to get that second book together (numerous second books of course) for way too long, it's a comfort. In a sense, I know what he means. It's quite a trick to pull off, and the book exists as the evidence. So I'm not sure I'll stop feeling bad that I haven't published more, but I'll take some solace in Vonnegut's statement. Or maybe I could even call it a blessing.

R. I. P.: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

He survived Pall Malls for 84 years, and it was a fall resulting in brain injury that led to his death. Kurt Vonnegut has been part of my life and close to my soul since the 1960s, when my fiction writing teacher who'd been his student at the Iowa Workshop got us reading his early novels, just a few months before the world discovered him big time with Slaughterhouse Five. Of contemporary writers, I felt closest in ways I can't explain to two: Vonnegut and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

His New York Times obit is here.

Vonnegut was one of the voices we clung to in those bitter years of the late 60s. His voice was so distinctive that it was something that writers attached to rhythmic mimickry had to get loose of. No sooner had you broken the habit of writing like J.D. Salinger, Hemingway and Joseph Heller, along came Vonnegut. So it goes.

He was a countercultural voice who came by it honestly; he earned it. His use of science fiction motifs was part of it, especially for me. In later years he took on the appearance as well as the mantle of our 20th/21st century Mark Twain.

I've known so many people who knew him, and I've seen him on various screens and of course read him, so I feel I did know him, in that peculiar way in which he didn't know me from Adam. I encountered him in person at least three times I can recall. He spoke in Pittsburgh, where the U.S. Army had once sent him to study engineering. His speeches, especially at colleges, are legendary--even the ones he didn't actually deliver. They were full of wit and practical wisdom, and lots of provocation of thought and feeling, worth any 20 political or academic talks.

Before that, he passed through my mind as I was walking in Boston one afternoon, idly thinking I might run into him. Late that night, while sitting in an unprestiguous, noisy, overlit restaurant with members of a rock band I was supposed to be writing about (the drummer lamenting the absense of the groupies he had been promised), I glanced across the room and saw Kurt Vonnegut looking at us, and not real kindly. Such a coincidence is common in Vonnegut's fictional universe, where there are "leaks" between worlds and time is permeable. It actually happened to me twice within a short time; the other time I was in O'Hare airport thinking about Paul Simon, and a minute later there he was. It was weird enough to be a little scary, and so it's never happened again.

The last time I remember was in Manhattan. It was on the street and I saw him walking towards me, wearing just a comfortable indoor sweater on a cold coat-and-scarf day. I recognized him and smiled; he looked at me the way I was often looked at in New York--that ' are you somebody I should know?' look--and when he'd concluded I wasn't, he looked away. But I have that picture of him, walking the midtown streets as if from one room of his house to another.

I was talking about a short story of his just the other day. Someone, I forget who, has recently written a satire in which the suggested solution to social security and medical care shortfalls because of aging baby boomers is to kill them--humanely, I assume. Apparently this idea is striking a chord, which doesn't surprise me. Vonnegut wrote about it in the 1950s, in a story called "Welcome to the Monkey House" (also the title of his first story collection.) Because of overpopulation, old people were encouraged to visit their government sponsored Ethical Suicide Parlors. It was a wicked idea, but what makes writers cherish Vonnegut is his imagination, his detail. These Parlors were housed next to Howard Johnsons, their purple roof next to the orange roof of HoJos. They all had Hostesses, stewardess-like young women who humor the old folks but efficiently hurry them along to take their injection and die peacefully in the Barcolounger. You absolutely know that when these places are established, this is what they will be like.

I've only quoted him here once, from a 2006 speech in which he said: “The only difference between Bush and Hitler is that Hitler was elected.” That's Vonnegut in a nutshell: vivid, combative, funny, outrageous, passionate, pushing at the edge but with wit and meaning.

Vonnegut often wrote about Kilgore Trout, his alter ego--a version of who he might well have been if it hadn't been for the sudden success of Slaughterhouse Five, a poor and obscure science fiction writer. In Vonnegut's last novel, Timequake, Kilgore Trout dies. He was 84.