Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [21]
But then, as though he were in a trance, and using the simplest hand-tools, he began to make perfectly beautiful cowboy boots, which he sold from door to door. They weren’t only tough and comfortable: they were dazzling jewelry for manly feet and calves, scintillating with gold and silver stars and eagles and flowers and bucking broncos cut from flattened tin cans and bottle caps.
But this new development in his life wasn’t as nice for me to see as you might think.
It gave me the creeps, actually, because I would look into his eyes, and there wasn’t anybody home anymore.
I would see the same thing happen to Terry Kitchen years later. He used to be my closest friend. And suddenly he began to paint the pictures which make many people say today that he was the greatest of all the Abstract Expressionists—superior to Pollock, to Rothko.
That was fine, I guess, except that when I looked into my best friend’s eyes, there wasn’t anybody home anymore.
Ah, me.
Anyway: back around Christmas in 1932, Marilee’s most recent letters were lying around somewhere, mostly unread. I had become bored with being her audience.
And then this telegram arrived, addressed to me.
Father would comment before we opened it that it was the first telegram our family had ever received.
The message was this:
BE MY APPRENTICE. WILL PA
TRANSPORTATION HERE PLUS FREE ROOM, BOARD, MODEST ALLOWANCE, ART LESSONS.
DAN GREGORY.
8
THE FIRST PERSON I told about this magnificent opportunity was the old newspaper editor for whom I had been drawing cartoons. His name was Arnold Coates, and he said this to me:
“You really are an artist, and you have to get out of here or you’ll shrivel up like a raisin. Don’t worry about your father. He’s a perfectly contented, self-sufficient zombie, if you’ll pardon my saying so.
“New York is just going to be a stopover for you,” he went on. “Europe is where the real painters are, and always will be.”
He was wrong about that.
“I never prayed before, but I’ll pray tonight that you never go to Europe as a soldier. We should never get suckered again into providing meat for the cannons and machine guns they love so much. They could go to war at any time. Look how big their armies are in the midst of a Great Depression!
“If the cities are still standing when you get to Europe,” he said, “and you sit in a cafe for hours, sipping coffee or wine or beer, and discussing painting and music and literature, just remember that the Europeans around you, who you think are so much more civilized than Americans, are looking forward to just one thing: the time when it will become legal to kill each other and knock everything down again.
“If I had my way,” he said, “American geography books would call those European countries by their right names: “The Syphilis Empire,” “The Republic of Suicide,” “Dementia Praecox,” which of course borders on beautiful “Paranoia.”
“There!” he said. “I’ve spoiled Europe for you, and you haven’t even seen it yet. And maybe I’ve spoiled art for you, too, but I hope not. I don’t see how artists can be blamed if their beautiful and usually innocent creations for some reason just make Europeans unhappier and more bloodthirsty all the time.”
That was an ordinary way for a patriotic American to talk back then. It’s hard to believe how sick of war we used to be. We used to boast of how small our Army and Navy were, and how little influence generals and admirals had in Washington. We used to call armaments manufacturers “Merchants of Death.”
Can you imagine that?
Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and