Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) by Kurt Vonnegut Page B

World War II, Hemingway took no orders and gave no orders. He came and went wherever and whenever he pleased. He actually hunted German submarines for a while in the Caribbean—in his own boat and of his own accord.
    “He was a reporter of war, and one of the best the world has ever known. So was Tolstoy—who was in addition a real soldier.
    “During World War I, the United States got into the fighting so late that an American with true war stories to tell, and a wound besides, was something of a rarity. Such was Heming way’s situation. He was an even rarer sort of American, again fresh from a battlefield, when he wrote about the Spanish Civil War during the 1930s.
    “But then the coinage of true battle stories by Americans was utterly debased by World War II, when millions upon millions of us fought overseas and came home no longer needing a Hemingway to say what war was like. Joseph Heller told me he would have been in the dry-cleaning business now, if it weren’t for World War II.
    “Heller is, of course, the author of
Catch-22,
a far more influential book nowadays than
A Farewell to Arms
or
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. The key word in this speech is ‘nowadays.’
    “Hemingway was unquestionably an artist of the first rank, with an admirable soul, the size of Kilimanjaro. His choice of subject matter, though, bullfighting and nearly forgotten wars and shooting big animals for sport, often makes him a little hard to read nowadays. Conservation and humane treatment of animals and contempt for the so-called arts of war rank high on most of our agendas nowadays.
    “How many of us can find pleasure nowadays in these words from Hemingway’s
Green Hills of Africa,
reportage, not fiction, describing a lion hunt fifty-three years ago: ‘I knew that if I could kill one alone … I would feel good about it for a long time. I had in my mind absolutely not to shoot unless I knew I could kill him. I had killed three and knew what it consisted in, but I was getting more excitement from this one than the whole trip.’ Imagine boasting of killing three lions, and reporting delight at the prospect of killing a fourth one, nowadays.
    “Vance Bourjaily, admired, as I’ve said, by Hemingway, gave me a rule of thumb about hunting. ‘The bigger the game,’ he said, ‘the more corrupted the soul of the hunter.’ As for the glamour of big game hunting nowadays: It is predicted that the last East African elephant will die of starvation or be killed for its ivory in about eight years.
    “As for bullfighting: It is an enterprise so little admired in this country by most people that it is in fact against the law. I don’t have to say ‘nowadays.’ Bullfighting was against the law here long before the birth of Hemingway. Paradoxically, I find his bullfighting stories among my favorites still. That could be because they are so alien to my own passions and experiences that I can accept them as ethnography, as accounts by an explorer of a society for which I bear no responsibility.
    “Let me hasten to say that no matter how much his choice of subject matter bothers me nowadays, I am always amazed and delighted by the power he discovered in the simplest language. A sample I choose at random from his short story ‘Big Two-Hearted River’: ‘Nick sat down against the charred stump and smoked a cigarette. His pack balanced on the top of the stump, harness holding ready, a hollow molded in it from his back. Nick sat smoking, looking out over the country. He did not need to get his map out. He knew where he was from the position of the river.
    “ ‘As he smoked, his legs stretched out in front of him, he noticed a grasshopper walk along the ground and up onto his woolen sock. The grasshopper was black. As he had walked along the road, climbing, he had started many grasshoppers from the dust. They were all black.’
    “(The grasshoppers were black, of course, because the area had been burned over recently, making black the ideal