Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [1]
Seriously.
But young Figler’s insight reached me too late. I had nearly finished another book—this one.
• • •
In it is a minor character, “Kenneth Whistler,” inspired by an Indianapolis man of my father’s generation. The inspirer’s name was Powers Hapgood (1900—1949). He is sometimes mentioned in histories of American labor for his deeds of derring-do in strikes and at the protests about the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, and so on.
I met him only once. I had lunch with him and Father and my Uncle Alex, my father’s younger brother, in Stegemeier’s Restaurant in downtown Indianapolis after I came home from the European part of World War Two. That was in July of 1945. The first atomic bomb had not yet been dropped on Japan. That would happen in about a month. Imagine that.
I was twenty-two and still in uniform—a private first class who had flunked out of Cornell University as a student of chemistry before going to war. My prospects did not look good. There was no family business to go into. My father’s architecture firm was defunct. He was broke. I had just gotten engaged to be married anyway, thinking, “Who but a wife would sleep with me?”
My mother, as I have said ad nauseam in other books, had declined to go on living, since she could no longer be what she had been at the time of her marriage—one of the richest women in town.
• • •
It was Uncle Alex who had arranged the lunch. He and Powers Hapgood had been at Harvard together. Harvard is all through this book, although I myself never went there. I have since taught there, briefly and without distinction—while my own home was going to pieces.
I confided that to one of my students—that my home was going to pieces.
To which he made this reply: “It shows.”
Uncle Alex was so conservative politically that I do not think he would have eaten lunch with Hapgood gladly if Hapgood had not been a fellow Harvard man. Hapgood was then a labor union officer, a vice-president of the local CIO. His wife Mary had been the Socialist Party’s candidate for vice-president of the United States again and again.
In fact, the first time I voted in a national election I voted for Norman Thomas and Mary Hapgood, not even knowing that she was an Indianapolis person. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman won. I imagined that I was a socialist. I believed that socialism would be good for the common man. As a private first class in the infantry, I was surely a common man.
• • •
The meeting with Hapgood came about because I had told Uncle Alex that I might try to get a job with a labor union after the Army let me go. Unions were admirable instruments for extorting something like economic justice from employers then.
Uncle Alex must have thought something like this: “God help us. Against stupidity even the gods contend in vain. Well—at least there is a Harvard man with whom he can discuss this ridiculous dream.”
(It was Schiller who first said that about stupidity and the gods. This was Nietzsche’s reply: “Against boredom even the gods contend in vain.”)
So Uncle Alex and I sat down at a front table in Stegemeier’s and ordered beers and waited for Father and Hapgood to arrive. They would be coming separately. If they had come together, they would have had nothing to say to each other on the way. Father by then had lost all interest in politics and history and economics and such things. He had taken to saying that people talked too much. Sensations meant more to him than ideas—especially the feel of natural materials at his fingertips. When he was dying about twenty years later, he would say that he wished he had been a potter, making mud pies all day long.
To me that was sad—because he was so well-educated. It seemed to me that he was throwing his knowledge and intelligence away, just as a retreating soldier might throw away his rifle and pack.
Other people found it beautiful. He was a much-beloved man in the city, with wonderfully talented hands. He was invariably courteous