Just for a moment of proof that the good men do lives after them,
Chronicle copy editor Allen Johnson rescued this obituary of Kurt Vonnegut
written many years ago by the late Examiner writer Ed Beitiks. (Obituaries of
famous people are often written long in advance of their death.) Beitiks was a
fine writer, a very nice man, and someone who passed away much too soon.
Allen sent this to members of the Chronicle staff, but it seemed a
shame not to let more people read it.
By Edvins Beitiks Of the Examiner Staff
In July of 1982, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. rejected attempts by his
hometown of Indianapolis to honor him. He refused to attend the ceremonies,
saying from his New York City home, ""I personally find it
embarrassing. It seems to me this is the kind of thing you do for an author
after he's dead.''
In the years since, Vonnegut has played the role of cantankerous
jester, outspoken conscience of America, a voice supporting the oddness of this
country while warning, ""The system promotes to the top those who
don't care about the planet.''
Vonnegut's voice was stilled overnight on Wednesday several weeks
after a fall that left him with permanent brain damage, his wife, Jill
Krementz, told the New York Times on Thursday.
If there was a quality separating Kurt Vonnegut Jr. from the other
World War II vets who turned their talents to the novel, it was a
tongue-in-cheekness, a continually raised eyebrow, an inability to believe that
all this crazy stuff was really happening. Even Joseph Heller, whose
""Catch-22'' set the tone for postwar insanity, tried to find a plumb
line for his world, working it out with each successive book.
But Vonnegut wrote books that threw up their hands at the
goings-on, delving into sci-fi when the down-to-earth wasn't enough, or turning
to the reader and simply asking, ""Do you know what's going on?
Because I'm having problems.''
>Vonnegut wrote 24 books, selling more than 10 million copies,
and all 14 of his novels are still in print. His success started with
""Player Piano'' in 1952, followed by ""The Sirens of
Titan,'' ""Mother Night,'' ""Cat's Cradle,'' and his most
successful book, ""Slaughterhouse-Five, or the Children's Crusade,''
written in 1969. ""Timequake,'' the last of Vonnegut's novels, was
written in 1997 to mixed reviews. His last work, "A Man Without a
Country," a collection of essays written in reaction to George W. Bush's
presidency, was published in 2005.
""Slaughterhouse-Five'' was a remembrance of the
firebombing of Dresden on Feb. 13, 1945, seen through the eyes of the narrator,
Billy Pilgrim. Vonnegut himself, taken prisoner of war in the Battle of the
Bulge, lived through that firebombing, hiding underground below a Dresden
slaughterhouse. The war colored his writings, as it did with other WWII vets
such as Heller, Norman Mailer, James Jones and Irwin Shaw, but Vonnegut seemed
to take it more in stride.
His postwar life was filled with other attacks and tragedies.
Vonnegut's older sister, Alice, died of cancer when she was 40, two days after
her husband died in a train cash. His son was diagnosed as a schizophrenic.
In 1971, ""Slaughterhouse-Five'' was outlawed in Oakland
County, Mich., for its language and its ""degradation of the person
of Christ,'' and in 1973 copies of the book were burned by the Drake School
Board in South Dakota, a playing-out of Ray Bradbury's fears in
""Fahrenheit 451,'' the temperature at which a book bursts into
flame.
Vonnegut, once a public relations man for General Electirc, took a
light-hearted look at the world outside as he lazed in the general comfort of
postwar America. But by the time ""Bagombo Snuff Box'' was put
together he was writing, ""You can't fight progress. The best you can
do is ignore it, until it finally takes your livelihood and self-respect away.
General Electric itself was made to feel like a buggy whip factory for a time,
as Bell Labs and others cornered patents on transistors and their uses, while
GE was still shunting electrons this way and that with vaccum tubes ... Too big
to fail, though, as I was not, GE recovered sufficiently to lay off thousands
and poison the Hudson River with PCBs.'' The short stories in
""Bagombo Snuff Box,'' written from 1949-63, during some of the
strongest years for corporate America, are smilingly described by Vonnegut as
""a bunch of Buddhist catnaps.''
Vonnegut, a fourth-generation German-American born in Indianapolis
on Nov. 11, 1922, sometimes took delight in the irony of being born on the
fourth anniversary of Veterans Day, which ended the First World War. He said he
owed his scientific bent to his father, an architect, and his politics to his
family's New Leftism, which distrusted all ""granfallons, political
or theological.'' After graduation from Shortridge High School in 1940,
Vonnegut studied chemistry at Cornell and the Carnegie Institute of Technology
before being drated into the Army.
Captured at the Bulge, he wound up in Dresden during the
firebombing, which killed 135,000 civilians -- more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki
combined -- a firebombing carried out, according to some historians, as a naked
demonstration of Allied air power to Russians moving toward Berlin. When he
came out of the Dresden bomb shelter, Vonnegut wrote, ""Everything
was gone but the cellars where 135,000 Hansels and Gretels had been baked like
gingerbread men. So we were put to work as corpse miners, breaking into
shelters, bringing bodies out.''
On Sept. 1, 1945, Vonnegut married a childhood sweetheart, Jane
Marie Cox, and the couple had three children, Mark, Edith and Nanette. The
family also included three adopted nephews, the children of Vonnegut's deceased
sister.
After the war Vonnegut studied anthropology at the University of
Chicago, worked as a police reporter for the city news bureau, then became a PR
man for GE in Schenectady, N.Y., a job he quit in 1950 to turn to full-time
freelance writing that included short stories for magazines like Galaxy,
Fantasy, Collier's, Cosmopolitan, Saturday Evening Post.
The stories inspired ""Player Piano,'' ""The
Sirens of Titan'' (1959) and ""Mother Night'' (1961). After
""Cat's Cradle'' in 1963 came ""Slaughterhouse-Five,''
leading New York Times' critic C.D.B. Bryan to compare Vonnegut to a mix of
H.G. Wells and Mark Twain, saying the two messages he found in Vonnegut were
""Be kind'' and ""God doesn't care whether you are or
not.''
In 1986, Vonnegut appeared before a Senate subcommittee to argue
for repeal of the McCarran- Warren Act, which allowed the State Department to
bar foreign visitors whose views were unacceptable to the government.
""All citizens are entitled to hear absolutely any idea anyone from
anywhere may care to express,'' he said. ""And where did I get the
notion there was such an incredible entitlement? I got it from the junior
civics course that was given in the seventh grade at Public School 35 in
Indianapolis.''
Vonnegut called censorship ""a disease that's been
around a long, long time, like Legionnaires' disease, maybe, or Altzheimer's.''
That same year he appeared at Berkeley's Sproul Plaza to join demonstrations against
South African apartheid, and soon after he flew to Mozambique as part of a
relief mission.
At the height of his popularity, Time magazine insisted that a
sign hanging in his home -- ""God damn it, you got to be kind'' --
""lies at the heart of Vonnegut's work.'' Vonnegut also kept a
self-signed report card on one wall that gave him an A for
""Slaughterhouse-Five'' and ""Cat's Cradle'' and lower
marks for later work, including a D for ""Slapstick.''
Time defended Vonnegut's books against those claiming the works
were anti-religious, saying his ""satiric forays are really an appeal
for a return to Christlike behavior. For Vonnegut, man's worst folly is a
persistent attempt to adjust, smoothly, rationally, to the unthinkable, the
unbearable.''
In a Life magazine piece, Wilfred Sheed wrote, ""What he
is, most profoundly, is an American humorist. He even walks like one, in a
diffident bloodhound lope. And when he laughs, it is with a wild glee that
stops just this sound of coughing.'' Vonnegut backed that up with ruminations
of his own, including, ""Most of us are made up of basketball hoops
and old cars.''
Over the years Vonnegut taught literature at Harvard, City College
of New York and the University of Iowa writers workshop. He was a member of the
National Institute of Arts and Letters, receiving their Literary Award in 1970,
as well as receiving a Guggenheim grant.
Life changed for Vonnegut across the years. He created an
alter-ego sci-fi writer, Kilgore Trout, wrote some mediocre novels, drew
Geraldo Rivera as a son-in-law, took part in periodic demonstrations and made
periodic commencement speeches. One bogus speech credited to him made the
rounds of the Internet -- a commencement at MIT in which he supposedly advised,
""Ladies and Gentlemen of the Class of 1997: Wear sunscreen.''
In 1979, Vonnegut married photographer Jill Krementz and together
they had a daughter, Lily, both of whom were at the family's brownstone on East
48th Street in New York in January, when a fire broke out in a rear bedroom and
Vonnegut had to be rushed to the hospital with smoke inhalation. Vonnegut, a
lifelong smoker already ill with emphysema, was pronounced in critical but
stable condition in the intensive care unit at New York Presbyterian Hospital.
Faced with his sudden mortality, the literary world began
searching through its files to put together a suitable Vonnegut obituary. No
matter how long people looked, though, there wasn't going to be a much better
epitaph for Vonnegut than novelist Jay McInerney's description of the man as
""a cynic who wants to believe ... a moralist with a whoopee
cushion.''