Martin, you were just talking to me about Vonnegut's work, which I guess I'll
now be discovering posthumously for him. Again, I hate to admit I've never read
any of his stuff. Love the quotes, especially this jab at teh Bushites:
("upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography"), or this epitaph
left for aliens who visit Earth in the future: "We probably could have saved
ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard... and too damn cheap"
I wonder, what writer(s) active now would you consider to be a spiritual
descendant of Vonnegut's?
*******************************************
Novelist Kurt Vonnegut dies at age 84
By CRISTIAN SALAZAR, Associated Press Writer 54 minutes ago
Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and
questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as
"Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Cat's Cradle," died Wednesday. He was 84.
Vonnegut, who often marveled that he had lived so long despite his lifelong
smoking habit, had suffered brain injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home
weeks ago, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.
The author of at least 19 novels, many of them best-sellers, as well as dozens
of short stories, essays and plays, Vonnegut relished the role of a social
critic. Indianapolis, his hometown, declared 2007 as "The Year of Vonnegut"
an announcement he said left him "thunderstruck."
He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and
delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were
dehumanizing people.
"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations,"
Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be
in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.
A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used
protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles
for his points of view. He also filled his novels with satirical commentary and
even drawings that were only loosely connected to the plot. In
"Slaughterhouse-Five," he drew a headstone with the epitaph: "Everything was
beautiful, and nothing hurt."
But much in his life was traumatic, and left him in pain.
Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression throughout his
life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later
about how he botched the job.
"I think he was a man who combined a wicked sense of humor and sort of steady
moral compass, who was always sort of looking at the big picture of the things
that were most important," said Joel Bleifuss, editor of In These Times, a
liberal magazine based in Chicago that featured Vonnegut articles.
His mother killed herself just before he left for Germany during World War II,
where he was quickly taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. He was
being held in Dresden when Allied bombs created a firestorm that killed an
estimated tens of thousands of people.
"The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what
I write and am what I am," Vonnegut wrote in "Fates Worse Than Death," his 1991
autobiography of sorts.
But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived
by huddling with other POW's inside an underground meat locker labeled
slaughterhouse-five. The novel, in which Pvt. Pilgrim is transported from
Dresden by time-traveling aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, was published at
the height of the Vietnam War, and solidified his reputation as an iconoclast.
"He was sort of like nobody else," said Gore Vidal, who noted that he, Vonnegut
and Norman Mailer were among the last writers around who served in World War II.
"He was imaginative; our generation of writers didn't go in for imagination
very much. Literary realism was the general style. Those of us who came out of
the war in the 1940s made it sort of the official American prose, and it was
often a bit on the dull side. Kurt was never dull."
Vonnegut was born on Nov. 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, a "fourth-generation
German-American religious skeptic Freethinker," and studied chemistry at
Cornell University before joining the Army.
When he returned, he reported for Chicago's City News Bureau, then did public
relations for General Electric, a job he loathed. He wrote his first novel,
"Player Piano," in 1951, followed by "The Sirens of Titan," "Canary in a Cat
House" and "Mother Night," making ends meet by selling Saabs on Cape Cod.
Critics ignored him at first, then denigrated his deliberately bizarre stories
and disjointed plots as haphazardly written science fiction. But his novels
became cult classics, especially "Cat's Cradle" in 1963, in which scientists
create "ice-nine," a crystal that turns water solid and destroys the earth.
Many of his novels were best-sellers. Some also were banned and burned for
suspected obscenity. Vonnegut took on censorship as an active member of the PEN
writers' aid group and the American Civil Liberties Union. The American
Humanist Association, which promotes individual freedom, rational thought and
scientific skepticism, made him its honorary president.
His characters tended to be miserable anti-heros with little control over their
fate. Vonnegut said the villains in his books were never individuals, but
culture, society and history, which he said were making a mess of the planet.
"We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try
very hard... and too damn cheap," he once suggested carving into a wall on the
Grand Canyon, as a message for flying-saucer creatures.
He retired from novel writing in his later years, but continued to publish
short articles. He had a best-seller in 2005 with "A Man Without a Country," a
collection of his nonfiction work, including jabs at the Bush administration
("upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography") and the uncertain
future of the planet.
He called the book's success "a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life."
In recent years, Vonnegut worked as a senior editor and columnist at In These
Times. Bleifuss said he had been trying to get Vonnegut to write something more
for the magazine, but was unsuccessful.
"He would just say he's too old and that he had nothing more to say. He
realized, I think, he was at the end of his life," Bleifuss said.
Vonnegut, who had homes in Manhattan and the Hamptons in New York, adopted his
sister's three young children after she died. He also had three children of his
own with his first wife, Ann Cox, and later adopted a daughter, Lily, with his
second wife, the noted photographer Jill Krementz.
Vonnegut once said that of all the ways to die, he'd prefer to go out in an
airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. He often joked about the
difficulties of old age.
"When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age
is more like a semicolon," Vonnegut told The Associated Press in 2005.
"My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy late in life.
But he was proud of not committing suicide. And I'll do the same, so as not to
set a bad example for my children."
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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