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Kurt Vonnegut - R.I.P. Sermon by Harry Jones at the Unitarian Church of Evanston, July 1, 2007. My wife, Jo, and I were fortunate earlier this year to be in a covenant group with Barbara Pescan. When Kurt Vonnegut died in April it came out at one of our meetings that I was actually in mourning for the man. He had been my favorite living author for many years. I went on about him probably more than I should have, but when time came to plan the summer schedule, Barbara asked me if I would talk about Vonnegut on one of these Sunday mornings and I said sure, I’d be glad to, it would be a labor of love. And it is.
I first read Vonnegut in the 1970's when a couple of fellow Kansas City Star newspaper reporters — both almost a generation younger than I --- kept joking about someone named Kilgore Trout and when I finally asked them who Kilgore Trout was, they said he was a recurring character in the novels of the great Kurt Vonnegut, whom I had never read. Read him, they urged, and I did . First I tried Slaughterhouse Five or The Children’s Crusade, then Breakfast of Champions, loved both of them and vowed to read more soon.
About this time, however, I developed a bad case of sleep apnea syndrome and for nearly a decade I couldn’t drive a car long distances or sit through a movie or read a book without falling asleep. When I did read a book, I read it standing up. In 1989, however, after we had moved to the serenity of the Missouri Ozarks, a doctor got my sleep apnea under control with a breathing machine and suddenly I could read books again. My first reading project was everything Kurt Vonnegut had written – chronologically -- from Player Piano in 1952 to Bluebeard in 1987. I naturally would read his later books as soon as each appeared in the book stores.
One of my proudest possessions today is a letter Vonnegut wrote me in 1997, thanking me for my "friendship and encouragement" as expressed in a letter I had written him thanking him for writing all the wonderful books and short stories and essays and plays and poems he had produced in the last 47 years. He signed it with a self-portrait that is almost identical to the one that decorates the cover of his last book. ** Why do I like his writings so much? Lots of reasons. He was wildly inventive and wrote with a mischievous sense of humor. Then too, I found myself agreeing with just about everything he wrote: On religion. On politics. On war. On human relationships.. On Mark Twain and the Marx Brothers and Bob and Ray. On what meaning, if any, we can attach to life He not only put some fresh ideas into my head and reinforced others, he often gave them a fresh perspective.
He simply said it all so well.
The man just didn’t know how to be dull.
Before getting into his darker, more serious material, let me share with you a sample of his whimsical side. It was reprinted from one of his books in Harper’s magazine a few years ago and was titled "Technology and Me ":
"I work at home and if I wanted to, I’d have a computer right by my bed, and I’d never have to leave it. But I use a typewriter, and afterwards I mark up the pages with a pencil. Then I call up this woman named Carol out in Woodstock and say, "Are you still doing typing?" Sure she is, and her husband is trying to track bluebirds out there and not having much luck., and so we chitchat back and forth, and I say, "Okay, I’ll send you the pages." Then I go down the steps and my wife calls, "Where are you going?" "Well, I say, "I’m going to buy an envelope." And she says, "You’re not a poor man. Why don’t you buy a thousand envelopes. They’ll deliver them, and you can put them in the closet." And I say, "Hush." So I go to this newsstand across the street where they sell magazines and lottery tickets and stationery. I have to get in line because there are people buying candy and all that sort of thing, and I talk to them. The woman behind the counter has a jewel betwen her eyes, and when it’s my turn I ask her if there have been any big winners lately. I get my envelope and seal it up and go to the postal convenience center down the block at 47th Street and Second Avenue, where I am secretly in love with the woman behind the counter. I keep absolutely poker-faced; I never let her know how I feel about her. One time I had my pocket picked in there and got to meet a cop and tell him about it. Anyway, I address the envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of the post office, and I go home. And I’ve had a hell of a good time. I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different."
Vonnegut’s New York Times obituary said that "his dark, comic talent and urgent moral vision caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation.," and that his novels "became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 60's and 70's." I would not quarrel with that, but having read him in the 80's and 90's, and now in the 21st century, I can testify that what he had to say back then is still alive and worth reading. *** Of all the paragraphs in those first 16 books that I read in 1989, one impressed me so much that I reproduced it on my computer in large letters and framed it for my daughter, Elizabeth, because she is a music teacher and a good Episcopalian. It was from a 1980 sermon Vonnegut gave on Palm Sunday in an Episcopal church in New York City:
"I am enchanted by the Sermon on the Mount. Being merciful, it seems to me, is the only good idea we have received so far. Perhaps we will get another good idea by and by — then we will have two good ideas. What might that second good idea be? I don’t know. How could I know? I will make a wild guess that it will come from music somehow. I have often wondered what music is and why we love it so. It may be that music is that second good idea’s being born...."
This is entirely in keeping with this, from another of his books, when he said that virtually every writer he knew would have preferred to have been a musician "because music gives pleasure as WE never can. Music is the most pleasurable and magical thing we can experience. I’m honorary president of the American Humanist Association, but I simultaneously say that music is the proof of the existence of God...."
Balance that out with what he said in a 1974 interview in Playboy, when asked about his religious background: "My ancestors who came to the United States a little before the Civil War were atheists. So I’m not rebelling against organized religion. I never had any. I learned my outrageous opinions about organized religion at my mother’s knee... They came here absolutely crazy about the United States Constitution and about the possibility of prosperity and the brotherhood of man here. They were willing to work very hard here, and they were atheists." I had heard that Kurt Vonnegut was a Unitarian but the closest I could come to confirming this was in Fates Worse Than Death, his 1991 collection of essays and speeches. In this he wrote: "In order not to seem a spiritual quadriplegic to strangers trying to get a fix on me, I sometimes say I am a Unitarian Universalist. So that denomination claims me as one of its own." Then he told them what he thought of U.U’s, in a sermon at a Unitarian Church in Rochester, N.Y: "I have come all the way to Rochester to speak to a congregation of persons of such deep faith that they dare to be skeptical about widely accepted pronouncements of what life is all about, who call themselves Unitarian Universalists. So I should surely offer an opinion as to the present condition of that relatively small denomination.
"I will say that you, in terms of numbers, power and influence, and your spiritual difference with the general population, are analogous to the earliest Christians in the catacombs under Imperial Rome. I hasten to add that your hardships are not the same, nor are you in any danger (as they were) ........You are like the early Christians in yearning for an era of peace and plenty and justice, which may never come.
"They thought Jesus would bring that about. You think human beings should be able to create such an era through their own efforts." ** He most often identified himself a humanist, explaining:
"Humanists behave well without any expectation of either reward or punishment in an afterlife. We serve, as best we can, our community. When I was growing up, nobody ever said anything about Heaven, about an afterlife. They said that this life was enough...."
As you may already have noticed, Vonnegut seemed somewhat ambivalent about God, as maybe a lot of us are.. God figures in the titles of three of his books — God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian and Like Shaking Hands with God. In his Sirens of Titan, an early novel, he may have tipped his hand about how he regarded organized religion when he created the "Church of God the Utterly Indifferent," which came to dominate the planet in that novel. On the other hand, he also wrote this:
‘If it weren’t for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn’t want to be a human being. I would just as soon be a rattlesnake.’"
On yet another hand, in a sermon he gave at the First Parish Unitarian Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1980 he complained:
"What is so comical about religious people in modern times? They believe so many things which science has proved to be unknowable or absolutely wrong. How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash? For one thing, I guess, the balderdash is usually beautiful — and therefore echos excitingly in the most primitive lobes of our brains, where knowledge counts for nothing." ** So much for Vonnegut and religion. Let’s talk about war.
Vonnegut’s most famous and most successful novel, of course, was Slaughterhouse Five or The Children’s Crusade. It centers on the needless destruction of Dresden by allied bombers near the end of World War II. Vonnegut had witnessed this while a P.O.W. in Dresden. In his first chapter, Vonnegut tells of how he researched for the book, reuniting at one point with a close friend who had been in Dresden with him during the bombing. He went to visit the friend, Bernard O’Hare, with the intention of picking O’Hare’s brain about all that had happened, to refresh his memory of what he wanted to write about.. He found O’Hare’s wife, Mary, uncommonly agitated with him as he and her husband talked and as their young children slept upstairs. Finally she blurted out at him, "You were just babies then!" "‘What?’ I said. "‘You were just babies in the war – like the ones upstairs.’ "I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood. "‘But you’re not going to write it that way, are you?’ This wasn’t a question. It was an accusation. "‘I—I don’t know,’ I said. "‘Well, I know,’ she said. ‘You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. ""And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them . And they’ll be fought by babies just like the babies upstairs.’" "So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn’t want her babies or anybody else’s babies killed in wars. And she thought that wars were partly encouraged by books and movies. "So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise: ‘Mary,’ I said, ‘I don’t think this book of mine is ever going to be finished. I must have written 5,000 pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor, there won’t be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne. I’ll tell you what,’ I said. ‘I’ll call it the Children’s Crusade.’ "She was my friend after that."
In fact, she was one of two persons to whom he dedicated the book. And Billy Pilgrim, the book’s protagonist, was played by Michael Sacks, a gentle antitheses of the macho John Wayne warrior. Vonnegut loved the movie, by the way, because it was so true to the book.
The book came out in 1969 as opposition to the Vietnam war was growing. The timing was perfect and Vietnam no doubt played a major role in making the book the best-seller it became. *** And what did Kurt Vonnegut think about our current wars? In his last book, A Man Without a Country, which was published two years ago, he wrote this sadly pessimistic observation:
"Many years ago I was so innocent. I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for the dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace. "But now I know that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. ...... . Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated --- as I never was — like toys a rich kid got for Christmas."
*** What else did he think about our nation’s leadership? Elsewhere in the same book he wrote: "I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality show. I have one realty show that would really make your hair stand on end: ‘C-Students from Yale.’"
But enough about war. He had good thoughts on many topics.
Vonnegut was a close friend of Joe Heller, author of another outstanding anti-war book that was laced with humor, "Catch 22." I can’t finish here today without reading you a short poem that Vonnegut had in The New Yorker last year. It’s title was "Joe Heller," and it went:
True story, Word of Honor: Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer, now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island. I said, "Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel, ‘Catch 22' -7- has earned in its entire history?" And Joe said, "I’ve got something he can never have." And I said, "What on earth could that be, Joe?" And Joe said, "The knowledge that I’ve got enough." Not bad! Rest in peace! ***
Vonnegut never won a Pulitzer, but he received an even higher honor, to my way of thinking, when he was asked to write an introduction to a 2-volume, 2,400-page collection of Mark Twain’s writing. In that introduction, he compared H.L. Mencken to Twain and wrote a description that very ably fit Vonnegut himself:
"Both men (Twain and Mencken) were irreverent about so-called spiritual matters and conventional patriotism, I think. But their most admirable similarity was their genius for perceiving and exploiting the American language’s peculiar powers to surprise and amuse." ** Just two more Vonnegut quotes and I’ll be through.. My wife, Jo, insisted I include this first one because it has led us to something of a family slogan since we first read it. In A Man without a Country Vonnegut is writing about his Uncle Alex, who he identifies as his "good uncle."
"He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. And his principle complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’"
Vonnegut continued: "So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’" **
This final quote carried what I perceive to be Vonnegut’s most valuable advice to the world that he worried so much about. The theme pervaded much of what he wrote for more than half a century, It is from his 1965 novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, He was welcoming all newborn babes to the Earth in this way: "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 that I know of, babies — God damn it, you’ve got to be kind."
When Vonnegut spoke at the memorial service for Isaac Asimov, whom he would succeed as honorary president of the American Humanist Association, he wrote that he "rolled them in the aisles" when he told the audience of humanists, "Isaac is up in Heaven now." And he added:
"When my own time comes to join the choir invisible or whatever, God forbid, I hope someone will say, ‘He’s up in Heaven now.’ Who really knows?
Vonnegut died last April 10, at the age of 84.
So, okay, Kurt, I’ll say it, and maybe it’s so
Kurt Vonnegut is up in Heaven now. #
Unitarian Church of Evanston
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