Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) (21 page)

Ed Wynn’s joke about the woman whose house was on fire (and who had put water on it, to no avail) is the funniest
clean
joke in the world. The funniest dirty joke in the world was told to me by my translator in Moscow, Rita Rait, who died in her late eighties a few years ago. (She was a language genius, a Robert Burns scholar, the translator of me and J. D. Salinger and Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck from English, of Franz Kafka from German, and on and on. Jill and I spent some time with her in Paris, where she was doing research in documents all in French.) During World War II she was an interpreter for American and British freighter crews bringing food and ammunition to Murmansk in northwest Russia (on the icy Barents Sea) while under constant attack by German planes and submarines. She could replicate several British accents flawlessly and told us this story in cockney.

The bare bones of the world’s funniest dirty story (without Rita to do the cockney) are as follows: An eccentric British millionaire died and left what was to be an enormous prize for the wittiest original limerick. He acknowledged in his will that the wittiest limericks tended to be the bawdiest as well, so that ribaldry (even of the coarsest sort) was not to disqualify any entry for the prize. So a blue-ribbon (but not bluenose) jury was formed and limericks arrived by the ton. People (being British) could talk of nothing else. The jurors at last announced that the contest had been won by a housewife in East Anglia. Their decision was not only unanimous but hilarious. The winning entry was surely the wittiest limerick in the world, but unfortunately so obscene that it could never be made public in any form.

The country of course went mad with curiosity, as would anybody upon hearing the premise of this perfect tale. The judges were adamant in both their delight with the winning limerick and their belief that the civilized world could never weather its indecency. So everybody went after the author, a suddenly rich and famous housewife, the seeming soul of propriety. (When telling this story, which she had heard from a British sailor, Rita became that housewife, simultaneously priggish and smug about the bottomless reserve of filthy thoughts which had enabled her to win the contest.) She agreed with the judges that her prize entry was so offensive, although brilliantly witty, that there was no alternative to their and her carrying the five lines to their graves. Winston Churchill himself, however, since the war effort had come to a halt because of her, prevailed on her to go on the BBC and recite her limerick, using the empty sound “dah” for the syllable of any word unfit for the ears of a family audience.

So she did it.

This was the bowdlerized limerick which went out over the air:

Rita (who was a Russian native but had a Scottish ancestor, hence her un-Russian last name) told us that story, and then she chirped with all possible cuteness, “English is not my language, so I can say whatever I please in it, no matter how dirty. What freedom! What fun!”

Translators should be paid the same royalties as authors. I have said so to several of my foreign publishers, offering to take less for myself in order that the translator might get more. I might just as well have told them that the world was flat and I could prove it. In November 1983, I spoke as follows to a gathering of translators at Columbia University:

“The first nation to publish me in a language other than English was West Germany, which brought out my first novel,
Player Piano
(Scribner’s, 1952), under the title
Das Höllische System
in 1964. The translator, Wulf H. Bergner, was so familiar with American English that he felt no need to ask me what I had meant by this or that. I do not mock him by saying so. This was truly the case. I am told that his is a fine translation. I take other people’s word for this, although I have some rudimentary familiarity with German. For reasons I am not prepared to explain, I can’t stand to read myself even in English. To give a name to this primitive neurosis: let us call it perpetual embarrassment.

“I had a lot more fun with the book’s next translator, Roberta Rambelli of Genoa, Italy. She sent me the first letter I ever got from a translator. I still remember two of her delightful questions: ‘What is a rumble seat? What is a Ferris wheel?’ I was pleased to tell her what few Americans know: The Ferris wheel was invented as a device to elevate artillery spotters above the treetops for the Grand Army of the Republic during our Civil War.

“It would be seven years before I would write another novel. This was not because of spiritual difficulties. This was because of financial difficulties. It costs a lot of money for a writer to support a family while he or she writes a book. For seven years I did not have the money.

“The second book was
The Sirens of Titan
(Dell, 1959), and the French were the first foreigners to pick it up. Their translator, Monique Theis, had no questions to put to me. I am told that many of her misunderstandings of American English are ludicrous. But then my old friend Roberta Rambelli wrote to say that she had again been hired to explain me to Italians, and she had about fifty-three questions for me—what was this, what was that? I was in love with her by then, and I dare to suggest that she was in love with me.

“Soon after that, my son Mark, who would himself become not only a writer but a pediatrician, went to Europe with money he had earned as a shellfisherman on Cape Cod. I urged him to visit my friend Roberta in Genoa, which he did. I myself had never met Roberta or seen Italy. He presented himself at her dwelling there, and she was clearly thrilled to see him. But they had to converse on paper, as though both of them were deaf and dumb. She could not understand spoken English, she could only read and write that language—my situation in French, by the way. Is this an ironical story? I say this: Not in the least. It is beautiful.

“Both books were pirated by the Soviet Union, which back then would have nothing to do with the capitalist plot known as the International Copyright Convention. I heard nothing from my translators there, which was nothing new, since, as I have said, I was given the same silent treatment by my translators in Germany, and France, and then in Denmark and Holland, as well.

“I am sixty-one years old now, and there have been a lot of books and translators since then. I used to make fun of my French translators, since people told me they did preposterous jobs, and I never heard from them, and people never seemed to like me much when I went to France. But the French translator of my last two books, Robert Pépin, also a novelist, speaks American English better than I do, and has become a close friend of mine. Not only that, but as fluent in American English as he is, his letters to me ask more good questions, even, than did those of dear Roberta Rambelli, who is in Heaven now.

“And while I continue to express annoyance that the Soviet Union pays me nothing when publishing works of mine which were written before it joined the Copyright Convention and pays me next to nothing for what I have written since, I have become fonder of my translator over there, Rita Rait, than I am of anybody else outside my own family. We first met in Paris, by arrangement, and then I went to visit her twice in Moscow and once in Leningrad. Even if she weren’t my translator, I think we would be crazy about each other as human beings.

“There are some obscenities in my books, since I make Americans, and particularly soldiers, speak as they really speak. The modern Russian equivalents of these words cannot be set in type in the USSR. Before translating me, Rita Rait had confronted the same problem with J. D. Salinger’s
Catcher in the Rye
. What did she do? It seems that there is an archaic peasant vocabulary for discussing barnyard matters which is regarded as inoffensive folklore, although it deals directly with excrement and sexual intercourse and so on. She used those words rather than modern obscenities when translating Salinger and me. Thus were we fairly represented.

“I could ramble on and on. The trouble I caused translators by naming a book
Jailbird
is worth an essay by itself. It turns out that countries older than my own have no word for persons who find themselves locked up again and again, since the penitentiary system, an invention of American Quakers, is so new. The closest European languages could come was with their words ‘gallows bird.’ This failed to describe the habitual criminai I had written about, since a person cannot be hanged again and again.

“Finally, every translator has had to totally rename the book.

“Und so weiter.
If I have taken this opportunity to recall translators who have been particularly friendly, it is not to argue that sociability is an essential part of the process. All I require of a translator is that he or she be a more gifted writer than I am, and in at least two languages, one of them mine.

“And now I must get back to answering my mail, and especially a chatty letter from my Japanese translator, Mr. Shigeo Tobita, who wants to know, among other things, referring to something I have written, ‘What is “Four Roses”? An expensive bottle of wine?’

“No. Four Roses is not quite the same thing as wine.” (End of speech.)

Five months after saying that to the translators (not that there was any connection), I was carted off to the Emergency Room of St. Vincent’s Hospital in the middle of the night to be pumped out. I had tried to kill myself. It wasn’t a cry for help. It wasn’t a nervous breakdown. I wanted “The Big Sleep” (Raymond Chandler). I wanted to “Slam the Big Door” (John D. MacDonald). No more jokes and no more coffee and no more cigarettes:

I wanted
out
of here.

(Near the end of the Appendix you can find an essay I wrote long afterward about possible connections between creativity and mental illness.)

The great fiction writer Ray Bradbury (who can’t drive an automobile) made up a story called “The Kilimanjaro Device,” which was about a person who could somehow undo ignominious suicides (or maybe ignominious anythings). He had a kind of magic Jeep, and he was driving it along a wilderness road near Ketchum, Idaho. He saw this terminally depressed, grizzled old bearded man, potbellied, trudging all alone. This was Ernest Hemingway, who would soon blow off his head with a shotgun. Bradbury’s person in the magic Jeep offered him a lift to a better death than the one he was headed for. If Hemingway got in, he would die in an airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro (19,340 feet) in Tanzania, Africa. So Hemingway got in and died glamorously.

(The French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote about a doctor friend who was obsessed with expiring with dignity and who died in convulsions under a grand piano.)

It is possible in Ray Bradbury country that my own suicide was as successful as Hemingway’s, that I am dead, that all I am seeing now is what might have been, if only I hadn’t ended it all. This could be a lesson. As the man said when they strapped him into the electric chair in Cook County Jail years ago, “This will certainly teach me a lesson.”

If all this is only what might have been (and I am moldering in my grave like my childhood idol, the bank robber John Dillinger), then I have to exclaim, “My goodness, I would have written at least four more books!” and so on. If only I had lived, I would have heard my daughter Lily singing a song she learned at summer camp:

If I hadn’t been too pissed off to live another minute (absolutely apeshit), I would have published this swell essay in
The New York Times
in the spring of 1990:

“For whatever reason, American humorists or satirists or whatever you want to call them, those who choose to laugh rather than weep about demoralizing information, become intolerably unfunny pessimists if they live past a certain age. If Lloyd’s of London offered policies promising to compensate comical writers for loss of sense of humor, its actuaries could count on such a loss occurring, on average, at age sixty-three for men, and for women at twenty-nine, say.

“My generalization is happily or unhappily confirmed in a book called
Punchlines
(Paragon House, 1990) by William Keough of the English Department of Fitchburg State College in Massachusetts. The subtitle is
The Violence of American Humor
. Mr. Keough, by means of essays on Mark Twain, Ring Lardner, Ambrose Bierce, myself, comedians in the movies (both silents and talkies), and radio and TV and nightclub comics right up to the present, persuades me that the most memorable jokes by Americans are responses to the economic and physical violence of this society. ‘How often does it seem that the American humorist, having set out daringly and lightly as an amused observer of the American spectacle of violence and corruption, ends up mouthing sardonic fables in a bed of gloom,’ he writes.

“So guess what: My latest novel,
Hocus Pocus,
to be published in September, is a sardonic fable in a bed of gloom.

“Inevitable.

“ ‘Violence, the inspiration of much American humor, outlives it,’ says Mr. Keough. ‘When the jokes grow cold, the guns—unfortunately—are still hot.’

“Mark Twain finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died. He hadn’t lived long enough to hear about nuclear weapons. He was dead as a doornail before he could even hear about World War I.