Kurt Vonnegut - Armageddon in Retrospect

W riting was a spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in. He wanted to get things right but never thought that his writing was going to have much effect on the course of things. His models were Jonah, Lincoln, Melville, and Twain.

He rewrote and rewrote and rewrote, muttering whatever he had just written over and over, tilting his head back and forth, gesturing with his hands, changing the pitch and rhythm of the words. Then he would pause, thoughtfully rip the barely written-on sheet of typing paper from the typewriter, crumple it up, throw it away, and start over again. It seemed like an odd way for a grown-up to spend his time, but I was just a child who didnt know much.

He had an extra gear language-wise. At eighty-plus he was still doing the New York Times crossword puzzles quickly and in ink and never asking for help. As soon as I told him the verb came last, he could translate my Latin homework at sight, without having ever taken Latin. His novels, speeches, short stories, and even dust-jacket comments are very carefully crafted. Anyone who thinks that Kurts jokes or essays came easily or were written off the cuff hasnt tried to write.

One of his favorite jokes was about a guy who was smuggling wheelbarrows. Every day for years and years a customs agent carefully searched through this guys wheelbarrow.

Finally, when he was about to retire, the customs agent asked the guy, Weve become friends. Ive searched your wheelbarrow every day for many years. What is it youre smuggling?

My friend, I am smuggling wheelbarrows.

Kurt would often laugh so hard at his own jokes that he would end up bent in half, looking up with his head in his lap. If it started a coughing fit, it could get a little scary.

When I complained about being paid fifty dollars for an article that had taken me a week to write, he said I should take into account what it would have cost me to take out a two-page ad announcing that I could write.

Anyone who wrote or tried to write was special to Kurt. And he wanted to help. More than once I heard him talking slowly and carefully to drunks who managed to get him on the phone about how to make a story or a joke, the wheelbarrow, work.

Who was that?

I dont know.

When Kurt wrote, he was setting out on a quest. He knew, because it had happened before, that if he could keep the feet moving, he might stumble over something good and work it and work it and make it his own. But as many times as it happened, Kurt didnt have much self-confidence. He worried that every good idea he got might be his last and that any apparent success he had had would dry up and blow away.

He worried that he had skinny legs and wasnt a good tennis player.

He had a hard time letting himself be happy, but couldnt quite hide the glee he got from writing well.

The unhappiest times in his life were those months and sometimes a whole year when he couldnt write, when he was blocked. Hed try just about anything to get unblocked, but he was very nervous and suspicious about psychiatry. In my early-to-mid-twenties he let it slip that he was afraid that therapy might make him normal and well adjusted, and that would be the end of his writing. I tried to reassure him that psychiatrists werent nearly that good.

If you cant write clearly, you probably dont think nearly as well as you think you do, he told me. If you ever think something he wrote was sloppy, you might be right, but just to be sure, read it again.

A little kid coming of age in Indiana in the Depression decides he wants to be a writer, a famous writer, and thats what ends up happening. What are the odds? He threw a lot of spaghetti up against the wall and developed a keen sense of what was going to stick.

When I was sixteen, he couldnt get a job teaching English at Cape Cod Community College. My mother claimed that she went into bookstores and ordered his books under a false name so the books would at least be in the stores and maybe someone would buy them. Five years later he published Slaughterhouse-Five and had a million-dollar multi-book contract. It took some getting used to. Now, for most people looking back, Kurts being a successful, even famous, writer is an of course kind of thing. For me it looks like something that very easily might have not happened.

He often said he had to be a writer because he wasnt good at anything else. He was not good at being an employee. Back in the mid-1950s, he was employed by Sports Illustrated , briefly. He reported to work, was asked to write a short piece on a racehorse that had jumped over a fence and tried to run away. Kurt stared at the blank piece of paper all morning and then typed, The horse jumped over the fucking fence, and walked out, self-employed again.