Kurt Vonnegut at 100: Kurt and My Father
This article originally ran in the Wheaton Wire, November 9, 2022.
November 11, 2022, will be the 100th birthday of one of the world’s most idiosyncratic, visionary, imaginative, subversive, humorous, and quintessentially American writers. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born in Indianapolis on November 11, 1922, one hundred years ago.
Vonnegut unfortunately passed away in 2007, but his contribution lives on — whether in the brightly colored Dial Press binding on a Barnes & Noble shelf or via the novels, movies, television shows, and other modes of artistic expression that echo his work. In his hometown of Indianapolis, a Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library champions his work and features a giant mural of Vonnegut himself on the side of the building.
One person who can tell you about Vonnegut’s importance is my own father. In 1996, he took up a job writing and editing a photo collection book for photographer Jill Krementz. Krementz’s husband was none other than Kurt himself. Down on East 48th Street in Manhattan, my dad found Vonnegut sitting on the front steps, smoking a cigarette. “I recognized him from blocks away,” he says. “He was so distinctive looking, with that bushy hair and melancholy face.”
“Want a pretzel?” was the first thing Vonnegut said to him, offering him one of those long pretzels that look like cigars. “Jill won’t let me smoke in the house, so I sit out here,” he explained.
“I sat down, and we had a friendly chat.” my father recalls. “He turned out to be just like his image, a sort of friendly, eccentric old uncle who liked to laugh at bad jokes. I got to know him better on later visits.”
My father already knew of Vonnegut before meeting him. His older brother left behind paperbacks of Vonnegut’s novels after moving to college. My father says it was only later that he realized the importance and brilliance of Vonnegut’s work.
“They are warnings to humankind, couched as science fiction and humor.” Some of these warnings came from Vonnegut’s observations of American culture, but much came from his experiences serving in World War II. He was in Dresden when the city was bombed by the Allies, despite the city being a civilian center with no military significance. A city full of innocent people, of historic architecture and artistic masterworks, all blown up in an instant. “I don’t think he ever fully recovered from the trauma of that.”
One of my father’s most distinct memories of Vonnegut is when he went to an outsider art fair with him. My father briefly mentioned in passing to Jill Krementz a fair of “untrained artists with crazy visions, some of whom live in abandoned school buses.” As soon as Kurt caught wind of this, he was on board.
My father’s friend, Mike Smith, the outsider art dealer who told my father about this fair, was ecstatic that Vonnegut was at his event. He introduced people to his “good friend Kurt,” whom he had only just met. Vonnegut didn’t mind at all. “Vonnegut was in his element at the fair. He took in all this weird, wild art, transfixed by the brilliance of the colors and the eccentric graphics.”
My father would see Vonnegut every few months between 1996 and 1999. The last time he saw him was in 2003, at an event at the Mark Twain House in Hartford. Twain was one of Vonnegut’s favorite authors. However, Vonnegut’s most significant influences were simply conversations with strangers — cab drivers, street dwellers, and the like. He wasn’t interested in showing off any intellectual affectations. This is reflected in his distinct prose, written “clearly and simply without a lot of subterfuge,” as my dad describes it.
In Vonnegut’s 1961 novel Mother Night, Howard W. Campbell Jr. is given a covert task to act as a Nazi propagandist to give secret information to the US government. No one could ever know about this covert operation, meaning the whole world remembers him as a hateful fascist. Campbell eventually realizes his propaganda was so damaging that no amount of clandestine help to the Allies could counteract it. Despite telling himself he was helping America and didn’t actually believe the Nazi rhetoric, in the end, his intent didn’t matter: he was just as evil as any other Nazi. Vonnegut, when asked to describe the message of this parable, writes, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
Go on any social media platform, and you will find boundless amounts of smugly ironic posts intended to shock or provoke. Regardless of their intent, these ideas can spread to impressionable minds who take them as genuine. If there was one thing Vonnegut valued, it was earnestness. In our postmodern, tumultuous, digitally-fueled world where “truth isn’t truth,” his message is more important than ever.
