Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) (8 page)

Tennessee Williams (1911–1983)
was
a member, thank goodness. (After all, he was our most excellent playwright.) Before Jill and I lived together, she brought him around to my apartment one night. I was so excited to meet a person who wrote that troublingly and amusingly and sympathetically about Americans who didn’t live in New York City that I bloodied my shins on my marble coffee table, trying to get to him so I could shake his hand. (He and T. S. Eliot grew up in St. Louis, but Williams admitted it. He didn’t all of a sudden start talking like the Archbishop of Canterbury.)

The only thing I ever wrote about him, though, was a note I hand-delivered to the actress Maria Tucci, who lives across the street. She was in rehearsal for Williams’s
The Night of the Iguana
and had told me that the cast members weren’t as comfortable with the play as they would like to be. My note said that an iguana was disgusting to look at but was in fact good to eat. The message I got from the play, I went on, was that it was better to love something other people might think was ugly than not to love at all. Eat an iguana, and you could wind up as well nourished as anyone.

(Trivia: Aldous Huxley died on the same day as John F. Kennedy. Louis-Ferdinand Céline died two days after Ernest Hemingway.)

A requiem is a mass for the dead, customarily sung in Latin. To those who know little Latin, which is my case, its words are nonsensically beautiful. Who cares what they mean? A mass which many composers have set to music was promulgated by Pope St. Pius V in 1570, by decree of the Council of Trent. The year of its promulgation is much, much closer to our own time than to that of Jesus Christ.

It begins and ends unobjectionably enough, “
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine; et lux perpetua luceat eis”
which means in English, “Rest eternal grant them, O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon them.” (A credulous and literal-minded person might conclude from this that Huxley and Kennedy and Céline and Hemingway and my sister and my first wife Jane and all the rest of the dead are now trying to get some sleep with the lights on.)

On February 12, 1985, my second wife Jill and I attended the world premiere of a new musical setting for this mass composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber (born in 1948, at which time I was a public-relations man for General Electric). Lloyd Webber by then had already composed the music for
Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita,
and
Cats.
(T. S. Eliot, whose poems about cats inspired that last-named musical, owed an unacknowledged debt, it has always seemed to me, to
Archie and Mehitabel
by Don Marquis, whose wife was the former Mrs. Walter Vonnegut.)

The premiere of Lloyd Webber’s requiem took place in St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, an outspokenly Anglican institution, although the specifically Roman Catholic words (lyrics) of the mass drew much of their anger from the fact of England’s having denied the spiritual supremacy of the Papacy. If I am any judge, the black-tie audience was about half Protestant and half Jewish. (Some of the musicians and TV cameramen and policemen outside were probably Catholics.)

Nobody seemed to know or care what the Latin words meant or where they came from. We were all there for the music. (Or maybe because that was the chic place to be that night.) After all, Placido Domingo (one of the Catholic musicians) was going to do a lot of the singing, along with the combined boys’ choirs of St. Thomas Church and Winchester Cathedral (all the way from England), backed up by members of the New York Philharmonic. Off they went,
“Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine”
et cetera. I was beguiled by the cat face and silvery voice of the soloist of the Winchester Boys’ Choir, and looked into my program to learn his name. God love him, he was Paul Miles-Kingston.

But then something else in the program caught my eye, which was a translation into English of the words of the mass, the last things anybody there gave a darn about. They were terrible! (And lest somebody think I am mocking Holy Scripture, I point out again that the mass was as frankly manmade and as nearly contemporary, taking the long view of history, as Hemingway’s
Green Hills of Africa.)

Domingo and Paul Miles-Kingston and Lloyd Webber’s soprano wife Sarah Brightman and all the rest of them onstage, in front of the organ pipes, were behaving as though God were a wonderful person who had prepared all sorts of goodies which we could enjoy after we were dead. They were in fact, if only they had known what they were saying, promising a Paradise indistinguishable from the Spanish Inquisition.

“Quantus tremor est futurus, quando judex est venturus, cuncta stricte discussurus!”
Whoopee! What fun! How nice. Except that what that means is, “What trembling there will be when the Judge shall come to examine everything in strict justice!”

“Quid sum miser tunc dicturus? Quem patronum rogaturus, cum vix justus sit securus?”
From the performers’ expressions and body language you would have concluded that the weak wouldn’t have to be afraid in Heaven, that they would find kindness and forgiveness on all sides. You would have been badly mistaken. The performers were singing, “What shall I, a wretch, say at that time? What advocate shall I entreat to plead for me when scarcely the righteous shall be safe from damnation?”

Ain’t that nice? (“Get a lawyer,” says the mass.)

Nearly the entire mass was that sadistic and masochistic. (You can find how it goes, from start to finish, in the Appendix. Decide for yourself.) So after Jill and I got home, I stayed up half the night writing a better one. (That is not a vain statement. Anybody could write a better one and nobody could write a worse one.) I got rid of the judges and the tortures and the lions’ mouths, and having to sleep with the lights on. (I have tossed that into the Appendix, too, so again, decide for yourself.)

I did not think it was very good poetry, and so I was eager (as were the lyricists at the Council of Trent, no doubt) to get it put into Latin as quickly as possible. As I told my wife, I wanted to find somebody who could put it through the hocus-pocus laundromat. I was willing to pay good money.

I tried Fordham first, but was turned down there on the grounds of heresy. But then I found a specialist in Church Latin at New York University, John F. Collins, who agreed to be my hired gun, come hell or high water. Like Placido Domingo, he is a Catholic. “Rest eternal grant them, O Cosmos, and let not light disturb their sleep,” my mass began. After John Collins put it through the hocus-pocus laundromat, it came out like this: “
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Munde, neve lux somnum perturbet eorum “

I was called for jury duty soon thereafter. There I met a composer named Edgar Grana, a Juilliard graduate who had been a student at the University of Iowa when I was a teacher there back in 1965. (One of my former students there, John Casey, won the 1989 National Book Award for Fiction, which is more than I ever did.) Grana spent the next year setting Collins’s Latin to music at his own expense. We shopped it around several churches here in New York without any luck. (I would say the music was sort of a postmodern, multiple-crossover, semiclassical bebop lemon marmalade.)

But then Barbara Wagner, the director of the best Unitarian Universalist choir in the country (lots of ringers), which is in Buffalo, said she wanted to do it. She started rehearsals right after Christmas, and by golly if we didn’t have our own world premiere on March 13, 1988, in her church. That was a Sunday night. I had lectured for money the night before in the same space, in order to pay for four synthesizer virtuosi. They were the orchestra.

I was so excited that my hair stood on end during the ten seconds of perfect silence before the first note was played.

When it was all over, though, I hadn’t heard a single word distinctly. That is how overwhelming the music was. (Mark Twain said of Italian opera that he hadn’t heard anything like it since the orphanage burned down.) So that was that. The composer and the performers had a stunning success, with a standing ovation and flowers and all the rest of it. I alone was disappointed, a crank who cared about the language.

That is pretty much the end of the story about my requiem, premiered three years after Andrew Lloyd Webber’s, except that my wife Jill subsequently ran into Lloyd Webber in London. She said to him, “My husband also wrote a requiem.”

He replied, as though he had started a fad, “Oh, I know. Now everybody is writing requiems.”

He missed the point I had tried to make by writing new language rather than new music for a mass for the dead: In the beginning was the word.

(Speaking of composers: My sister Alice asked our father when she was about ten years old if he and Mother used to dance to Beethoven.)

And speaking of revered old documents which cry out for a rewrite nowadays, how about the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, which reads:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” What we have there is what should have been at least three separate amendments, and maybe as many as five, hooked together willy-nilly in one big Dr. Seuss animal of a nonstop sentence. It is as though a starving person, rescued at last, blurted out all the things he or she had dreamed of eating while staying barely alive on bread and water.

When James Madison put together the first ten Amendments, the “Bill of Rights,” in 1778, there was so much blurting by male property owners ravenous for liberty that he had 210 proposed limitations on the powers of the Government to choose from. (In my opinion, the thing most well-fed people want above all else from their Government is, figuratively speaking, the right to shoot craps with loaded dice. They wouldn’t get that until President Ronald Reagan.)

I said to a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union that Madison’s First Amendment wasn’t as well written as it might have been.

“Maybe he didn’t expect us to take him so seriously,” he said.

I think there is a chance of that, although the lawyer was being wryly jocular. So far as I know, Madison did not laugh or otherwise demur when Thomas Jefferson (who owned slaves) called the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia an assembly of demi-Gods. People two-thirds of the way to the top of Mount Olympus might not take as seriously as some of us do the possibility of actually honoring among the squabbling mortals the airy, semi-divine promises of the Bill of Rights.

The ACLU lawyer said that I, as a writer, should admire Madison for making his Amendments as unambiguous as a light switch, which can be only “on” or “off,” by the strong use of absolute negatives: “Congress shall make
no
law … shall
not
be infringed … No soldier shall … shall
not
be violated, and
no
warrants shall issue….
No
person shall be held to answer
… no
fact tried by a jury … shall
not
be required … shall
not
be construed….” There are no words anywhere in his Amendments meaning “under ideal conditions” or “whenever possible” or “at the convenience of the Government.” From moment to moment in our now long history (the oldest continuous government save for Switzerland’s), the several specific provisions of the Bill of Rights can be, thanks to James Madison, only “off” or “on.”

To me the First Amendment sounds more like a dream than a statute. The right to say or publish absolutely anything makes me feel as insubstantial as a character in somebody else’s dream when I defend it, as I often do. It is such a
tragic
freedom since there is no limit to the vileness some people are proud to express in public if allowed to do so with impunity. So again and again in debates with representatives of the Moral Majority and the like, and some of the angrier Women Against Pornography, I find myself charged with being an encourager of violence against women and kiddie porn.

When I was new at such discussions I insouciantly asked a fundamentalist Christian opponent (“Oh, come on now, Reverend”) if he knew of anyone who had been ruined by a book. (Mark Twain claimed to have been ruined by salacious parts of the Bible.)

The Reverend was glad I asked. He said that a man out in Oregon had read a pornographic book and then raped a teenage maiden on her way home from the grocery store, and then mutilated her with a broken Coke bottle. (I am sure it really happened.) We were there to discuss the efforts of some parents to get certain books eliminated from school libraries and curricula on the grounds that they were offensive or morally harmful—quite mild and honorable books in any case. But my dumb question gave the Reverend the opportunity to link the books in question to the most hideous sexual crimes.

The books he and his supporters wanted out of the schools, one of mine among them, were not pornographic, although he would have liked our audience to think so. (There
is
the word “motherfucker” one time in my
Slaughterhouse-Five,
as in “Get out of the road, you dumb motherfucker.” Ever since that word was published, way back in 1969, children have been attempting to have intercourse with their mothers. When it will stop no one knows.) The fault of
Slaughterhouse-Five,
James Dickey’s
Deliverance,
J. D. Salinger’s
Catcher in the Rye,
several books by Judy Blume, and so on, as far as the Reverend was concerned, was that neither their authors nor their characters exemplified his notion of ideal Christian behavior and attitudes.

The Reverend (as was his right) was making an undisguised attack not only on Americans’ demi-God—given right to consider every sort of idea (including his), but also on the Constitution’s insistence that the Government (including the public schools) not declare one religion superior to any other and behave accordingly with the force of law.