Kurt Vonnegut: 1922-2007
by James Norton

Kurt Vonnegut is dead. The 84-year-old author of books including Cat's Cradle, Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan and Slaughterhouse-Five was a writer of tremendous power, whose works ranged far beyond the cloisters of "literature" in order to connect with all manner of readers. You didn't have to be a writer or English major to appreciate his work. In fact, his plainspoken style and digressions into genre writing are distinctly unfashionable among the smart set.

He wrote with a style that was elegantly forceful, always clear rather than mannered, and acidly funny about a tremendously dark and unpredictable universe. A war veteran and POW present during the Dresden firebombing, Vonnegut had no illusions about life being safe or humane.

But for all his darkness, and all the stylistic flourishes of his books — distorted timelines, the author as character, science fiction riffs, non-sequiturs — the core of the man's work is an essential and unwavering decency. There is a secular humanistic idea that keeps cropping up throughout his work: We are alone in a dangerous, cruel, unfair universe. Horrible things happen to good people, and evil people prosper. There is no inherent meaning to anything. And yet we must be decent to one another.

Vonnegut was a literary descendent of the great humanist Mark Twain (he in fact named one of his sons Mark), and in many ways was the author's heir. He was skeptical. He used humor both as a weapon against the wicked and a shield for the (relatively) innocent. He held few optimistic illusions personally, but was relatively gentle and sympathetic to the poor fools who still did. He had no tolerance whatsoever for the kinds of hypocrites, bullies, idiots and monsters who so often take and misuse power, much to the misfortune of everyone around them. And like Twain, he constantly agitated for causes that promoted human rights, stood against war, and represented enlightened tolerance in the face of cynical tribalism.

In 1997, while attending college in Madison, I had the opportunity to interview Vonnegut. He was promoting Timequake (his "final book," he declared at the time, and for most intents it was), and he agreed to meet with two writers from the competing daily student papers.

Among other things, I asked him: "What advice would you have for a 22-year-old kid who hopes to write books that have the same kind of impact that your books have had?"

He replied: "Forget impact. Forget readership, forget sales — just write organically. Let the work emerge from your experiences."

That was a holy moment for an impressionable young writer. And it remains some of the best advice I have ever received about working with words.

My colleague, an arts writer from the Badger Herald, later asked Vonnegut: "Are you obsessed with time, or is time obsessed with you?"

This remains the single dumbest question I have heard asked at a press conference.

In response, Vonnegut could have torn him limb from limb. He could have needled him with sarcasm, eviscerated him with direct evaluation of the question's lack of content, or simply refused to answer. But he didn't — he gamely took a stab at it, segued onto firmer ground, and discussed the creative process behind the book. He realized that the person asking him the question was a college kid, overawed and seeking to impress a famous man — in other words, someone much like myself. And he treated the kid decently. He treated me decently, too.

When you read Vonnegut's works, you marvel at his imagination, his gallows humor, his visceral sense of good and evil, and the elegance of his words. And you perceive a fundamental decency of character — which would be heartbreaking if revealed as a mask, or pose. But all the evidence I've read and seen suggests that it was real.

Vonnegut saw horrors in World War II that would transform his life and his fiction. His sister and brother-in-law both died in one week during 1958. In 2000, a fire nearly killed him, and damaged his archives.

Now he's gone. But he left us some books. So it goes.

E-mail James Norton at jim@flakmag.com.