Thursday, April 12, 2007
Kurt who??
Overly flippant, I know. But with everybody and his sibling (among many others: Avedon, Goldy, skippy, Daniel K, Jeralyn, Devin, Shaun) getting all misty-eyed over last night’s announcement of the passing of Kurt Vonnegut, I must make a confession.
Alone among Baby Boomers, it seems, I never read Vonnegut. Oh, I may have picked up one or two of his books on a random occasion—after all, they were always lying about on coffeetables and bookshelves—and probably read a few random paragraphs or pages somewhere along the line. But that little taste never enticed me to continue reading, never leapt out and grabbed my attention. Which means that the in-jokes and quotations in the many paeans to Vonnegut don’t mean much to me. I know that Billy Pilgrim was one of his characters, but not where he was a character and not who he was in the Vonnegut corpus. I don’t have the faintest idea what “Tralfamadore” represents ... is it a place? a person? a book title?
If that means I have to turn in my Baby Boomer merit badge or return my decoder ring, sobeit.
Which is not to say that I lack appreciation for his place in the American literary tradition. Perhaps he cultivated the Mark Twain “look” to reflect his similar darkly sardonic view of the human condition, or maybe it’s just that their shared quality of radical observation of the American condition had the same effect on both of them. If anyone in the late 20th/early 21st century was a literary descendant of Twain, it was Kurt Vonnegut. Praise doesn’t get much higher than that.
Several of today’s Vonnegut essays bemoan the fact that his death means that he cannot win the Nobel Prize for literature. Not to speak ill of the dead, but are they kidding? The Nobel Prize goes to “serious” writers, not those who produce slim and overtly funny popular novels. Vonnegut didn’t write tomes; he wrote paperbacks. Add to that the recent paucity of Americans in the roster of the literature prize—Toni Morrison (1993) is the most recent, and the last US-born honoree before her was John Steinbeck (1962). Several writers associated with the US came between those two, but Joseph Brodsky (1987) was a Russian who came here only after being expelled from the USSR, Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978) grew up in Poland and wrote mostly in Yiddish, and while Saul Bellow (1976) was closely linked to Chicago, he was born in a suburb of Montreal.
My point is that Vonnegut had none of the attributes one would associate with the Nobel Prize in literature. Given current trends, it’s doubtful that any American will win one in the next few years, and Vonnegut would have been nowhere near the top of that list. I can imagine the Nobel committee considering Pynchon, DeLillo, Oates, or maybe Roth, Salinger, McCarthy. But not Vonnegut—he was too straightforward, too much the quipster, too sarcastic.
Still and all, of course I mourn the passing of Kurt Vonnegut. That he left us while Dubya and Darth Cheney still rule the roost is galling. And he’d probably be the first to bemoan that fact.
