Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) (6 page)

“Those children, close to middle age now and with children of their own, have not had to learn the hard way that the harbor and the marsh and the pond are for them as portable as their souls. Their childhood home in Barnstable is still in the family. They own it jointly now. Their mother left it to them, along with the royalties from her book, if any, in her simple will. One of them, a painter, lives there all year round with her husband and their son. The other heirs visit it frequently with their mates and children, and especially in the good old summertime.

“Their own children, whether by the harbor or the pond or the marsh, which has patches of quicksand, are themselves learning how to get safely home before the sun goes down. They are so numerous! They are monolingual and of mixed ancestry, and no doubt have several words in common which will never appear in any dictionary, since they themselves invented them.

“And here is almost the last word in
The Brothers Karamazov:
‘Hurrah!’ “

(That piece, too, was published by
Architectural Digest.
I like to write for it because my father and his father were architects. My appearing in a journal celebrating their profession may be a reproach, a way of saying to their ghosts that if only Father had encouraged me, I could have been and should have been the next in a long line of Indiana architects named Vonnegut. There is in fact a young architect named Scott Vonnegut working in Vermont now, the son of my big brother Bernard. But Vermont is nothing like Indiana, and Scott is not and cannot be what I might have been, which is a partner of my father.)

I never met my architect grandfather Bernard, but I have been told that he so disliked his native Indianapolis that he was relieved to die there when he was still fairly young. He would have preferred to live in New York City or Europe, where he had spent much of his youth and early manhood. My guess is that he would have been bemused by his barbarous Hoosier grandchildren, always yearning to be elsewhere—in beautiful Dresden on the Elbe, perhaps.

My father, as I have said elsewhere ad nauseam, said I could go to college only if I studied chemistry. How flattered I would have been if he had said instead that I, too, should become an architect.

(My goodness! What a lot of heavy psychological stevedoring I have done so early on! Already I have explained why I am secretly frightened of women and why I wear a shit-eating grin every time the subject of conversation is architecture.)

At a memorial service for the brilliant author Donald Barthelme (who was surely sorry to die, since he was going from strength to strength), I said off the cuff that we had had a secret bond, as though we were both descended from Estonians, say, or Frisian Islanders. (This would have been in November 1989.) Barthelme and I had known each other for many years but were not particularly close. Often when our eyes met, though, there flashed between us an acknowledgment of the secret bond and its complex implications.

This was it: We were the sons of architects.

This explained why we were aggressively unconventional storytellers, even though we knew that literary conventions were a form of politeness to readers, and on no grounds to be despised. (Literature, unlike any other art form, requires those who enjoy it to be performers. Reading is a performance, and anything a writer can do to make this difficult activity easier is of benefit to all concerned. Why write a symphony, so to speak, which can’t even be played by the New York Philharmonic?) As sons of architects, though, Barthelme and I tried hard to make every architect’s dream come true, which is a dwelling such as no one has ever seen before, but which proves to be eminently inhabitable.

Casualties have been heavy among American writers I have cared a lot about. (Actuaries for life insurance companies would be unsurprised by such an announcement by a man sixty-seven years of age.) There was a memorial service for Bernard Malamud, dead at seventy-one, four days after Barthelme’s. (I missed it. I was sick. If I had been there, I would have read aloud from his own work.) My Long Island summer neighbors James Jones and Nelson Algren and Truman Capote and Irwin Shaw have all been augered in. Barthelme was the youngest and the least used-up to be forced to leave. He was only fifty-eight. (The average age of a killed American in World War II was twenty-six. In Vietnam it was twenty. What a shame! What a shame!)

Nelson Algren lived to be seventy-two (as did my father). I said this about him in an introduction for a new edition of his
Never Come Morning
(Four Walls Eight Windows, 1987): “According to the diary of my wife Jill Krementz, the young British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie came to our house in Sagaponack, Long Island, for lunch on May 9, 1981. His excellent novel
Midnight’s Children
had just been published in the United States, and he told us that the most intelligent review had been written by Nelson Algren, a man he would like to meet. I replied that we knew Algren some, since Jill had photographed him several times and he and I had been teachers at the Writers’ Workshop of the University of Iowa back in 1965, when we were both dead broke and I was forty-three and he was fifty-six.

“I said, too, that Algren was one of the few writers I knew who was really funny in conversations. I offered as a sample what Algren had said at the Workshop after I introduced him to the Chilean novelist José Donoso: ‘I think it would be nice to come from a country that long and narrow.’

“Rushdie was really in luck, I went on, because Algren lived only a few miles to the north, in Sag Harbor, where John Steinbeck had spent the last of his days, and he was giving a cocktail party that very afternoon. I would call him and tell him we were bringing Rushdie along, and Jill would take pictures of the two of them together, both writers about people who were very poor. I suggested that the party might be the only one that Algren had given for himself in his entire life, since, no matter how famous he became, he remained a poor man living among the poor, and usually alone. He was living alone in Sag Harbor. He had had a new wife in Iowa City, but that marriage lived about as long as a soap bubble. His enthusiasm for writing, reading, and gambling left little time for the duties of a married man.

“I said that Algren was bitter about how little he had been paid over the years for such important work, and especially for the movie rights to what may be his masterpiece,
The Man with the Golden Arm,
which made a huge amount of money as a Frank Sinatra film. Not a scrap of the profits had come to Algren, and I heard him say one time, ‘I am the penny whistle of American literature.’

“When we got up from lunch, I went to the phone and dialed Algren’s number. A man answered and said, ‘Sag Harbor Police Department.’

“ ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Wrong number.’

“ ‘Who were you calling?’ he said.

“ ‘Nelson Algren,’ I said.

“ ‘This is his house,’ he said, ‘but Mr. Algren is dead.’ A heart attack that morning had killed Algren.

“He is buried in Sag Harbor—without a widow or descendants, hundreds and hundreds of miles from Chicago, Illinois, which had given him to the world and with whose underbelly he had been so long identified. Like James Joyce, he had become an exile from his homeland after writing that his neighbors were perhaps not as noble and intelligent and kindly as they liked to think they were.

“Only a few weeks before his death, he had been elected by his supposed peers, myself among them, to membership in the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters—a certification of respectability withheld from many wonderful writers, incidentally, including James Jones and Irwin Shaw. This was surely not the first significant honor ever accorded him. When he was at the peak of his powers and fame in the middle of this century, he regularly won prizes for short stories and was the first recipient of a National Book Award for Fiction, and so on. And only a few years before his death the American Academy and Institute had given him its Medal for Literature, without, however, making him a member. Among the few persons to win this medal were the likes of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.

“His response to the medal had been impudent. He was still living in Chicago, and I myself talked to him on the telephone, begging him to come to New York City to get it at a big ceremony, with all expenses paid. His final statement on the subject to me was this: ‘I’m sorry, but I have to speak at a ladies’ garden club that day.’

“At the cocktail party whose prospect may have killed him, I had hoped to ask him if membership in the American Academy and Institute had pleased him more than the medal. Other friends of his have since told me that the membership had moved him tremendously and had probably given him the nerve to throw a party. As to how the seeming insult of a medal without a membership had ever taken shape: This was nothing but a clumsy clerical accident caused by the awarders of prizes and memberships, writers as lazy and absentminded and idiosyncratic in such matters as Algren himself.

“God knows
how
it happened. But all’s well that ends well, as the poet said.

“Another thing I heard from others, but never from Algren himself, was how much he hoped to be remembered after he was gone. It was always women who spoke so warmly of this. If it turned out that he had never mentioned the possibility of his own immortality to any man, that would seem in character. When I saw him with men, he behaved as though he wanted nothing more from life than a night at the fights, a day at the track, or a table-stakes poker game. This was a pose, of course, and perceived as such by one and all. It was also perceived back in Iowa City that he was a steady and heavy loser at gambling, and that his writing was not going well. He had already produced so
much,
most of it in the mood of the Great Depression, which had become ancient history. He appeared to want to modernize himself somehow. What was my evidence? There he was, a master storyteller, blasted beyond all reason with admiration for and envy of a moderately innovative crime story then appearing in serial form in
The New Yorker,
Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood.
For a while in Iowa, he could talk of little else.

“While he was only thirteen years my senior, so close to my own age that we were enlisted men in Europe in the same world war, he was a pioneering ancestor of mine in the compressed history of American literature. He broke new ground by depicting persons said to be dehumanized by poverty and ignorance and injustice as being
genuinely
dehumanized, and dehumanized quite
permanently.
Contrast, as if you will, the poor people in Algren’s tales with those in the works of social reformers such as Charles Dickens and George Bernard Shaw, and particularly with those in Shaw’s
Pygmalion
, with their very promising wit and resourcefulness and courage. Reporting on what he saw of dehumanized Americans with his own eyes day after day, year after year, Algren said in effect, ‘Hey—an awful lot of these people your hearts are bleeding for are really mean and stupid. That’s just a fact. Did you know that?’

“And why didn’t he soften his stories, as most writers would have, with characters with a little wisdom and power who did all they could to help the dehumanized? His penchant for truth again shoved him in the direction of unpopularity. Altruists in his experience were about as common as unicorns, and especially in Chicago, which he once described to me as ‘the only major city in the country where you can easily buy your way out of a murder rap.’

“So—was there anything he expected to accomplish with so much dismaying truthfulness? He gives the answer himself, I think, in his preface to this book. As I understand him, he would be satisfied were we to agree with him that persons unlucky and poor and not very bright are to be respected for surviving, although they often have no choice but to do so in ways unattractive and blameworthy to those who are a lot better off.

“It seems to me now that Algren’s pessimism about so much of earthly life was Christian. Like Christ, as we know Him from the Bible, he was enchanted by the hopeless, could not take his eyes off them, and could see little good news for them in the future, given what they had become and what Caesar was like and so on, unless beyond death there awaited something more humane.”

My introduction stops here. I knew very little about Algren’s sex life (or about my own, for that matter). I subsequently learned from Deirdre Bair’s
Simone de Beauvoir
(Summit, 1990) that he helped Miss de Beauvoir achieve her first orgasm. (The only person I ever helped achieve a first orgasm was good old me.) In Iowa City, Algren would refer to her as “Madame Yak Yak” because she had given their relationship so much publicity.

I wrote an introduction to a collection of short stories by Budd Schulberg, too, and a long salutation for a Festschrift presented to Erskine Caldwell on his eightieth birthday. (He still had three years to go.) I have misplaced copies of both, which is probably just as well. In both, I remember, I exclaimed over the foreshortening of American literary history, in which seeming generations of writers may be separated by less than twenty years. When I set out to be a professional writer of fiction, Irwin Shaw and Nelson Algren and William Saroyan and John Cheever and Erskine Caldwell and Budd Schulberg and James T. Farrell seemed as ancestral as Mark Twain or Nathaniel Hawthorne. But I would come to be friends with all of them. And why not? With the exception of Caldwell, most were about the age of my big brother, Bernard. (I never met John Steinbeck, but I know his widow, Elaine, and she is about my late sister’s age.)

It is the spectacular violence modern times wreak on culture which accounts for this foreshortening, surely. We are defined by booms and busts, and by wars radically different in mood and purpose and technology. My wife, Jill, covered the Vietnam War as a photographer. To the young people she now does books about, that war might as well have been a thousand years ago.

Yes, and to me as a schoolboy during the Great Depression, which defined Steinbeck and Saroyan and Algren, World War I, which defined Ernest Hemingway, might also have been a thousand years ago, but I knew his widow, Mary, too, and he was born after (but died sooner than) my Uncle Alex, who went to Harvard because his big brother was at MIT.