Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) by Kurt Vonnegut Page A
Authors: Kurt Vonnegut
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him that persons unlucky and poor and not very bright are to be respected for surviving, although they often have no choice but to do so in ways unattractive and blameworthy to those who are a lot better off.
“It seems to me now that Algren’s pessimism about so much of earthly life was Christian. Like Christ, as we know Him from the Bible, he was enchanted by the hopeless, could not take his eyes off them, and could see little good news for them in the future, given what they had become and what Caesar was like and so on, unless beyond death there awaited something more humane.”
My introduction stops here. I knew very little about Algren’s sex life (or about my own, for that matter). I subsequently learned from Deirdre Bair’s
Simone de Beauvoir
(Summit, 1990) that he helped Miss de Beauvoir achieve her first orgasm. (The only person I ever helped achieve a first orgasm was good old me.) In Iowa City, Algren would refer to her as “Madame Yak Yak” because she had given their relationship so much publicity.
I wrote an introduction to a collection of short stories by Budd Schulberg, too, and a long salutation for a Festschrift presented to Erskine Caldwell on his eightieth birthday. (He still had three years to go.) I have misplaced copies of both, which is probably just as well. In both, I remember, I exclaimed over the foreshortening of American literary history, in which seeming generations of writers may be separated by less than twenty years. When I set out to be a professional writer of fiction, Irwin Shaw and Nelson Algren and William Saroyan and John Cheever and Erskine Caldwell and Budd Schulberg and James T. Farrell seemed as ancestral as Mark Twain or Nathaniel Hawthorne. But I would come to be friends with all of them. And why not? With the exception of Caldwell, most were about the age of my big brother, Bernard. (I never met John Steinbeck, but I know his widow, Elaine, and she is about my late sister’s age.)
It is the spectacular violence modern times wreak on culture which accounts for this foreshortening, surely. We are defined by booms and busts, and by wars radically different in mood and purpose and technology. My wife, Jill, covered the Vietnam War as a photographer. To the young people she now does books about, that war might as well have been a thousand years ago.
Yes, and to me as a schoolboy during the Great Depression, which defined Steinbeck and Saroyan and Algren, World War I, which defined Ernest Hemingway, might also have been a thousand years ago, but I knew his widow, Mary, too, and he was born after (but died sooner than) my Uncle Alex, who went to Harvard because his big brother was at MIT.
“I did not know Ernest Hemingway,” I told a group of Hemingway scholars convening in Boise, Idaho, a couple of years ago. “He was twenty-three years my senior. He would now be ninety. We were born in the Middle West, we set out to be reporters, our fathers were gun nuts, we felt profoundly indebted to Mark Twain, and we were the children of suicides.
“I am not aware that he thought much about my own generation of American novelists. Norman Mailer, I know, sent him a copy of
The Naked and the Dead,
soon after it was published. The package was returned unopened. Hemingway chided Irwin Shaw for having, as he put it, dared to go into the ring with Tolstoy by writing a novel which viewed a war from both sides of the battle lines,
The Young Lions
. I know of only two members of my generation he praised: Nelson Algren, the Chicago tough guy and friend of boxers and gamblers, and Vance Bourjaily, the hunting enthusiast who was in World War II what Hemingway had been in the first one, a civilian ambulance driver attached to a combat unit.
“James Jones, author of
From Here to Eternity,
and a rifleman in peacetime and then in war, told me that he could not consider Hemingway a fellow soldier, since he had never submitted to training and discipline. In the Spanish Civil War and then in
“It seems to me now that Algren’s pessimism about so much of earthly life was Christian. Like Christ, as we know Him from the Bible, he was enchanted by the hopeless, could not take his eyes off them, and could see little good news for them in the future, given what they had become and what Caesar was like and so on, unless beyond death there awaited something more humane.”
My introduction stops here. I knew very little about Algren’s sex life (or about my own, for that matter). I subsequently learned from Deirdre Bair’s
Simone de Beauvoir
(Summit, 1990) that he helped Miss de Beauvoir achieve her first orgasm. (The only person I ever helped achieve a first orgasm was good old me.) In Iowa City, Algren would refer to her as “Madame Yak Yak” because she had given their relationship so much publicity.
I wrote an introduction to a collection of short stories by Budd Schulberg, too, and a long salutation for a Festschrift presented to Erskine Caldwell on his eightieth birthday. (He still had three years to go.) I have misplaced copies of both, which is probably just as well. In both, I remember, I exclaimed over the foreshortening of American literary history, in which seeming generations of writers may be separated by less than twenty years. When I set out to be a professional writer of fiction, Irwin Shaw and Nelson Algren and William Saroyan and John Cheever and Erskine Caldwell and Budd Schulberg and James T. Farrell seemed as ancestral as Mark Twain or Nathaniel Hawthorne. But I would come to be friends with all of them. And why not? With the exception of Caldwell, most were about the age of my big brother, Bernard. (I never met John Steinbeck, but I know his widow, Elaine, and she is about my late sister’s age.)
It is the spectacular violence modern times wreak on culture which accounts for this foreshortening, surely. We are defined by booms and busts, and by wars radically different in mood and purpose and technology. My wife, Jill, covered the Vietnam War as a photographer. To the young people she now does books about, that war might as well have been a thousand years ago.
Yes, and to me as a schoolboy during the Great Depression, which defined Steinbeck and Saroyan and Algren, World War I, which defined Ernest Hemingway, might also have been a thousand years ago, but I knew his widow, Mary, too, and he was born after (but died sooner than) my Uncle Alex, who went to Harvard because his big brother was at MIT.
“I did not know Ernest Hemingway,” I told a group of Hemingway scholars convening in Boise, Idaho, a couple of years ago. “He was twenty-three years my senior. He would now be ninety. We were born in the Middle West, we set out to be reporters, our fathers were gun nuts, we felt profoundly indebted to Mark Twain, and we were the children of suicides.
“I am not aware that he thought much about my own generation of American novelists. Norman Mailer, I know, sent him a copy of
The Naked and the Dead,
soon after it was published. The package was returned unopened. Hemingway chided Irwin Shaw for having, as he put it, dared to go into the ring with Tolstoy by writing a novel which viewed a war from both sides of the battle lines,
The Young Lions
. I know of only two members of my generation he praised: Nelson Algren, the Chicago tough guy and friend of boxers and gamblers, and Vance Bourjaily, the hunting enthusiast who was in World War II what Hemingway had been in the first one, a civilian ambulance driver attached to a combat unit.
“James Jones, author of
From Here to Eternity,
and a rifleman in peacetime and then in war, told me that he could not consider Hemingway a fellow soldier, since he had never submitted to training and discipline. In the Spanish Civil War and then in
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