They would be married in 1945, he declared as a [college] sophomore—he placed a bet on it with a fraternity brother. They would have a home with books and art and a well-stocked bar. They would have friends over for intellectual conversations. They would have seven kids. He traced sevens behind his paragraphs and signed most of his letters with seven X’s....
“The world is divided into two groups: us, and the other people,” he told her. “We’ll win against any combination of powers.” Once married, the pair began figuring out how to run that nation, which was to be, they decided, a nation of love, arts, common decency, and peace. Jane drafted a household constitution: “We cannot and will not live in and be hogtied by a society which not only has not faith in the things we have faith in, but which reviles and damns that faith with practically every breath it draws.”
Kurt was more pragmatic, casting about for career ideas—teaching, reporting, opening a library with a bar. Jane had just one idea, and she pressed it with patient determination. Kurt would be a writer—a great one....
December 8, 2015
"Many of the ideas and themes that characterize Vonnegut were born in the conversation between Kurt and Janet..."
"... and throughout his career she remained a voice in the text. She was there: that was her," writes Ginger Strand in The New Yorker.
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56 comments:
As I remember, Kurt was down in a basement Freezer in the Slaughterhouse while 100,000 Germans living peacefully in Dresden paid Karma in one night for Auschwitz's ovens.
The Mighty Eighth Airforce under Curtis LeMay did civilian targeting that ISIL under Al Baghdadi can only envy today.
Trump will find today's Curtis LeMay.
Nobody doesn't like Vonnegut's writing style.
“We cannot and will not live in and be hogtied by a society which not only has not faith in the things we have faith in, but which reviles and damns that faith with practically every breath it draws.” You can see why she wanted him to be the great writer.
I used to love Vonnegut. And I'm not ashamed to admit it.
They ultimately broke up, and if I am to believe Wikipedia it was because they lackec a shared faith. She went Christian and he was atheist.
@traditionalguy,
Vonnegut has an amazing personal story from WWII. No doubt about that.
But, I was reading some old classics in the summer, and read Fahrenheit 451, and frankly I was surprised at how bad it was. A literary hunk of junk. A weird pseudo-leftist commentary, with the penetrating message, "War is Bad," mixed into a random slog of discordant words, phrases, and sentences. Wow, thanks for the insight Kurt!
Catch-22, on the other hand, is indeed a masterpiece:)
These are merely my opinions, and are subject to change
The sixties was when the WWII generation began to divorce, a theme developed and brought to full bloom by their children. Being a mediocre writer driven to success by his wife may have also played a part.
Bay Area Guy, Ray Bradbury wrote Farenheit 451.
Bay Area Guy, Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451, and how is it about war?? Are you recalling the right book?
Don't think he wrote Catch 22 or F-451
> Catch-22, on the other hand, is indeed a masterpiece
It is one of the few that survive from the sixties. But it is not an honest novel, it didn't match Joseph Heller's own experience of the military. So perhaps it is best considered a triumph of imaginative fiction, i.e., fantasy.
PS, Ray Bradbury wrote "Fahrenheit 451", and he was a conservative, at least in later life. I suspect you have the wrong work in mind.
Doh! I meant Slaughterhouse 5. Now, I look like a literary idiot!
Thank you @I Have Misplaced My Pants. I owe you a new pair of Yoga Pants, preferably from the new Hillary ensemble.
Everything I said above relates to Slaughter 5, not Fahrenheit 451.
The Sirens of Titan
@ dustbunny -- ditto apologies to you, as well!
A mediocre writer with a mediocre intellect. His writing was clunky and childish; his stories were childish too.
You want junk from the '60s, try Philip K. Dick. Very little passes the smell test.
I used to love Vonnegut too. Unfortunately, I read his last book. Terrible. Just filled with bile and bitterness. The publishers should've let well enough alone. Same with Fitzgerald. I think Tender is the Night is breathtaking but his last book, which I'm not even going to bother to find the name of, was written in an alcoholic delerium and its obvious
And I just read Fahrenheit 451 this month and its sent me on a Ray Bradbury binge. Definitely worth picking up
Catch 22, like Dylan's lyrics, were written by a
Hebrew Prophets as a sign from God that God is alive and well for all the intellectuals that claim they are atheists.
In my line of work, the older (book-smarter) Vonnegut brother has more influence.
Bay Area Guy said...
Everything I said above relates to Slaughter 5, not Fahrenheit 451.
Denizens of Dresden auto-ignite at 5 degrees F ?
traditionalguy said...
Catch 22, like Dylan's lyrics, were written by a Hebrew Prophets[sic] as a sign from God that God is alive and well for all the intellectuals that claim they are atheists.
Maybe that's why I couldn't stand to read it.
"Kurt? Kurt Vonnegut, is that you?"
"Yes Laslo, I am Kurt Vonnegut. I am on the other side of Space and Time, and have found a puckered Space Hole that brings me to you."
"Puckered Space Hole? Really? Is it anything like that asshole you drew in "Breakfast of Champions"?"
"It is almost EXACTLY like the asshole I drew in "Breakfast of Champions".
"Why are you here now, with me?"
"Well, this is where this particular Space Hole ends. That's pretty much it. Random, really."
"No one at Althouse will believe this!"
"Ah, Althouse. I like her writing. "Splooge stooges": I wish I had come up with that one."
"You read blogs from wherever you are?"
"Ah: the Astral Plane receives all the zeroes and ones that are cast off into the atmosphere. Words never die. Thoughts last. Stupidity lasts forever."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. You know, you might want to remember that sometimes before you hit "Publish," Laslo..."
"Point taken, Mr. Vonnegut. So is where you are... Heaven?"
"I'm not sure. I have the Complete Fullness of Time in the Universe to reread all of my writings and dwell for centuries on all of the little details and word choices I would surely change now, if given the opportunity: I'm not sure if that makes this Heaven or Hell."
"So if you were to do it again, you might not be a writer?"
"Oh, I'd be a writer, all right. But I'd be a BLACK writer. No one remembers us Twentieth-Century White Writers anymore."
"I've accepted it, I have; but Norman Mailer, it really makes him angry..."
I am Laslo.
Vonnegut was my absolute favorite in high school. I bought Timequake in college and didn't finish it because I hated it, but that was an anomaly.
A few years ago I tried to go back and read some of the books of his that I loved in high school, but they didn't hold the same magic. Like Vonnegut's wife, The Brothers Karamazov is my favorite book, and like his wife, I became a Christian. Their marriage broke up, and I'm not into his writing anymore. His books are more enjoyable to the atheist mind, I think.
Jane drafted a household constitution: “We cannot and will not live in and be hogtied by a society which not only has not faith in the things we have faith in, but which reviles and damns that faith with practically every breath it draws.”
Holding contempt for the mass of humanity is not a sign of a healthy mind. Writing down that contempt puts you even further away from humanity, which, I suppose, is the point. Unless you are younger than 24 years of age, or are a lifelong bachelor. In that case you acting according to your nature.
This is what I disliked about Christopher Hitchens. He not only put himself above the religious figures he reviled, he put himself above the people who did not revile the same religious people he reviled. Hitch was never very good at explaining how he developed the moral sensitivity that he (of course) considered better than every other person's moral sensitivity. He just got lucky, maybe? Innate superiority?
Laslo, thanks.
Terry, I don't know your background but I see hope and aspiration in the statement, not condemnation and contempt.
Vonnegut's sentences were short and usually sarcastic... it was as if he could not say straight out what he felt, like what he felt was so intense that it was best to satirize it. I like that in some authors but not in Vonnegut. It's an evasion that seems to be intended to cow the reader with the intense morality of his feelings.
I hate that every novel I loved in my youth seems unreadable now.
Vonnegut had an original style, he claimed to never have taken a writing class and I believe it. But his politics were infantile. That's why he didn't age well--I didn't notice back then how stupid his ideas are.
I hate that every novel I loved in my youth seems unreadable now.
No kidding! With so few exceptions. Maybe I should go back and read the ones I hated.
Unknown, the full quote is:
“The world is divided into two groups: us, and the other people,” he told her. “We’ll win against any combination of powers.” Once married, the pair began figuring out how to run that nation, which was to be, they decided, a nation of love, arts, common decency, and peace. Jane drafted a household constitution: “We cannot and will not live in and be hogtied by a society which not only has not faith in the things we have faith in, but which reviles and damns that faith with practically every breath it draws.”
The society that the Vonneguts lived in, post WW2 America, was wealthier, with a larger, more educated middle class than any society in all of world history. What would it mean to believe that society reviled and damns "love, arts, common decency, and peace"? Surely not hope and aspiration for society?
traditionalguy said...
Nobody doesn't like Vonnegut's writing style.
Proven wrong by these comments. Sometimes it was annoying. That may have been a comment on my moods more than the writing style.
A guy in his middle age next to me on a plane last month was reading Catcher in the Rye. He had an old beat up paperback edition, which he said he was rereading after 30 years.
I asked him how it read to him now. He said he was loving it. Kept his nose in the book for most of the flight.
He wasn't froom New York either.
"I hate that every novel I loved in my youth seems unreadable now."
This. All that '70's crap that seemed so cutting edge and transgressive then, is now, clearly, a steaming pile of kalakala. Who would give Tom Robbins two seconds of their time now?
Terry said...
Hitch was never very good at explaining how he developed the moral sensitivity that he (of course) considered better than every other person's moral sensitivity.
Lying about someone isn't a very good display of your morality.
He just got lucky, maybe? Innate superiority?
That information is very easy to find, so obviously you would rather complain and insult than learn.
Hitchens—The Morals of an Atheist (has transcript - I never watch these kinds of videos).
But this article by fellow atheist Steven Pinker is better: The Moral Instinct.
Since you don't like learning, you won't be reading Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature.
Hey Laslo: Nice!
I've read most of Vonnegut, mostly in the 60s and early 70s. What has stayed with me have been a few of his short stories and his novel Mother Night. I've read that over and over. A very moving novel and a great film with Nick Nolte, Alan Arkin and John Goodman as the Blue Fairy. I've seen it a number of times and it gets better on each viewing.
I never understood the appeal of Slaughterhouse 5 either the book or the movie.
In the 70s, or perhaps the early 80's, PBS did a 2-3 hour presentation of Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi with Vonnegut narrating. My very favorite Twain book and an excellent presentation. I've found a few bits and pieces but have never found the whole thing. Still sticks in my mind after all these years.
John Henry
I don't get the appeal of Joseph Heller. Catch-22 I get the appeal of. I've read that book 8-10 times though probably not in the past 30 years. Even after repeated readings, I would still laugh out loud in places.
I remember being particularly struck the first time I read Yossarian saying "They're trying to kill me." Well, yeah, that is kind of the idea and you are trying to kill them too. I'd never thought of war that way before: "They're trying to kill ME I think in that one sentence he nails the entire idea.
I have tried to read Heller's other novels and I found them completely unreadable. I was unable to get more than a chapter or so in. I had to force that thinking "This is the guy wrote Catch-22, give him a chance, he'll break out." and he never did.
John Henry
The Britts bombed Dresden, not the US 8th Air Force, and Le May was in the Pacific when it happened.
Blogger Valentine Smith said...
I hate that every novel I loved in my youth seems unreadable now.
Some novels have turned out like that for me. I don't care much for any science fiction, with a few exceptions. From about 19 to 23 years old I probably read 5-6 Sci-Fi novels a week. I probably burned myself out.
There is also an opposite effect in play, at least for me. High School completely turned me off several authors that we read. Dickens, Trollope, Conrad to name a couple. In my 20's I stumbled across Conrad's Typhoon and have been an ardent reader ever since. Just listened to Heart of Darkness again last month at Librivox. I've read his sea stories over and over and over again. I've probably read Youth 100 times. It has some of the best paragraphs I've ever read besides being a great sea story.
I am a big Trollope fan as well. Currently listening to The Three Clerks and have read and/or listened to dozens of his other novels.
I go hot and cold on Dickens but when I do read him, I enjoy him.
Orwell was completely ruined for me with 1984 and Animal Farm. It was not till grad school that I realized he had written anything else. All of it better than either of those, good as they are.
Ditto Nevil Shute and On the Beach. I didn't realize he had done anything else until the 90s. Then I got so immersed in him that I founded the Nevil Shute Society (Now the Nevil Shute Foundation www.nevilshute.org) in the early days of the web.
God Damn! my high school teachers for ruining so many authors for so long. Thank God I have refound them. The authors, not the teachers. It is not that I was not a reader in HS. I learned to read, (really read) in 5th grade and have probably averaged 2 books a week ever since. So it was not that. I think Ed School teaches English teachers to take anything remotely interesting then beat the crap out of it until it is duller than dishwater.
John Henry
I still like Richard Brautigan, though. Though I think he was tapping into something older and more essentially American than the self-consciously coy rubbish spewed out by so many others.
First of all, Fernandinande, I never made any claim about my own morality.
I never watch videos when I can read a transcript either. The transcript begins:
>>Why do you find it insulting?
>> Because I think it's degrading to the human, to us, to you and me, to imply, or not to imply, to state directly that absent a celestial dictatorship that have some supernatural influence over us, yet to be established, by the way, as anything really existent, but without the assumption of it, we wouldn't know right from wrong. We wouldn't return stolen property if we found it in the back of a cab. We wouldn't give blood if someone badly needed a transfusion unless we were afraid, either of punishment or desirous of reward, that we might help ourselves to underage children as some religious people have actually been known to do because, after all, what's stopping us? Now, you could tell me if you wanted, that you would do all those things if you weren't God fearing but I would choose not to believe you. I have more respect for you, if not for your opinions, than that.
This is handwaiving, Fernandinande. The problem is that if knowledge of right and wrong is innate (and it is not irreligious to say it is), what makes right, right, and wrong, wrong? Hitch goes for evolution (Hitch had no education as a natural scientist), which puts him in the trap of believing that nature -- human nature -- decrees what is right and wrong. This gives nature a moral sense, which of course nature, blind and unknowing, does not have.
I'm surprised you are impressed by this. Perhaps nature produced me in such a way that my survival depends on doing all the things that Hitch says are against my innate beliefs -- robbery, murder, and so forth. In what way is this wrong? Morality is more than might makes right, I hope, or what spreads my genes. You find this again and again with Hitchens. He thunders against what he sees as wickedness like John Donne giving a sermon, then insists that morality is something natural and mechanistic, as though a tiger that is better at killing and producing healthy young is acting in a more moral fashion than the other tigers.
It's more apparent in the transcript than it is in the video, but Hitch frequently deploys some tricks in a debate. I wouldn't call it rhetorical trick, more of a ploy. When he is pressed, and he has (apparently) a hard time coming up with a reply, he says something outrageous, as a distraction, I suppose.
For one example, in the transcript, when pressed about how man -- who knows right from wrong innately -- can produce the mass killings of the 20th century, Hitch says that the Nazis were the right wing of the Catholic church.
Now this is nonsense. Germany was not a Catholic nation. In governance it was influenced more by Protestantism than by Catholicism. To make the connection, Hitch has to throw Spain and Italy into the pot (Catholic nations), but the problem is that if fascism had only been Spain and Italy, fascism would be a historical footnote. German 'werewolf brigades', deployed during the Warsaw rebellion of 1944, burned a Catholic hospital, killing the patients, and then stripped, flogged, raped, and murdered the catholic sisters who ran the hospital. This is out of control Catholicism? The mass deaths of the 20th century can't sensibly be blamed on Catholicism. Hitch then segues to blaming the Czars for Stalin's crimes -- because the czar was the protector and sponsor of the Russian orthodox church Yet somehow he never got around to mass murder himself.
I like Hitchens. I've read more Hitchens than you may think I have, Fernandinande. But their is a reason why, in the Hitchens-Galloway, the insult that Galoway flung at Hitchens that hurt Hitch most (by his own admission) was that Hitch was a poppinjay.
The best novel written the 1960s was Richard McKenna's The Sand Pebbles. I am serious. It is a masterpiece.
Being an English Literature major in college almost killed my love for literature. Fortunately I recovered, in part (I think) because I never attended graduate school. Instead I became a writer. Still am.
In the 1980s I discovered Cormac McCarthy. Holy smokes. I briefly corresponded with him. I wrote him a letter and he wrote back. A high point in my life then, and now.
At one point The Naked and The Dead and From Here to Eternity vied for the title of Great American Novel of WWII. I don't think anyone reads them anymore. The contest is between Slaughterhouse 5 and Catch 22. Those are the two books about WWII that are still read. I'd give Catch 22 seventeen points on Slaughterhouse 5, but they're both pretty good and even better if read in high school..........It doesn't matter what you think about Vonnegut now. If you read him as a young person, he is part of who you are.......Novels are mostly for young people. They have curiousity about how life turns out and how people play out their hands. After a certain age you know how it turns out and the winning hands are bluffs.
The only thing I remember about The Brothers Karamazov is the holy monk whose corpse started to stink. The Russian Orthodox had this weird belief that if you had a pure soul then your corpse wouldn't putrefy. As I remember, one of the brothers had a crisis of faith when the holy man's corpse got ripe. Thank God the holy man didn't own a cat........After the revolution, the Bolshies dug up the corpses of saints to show that they had decayed. Interesting to note that they themselves took such elaborate measures to preserve Lenin's corpse in a pristine state. Faith can never be created or destroyed, but it is easily redirected,
Blogger Roughcoat said...
The best novel written the 1960s was Richard McKenna's The Sand Pebbles. I am serious. It is a masterpiece.
Thanks, roughcoat!
Just bought it for my Kindle!
http://www.amazon.com/Sand-Pebbles-RosettaBooks-into-Film-ebook/dp/B003XREM2Y/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
I, too, am a recovering English lit major. I never became a writer, however.
I've recently been working my way through Joseph Conrad's better known stories and novels. The Sand Pebbles should fit right in there.
Gravity's Rainbow is the most interesting novel set during WW2
I read and liked a lot of Vonnegut when I was in high school. Not sure I'd want to take it on again and I don't have to.
Michener's Tales of the South Pacific won the Pulitzer in '48.
Tales of the South Pacific is a cracking read.
But everybody was putting their shoes in Hemingway's footsteps in those days, including Louis L'Amour. L'Amour's WW2 stories are like a Hemingway pastiche. Miller, IMHO, wasn't much better.
Again IMHO, the A.B. Guthrie westerns, The Big Sky, and The Way West, 1947 and 1948 (The Way West won the Pulitzer in 1950) were far better novels than any of the WW2 novels written by more popular authors, and they aren't Hemingwayesque at all.
Terry, thanks for the trenchant takedown of Hitch. While I would have loved to have sat down over an 18-year-old single malt with the admittedly gifted raconteur and greatly admire his unwavering opposition to Islamist terrorism, why anyone has ever mistaken his amusing bafflegab for erudition or sophistication has always been beyond me. But then, the American electorate put someone without even Hitch's rhetorical gifts, ostensibly as a brilliant thinker and speaker, in the White House, not once, but twice. In any case, we see the magic of tribal self-selection: Hitch's brother Peter is still with us, but gets no air time because he has the poor taste to be his brother's religious and political opposite.
BTW, since I am a Hoosier, let me just add that there is something ineluctably Hoosier about Vonnegut, in spite of his infantile politics. If anything, I suspect that it was that combination of reflexive atheism and socialism in the decidedly non-evangelical-Bible-belt, mainline-Catholic-and-Protestant, industrial-commercial Indiana—the Indiana that gave us governors Evan Bayh (D) and Mitch Daniels (R) who both ran the state at a surplus; must be something in the water, or something—that especially drove Vonnegut nuts. Wake up, sheeple! Can't you see that your devout-but-not-in-your-face Christianity and your being paid to help your employer bring in revenue in excess of their operating costs is a sham!?
Indiana is a bad place to be an aesthete. It tends to nice the exquisite sensitivity right out of you.
I couldn't believe it when I found out later on that Vonnegut wasn't writing everything ironically. Suddenly I lost all respect for him.
Terry:
What would it mean to believe that society reviled and damns "love, arts, common decency, and peace"? Surely not hope and aspiration for society?
An aspiration, a hope, a goal.
The statement could be in application a driver for a number of actions, including activism (to attempt to make changes where society did not meet the criteria) or maybe finding a better place to live -- the "society" that one lives in is not defined by a monolithic, national stereotype but is more localized.
I move about every 10 years, and find huge differences in my personal interpretations of these specific items. I've lived in (relatively) big cities & small towns in the mid-west, northeast, deep south, Florida (southernmost northern state), and Austin (as in "you've got to drive through Texas to get to Austin"). Someday I'll retire and pick the place I want.
Terry said...
This is handwaiving, Fernandinande. The problem is that if knowledge of right and wrong is innate (and it is not irreligious to say it is), what makes right, right, and wrong, wrong? Hitch goes for evolution (Hitch had no education as a natural scientist), which puts him in the trap of believing that nature -- human nature -- decrees what is right and wrong. This gives nature a moral sense, which of course nature, blind and unknowing, does not have. I'm surprised you are impressed by this.
Didn't say I was impressed. You asked why Hitchens thought something, and the only person to answer that is him.
I've never looked to Hitchens to supply any answers or philosophical direction; like you said, he's not a scientist, and if you'd asked "where do atheists think 'moral' behavior comes from?" (a better question is: "why do people behave as they do?"), it wouldn't have occurred to me to mention him. As far as arguing with Bishops or whoever, I'm not interested, in exactly the same way as I'm not interested in debates about the existence and influence of Aztec or Norse gods. It's not an issue.
I like Hitchens. I've read more Hitchens than you may think I have, Fernandinande.
Well, that's probably good, and I've read far less Hitchens than you may think I have.
Terry said...
Again IMHO, the A.B. Guthrie westerns, The Big Sky,
One of my favorite books. I read his semi-autobiographical "Arfive" a few days ago, it wasn't as good.
Vonnegut is so pessimistic and cynical that he is wasted on the young, and serves only to depress them. And he is too simplistic of anyone but the young.
Give me Douglas Adams any day.
From an Indianapolis friend of mine, a Vonnegut nephew:
Thanks for the interesting Vonnegut info. Just a small point, Kurt only took in three of my Uncle Jimmy's four sons. A cousin named Charles Nice took in the youngest son. He lived in Alabama and was a lawyer and judge.
Pete
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