Authors: Kurt Vonnegut
INTERVIEWER:
The Franklin Library is bringing out a deluxe edition of
Slaughterhouse-Five
, I believe.
VONNEGUT:
Yes. I was required to write a new introduction for it.
INTERVIEWER:
Did you have any new thoughts?
VONNEGUT:
I said that only one person on the entire planet benefited from the raid, which must have cost tens of millions of dollars. The raid didn’t shorten the war by half a second, didn’t weaken a German defense or attack anywhere, didn’t free a single person from a death camp. Only one person benefited—not two or five or ten. Just one.
INTERVIEWER:
And who was that?
VONNEGUT:
Me. I got three dollars for each person killed. Imagine that.
INTERVIEWER:
How much affinity do you feel toward your contemporaries?
VONNEGUT:
My brother and sister writers? Friendly, certainly.
It’s hard for me to talk to some of them, since we seem to be in very different sorts of businesses. This was a mystery to me for a while, but then Saul Steinberg—
INTERVIEWER:
The graphic artist?
VONNEGUT:
Indeed. He said that in almost all arts there were some people who responded strongly to art history, to triumphs and fiascoes and experiments of the past, and others who did not. I fell into the second group, and had to. I couldn’t play games with my literary ancestors, since I had never studied them systematically. My education was as a chemist at Cornell and then an anthropologist at the University of Chicago. Christ—I was thirty-five before I went crazy about Blake, forty before I read
Madame Bovary
, forty-five before I’d even heard of Céline. Through dumb luck, I read
Look Homeward, Angel
exactly when I was supposed to.
INTERVIEWER:
When?
VONNEGUT:
At the age of eighteen.
INTERVIEWER:
So you’ve always been a reader?
VONNEGUT:
Yes. I grew up in a house crammed with books. But I never had to read a book for academic credit, never had to write a paper about it, never had to prove I’d understood it in a seminar. I am a hopelessly clumsy discusser of books. My experience is nil.
INTERVIEWER:
Which member of your family had the most influence on you as a writer?
VONNEGUT:
My mother, I guess. Edith Lieber Vonnegut. After our family lost almost all of its money in the Great Depression, my mother thought she might make a new fortune by writing for the slick magazines. She took short story courses at night. She studied magazines the way gamblers study racing forms.
INTERVIEWER:
She’d been rich at one time?
VONNEGUT:
My father, an architect of modest means, married one of the richest girls in town. It was a brewing
fortune based on Lieber Lager Beer and then Gold Medal Beer. Lieber Lager became Gold Medal after winning a prize at some Paris exposition.
INTERVIEWER:
It must have been a very good beer.
VONNEGUT:
Long before my time. I never tasted any. It had a secret ingredient, I know. My grandfather and his brewmaster wouldn’t let anybody watch while they put it in.
INTERVIEWER:
Do you know what it was?
VONNEGUT:
Coffee.
INTERVIEWER:
So your mother studied short story writing?
VONNEGUT:
And my father painted pictures in a studio he’d set up on the top floor of the house. There wasn’t much work for architects during the Great Depression—not much work for anybody. Strangely enough, though, Mother was right: Even mediocre magazine writers were making money hand over fist.
INTERVIEWER:
So your mother took a very practical attitude toward writing.
VONNEGUT:
Not to say crass. She was a highly intelligent, cultivated woman, by the way. She went to the same high school I did, and was one of the few people who got nothing but A-plusses while she was there. She went east to a finishing school after that, and then traveled all over Europe. She was fluent in German and French. I still have her high school report cards somewhere. “A-plus, A-plus, A-plus …” She was a good writer, it turned out, but she had no talent for the vulgarity the slick magazines required. Fortunately, I was loaded with vulgarity, so, when I grew up, I was able to make her dream come true. Writing for
Collier’s
and
The Saturday Evening Post
and
Cosmopolitan
and
Ladies’ Home Journal
and so on was as easy as falling off a log for me. I only wish she’d lived to see it. I only wish she’d
lived to see all her grandchildren. She has ten. She didn’t even get to see the first one. I made another one of her dreams come true: I lived on Cape Cod for many years. She always wanted to live on Cape Cod. It’s probably very common for sons to try to make their mothers’ impossible dreams come true. I adopted my sister’s sons after she died, and it’s spooky to watch them try to make her impossible dreams come true.
INTERVIEWER:
What were your sister’s dreams like?
VONNEGUT:
She wanted to live like a member of
The Swiss Family Robinson
, with impossibly friendly animals in impossibly congenial isolation. Her oldest son, Jim, has been a goat farmer on a mountain top in Jamaica for the past eight years. No telephone. No electricity.
INTERVIEWER:
The Indianapolis high school you and your mother attended—
VONNEGUT:
And my father. Shortridge High.
INTERVIEWER:
It had a daily paper, I believe.
VONNEGUT:
Yes.
The Shortridge Daily Echo
. There was a print shop right in the school. Students wrote the paper. Students set the type. After school.
INTERVIEWER:
You just laughed about something.
VONNEGUT:
It was something dumb I remembered about high school. It doesn’t have anything to do with writing.
INTERVIEWER:
You care to share it with us anyway?
VONNEGUT:
Oh—I just remembered something that happened in a high school course on civics, on how our government worked. The teacher asked each of us tó stand up in turn and tell what we did after school. I was sitting in the back of the room, sitting next to a guy named J. T. Alburger. He later became an insurance man in Los Angeles. He died fairly recently. Anyway— he kept nudging me, urging me, daring me to tell the
truth about what I did after school. He offered me five dollars to tell the truth. He wanted me to stand up and say, “I make model airplanes and jerk off”
INTERVIEWER:
I see.
VONNEGUT:
I also worked on
The Shortridge Daily Echo
.
INTERVIEWER:
Was that fun?
VONNEGUT:
Fun and easy. I’ve always found it easy to write. Also, I learned to write for peers rather than for teachers. Most beginning writers don’t get to write for peers—to catch hell from peers.
INTERVIEWER:
SO every afternoon you would go to the
Echo
office—
VONNEGUT:
Yeah. And one time, while I was writing, I happened to sniff my armpits absent-mindedly. Several people saw me do it, and thought it was funny—and ever after that I was given the name “Snarf.” In the Annual for my graduating class, the Class of 1940, I’m listed as “Kurt Snarfield Vonnegut, Jr.” Technically, I wasn’t really a snarf. A snarf was a person who went around sniffing girls’ bicycle saddles. I didn’t do that. “Twerp” also had a very specific meaning, which few people know now. Through careless usage, “twerp” is a pretty formless insult now.
INTERVIEWER:
What is a twerp in the strictest sense, in the original sense?
VONNEGUT:
It’s a person who inserts a set of false teeth between the cheeks of his ass.
INTERVIEWER:
I see.
VONNEGUT:
I beg your pardon; between the cheeks of his or
her
ass. I’m always offending feminists that way.
INTERVIEWER:
I don’t quite understand why someone would do that with false teeth.
VONNEGUT:
In order to bite the buttons off the back seats of taxicabs. That’s the only reason twerps do it. It’s all that turns them-on.
INTERVIEWER:
You went to Cornell University after Short-ridge?
VONNEGUT:
I imagine.
INTERVIEWER:
You imagine?
VONNEGUT:
I had a friend who was a heavy drinker. If somebody asked him if he’d been drunk the night before, he would always answer off-handedly, “Oh, I imagine.” I’ve always liked that answer. It acknowledges life as a dream. Cornell was a boozy dream, partly because of booze itself, and partly because I was enrolled exclusively in courses I had no talent for. My father and brother agreed that I should study chemistry, since my brother had done so well with chemicals at M.I.T. He’s eight years older than I am. Funnier, too. His most famous discovery is that silver iodide will sometimes make it rain or snow.
INTERVIEWER:
Was your sister funny, too?
VONNEGUT:
Oh, yes. There was an odd cruel streak to her sense of humor, though, which didn’t fit in with the rest of her character somehow. She thought it was terribly funny whenever anybody fell down. One time she saw a woman come out of a streetcar horizontally, and she laughed for weeks after that.
INTERVIEWER:
Horizontally?
VONNEGUT:
Yes. This woman must have caught her heels somehow. Anyway, the streetcar door opened, and my sister happened to be watching from the sidewalk, and then she saw this woman come out horizontally—as straight as a board, facedown, and about two feet off the ground.
INTERVIEWER:
Slapstick?
VONNEGUT:
Sure. We loved Laurel and Hardy. You know what one of the funniest things is that can happen in a film?
INTERVIEWER:
No.
VONNEGUT:
To have somebody walk through what looks like a shallow little puddle, but which is actually six feet deep. I remember a movie where Cary Grant was loping across lawns at night. He came to a low hedge, which he cleared ever so gracefully, only there was a twenty-foot drop on the other side. But the thing my sister and I loved best was when somebody in a movie would tell everybody off, and then make a grand exit into the coat closet. He had to come out again, of course, all tangled in coathangers and scarves.
INTERVIEWER:
Did you take a degree in chemistry at Cornell?
VONNEGUT:
I was flunking everything by the middle of my junior year. I was delighted to join the Army and go to war. After the war, I went to the University of Chicago, where I was pleased to study anthropology, a science that was mostly poetry, that involved almost no math at all. I was married by then, and soon had one kid, who was Mark. He would later go crazy, of course, and write a fine book about it—
The Eden Express
. He has just fathered a kid himself, my first grandchild, a boy named Zachary. Mark is finishing his second year in Harvard Medical School, and will be about the only member of his class not to be in debt when he graduates—because of the book. That’s a pretty decent recovery from a crackup, I’d say.
INTERVIEWER:
Did the study of anthropology later color your writings?
VONNEGUT:
It confirmed my atheism, which was the faith of my fathers anyway. Religions were exhibited and studied as the Rube Goldberg inventions I’d always thought they were. We weren’t allowed to find one culture superior to any other. We caught hell if we mentioned races much. It was highly idealistic.
INTERVIEWER:
Almost a religion?
VONNEGUT:
Exactly. And the only one for me. So far.
INTERVIEWER:
What was your dissertation?
VONNEGUT:
Cat’s Cradle
.
INTERVIEWER:
But you wrote that years after you left Chicago, didn’t you?
VONNEGUT:
I left Chicago without writing a dissertation— and without a degree. All my ideas for dissertations had been rejected, and I was broke, so I took a job as a P.R. man for General Electric in Schenectady. Twenty years later, I got a letter from a new dean at Chicago, who had been looking through my dossier. Under the rules of the university, he said, a published work of high quality could be substituted for a dissertation, so I was entitled to an M.A. He had shown
Cat’s Cradle
to the Anthropology Department, and they had said it was halfway decent anthropology, so they were mailing me my degree. I’m Class of 1972 or so.
INTERVIEWER:
Congratulations.
VONNEGUT:
It was nothing, really. A piece of cake.
INTERVIEWER:
Some of the characters in
Cat’s Cradle
were based on people you knew at G.E., isn’t that so?
VONNEGUT:
Dr. Felix Hoenikker, the absent-minded scientist, was a caricature of Dr. Irving Langmuir, the star of the G.E. Research Laboratory. I knew him some. My brother worked with him. Langmuir was wonderfully absent-minded. He wondered out loud one time whether, when turtles pulled in their heads, their spines buckled or contracted. I put that in the book. One time he left a tip under his plate after his wife served him breakfast at home. I put that in. His most important contribution, though, was the idea for what I called “Ice-9,” a form of frozen water that was stable at room temperature. He didn’t tell it directly to me. It was a legend around the Laboratory—about the time H. G. Wells came to Schenectady. That was long before my
time. I was just a little boy when it happened—listening to the radio, building model airplanes.
INTERVIEWER:
Yes?
VONNEGUT:
Anyway—Wells came to Schenectady, and Langmuir was told to be his host. Langmuir thought he might entertain Wells with an idea for a science-fiction story—about a form of ice that was stable at room temperature. Wells was uninterested, or at least never used the idea. And then Wells died, and then, finally, Langmuir died. I thought to myself: “Finders, keepers—the idea is mine.” Langmuir, incidentally, was the first scientist in private industry to win a Nobel Prize.