Kurt Vonnegut: Breakfast of Champions

The fan letter came much too late. It wasn’t good news. It was perceived as an invasion of privacy by Kilgore Trout. The letter from

Rosewater promised that he would make Trout famous. This is what Trout had to say about that, with only his parakeet listening: “Keep the hell out of my body bag.”

A body bag was a large plastic envelope for a freshly killed American soldier. It was a new invention.

I do not know who invented the body bag. I do know who invented Kilgore Trout. I did.

I made him snaggle-toothed. I gave him hair, but I turned it white. I wouldn’t let him comb it or go to a barber. I made him grow it long and tangled.

I gave him the same legs the Creator of the Universe gave to my father when my father was a pitiful old man. They were pale white broomsticks. They were hairless. They were embossed fantastically with varicose veins.

And, two months after Trout received his first fan letter, I had him find in his mailbox an invitation to be a speaker at an arts festival in the American Middle West.

The letter was from the Festival’s chairman, Fred T. Barry. He was respectful, almost reverent about Kilgore Trout. He beseeched him to be one of several distinguished out-of-town participants in the Festival, which would last for five days. It would celebrate the opening of the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts in Midland City.

The letter did not say so, but Mildred Barry was the late mother of the Chairman, the wealthiest man in Midland City. Fred T. Barry had paid for the new Center of the Arts, which was a translucent sphere on stilts. It had no windows. When illuminated inside at night, it resembled a rising harvest moon.

Fred T. Barry, incidentally, was exactly the same age as Trout. They had the same birthday. But they certainly didn’t look anything alike. Fred T. Barry didn’t even look like a white man anymore, even though he was of pure English stock. As he grew older and older and happier and happier, and all his hair fell out everywhere, he came to look like an ecstatic old Chinaman.

He looked so much like a Chinaman that he had taken to dressing like a Chinaman. Real Chinamen often mistook him for a real Chinaman.

Fred T. Barry confessed in his letter that he had not read the works of Kilgore Trout, but that he would joyfully do so before the Festival began. “You come highly recommended by Eliot Rosewater,” he said, “who assures me that you are perhaps the greatest living American novelist. There can be no higher praise than that.”

Clipped to the letter was a check for one thousand dollars. Fred T. Barry explained that this was for travel expenses and an honorarium.

It was a lot of money. Trout was suddenly fabulously well-to-do.

Here is how Trout happened to be invited: Fred T. Barry wanted to have a fabulously valuable oil painting as a focal point for the Midland City Festival of the Arts. As rich as he was, he couldn’t afford to buy one, so he looked for one to borrow.

The first person he went to was Eliot Rosewater, who owned an El Greco worth three million dollars or more. Rosewater said the Festival could have the picture on one condition: that it hire as a speaker the greatest living writer in the English language, who was Kilgore Trout.

Trout laughed at the flattering invitation, but he felt fear after that.

Once again, a stranger was tampering with the privacy of his body bag. He put this question to his parakeet haggardly, and he rolled his eyes: “Why all this sudden interest in Kilgore Trout?”

He read the letter again. “They not only want Kilgore Trout,” he said, “they want him in a tuxedo, Bill. Some mistake has been made.”

He shrugged. “Maybe they invited me because they know I have a tuxedo,” he said. He really did own a tuxedo. It was in a steamer trunk which he had lugged from place to place for more than forty years. It contained toys from childhood, the bones of a Bermuda Ern, and many other curiosities including the tuxedo he had worn to a senior dance just prior to his graduation from Thomas Jefferson High School in Dayton, Ohio, in 1924. Trout was born in Bermuda, and attended grammar school there. But then his family moved to Dayton.

His high school was named after a slave owner who was also one of the world’s greatest theoreticians on the subject of human liberty.

Trout got his tuxedo out of the trunk and he put it on. It was a lot like a tuxedo I’d seen my father put on when he was an old, old man. It had a greenish patina of mold. Some of the growths it supported resembled

patches of fine rabbit fur. “This will do nicely for the evenings,” said Trout. “But tell me, Bill—what does one wear in Midland City in October before the sun goes down?” He hauled up his pants legs so that his grotesquely ornamental shins were exposed. “Bermuda shorts and bobby socks, eh, Bill? After all—I am from Bermuda.”

He dabbed at his tuxedo with a damp rag, and the fungi came away easily. “Hate to do this, Bill,” he said of the fungi he was murdering. “Fungi have as much right to life as I do. They know what they want, Bill. Damned if I do anymore.”

Then he thought about what Bill himself might want. It was easy to guess. “Bill,” he said, “I like you so much, and I am such a big shot in the Universe, that I will make your three biggest wishes come true.”

He opened the door of the cage, something Bill couldn’t have done in a thousand years.

Bill flew over to a windowsill. He put his little shoulder against the glass. There was just one layer of glass between Bill and the great out-of-doors. Although Trout was in the storm window business, he had no storm windows on his own abode.

“Your second wish is about to come true,” said Trout, and he again did something which Bill could never have done. He opened the window. But the opening of the window was such an alarming business to the parakeet that he flew back to his cage and hopped inside.

Trout closed the door of the cage and latched it. “That’s the most intelligent use of three wishes I ever heard of,” he told the bird. “You made sure you’d still have something worth wishing for—to get out of the cage.”

Trout made the connection between his lone fan letter and the invitation, but he couldn’t believe that Eliot Rosewater was a grownup. Rosewater’s handwriting looked like this:

“Bill,” said Trout tentatively, “some teen-ager named Rosewater got me this job. His parents must be friends of the Chairman of the Arts Festival, and they don’t know anything about books out that way. So when he said I was good, they believed him.”

Trout shook his head. “I’m not going, Bill. I don’t want out of my cage I’m too smart for that. Even if I did want out, though, I wouldn’t go to Midland City to make a laughing stock of myself—and my only fan.”

He left it at that. But he reread the invitation from time to time, got to know it by heart. And then one of the subtler messages on the paper got through to him. It was in the letterhead, which displayed two masks intended to represent comedy and tragedy:

One mask looked like this:

he other one looked like this:

“They don’t want anything but smilers out there,” Trout said to his parakeet. “Unhappy failures need not apply.” But his mind wouldn’t leave it alone at that. He got an idea which he found very tangy: “But maybe an unhappy failure is exactly what they need to see.”