Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage

  “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.

  “Jokes work this way: The jokester frightens the listener just a little bit, by mentioning something challenging, such as sex or physical danger, or suggesting that the listener is having his or her intelligence tested. Step two: The jokester makes clear that no intelligent response is required of the listener. This leaves the listener stuck with useless fight-or-flee chemicals in his or her bloodstream, which must be gotten rid of somehow, unless the listener wants to slug the jokester or do jumping jacks.

  “What the listener most likely will do is expel those chemicals through the lungs with quick expansions and contractions of the chest cavity, accompanied by grotesque facial expressions and barking sounds.

  “Intelligence test: ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ Sex: ‘A traveling salesman’s car broke down on a country road on a stormy night. He knocked on a farmer’s door, and the farmer said, “You can spend the night, but you’ll have to sleep with my daughter.”‘ Physical danger: ‘A man fell off a cliff. Halfway down he grabbed a sapling. So there he was, hanging by his hands, with certain death a thousand feet below him.’

  “But jokesters are all through when they find themselves talking about challenges so real and immediate and appalling to their listeners that no amount of laughter can make the listeners feel safe and perfectly well again. I found myself doing that on a speaking tour of campuses in the spring of 1989, and canceled all future engagements. That wasn’t at all what I enjoyed doing to audiences, and yet there I was doing it. I wondered out loud onstage, for instance, what I and my brother and sister and our parents might have done if we had been German citizens when Hitler came to power. Any reply would be moot, but almost certainly depressing. And then I said that the whole world faced a problem far worse than the rise of another Hitler, which was our destruction of the planet as a life-supporting apparatus of delicate and beautiful complexity.

  “I said that one day fairly soon we would all go belly-up like guppies in a neglected fishbowl. I suggested an epitaph for the whole planet, which was: ‘We could have saved it, but we were too darn cheap and lazy.’

  “It really was time to quit.

  “My Lord, I think I even said—in fact I know I said—that humanity itself had become an unstoppable glacier made of hot meat, which ate up everything in sight and then made love, and then doubled in size again. I topped that off with a stage aside to the effect that the Pope in Rome was of no help when it came to slowing down the meat.

  “Enough!

  “It seemed possible to me, though, that I might still be amusing on paper, hooking people with little barbless hooks and then letting them off again. Writing a book, after all, is a slow and deliberate activity, like making flowered wallpaper for a ballroom by hand. Since I knew how jokes worked, hooking and releasing, I could still make them, even though I no longer felt like making them. I remembered that my father got sick of being an architect, when he was about ten years younger than I am, actually, but he went on doing architecture.

  “As a good friend pointed out to me one time, my ideas have everything but originality. That was my fate. So I came up with the wholly unoriginal idea of writing a Don Quixote set in modern times. There might be a certain amount of freshness to my tale, I hoped, if I gave an affectionate razzing to what had long been my dream of an ideal citizen. Although Mr. Keough doesn’t say so, I think all American humorists, when saying how flawed American citizens really are, would not be interested in doing that if they did not have clear images in their heads of what American citizens ought to be. Dreams of ideal citizens are as essential to our humorists, in my opinion, as they were to Karl Marx and Thomas Jefferson.

  “But it didn’t come out very funny. There wasn’t any way to let readers off the hook, off the Montauk Umbrella of modern times.

  “A Montauk Umbrella is a fishing rig favored by sports fishermen putting out to sea in motor yachts from the easternmost town on the South Fork of Long Island. It is like the spread ribs of an umbrella stripped of its cloth and handle. At the tip of each rib is a steel wire leader. At the end of each leader is a counterfeit squid made of off-white surgical tubing. Sticking out through a slit in each tube is a hook with a barb so big and sharp that any bluefish or bass that strikes at it or any other lure in the fast-moving galaxy of seeming tasty tidbits can never get off again.

  “There is no contemporary equivalent to the unhooking device Mark Twain was able to use with success before World War I and World War II and all the rest of it, at the end of possibly the blackest of all well-known American comic novels, Huckleberry Finn. This, of course, was the unhooking: Huck, resourceful and tough and adorable, and with most of his life still ahead of him, says he is going to ‘light out for the territory.’

  “Rocky Flats, Colorado, maybe? Or how about Hanford, Washington, or the shores of Prince William Sound in Alaska? Or how about lighting out for Twain’s own intended destination when he himself lit out from Hannibal—the virgin wilderness of the Amazon?” (The end.)

  Not only would I have written that if I hadn’t died, but I would have rejoiced in the birth of three more grandchildren. I already had three. My mother never saw any of her one dozen grandchildren, although my sister Alice was pregnant with her first one, Jim, when Alice and I found Mother dead. (No prospect of good news, obviously, could rescue Mother. She felt as awful as anybody does nowadays in Mozambique, where there is no end to murdering but almost no suicide.)

  But to heck with the premise that all I am experiencing now is what might have been if I hadn’t cashed in my chips in the Emergency Room of St. Vincent’s Hospital six years ago. I am alive, still smoking and wearing my father’s mournful mustache. (My brother wears it, too.) Cogito ergo sum.

  I have actually written an essay in praise of something, of the reading of books, for a 1990 Christmas catalogue sent to the best customers of the Kroch’s & Brentano’s bookstores in Chicago. It goes like this:

  “I was willing to believe back in the 1960s that deep meditation as practiced in India might be a way to achieve happiness and wisdom which had not been previously available to people of European and African stock. The Beatles also believed this for a while. I doubt that the late, great (I mean it) Abbie Hoffman ever believed it. He wasn’t about to give up his frenzied sense of humor, the sanest thing in this country during the Vietnam War, in exchange for personal, inner peace.

  “I would have been glad to make that swap. I delivered myself to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, as had the Beatles, to learn how to do Transcendental Meditation, or TM. I did not know the Beatles, and never heard their ultimate opinion of TM. I seem to recall that they broke up with the Maharishi over matters having nothing to do with Eastern-style semi-trances. My own impression was that TM was a nice little nap, but that not much happened, whether for good or ill. It was like scuba diving in lukewarm bouillon. A pink silk scarf might drift slowly by. That was big news down there.

  “You awoke unchanged from a pleasant state between sleep and wakefulness.

  “But I got more from my TM experiment than naps. When I sat upright in a straight chair, as the Maharishi had told me, and ignored niggling distractions and repeated my mantra (‘aye-eem’) externally and then internally, I realized that I had done the same sort of thing thousands of times before.

  “I had done it while reading books!

  “Since I was eight or so, I had been internalizing the written words of persons who had seen and felt thi
ngs new to me instead of ‘aye-eem, aye-eem, aye-eem.’ The world dropped away when I did it. When I read an absorbing book, my pulse and respiration rate slowed down perceptibly, just as though I were doing TM.

  “I was already a veteran meditator. When I awoke from my Western-style meditation I was often a wiser human being. And I tell this story because so many people nowadays regard printed pages as nothing more than obsolescent technology, first developed by the Chinese two thousand years ago. Books came into being, surely, as practical schemes for transmitting or storing information, no more romantic in Gutenberg’s time than a computer in ours. It so happens, though—a wholly unforeseen accident—that the feel and appearance of a book when combined with a literate person in a straight chair can create a spiritual condition of priceless depth and meaning.

  “This form of meditation, an accident, as I say, may be the greatest treasure at the core of our civilization. So we should never give up books, surrendering only crass and earthly matters to the printout and the cathode tube.” (The end.)

  (Xanthippe, with a career and income all her own, continues to empty chamber pots on my head from time to time. If it weren’t for her I think I probably would have died of too much sleep long ago. I would have napped myself to death. At the very least I would have stopped seeing movies and plays, and reading books and magazines, and going outside, things like that. She is what George Bernard Shaw called “a life force woman.”)

  I mentioned Abbie Hoffman in that piece about books as mantras for meditation. I realize that most people nowadays don’t know who he was or what he did. He was a clowning genius, having come into the world that way, like Lenny Bruce and Jack Benny and Ed Wynn and Stan Laurel and W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers and Red Skelton and Fred Allen and Woody Allen and so on. He was a member of my children’s generation. He is high on my list of saints, of exceptionally courageous, unarmed, unsponsored, unpaid souls who have tried to slow down even a little bit state crimes against those Jesus Christ said should inherit the Earth someday.

  He did this with truth, anger, and ridicule.

  He spent the last years of his short and frantically unfunny life attempting to protect Nature in the Delaware River Valley. He left his family without a cent. He had a criminal record, including flight from prosecution for a drug deal. But his most memorable crime was his violation of a law which has never been written down in so many words: “Monster fuck-ups engineered by your own government are not to be treated with disrespect until the damage done is absolutely unforgivable, incomprehensible, and beyond repair.”

  So much for “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for redress of grievances.” (Or as a corrupt or stupid Head of State might put it, “If TV news is for me, who can be against me?”)

  I doubt that Abbie Hoffman’s clowning shortened the Vietnam War by as much as a microsecond; nor did protests by anyone but the enemy. At a meeting of writers (P.E.N.) in Stockholm, when that war still had about a year to go, I said that almost all American artists of every sort were opposed to the war, forming a sort of laser beam of moral outrage. The power of this beam, I reported, turned out to be equivalent to that of a banana cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder four feet high.

  My wife Jill (“Xanthippe”) spent a whole year in Vietnam with the war going on. She photographed the Vietnamese people rather than the war stuff long before I met her. Some of those humane and beautiful pictures were combined with a text by Dean Brelis (then a CBS correspondent) in a book called The Face of South Vietnam. On her fiftieth birthday she received this letter from Brelis:

  “Many happy returns, Jill.

  “On this happy occasion, thoughts go back to nearly twenty-five years ago when you were in Vietnam. You did not get stuck on yourself. Not that anyone could blame a beautiful woman walking around like a queen, what with tens of thousands of men around. But you didn’t. You hid behind those cameras of yours and you saw what so many did not see. You carried no gun—and more than one journalist did. You found the pain and the loss of the Vietnamese people, especially the children. You went deep into the nature of the cruel unhappiness brought to Vietnam. It often brought you to tears but you never gave up seeking out the truth. Behind every image you captured in Vietnam were your heart and your mind. And always your photographs asked, Why this? That question alone in your photographs was a good way toward finding the truth.

  “It was a sad, grim land when you were there, Jill. The cities were burning, life had gone out of the villages, the paddy fields lay fallow, and I remember you cursing the human waste, the kids lying in the gutters. You shook your fist with rage, and then you went out with nuns and worked with them, picking your way through the garbage, to bring just a moment’s warmth and hope where there was none. And very near, the Viet Cong watched and left you and the nuns alone. They knew you were easing the pain. Recently when I was in Ho Chi Minh City, which you knew as Saigon, one of those Viet Cong showed me a list of names of those round-eyes who were not to be harmed. Your name was on the list.

  “Your actions and behavior in Vietnam, like your photographs, wanted a better world. I hope you feel a bit closer to that goal today as you begin to run to one hundred. As an old Vietnamese saying goes, the fun begins at fifty.”

  He signed the letter, “Your old pal, Dean Brelis.”

  So Xanthippe (Mrs. Vonnegut) is yet another saint.

  Dr. Robert Maslansky, who treats every sort of addict at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, and in the jails, too, is a saint. (When we take walks together many homeless people greet him by name.) Tris Coffin and his wife Margaret, who get out a four-page weekly called The Washington Spectator, are saints. (I told Tris and Margaret a month ago that I considered them saints. They said they were too old to protest very vehemently.)

  I can be more prompt than the Roman Catholic Church in announcing who is a saint, since I do not require courtroom-style proofs that so-and-so was on at least three occasions capable of magic with the help of God. It is enough for me if a person (like a good anthropologist) easily finds all races and classes equally respectable and interesting, and doesn’t keep score with money.

  Morris Dees, the southern lawyer who takes the likes of the Ku Klux Klan to court (thus putting his life on the line) on his own initiative, is a saint. (The Klan says he is a Jew, which he isn’t. But what difference would that make?) I told him one time that he must be nuts, and he agreed. Ah me. Sure, and former Peace Corps people (now middle-aged) whom I met in Mozambique, who were working for the relief agency CARE there, are saints. They not only lived in friendly and shrewd harmony with the human beings they found there but taught them shipping and warehousing and accountancy (hard-edge business practices), so that starving to death might still be kept to a minimum after CARE went elsewhere (possibly to Leningrad).

  Meanwhile, of course, back home (from the viewpoint of the CARE people), the forces of Beelzebub were waging racist and classist political campaigns, and taking over and liquidating businesses and natural resources, and looting pension funds, insurance companies, and savings banks, and putting a greater percentage of our citizens in jails and prisons than even the Soviet Union or the Republic of South Africa. (Some beacon of liberty we are to the rest of the world!)

  XX

  I said to the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., one time, “If you had to say that the world was divided into only two kinds of people, not counting the sexes, what would they be?” It took him maybe ten seconds before replying, “Roundheads and Cavaliers.” (I thought that was a swell answer. I am a Roundhead. Xanthippe is a Cavalier.) I said to the graphic artist Saul Steinberg one time, “There are some novelists I can hardly talk to. It is as though we were in two very unlike professions, like podiatry and deep-sea diving, say. What do you think is going on?” He replied, “It is very simple. There are two types of artists, neither superior to the other. One responds to life itself. The other responds to the history of his or her art
so far.” (Jill and I are both artists of the first sort, which could be why we got married. We are both barbarians, too ignorant to respond to the histories of our arts so far.)

  Yes, and I, having just finished reading William Styron’s short and elliptical account of his recent attack of melancholia, Darkness Visible (a suicide attempt may or may not have been involved), am now prepared to say that suicidal persons can be divided into two sorts. Styron’s sort blames the wiring and chemistry of his brain, which could easily fit into a salad bowl. My sort blames the Universe. (Why mess around?) I don’t offer this insight as yet another joke (“Why is cream more expensive than milk?”). It is my serious belief that those of us who become humorists (suicidal or not) feel free (as most people do not) to speak of life itself as a dirty joke, even though life is all there is or ever can be.

  We do, doodily do, doodily do, doodily do

  What we must, muddily must, muddily must, muddily must:

  Muddily do, muddily must, muddily do, muddily must,

  Until we bust, bodily bust, bodily bust, bodily bust.

  (The summer of 1990 is just about finished, and so is this book. Christmas will be at our throats before we know it. My big brother Bernard says that the Christmas season makes him feel as though somebody were beating him in the face with a bladder.)

  Shakespeare’s Hamlet, when he sorts through the possible consequences of his doing himself in with a bare bodkin (sleeping pills and automobile exhaust and .357 Magnums were then unavailable), does not ponder the grief and confusion he might cause many who would still be alive. He was, after all, not only a close friend of Horatio and beloved by darling Ophelia, but the future King of Denmark. (The more recent abdication of Edward VIII from the Throne of England for the love of a gimlet-eyed divorcée from Baltimore comes to mind. My fellow novelist Sidney Zion said in mixed company at supper recently, anent Edward VIII, that blowjobs accounted for the history of the world so far. Some people are so frank nowadays!)