INTERVIEWER: Where is Knox Burger now?
VONNEGUT: He’s a literary agent. He represents my son Mark, in fact.
INTERVIEWER: And Littauer and Wilkinson?
VONNEGUT: Littauer died ten years ago or so. He was a colonel in the Lafayette Escadrille, by the way, at the age of twenty-three—and the first pilot to strafe a trench. He was my mentor. Max Wilkinson has retired to Florida. It always embarrassed him to be an agent. If some stranger asked him what he did for a living, he always said he was a cotton planter.
INTERVIEWER: Do you have a new mentor now?
VONNEGUT: No. I guess I’m too old to find one. Whatever I write now is set in type without comment by my publisher, who is younger than I am, by editors, by anyone. I don’t have my sister to write for anymore. Suddenly, there are all these unfilled jobs in my life.
INTERVIEWER: Do you feel as though you’re up there without a net under you?
VONNEGUT: And without a balancing pole, either. It gives me the heebie-jeebies sometimes.
INTERVIEWER: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
VONNEGUT: You know the panic bars they have on the main doors of schools and theaters? If you get slammed into the door, the door will fly open?
INTERVIEWER: Yes.
VONNEGUT: The brand name on most of them is “Vonduprin.” The “Von” is for Vonnegut. A relative of mine was caught in the Iroquois Theater Fire in Chicago a long time ago, and he invented the panic bar along with two other guys. “Prin” was Prinz. I forget who “Du” was.
INTERVIEWER: O.K.
VONNEGUT: And I want to say, too, that humorists are very commonly the youngest children in their families. When I was the littlest kid at our supper table, there was only one way I could get anybody’s attention, and that was to be funny. I had to specialize. I used to listen to radio comedians very intently, so I could learn how to make jokes. And that’s what my books are, now that I’m a grownup—mosaics of jokes.
INTERVIEWER: Do you have any favorite jokes?
VONNEGUT: My sister and I used to argue about what the funniest joke in the world was—next to a guy storming into a coat closet, of course. When the two of us worked together, incidentally, we could be almost as funny as Laurel and Hardy. That’s basically what Slapstick was about.
INTERVIEWER: Did you finally agree on the world’s champion joke?
VONNEGUT: We finally settled on one. It’s sort of hard to tell it just flat-footed like this.
INTERVIEWER: Do it anyway.
VONNEGUT: Well—you won’t laugh. Nobody ever laughs. But one is an old ’Two Black Crows” joke. The “Two Black Crows” were white guys in blackface—named Moran and Mack. They made phonograph records of their routines, two supposedly black guys talking lazily to each other. Anyway, one of them says, “Last night I dreamed I was eating flannel cakes.” The other one says, “Is that so?” And the first one says, “And when I woke up, the blanket was gone.”
INTERVIEWER: Um.
VONNEGUT: I told you you wouldn’t laugh.
INTERVIEWER: YOU seem to prefer Laurel and Hardy over Chaplin. Is that so?
VONNEGUT: I’m crazy about Chaplin, but there’s too much distance between him and his audience. He is too obviously a genius. In his own way, he’s as brilliant as Picasso, and this is intimidating to me.
INTERVIEWER: Will you ever write another short story?
VONNEGUT: Maybe. I wrote what I thought would be my last one about eight years ago. Harían Ellison asked me to contribute to a collection he was making. The story’s called “The Big Space Fuck.” I think I am the first writer to use “Fuck” in a title. It was about firing a space ship with a warhead full of jizzum at Andromeda. Which reminds me of my good Indianapolis friend, about the only Indianapolis friend I’ve got left—William Failey. When we got into the Second World War, and everybody was supposed to give blood, he wondered if he couldn’t give a pint of jizzum instead.
INTERVIEWER: If your parents hadn’t lost all their money, what would you be doing now?
VONNEGUT: I’d be an Indianapolis architect—like my father and grandfather. And very happy, too. I still wish that had happened. One thing, anyway: One of the best young architects out there lives in a house my father built for our family the year I was born—1922. My initials, and my sister’s initials, and my brother’s initials are all written in leaded glass in the three little windows by the front door.
INTERVIEWER: So you have good old days you hanker for.
VONNEGUT: Yes. Whenever I go to Indianapolis, the same question asks itself over and over again in my head: “Where’s my bed, where’s my bed?” And if my father’s and grandfather’s ghosts haunt that town, they must be wondering where all their buildings have gone to. The center of the city, where most of their buildings were, has been turned into parking lots. They must be wondering where all their relatives went, too. They grew up in a huge extended family which is no more. I got the slightest taste of that—the big family thing. And when I went to the University of Chicago, and I heard the head of the Department of Anthropology, Robert Redfield, lecture on the folk society, which was essentially a stable, isolated extended family, he did not have to tell me how nice that could be.
INTERVIEWER: Anything else?
VONNEGUT: Yes. Slapstick is the first American novel to employ units from the metric system throughout. Nobody noticed, so now I have to toot my own horn about it.
INTERVIEWER: Anything else?
VONNEGUT: Well—I just discovered a prayer for writers. I’d heard of prayers for sailors and kings and soldiers and so on—but never of a prayer for writers. Could I put that in here?
INTERVIEWER: Certainly.
VONNEGUT: It was written by Samuel Johnson on April 3, 1753, the day on which he signed a contract which required him to write the first complete dictionary of the English language. He was praying for himself. Perhaps April third should be celebrated as “Writers’ Day.” Anyway, this is the prayer: “O God, who hast hitherto supported me, enable me to proceed in this labor, and in the whole task of my present state; that when I shall tender up, at the last day, an account of the talent committed to me, I may receive pardon, for the sake of Jesus Christ. Amen.”
INTERVIEWER: That seems to be a wish to carry his talent as far and as fast as he can.
VONNEGUT: Yes. He was a notorious hack.
INTERVIEWER: And you consider yourself a hack?
VONNEGUT: Of a sort.
INTERVIEWER: What sort?
VONNEGUT: A child of the Great Depression.
INTERVIEWER: I see. Our last question. If you were Commissar of Publishing in the United States, what would you do to alleviate the present deplorable situation?
VONNEGUT: There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass of readers.
INTERVIEWER: SO—?
VONNEGUT: I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check.
INTERVIEWER: Thank you.
VONNEGUT: Thank you.
6
THE PEOPLE ONE KNOWS
FROM POLITICS TODAY, January/February 1979:
“Who in America is truly happy?” my offspring used to ask me in one way or another as they entered adolescence, which is children’s menopause. I was silent then, but need not have been. There was an answer then which holds good today: “William F. Buckley, Jr.” I have his fifteenth solo book at hand, a collection of 130 or so pieces published elsewhere (with one interesting exception) since 1975 began. Norman Mailer has said of himself that he is one of the best “fast writers” around. Buckley is at least twice as fast. He can do a column in 20 minutes, he tells us, and turn out 150 a year, plus a book and many reviews and speeches and articles, and television introductions besides. The fast writings collected in this volume are uniformly first rate—not only in terms of unbridled happiness (where Mailer surely falls short), but as shrewd comedies and celebrations of the English language
.
He is a superb sailor and skier as well—and multilingual, and a musician, and an airplane pilot, and a family man, and polite and amusing to strangers. More: He is, like the Yale-educated hero of his novel Saving the Queen, startlingly good-looking. His distinctly American features are animated, but tempered with a certain shyness, a reserve. (The last nine words are Buckley’s own gloss on the good looks of the hero, Bradford Oakes.)
So whenever I see Mr. Buckley, I think this, and, word of honor, without an atom of irony: “There is a man who has won the decathlon of human existence.”
I also marvel at how much he resembles a far more lopsided genius, the comedian Stanley Laurel. Laurel also managed to imply, despite his beauty and seriousness, that something screamingly funny was going on. People cannot earn or cultivate that look, in my opinion. Peer through the window of any hospital nursery, and you will find that one infant in fifty has it. The difficult part for many, but easy as pie for Laurel and Buckley, is living up to such a face.
I would give a million dollars to look like that.
I wonder, too, when I see Buckley: Would he have known that it was possible to be genuinely funny and conservative at the same time, if it had not been for the pioneering work of H. L. Mencken? Probably so. That face of his, when coupled with his fine mind and high social position, would have made him sound like a spiritual son of Mencken’s, even if he had never heard of the Sage of Baltimore.
How serious is he about conservatism? Well—serious enough to devote his life to it, surely, but beyond that? The ideals he defends, conventional Republicanisms, really, were logically his from birth. He was rich and brilliant with congenial and enterprising relatives before he wore his first diaper—and he had the rare gift of being happy a lot, as I say. And nothing changed much except, perhaps, that life kept getting better and better.
Most important: there has never been anything to be ashamed of. It is a quite unusual experience in America to have never been ashamed. Buckley’s intellectual voyage has been one of confirmations rather than discoveries. So there is the chance that he is more playful about conservatism than many who have come to it the hard Way—than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, say. Buckley has not come to conservatism through rage and pain.
Solzhenitsyn could never say at the beginning of a book, and neither could Mencken, for that matter, what Buckley says at the beginning of this one, that he must subtitle it as being controversial for this reason: “… for almost everything that is said here, there is an opposite, if intellectually unequal, reaction set down somewhere. This is of course a pity, but on the other hand I have not expected to bring around the world by acclamation.”
These are, I submit, the nearly weightless words of an undefeatable debater rather than of a passionate advocate—a debater who, because he is so good at debating, is about to make ninnies of the opposition yet again, knowing that nobody is going to be particularly burned up afterward. He continues to do what he did as a Yale undergraduate, which was to engage in badinage with registered Democrats, and always genially. He tells us that “… one of the reasons I was so happy at Yale was that geniality is … as natural to Yale as laughter is to Dublin, song to Milan, or angst to The New York Review of Books.”
I, for one, am grateful that Buckley, serious or not, has volunteered to be as consistent in his responses to outside stimuli as a pinball machine, a machine designed to teach conservative ideals—5,000 points for the electric chair, 10,000 for right-to-work laws, 50,000 for more sympathy with the CIA, a cool million for individual excellence and daring, and so on. If we did not have such an intelligent and genial man (as compared with General Goldwater, for instance) to argue in favor of social Darwinism, some of us might be too appalled and confused to listen, to learn for our own good how uncharitable we had better be.
• • •
William F. Buckley, Jr., is a friend of mine. Ours is a New York friendship. A New York friendship is a friendship with a person you have met at least once. If you have met a person only once, and you are a New Yorker, you are entitled to say, whenever that person’s name comes up in conversation, “Yes—so-and-so is a friend of mine.”
I have met Mr. Buckley, or Bill, as his friends call him, maybe thrice, for a grand total of sixty seconds. I am intimidated by his cultural and athletic accomplishments, and by his social rank—but especially by his skills as a debater. I have no idea how to win an argument, or even to hold my own in one.
If I am to say what I believe, I must do so without opposition, or I am mute. I have been on the Irv Kupcinet Show, a talk show originating in Chicago, four times. I have never said a word. I ran into Mr. Kupcinet recently, and he said he would certainly like to have me on again. Why not?
• • •
I spoke one time at the Library of Congress, in 1972, or so. A man stood up in the middle of the audience, when I was about halfway through, and he said, “What right have you, as a leader of America’s young people, to make those people so cynical and pessimistic?’”
I had no good answer, so I left the stage.
Talk about profiles in courage!
• • •
The beliefs I have to defend are so soft and complicated, actually, and, when vivisected, turn into bowls of undifferentiated mush. I am a pacifist, I am an anarchist, I am a planetary citizen, and so on.
But the subject of this chapter is friendship, and, thanks to a routine miracle of this age of computers, I am able to submit an alphabetized list of writers who are or, in the case of the dead, were friends of mine. My wife, Jill Krementz, you see, has over the years photographed hundreds of writers, and has given their names and negative numbers to a computer, in order that she may deliver a picture of any one of them in a twinkling or two.
So I simply go down her list with my index finger, stopping at the name of each person I have met at least once, and, hey presto, my friends are Chinua Achebe, Richard Adams, Renata Adler, Ghingiz Aitmatov, Edward Albee, Nelson Algren, Lisa Alther, Robert Anderson, Maya Angelou, Hannah Arendt, Michael Arlen, John Ashbery, Isaac Asimov, Richard Bach, Russell Baker, James Baldwin, Marvin Barrett, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Jacques Barzun, Steve Becker, Saul Bellow, Ingrid Benjis, Robert Benton, Tom Berger, Charles Berlitz, Carl Bernstein, Michael Bessie, Ann Birstein, William Blatty, Heinrich Boll, Vance Bourjaily, Ray Bradbury, John Malcolm Brinnin, Jimmy Breslin, Harold Brodkey, C.D.B. Bryan, Art Buchwald, and, yes, William F. Buckley, Jr., William Burroughs, Lynn Caine, Erskine Cald-well, Hortense Calisher, Vincent Canby, Truman Capote, Schuyler Chapin, John Cheever, Marchette Chute, John Ciardi, Eleanor Clark, Ramsey Clark, Author C. Clarke, James Clavell, Arthur Cohen, William Cole, Dr. Alex Comfort, Richard Condon, Evan Connell, Frank Conroy, Malcolm Cowley, Harvey Cox, Robert Creighton, Michael Crichton, Judith Crist, John Crosby, Charlotte Curtis, Gwen Davis, Peter Davison, Peter de Vries, Borden Deal, Midge Decter, Lester Del Rey, Barbaralee Diamonstein, Monica Dickens, James Dickey, Joan Didion, E. L. Doctorow, Betty Dodson, J. P. Donleavy, José Donoso, Rosalyn Drexler, John Dunne, Richard Eberhart, Leon Edel, Margareta Ekstrôm, Stanley Elkin, Ralph Ellison, Richard Elman, Amos Elon, Gloria Emerson, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Nora Ephron, Edward Epstein, Jason Epstein, Willard Espy, Fred Exley, Oriana Fallaci, James T. Farrell, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Frances Fitzgerald, Joe Flaherty, Janet Flanner, Thomas Fleming, Peter Forbath, William Price Fox, Gerald Frank, Michael Frayne, Eliot Fremont-Smith, Betty Friedan, Bruce Jay Friedman, Otto Friedrich, Max Frisch, Erich Fromm, Carlos Fuentes, William Gaddis, Nicholas Gage, Charles Gaines, John Kenneth Galbraith, Mavis Gallant, John Gardner, William Gass, Barbara Gelb, Dan Gerber, Brendan Gill, Penelope Gilliatt, Allen Ginsberg, Nikki Giovanni, Gail Godwin, William Goldman, Nadine Gordimer, Edward Gorey, Lois Gould, Gunter Grass, Francine du Plessix Gray, Adolph Green, Gael Greene, Germaine Gréer, Winston Groom, Alex Haley, Daniel Halpern, Pete Hamill, Elizabeth Hard-Wick, Curtis Harnack, Michael Harper, Jim Harrison, Molly Haskell, John Hawkes, Joseph Heller, Lillian Hellman, Nat Hentoff, John Hersey, Rust
Hills, Warren Hinkle, Sandra Hochman, Townsend Hoopes, A. E. Hotchner, Barbara Howar, Jane Howard, William Inge, Clifford Irving, John Irving, Christopher Isherwood, Roman Jakobson, Jill Johnston, James Jones, Erica Jong, Pauline Kael, E. J. Kahn, Garson Kanin, Justin Kaplan, Sue Kaufman, Elia Kazan, Alfred Kazin, Murray Kempton, Galway Kinnell, Judy Klemesrud, John Knowles, Hans Koning, Jerzy Kosinski, Robert Kotlowitz, Joe Kraft, Paul Krassner, Stanley Kunitz, Lewis Lapham, Jack Leggett, Siegfried Lenz, John Leonard, Max Lerner, Doris Lessing, Ira Levin, Meyer Levin, Robert Jay Lifton, Jakov Lind, Loyd Little, Anita Loos, Anthony Lukas, Alison Lurie, Leonard Lyons, Peter Maas, Dwight MacDonald, John D. MacDonald, Ross Macdonald, Archibald Mac-Leish, Eugene McCarthy, Mary McCarthy, Tom McGuane, Marshall McLuhan, Larry McMurtry, Terrance McNally, John McPhee, James McPherson, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Marya Mannes, Peter Matthiessen, Armistead Maupín, Rollo May, Margaret Mead, William Meredith, James Merrill, Arthur Miller, Jonathan Miller, Merle Miller, Kate Millett, James Mills, Jessica Mitford, Honor Moore, Eisa Morante, Alberto Moravia, Hans Morgenthau, Willie Morris, Wright Morris, Toni Morrison, Penelope Mortimer, Ray Mungo, Albert Murray, William Murray, V. S. Naipaul, Victor Navasky, Edwin Newman, Leslie Newman, Anais Nin, William A. Nolen, Marsha Norman, Edna O’Brien, Joyce Carol Oates, Sidney Offit (best friend!), Iris Owens, Amos Oz, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Gordon Parks, Jonathan Penner, S. J. Perelman, Eleanor Perry, Frank Perry, Jayne Anne Phillips, George Plimpton, Robert Pisig, Peter Prescott, V. S. Pritchett, Dotson Rader, Ishmael Reed, Rex Reed, Richard Reeves, James Reston, Jr., Adrienne Rich, Jill Robinson, Betty Rollins, Judith Rossner, Philip Roth, Mike Royko, Muriel Rukeyser, John Sack, William Safire, Carl Sagan, Harrison Salisbury, William Saroyan, Andrew Sarris, Nora Sayre, Dick Schaap, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Steve Schlesinger, Bud Schulberg, Ellen Schwamm, Barbara Seaman, Erich Segal, Anne Sexton, Ntozake Shange, Harvey Shapiro, Adam Shaw, Irwin Shaw, Wilfrid Sheed, Neil Sheehan, Susan Sheehan, Lynn Sherr, Alix Kates Shulman, Andre Simenov, John Simon, Isaac B. Singer, Hedrick Smith, W. D. Snodgrass, C. P. Snow, Barbara Probst Soloman, Susan Sontag, Terry Southern, Wole Soyinka, Stephen Spender, Benjamin Spock, Jean Stafford, Gloria Steinem, Shane Stevens, I. F. Stone, Irving Stone, Robert Stone, Dorothea Straus, Rose Styron, William Styron, Jacqueline Susann, Gay Tálese, James Tate, Peter Taylor, Studs Terkel, Hunter S. Thompson, Lionel Tiger, Hannah Tillich, Alvin Toffler, Lazlo Toth, Michael Tournier, Willard Trask, Calvin Trillin, Diana Trilling, Barbara Tuch-man, Kenneth Tynan, Amy Vanderbilt, Gore Vidal, Esther Vilar, Roman Vishniac, Mark Vonnegut, Andrei Voznesen-sky, Alice Walker, Joseph Wambaugh, Wayne Warga, Robert Penn Warren, Per Wästberg, Peter Weiss, Eudora Welty, Glenway Wescott, Morris West, E. B. White, Theodore White, William Whitworth, Tom Wicker, Elie Wiesel, Richard Wilbur, Paul Wilkes, Joy Williams, Tennessee Williams, Garry Wills, Larry Woiwode, Tom Wolfe, Geoffrey Wolff, Herman Wouk, Christopher Wren, Charles Wright, James Wright, Lois Wyse, and Richard Yates.