“I say it now. If I had to say it at the end, to build up to saying it, I would go all to pieces, I think. I would bark like a dog. So I say it now: ’Good-bye, darling Lavina.’
“There—that is behind me now. That is behind us, now.
“It is common at funerals for survivors to regret many things that were said and done to the departed—to think, ’I wish I had said this instead of this, I wish I had done that instead of that.’ This is not that sort of funeral. This is not a church filled with regrets.
“Why not? We always treated Lavina with love and decency. Why did we do that? It was Lavina’s particular genius to so behave that the only possible responses on our part were love and decency. That is her richest legacy to us, I think: Her lessons in how to treat others so that their only possible responses are, again, love and decency.
“There is at least one person here who does not need to learn what Lavina knew. He is Lavina’s spiritual equal, although he was so much in love with her that perhaps he never knew it. He is Ollie Morris Lyon.
“Ollie and Lavina are country people, by the way.
“I have seen them achieve success and happiness in the ugly factory city of Schenectady, New York, where I first met them. They were not much older than Mary and Philip then. Think of that. Yes, and when they lived in New York City, they had as much fun as any jazz-age babies ever did. Good for them! But they were always a farmer and his wife.
“Now the farmer’s wife has died. I’m glad they got back here before she died.
“The wife died first.
“It happens all the time—but it always seems like such a terrible violation of the natural order when the wife dies first. Is there anyone here, even a child, who did not believe that Lavina would survive us all? She was so healthy, so capable, so beautiful, so strong. She was supposed to come to our funerals—not the other way around.
“Well—she may come to them yet. She will, if she can. She will talk to God about it, I’m sure. If anybody can stretch the rules of heaven a little, Lavina can.
“I say she was strong. We all say she was strong. Yes, and in this bicentennial springtime we can say that she was like a legendary pioneer woman in her seeming strengths. We know now that she was only pretending to be strong—which is the best any of us can do. Of course, if you can pretend to be strong all your life, which is what Lavina did, then you can be very comforting to those around you. You can allow them to be childlike now and then.
“Good job, Lavina, darling. And remember, too, Lavina, the times we let you be a little girl.
“When she was a little girl in Palmyra, Illinois, being the youngest of a large family, she was expected to leave a note in the kitchen saying where she had gone after school. One day the note that was found said ’I have gone where I have decided.’
“We loved you.
“We love you.
“We will always love you.
“We will meet again.”
• • •
I now confess that the American poems which move me most are those which marvel most, simply and clearly, at the queer shapes which the massive indifference of America gives to lives. So The Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters seems a very great book to me.
That is a barbarous opinion. So I have nothing to lose by blurting moreover that I find much to celebrate in the shrewd innocence of many of the poems now being set to country music.
Pay attention, please, to the words of “The Class of ’57,” a big country hit of a few years ago:
Tommy’s sellin’ used cars,
Nancy’s fixin’ hair,
Harvey runs a groc’ry store
And Marg’ret doesn’t care,
Jerry drives a truck for Sears
And Charlotte’s on the make.
And Paul sells life insurance
And part-time real estate.
And the Class of Fifty Seven had its dreams.
But we all thought we’d changed the world
With our great works and deeds;
Or maybe we just thought the world
Would change to fit our needs.
The Class of Fifty Seven had its dreams.
Betty runs a trailer park,
Jan sells Tupperware,
Randy’s on an insane ward,
And Mary’s on welfare,
Charley took a job with Ford,
Joe took Freddy’s wife,
Charlotte took a millionaire,
And Freddy took his life.
And the Class of Fifty Seven had its dreams,
But livin’ life from day to day
Is never like it seems.
Things get complicated
When you get past eighteen,
But the Class of Fifty Seven had its dreams.
Helen is a hostess,
Frank works at the mill,
Janet teaches grade school
And prob’ly always will,
Bob works for the city,
And Jack’s in lab research,
And Peggy plays the organ
At the Presbyterian Church.
And the Class of Fifty Seven had its dreams.
But we all thought we’d change the world
With our great works and deeds;
Or maybe we just thought the world
Would change to fit our needs.
The Class of Fifty Seven had its dreams.
John is big in cattle,
Ray is deep in debt,
Where Mavis fin’ly wound up
Is anybody’s bet,
Linda married Sonny,
Brenda married me,
And the class of all of us
Is just part of history.
And the Class of Fifty Seven had its dreams,
But livin’ life from day to day
Is never like it seems.
Things get complicated
When you get past eighteen,
But the Class of Fifty Seven had its dreams.
Ah, the Class of Fifty Seven had its dreams.
Copyright © 1972 by House of Cash.
The authors are Don and Harold Reid, the only actual brothers in the country-music quartet that calls itself the Statler Brothers. Nobody in the quartet is named Statler. The quartet named itself after a roll of paper towels.
• • •
My wife Jill and I admire the Statler Brothers so much that we went all the way to the Niagara Falls International Convention Center in April of 1980 to hear them and to shake their hands. We had our pictures taken with them, too.
Yes, and they announced from the stage that they were honored that night to have in the audience “the famous writer Kurt Vonnegut and his wife, Jill Krementz, the famous photographer.” We got a terrific hand, although we did not stand up and identify ourselves, and although nobody, I’m sure, had ever heard of us before.
A woman came up to us afterward, and she said that we must be the famous people the brothers had mentioned, since we didn’t look like anybody else in the auditorium. She said that from now on she was going to read everything we wrote.
Jill and I stayed in the same Holiday Inn as the Statler Brothers, but they slept all afternoon. Their bus was parked outside where we could see it from our room. Right after their performance, around midnight, they got on the bus, and it started up with that fruity, burbling, soft purple rumble that bus engines have. The bus left without any lights showing inside. Nobody waved from a window. It headed for Columbus, Ohio, for another performance the next night. I forget where it was supposed to go after that—Saginaw, Michigan, I think.
• • •
I would actually like to have “The Class of ’57” become our national anthem for a little while. Everybody knows that “The Star Spangled Banner” is a bust as music and poetry, and is as representative of the American spirit as the Taj Mahal.
I can see Americans singing in a grandstand at the Olympics somewhere, while one of our athletes wins a medal—for the decathlon, say. I can se
e tears streaming down the singers’ cheeks when they get to these lines:
Where Mavis fin’ly wound up
Is anybody’s bet.
• • •
“The Class of ’57” could be an anthem for my generation, at least. Many people have said that we already have an anthem, which is my friend Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” which starts off like this:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed
by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets
at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient
heavenly connection to the starry dynamo
in the machinery of night.
And so on.
I like “Howl” a lot. Who wouldn’t? It just doesn’t have much to do with me or what happened to my friends. For one thing, I believe that the best minds of my generation were probably musicians and physicists and mathematicians and biologists and archaeologists and chess masters and so on, and Ginsberg’s closest friends, if I’m not mistaken, were undergraduates in the English department of Columbia University.
No offense intended, but it would never occur to me to look for the best minds in any generation in an undergraduate English department anywhere. I would certainly try the physics department or the music department first—and after that biochemistry.
Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that.
• • •
Also, and again I intend no offense, the most meaningful and often harrowing adventures which I and many like me have experienced have had to do with the rearing of children. “Howl” does not deal with such adventures.
Truly great poems never do, somehow.
• • •
Allen Ginsberg and I were inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters in the same year, 1973. Somebody from Newsweek called me up to ask what I had to say about two such antiestablishment writers being embraced by such a conservative organization.
I said this, and I meant it, and my comment was not printed: “My goodness, if Mr. Ginsberg and I aren’t already members of the establishment, I don’t know who is.”
• • •
To return to the subject of childhood playmates: In the Vonnegut house, with its charge-account deadbeats, and in the Goldstein house next door, with its bankruptcy, there were many books. As luck would have it, the Goldstein children and I, and the Marks children three doors down, whose father would soon die quite suddenly, could all read about as easily as we could eat chocolate ice cream. Thus, at a very tender age and in utter silence, disturbing no one, being children as good as gold, we were comforted and nourished by human minds which were calmer and more patient and amusing and unafraid than our parents could afford to be.
• • •
Years later, on October 1, 1976, I would pay this circuitous tribute to the art of reading at the dedication of a new library at Connecticut College, New London:
“The name of this speech is ’The Noodle Factory.’
“Like life itself, this speech will be over before you know it. Life is so short!
“I was born only yesterday morning, moments after daybreak—and yet, this afternoon, I am fifty-four years old. I am a mere baby, and yet here I am dedicating a library. Something has gone wrong.
“I have a painter friend named Syd Solomon. He was also born only yesterday. And the next thing he knew, it was time for him to have a retrospective exhibition of his paintings going back thirty-five years. Syd asked a woman claiming to be his wife what on earth had happened. She said, ’Syd, you’re fifty-eight years old now.’
“You can imagine how he felt.
“Another thing Syd found out was that he was a veteran of something called the Second World War. Somebody said I was in that war, too. Maybe so. I don’t argue when people tell me things like that.
“I decided to read up on that war some. I went to a library a lot like this one. It was a building full of books. I learned that the Second World War was so terrible that it caused Adolf Hitler himself to commit suicide. Think of that: He had just been born, and suddenly it was time for him to shoot himself.
“That’s history for you. You can read about it yourself.
“My friend Syd Solomon was certainly luckier than Hider. All Syd had to do was put on a retrospective exhibition. So I tried to help him out—by writing an essay for the front of his catalogue.
“That is certainly one of the nice things about this planet, I think—the way people will try to help other people sometimes.
“In the words of Barbra Streisand, which should perhaps be emblazoned on the facade of this building, along with a picture of an atomic submarine: ’People who need people are the luckiest people in the world. ’
“In order to write the essay about Syd’s paintings, I had to ask him what he thought he was doing with paint. He was an abstract expressionist, you see. His paintings looked like bright weather to me—neon thunderstorms and the like.
“Was I ever in for a shock! Syd could not tell me what he thought he was doing!
“This did not wobble my opinions of Syd or his work. Syd and his paintings remained as honorable and beautiful as ever. What I lost faith in was the English language—by far the largest language in the world, incidentally. We have more words than anybody.
“But our great language, when confronted by abstract expressionism, was failing Syd and me—and every art critic I ever read.
“The language was speechless!
“Until that moment of truth, I had agreed with the Nobel-prize chemist, the late Irving Langmuir, who once said within my hearing, ’Any person who can’t explain his work to a fourteen-year-old is a charlatan.’
“I couldn’t believe that anymore.
“So what I finally wrote for Syd’s catalogue was your standard load of horse crap about modern art.
“It may be in your library here. Enjoy it in good health.
“But the puzzle has been on my mind ever since—and I have good news for you today. I can once again agree with Dr. Langmuir about charlatans. Here, in simple English, is what Syd Solomon does:
“He meditates. He connects his hand and paintbrush to the deeper, quieter, more mysterious parts of his mind—and he paints pictures of what he sees and feels down there.
“This accounts for the pleasurable shock of recognition we experience when we look at what he does.
“How nice!
“Hooray for Syd Solomon! I say. He is certainly more enterprising and useful than all the quack holy men who meditate deeply, who then announce smugly that it is impossible for them to express what they have seen and felt.
“The heck with inarticulate meditators! And three cheers for all artists who dare to show and tell.
“Since we are here to dedicate a library, let us especially applaud those artists we call writers. By golly, aren’t writers wonderful? They don’t just keep their meditations to themselves. They very commonly give themselves migraine headaches and ulcers, and destroy their livers and their marriages, too, doing their best to show and tell.
“I once learned how to be the other sort of meditator, the sort that doesn’t show and tell. I paid Maharishi Mahesh Yogi eighty dollars to show me how.
“Maharishi Mahesh Yogi gave me a mantra, a nonsense word I was supposed to say over and over to myself as I sank deeper and deeper into my mind. I promised not to tell anybody what my mantra was. This was it: Aye-eem.
“I will now demonstrate. [Going into a trance] Aye-eem, aye-eem, aye-eem….
[Emerging from the trance] “Where am I? Am I still fifty-four? Or am I eighty-six now? I wouldn’t be surprised.
“All right—that was the socially fruitless sort of meditation. I feel mildly refreshed, but I don’t see how that can be much use to anybody else in New London or anywhere.
“Now for the socially fruit
ful sort of meditation, which has filled this noble building here: When writers meditate, they don’t pick bland, meaningless mantras to say over and over to themselves. They pick mantras that are hot and prickly, full of the sizzle and jingle-jangle of life. They jazz the heck out of their inner beings with the mantras they pick.
“I will give you some examples:
“War and Peace.
“The Origin of Species.
“The Iliad.
“Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
“Critique of Pure Reason.
“Madame Bovary.
“Life on the Mississippi.
“Romeo and Juliet.
“The Red Badge of Courage.
“I only wish I had your card catalogue here. I could go on and on with literary mantras that have changed the world for the better.
“About The Red Badge of Courage, by the way: That story by Stephen Crane is supposed to be a particularly salutary story for Americans to read—especially during the bicentennial. But I know another story by Crane which, in my opinion, is even more instructive for Americans of our time. Perhaps you know it, too. It is called ’The Blue Hotel.’
“‘The Blue Hotel’ is about a foreigner who comes here and commits murder. He imagines that he is defending himself. He has scared himself out of his wits, thinking that Americans are much more dangerous than they really are.
“So he kills.
“So much for that.
“Ten percent of you may be wondering by now why I called this speech ’The Noodle Factory.’ One hundred percent of me is delighted to explain:
“It is very simple. The title is an acknowledgment of the fact that most people can’t read, or, in any event, don’t enjoy it much.
“Reading is such a difficult thing to do that most of our time in school is spent learning how to do that alone. If we had spent as much time at ice skating as we have with reading, we would all be stars with the Hollywood Ice Capades instead of bookworms now.
“As you know, it isn’t enough for a reader to pick up the little symbols from a page with his eyes, or, as is the case with a blind person, with his fingertips. Once we get those symbols inside our heads and in the proper order, then we must clothe them in gloom or joy or apathy, in love or hate, in anger or peacefulness, or however the author intended them to be clothed. In order to be good readers, we must even recognize irony—which is when a writer says one thing and really means another, contradicting himself in what he believes to be a beguiling cause.