Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [113]
And people reached me by mail, most often asking me to read this or that new novel and write some words of praise for the jacket.
No book had been published in the past ten years for which I had not written a blurb.
But then an old friend wrote a book so bad that even I, crossing my eyes and ransacking it from end to end, could find nothing in it which could be mistaken for even a winsome sort of imbecility. So I declined to write a blurb. This may have been a major turning point in my life.
It was a crisis in the life of another writer, too, it turned out. He had written a blurb for the book I had spurned. He called me up in the middle of the night, long distance and sounding as though he had just swallowed Drano. “My God,” he said, “you just can’t leave me on that book jacket all alone.”
• • •
And so on. Somewhere in there my son Mark went crazy and recovered. I went out to Vancouver and saw how sick he was, and I put him in a nut house. I had to suppose that he might never get well again.
He never blamed me or his mother, as I have said before. His generous wish not to blame us was so stubborn that he became almost a crank on the subject of chemical and genetic causes of mental illness. Talk therapy made sense as poetry but not as a means to a cure, he thought.
But now, as a physician, as an open-minded scientist, he has delivered himself into the hands of a talk therapist, blabbing his head off about Jane and me and his sisters and his cousins and all that, I hope, and finding it hilariously beneficial.
Hooray.
There will be talk about how people wronged him. It’s about time. It’s about time.
• • •
Everything is about time.
Yes, and somewhere in there I looked in on George Roy Hill while he made a motion picture based on a novel of mine, Slaughterhouse-Five.
There are only two American novelists who should be grateful for the movies which were made from their books. I am one of them. The other one? Margaret Mitchell, of course.
• • •
The Eastern Seaboard’s intellectual ranks will probably always require one woman to be so brilliant, supposedly, that everybody else is scared to death of her. Mary McCarthy used to hold that job. Susan Sontag has it now.
Susan Sontag approached me at a party one time. I was petrified. What brilliant question would she ask me, and what would be my pip-squeak reply?
“How did you like the movie they made of Slaughterhouse-Five?” she said.
“I liked it a lot,” I confessed.
“So did I,” she said.
How sweet and easy that was, and what a great motion picture Slaughterhouse-Five must really be!
• • •
There was a depression going on in the movie industry in Hollywood back then. Only two pictures were being made, both based on works of mine. The other one was Happy Birthday, Wanda June.
This movie, starring Rod Steiger and Susannah York, turned out so abominably that I asked that my name be taken off it. I had heard of other writers doing that. What could be more dignified?
This proved to be impossible, however. I alone had done the thing the credits said I had done. I had really written the thing.
• • •
Yes, and it wasn’t the only bad job I ever did. I have graded my separate works from A to D. The grades I hand out to myself do not place me in literary history. I am comparing myself with myself. Thus can I give myself an A-plus for Cat’s Cradle, while knowing that there was a writer named William Shakespeare. The report card is chronological, so you can plot my rise and fall on graph paper, if you like:
Player Piano B
The Sirens of Titan A
Mother Night A
Cat’s Cradle A-plus
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater A
Slaughterhouse-Five A-plus
Welcome to the Monkey House B-minus
Happy Birthday, Wanda. June D
Breakfast of Champions C
Wampeters, Poma & Granfalloons C
Slapstick D
Jailbird A
Palm Sunday C
• • •
What has been my prettiest contribution to my culture? I would say it was a master’s thesis