God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian - Kurt Vonnegut [8]
This is Kurt Vonnegut in the effing state-of-the-art lethal injection facility in Huntsville, effing, Texas signing off.
during my most recent controlled
near-death experience, I got to interview William Shakespeare. We did not hit it off. He said the dialect I spoke was the ugliest English he had ever heard, “fit to split the ears of groundlings.” He asked if it had a name, and I said, “Indianapolis.”
I congratulated him on all the Oscars the movie Shakespeare in Love had won, since it had his play Romeo and Juliet as its centerpiece.
He said of the Oscars, and of the movie itself, “A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
I asked him point-blank if he had written all the plays and poems for which he’d been given credit. “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” he said. “Ask Saint Peter!” Which I would do.
I asked him if he had love affairs with men as well as women, knowing how eager my WNYC audience was to have this matter settled. His answer, however, celebrated affection between animals of any sort:
“We were as twinn’d lambs that did frisk in the sun, and bleat the one at the other: what we chang’d was innocence for innocence.” By changed he meant exchanged: “What we exchanged was innocence for innocence.” That has to be the softest core pornography I ever heard.
And he was through with me. In effect, he told your reporter to go screw himself. “Get thee to a nunnery!” he said, and off he went.
I felt like such a fool as I made my way back to the blue tunnel. An enchanting answer to any question I might have asked the greatest writer who ever lived could be found in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. The beaut about exchanging innocence for innocence was from The Winter’s Tale.
I at least remembered to ask Saint Peter if Shakespeare had written Shakespeare. He told me that nobody arriving in Heaven, and there was no Hell, had claimed authorship for any of it. Saint Peter added, “Nobody, that is, who was willing to submit to my lie-detector test.”
This is your tongue-tied, humiliated, self-loathing, semi-literate Hoosier hack Kurt Vonnegut, signing off with this question for today: “To be or not to be?”
never before have i been a tease
about a dead person I’ve interviewed, but now is the time. Let’s see how smart you are about the history of big ideas.
For starters: This former Earthling, although not quite twenty, published an idea as persistent in the minds of thinking people today as Pasteur’s germ theory, say, or Darwin’s theory of evolution, or Malthus’s dread of overpopulation.
Hint number two: Breeding will tell. This incredibly precocious writer’s mother was a famous writer, too. Some of her books were illustrated by none other than William Blake! Imagine having one’s book illustrated by William Blake! Her most passionate subject: the right of women to be treated as the equals of men.
My mystery dead person’s father was a writer, too, an anti-Calvinist preacher who wrote, most memorably, “God himself has no right to be a tyrant.”
Who were the friends of such distinguished parents? William Blake and Thomas Paine, and William Wordsworth to name a few.
Hint number three: This person was married to a celebrity, as famous for the romantic disorder of his life as for his poetry. He inspired the suicide of his first wife, for example. As Romantically as you please, he drowned when he was only thirty.
Give up? I spoke in Heaven today to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author, again before she was twenty, of the most prescient