Remembering Kurt Vonnegut

Remembering Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut 1922-2007 "All this happened, more or less," writes Vonnegut in the opening line of his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Vonnegut taught—more or less—a generation how to rewrite and reread American culture. How to get outside of it and laugh and cry and scream about it. He delivered biting satire through unpretentious, innovative narrative with irreverence, brilliance, and humor. To simutaneously bellylaugh and think deeply about American society, culture, and history was his particular form of genius. I met him for the first time in the mid-eighties. He was a literary rock star at the time. He and I sat down for a beer at the college pub. I wanted to ask him so many things, but wound up compressing them into one question: "Where's it all headed, Mr. Vonnegut?" He replied, "The world's on the brink of a nuclear war and the only thing preventing it from happening is an alcoholic president staring down his last beer in an otherwise empty refrigerator." Wittgenstein couldn't have answered my question more deeply, but I also lost some of my beer from laughing so hard. I raise a last glass to Mr. Vonnegut. —Jeffrey R. Di Leo Tralfamadorians, who understand time, know that people only appear to die, because they're still very much alive in all the other moments oftheir life. On April 11 , 2007, Kurt Vonnegut will always have died. But that signature sardonic humor, that compassionate pessimism, all those foma, wampeters, and granfaloons, remain alive in the pages ofhis books. In those books, Vonnegut's great heart will continue to beat, forever unstuck in time. —Charles B. Harris VONNEGUTS-A MEMOIRRHOID It was a bright spring afternoon in Manhattan, and I was headed uptown. George Plimpton had arranged a gathering at Elaine's that he gave some kind of sappy name like Convergence ofGenius, or the Genius Club. It was meant to create an artistic, literary think tank. Many eminences like Joseph Heller, Robert Rauschenberg, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Andy Warhol, Tom Wolfe, and etc. were among the geniuses. I had just published The Exagggerations of Peter Prince (1968) and doors were opening for me, though I understood little about how to use this advantage. I was invited to this gathering but was too shy and insecure to know how to maintain myself among the literary/artistic glitterati. My seat was at a table with only Kurt Vonnegut and his friend, the photographer, Jill Krementz, whom he later married. I had almost crossed paths with Vonnegut before. Hejust left his teaching gig at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, when I started mine. I did meet Edie, his daughter, whom I liked a lot. She was finishing school there, an art major. Edie visited me at my apartment on Morton Street once, with her boyfriend, little Geraldo Rivera. He hadn't yet started on his way to being the media brute he is today. I could see he had little interest in what I was doing. Edie told me she'd shown my novel to her father, and he didn't know what to make of it. 1 wasn't attracted much to the writing in Cat's Cradle (1963), the only Vonnegut I'd read. My general social ineptitude and discomfort among geniuses conspired with those hovering opinions to make a nearly silent table. Mr. Vonnegut tried very hard to tell jokes and be jovial. Some of them must have been about the silly situation with geniuses. I might have enjoyed this under different circumstances. Jill Krementz enjoyed him immensely. I couldn't listen. I couldn't laugh. I could only think foolishly that we worked on different writing planets, his obviously more popular and lucrative. I didn't have the grace to break through socially to a more congenial posture. When I visited Dresden, I thought frequently ofVonnegut, ofhis distress after writing Slaughterhouse Five (1969). I was on a research trip to see all the paintings ofAntonello da Messina for my novel, Antonello's Lion (2004). Five months earlier I had emerged from a quad bypass extravaganza, and didn't know what my life would...