Kurt Vonnegut's America

Introduction - Vonnegut Released

INTRODUCTION Vonnegut Released Kurt Vonnegut died late in the evening of April 11, 2007, at the age of eightyfour years and five months. Five months precisely—his birth date was November 11, 1922, Armistice Day, as it was called then, when there was only one world war to remember. It was a hallowed occasion throughout the 1920s and 1930s and into the 1940s, until a new world war would steal attention. At eleven minutes after the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of each year, schoolchildren paused from their lessons for a moment of silence. At work and at home, adults would do the same. As a veteran himself, a pacifist but nobly civic in his intent, Vonnegut recalled those ceremonies as subsequent decades effaced them, the event renamed Veterans Day and for a time having its celebration shifted to the closest Monday. It has since been restored to its proper date, which pleased him. Aged veterans of the First World War had told Vonnegut that in 1918, when at this precise minute the gunfire and explosions had suddenly stopped, the silence sounded like the voice of God. Throughout his own career as a writer, he’d tried to give voice to the sentiments behind such memories of an ideal America. And now the living presence of that voice had been silenced. His last years, the first of this new century, had been difficult for him. After Timequake (1997), his fourteenth novel, itself a struggle to produce, he complained of being tired, of wishing to do no more work. After all, he’d labored on for two decades after conventional retirement age, trying to make things better for an age in which everything seemed to be going wrong. His novel in progress, the story of an old-fashioned comedian, never took satisfactory shape; what survives is its title, If God Were Alive Today. Henceforth people worrying about subsequent atrocities and abominations might use the same sad phrase about Kurt Vonnegut. He’d tried his hardest, but with a nightmare war in Iraq, unchecked global warming, and a sad deterioration in cultural civility, the tasked seemed almost too much. Introduction 2 As for himself, Kurt Vonnegut feared that he’d be forgotten, or at best regarded as a relic of the 1960s. Ironically his death proved how wrong he was. On the morning of April 12, 2007, The Today Show’s Ann Curry announced his passing as a major news item. That evening on NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams treated it with the respect for the passing of a Melville or a Faulkner. The CBS Evening News gave the story of Kurt’s death its last seven minutes, a time slot reserved since Walter Cronkite’s days for the subject of deepest reflection . Of course, these newspeople had known the man, hosting him on their interview shows whenever he’d have a new novel to promote or be speaking out on an important current issue. They too were of the generation that had read him when they were young, part of the 1960s–70s generation that had propelled Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) to best-sellerdom and enshrined paperbacks of his earlier novels as classics. But this was not all. That evening, Jon Stewart gave over part of The Daily Show to a clip of Kurt Vonnegut’s appearance from late in 2005, and he ended the program on a rare serious note, saying that with this man’s death, “The world today is a colder, emptier place.” Sober stuff, especially for a younger generation the author feared was lost, or at least lost to his message. But the message was alive. In the even more outrageous Colbert Report, scheduled to ramp up Jon Stewart’s irreverence to a higher, gratingly ridiculous level, host Stephen Colbert restricted his customary biting segue to just five words: “Welcome to the Monkey House!” That’s the title of Vonnegut’s 1968 story collection, the satirical tone of which actually paved the way for today’s sharper edge of sociopolitical comedy, be it Stewart’s, Colbert’s, or David Letterman’s. Kurt Vonnegut had done the Letterman show in 2005 as well. Indeed he’d become famous all over again with a newly enthralled young audience, thanks to his recently written essays being collected and published as A Man without a Country (2005). Given quiet publication by a small press, it astounded everyone by rocketing to the New York Times best-seller list...