William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

The other contributions are a history of the Vonnegut family written by a cousin, a letter from his daughter and miscellaneous extracts from work by other relatives. The result is far more effective than the earlier book. Indeed were it not for the “connective tissue” Palm Sunday would be dangerously inconclusive and slight. For the plain fact of the matter is that Vonnegut hasn’t done that much reviewing or public speaking in the intervening six years. Even without the extra help provided by his family some of the pieces included here are clearly no more than padding. There can be no other reason for reprinting his short story “The Big Space Fuck” or subjecting us to a truly appalling libretto for a musical version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde — which the producers quite rightly turned down. It is Vonnegut’s musings and speculations on and around the circumstances that prompted this or that address or introduction to a book that prove in the end to be far and away the most rewarding elements of Palm Sunday. They do, as he intended, form a partial autobiography — a “sort of life”—which reveals the author to us in a genial and unselfconscious way and raises hopes that this will prove to be a trial run for a fuller, longer account of his life.

I have often suspected that a reader’s reaction to Vonnegut’s style depends largely on the mood he or she happens to be in at the time. It’s quite possible one day to be entertained, and the next to be irked and infuriated. This is not a result of inconsistencies in Vonnegut: his tone of voice has remained remarkably consistent through his writing career — a curious blend of faux naïveté and profanity, of innocence and deep irony. It produces, in Palm Sunday, such effects as these:

As for literary criticism in general, I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person that has put on full armour and attacked a hot fudge sundae or banana split.

and

Dog poisoning is still the most contemptible crime I can think of.

and

He was an abstract impressionist you see. His paintings just looked like bright weather…

and

The apathy of the University of Chicago is repulsive to me. They can take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooooon.

To me this appears, respectively, to be: largely correct; fake, coy and stupid; nicely put; and childish but forceful.

However, it’s unfair to quote Vonnegut out of context, because, such is the nature of his style, you can find examples to suit any accusation you choose. Moreover, beneath the mannerisms lies an amenable personality whose opinions are not without merit and relevance. Vonnegut’s bêtes noires are worthy and well known and include such targets as multinationals, pollution, organized religion, war and inhumanity. If a new note appears in Palm Sunday then it’s a plea to abandon the nuclear family and to return to the extended one. Vonnegut talks wistfully of Ibo tribesmen who know or are related to upward of a thousand people. Speculating on the fact that one in three Americans is or will become divorced, he offers this explanation:

The nuclear family doesn’t provide nearly enough companionship … In a nuclear family children and parents can be locked in hellish close combat for twenty-one years or more. In an extended family, a child has scores of other homes to go to in search of love and understanding. He need not stay at home and torture his parents, and he need not starve for love.

This particular direction of Vonnegut’s thought seems to have been caused by the breakdown of his twenty-year-old marriage and the dispersal of his six children. Without rancour or sentiment he chronicles their lives and assesses their characters and future. He regards his family in the same way as he contemplates other people: alien but generally nice beings who are difficult to understand or fathom, whether they are leading aimless or purposeful lives. This is particularly evident when he savours the irony of the fact that — a professed and radical atheist all his life — not only his wife but also both his daughters should have recently become fervent born-again Christians.

Unlike the hostage-diplomat, the explorer or the film star, the novelist’s life is on the whole a dull unremarkable affair. Auden’s poem sums it up perfectly. The novelist

Must struggle out of his boyish gift and learn

How to be plain and awkward, how to be

One after whom none think it worth to turn.

Vonnegut is no exception. He lives in New York with his second wife, smokes fifty cigarettes a day, and writes. So when it comes to autobiography something other than the facts must be present if the account is to grip and intrigue. The answer is to cultivate a tone of voice — a literary personality who may bear no relation to the real one but whose idiosyncrasies and manner provide a point of view, an angle of vision, that redeems the otherwise banal details and unexceptionable events. In fact this dictum may well apply to any published writing where the first person pronoun is frequently in use.

Nabokov in Strong Opinions achieves this superbly. The spry, dandified inconoclast is highly engaging and teasingly outrageous. So too with Graham Greene in A Sort of Life and the recent Ways of Escape. The measured self-deprecating ironic gaze suits the recollections admirably. It doesn’t matter if the real Nabokov and Greene bear scant resemblance to their literary siblings — indeed there is something to be said for maximizing the distance between the two — the pleasure resides in the pose, the imposture. Vonnegut may or may not be like the portrait he presents of himself here. The point is that he has found his voice and it informs and colours the moderately interesting facts and tendentious opinions in a beguiling and sympathetic way. When talking about Thoreau, Vonnegut observes that “Thoreau, I now feel, wrote in the voice of a child, as I do.” That is Vonnegut’s voice, his particular imposture, and, like any child, its pronouncements can be maddening or inspiringly perceptive. There are enough of the latter to make us hope for more in the future.

1981

Every time I open a novel by Kurt Vonnegut the same words spring to mind: “Coy,” “Arch,” “Winsome” and “Cute.” But they are equally quickly dispelled. I suspect that Vonnegut’s tone of voice — and a remarkably consistent one it is — either wins the reader over fairly promptly or not at all. In my own case it’s the former effect that occurs, certainly with the category of novel which we can safely demarcate “late” Vonnegut: the sequence of books beginning with Breakfast of Champions and including Slapstick, Jailbird, Palm Sunday (autobiography) and this, the latest.

In these novels — and in Slaughterhouse 5 — the connection between life and art is straightforwardly causal. It seems to me that all the books mentioned emerge directly from the author’s baffled observation of human life and nature and effectively dramatize certain questions (and attempt to come up with some answers) that the observation engenders. Vonnegut considers our swarming damaged planet and contemplates our bizarre behaviour-patterns. He looks at the way we exploit and corrupt each other; he marvels at the multitude of toxic chemicals we happily ingest; he ponders why we spend so much time inventing devices that can so easily bring about our annihilation as a species — and so on, as he would say. But he also focuses his gaze more precisely: on the sex-game, as he terms it; on the connection between love and common decency; on how to cope with the random fatalities of life, with sudden and incomprehensible bereavement. In this sense Vonnegut is the most overtly humane of that remarkable generation of American novelists to which he belongs, and it’s to his undying credit that no sentiment, pap or any kind of emotional sop ever clouds or diminishes the cool, ironic, unapologetic quality of his vision.