(HOST) One of commentator Tom Slayton’s favorite authors died recently. Here’s his fond fairwell…
(SLAYTON) Kurt Vonnegut, humorist, novelist, and curmudgeon, died a couple of weeks ago. Chances are it didn’t displease him all that much.
It was Vonnegut, after all, who once playfully suggested that he was going to sue the makers of Pall Mall cigarettes for “a billion bucks.” He said he had been chain-smoking unfiltered Pall Malls ever since he was twelve years old, and, although the company had promised to kill him – in a warning right on the package – he was still alive in his eighties. “Thanks a lot, you dirty rats.” he wrote.
I discovered Vonnegut in the 1970s. Like many other idealistic young people disillusioned by the Vietnam War, I found Vonnegut’s dark, pessimistic satires attractive.
He saw clearly the horrible follies of our society and held them up to ridicule. He believed in the things many of us believed in: the futility of war, the venality of much of what passes for everyday life, the desperate need to stop degrading the environment – but instead of earnestly denouncing such evils – anyone could do that – he made fun of them. He skewered them and made us laugh. It was refreshing.
For the next fifteen years, I read just about everything by Vonnegut that I could get my hands on. His novels were weird blends of science fiction, social criticism, and ribaldry – all brought together in a darkly comic world view that saw human life on planet Earth as a deadly farce, and urged us to at least have the decency to laugh at ourselves, and be kind to others.
Vonnegut wrote in his last book, A Man Without A Country, that he was a humanist – that is, he said, someone who tries to act decently and honorably, ” without any expectation of rewards or punishment in an afterlife.”
“But if Christ hadn’t delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity,” he added, “I wouldn’t want to be a human. I’d just as soon be a rattlesnake.”
Vonnegut wrote fourteen novels but is perhaps best known for Slaughterhouse Five, a fictionalized account of the central experience of his life – surviving the Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany, as a prisoner of war.
He was trenchantly, brilliantly funny. But every now and then, he would tell us directly how he felt about life. The effect could be devastating.
In God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, he summed up his moral view succinctly in a benediction:
“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule I know of, babies… you’ve got to be kind.”
When he died in mid-April, the New York Times gave Vonnegut a rare full-page obit, which praised him but noted that some of his critics said he was inconsistent or even incoherent as a writer and philosopher.
Though his writing was never incoherent, his philosophy may have been inconsistent at times.
But he wasn’t really a philosopher or a reformer, not in the usual sense. Kurt Vonnegut was a humorist. He made us laugh.
And these days, that’s essential.
Tom Slayton is editor-emeritus of Vermont Life magazine.