Kurt Vonnegut is gone. And with him goes a swath of wisdom and uncompromised morality that literature probably will not see again for a generation or two. He was, I’m convinced, the reincarnation of Mark Twain: down to those puffy hangdog pockets beneath their eyes, the perpetual wreath of smoke, the curling hair, and the deep-set wrinkles of men whose eyes have looked too long at eternity, and seen eternity look back. They talked alike. They talked real witty.
“Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.”

Are those the words of a cruel man? Or the words of a brutally honest man? Because he’s the same man who famously wrote “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 got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that Iknow of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

That, folks, was a statement that required courage for a man who witnessed first-hand the bombing of Dresden, whose own faith in the goodness of human nature was thin as a whistle at the best of times, but dogged him all his days.

He knew the cruelty of authority — he saw a man executed among the corpse mines of World War II for the stealing of a teapot. He knew the brutality of the military: he survived the bombing of Dresden because, as a prisoner of war, he was assigned that day to work in the sub-basement below a slaughterhouse, safe from the carpet bombing and flames but forever scarred by the twin horrors of who the Nazis were and what the Allies did to a civilian target. And he knew the venality of corporate America from the days he spent sputtering in despair as he wrote puff pieces for General Electric:

You can’t fight progress. The best you can do is ignore it, until it finally takes your livelihood and self-respect away. General Electric itself was made to feel like a buggy whip factory for a time, as BellLabs and others cornered patents on transistors and their uses, while GE was still shunting electrons this way and that with vacuum tubes.

Too big to fail, though, as I was not, GE recovered sufficiently to lay off thousands and poison the Hudson River with PCBs.

So it goes.

He didn’t believe that good was triumphant, but he believed it important. And the humour was born of the fact that the nihilist in him couldn’t say exactly why.
My first Vonnegut novel was “Sirens of Titan” recommended by my younger sister, who spotted the Kilgore Trout ruse a mile away. From there to Breakfast of Champions, Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five, God Bless you Mr. Rosewater all the way to Galapagos and Deadeye Dick, I don’t think I missed a single one of his novels. I read his son’s reminicense of schizophrenia. I poured through his collection of essays, “Foma, Wampeters, and Granfaloons.” His biographical essay on Twain. The commencement speech he didn’t actually write, “Wear Sunscreen,” mistakenly attributed to him and which he bemusedly reported his wife describing as the best thing he’d never written.

Vonnegut was taught in my high school by the closest thing to a radical that small-town Seneca Falls had ever known. (If you need a mental pictuire, Seneca Falls claims to be the inspiration for Bedford Falls of “It’s a Wonderful Life” as Frank Capra once visited and left.)

Both the teacher and the books were banned in later years by the fundamentalist numbskulls that believed students had to be protected from moral literature containing drawings of cartoon assholes and obscenities milder than anything we saw every day on the bathroomwalls. So it goes.

Vonnegut’s mother committed suicide on Mother’s Day just before he was shipped off to World War II. He attempted to off himself in 1984. But by the end of his days, he was able to joke about it, to put, as he so often did, a pair of humorous brackets around the most unfunny topics imaginable.

“When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon.”
“My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy late in life. But he was proud of not committing suicide. And I’ll do the same,so as not to set a bad example for my children.”

He’s made good on the promise. He once said he hoped that when he was dead people would say “Kurt Vonnegut is in heaven. That’s my favorite joke.”
My favourite joke from him was this: “Of course we’re all tired. We spend the entire day reasoning in a universe that was not meant to be reasonable.”
Thanks for not killing yourself, Kurt. It would have been unkind.

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