Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [25]
I still feel uneasy about prosperity and associating with members of my parents’ class on that account.
Henry David Thoreau said, “I have traveled extensively in Concord.” That quotation was probably first brought to my attention by one of my magnificent teachers in high school. Thoreau, I now feel, wrote in the voice of a child, as do I. And what he said about Concord is what every child feels, what every child seemingly must feel, about the place where he or she was born. There is surely more than enough to marvel at for a lifetime, no matter where the child is born.
Castles? Indianapolis was full of them.
• • •
One of my brother Bernard’s favorite stories is about the farmer who decides to go to have a look at St. Louis, the nearest city. This would be in 1900, say. When he comes back to his farm after a week, he is gaga about all the human activities and machinery he has seen.
When he is questioned about this famous landmark or that one in St. Louis, it turns out that he knows nothing about them. He makes this confession: “Actually, I never got past the depot.”
• • •
My father had few gifts for getting along famously with me. That’s life. We did not spend much time together, and conversations were arch and distant. But Father’s younger brother, Uncle Alex, a Harvard graduate and life insurance salesman, was responsive and amusing and generous with me, was my ideal grown-up friend.
He was also then a socialist, and among the books he gave me, when I was a high school sophomore, was Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. I understood it perfectly and loved it, since it made low comedy of the empty graces and aggressively useless possessions which my parents, and especially my mother, meant to regain someday.
• • •
It will be noted that my mother attempted to be what I have in fact become—which is a professional writer.
It used to be a fairly reliable rule of American middle-class life that a son could be expected to try hard, with his own life, to make some of his disappointed mother’s dreams come true.
This may no longer be the case. Things change.
• • •
Uncle John’s coda to the history of my family is this:
“In reviewing K’s ancestors for four generations it is highly significant that there was not a weakling, nor even a mildly psychotic or neurotic individual in the lot. Taken together they provided K with a rich bank of genes upon which to draw. How this genetic background was influenced by K’s adolescent conditioning is for him to say. But with respect to his ancestors who came to America from their homeland, let him observe the counsel of the poet Goethe:
’WAS DU ERERBET VON DEINEN VATERN HAST, ER WIRB
ES; UM EST ZU BESITZEN.’
“WE WILL LET HIM TELL HIS OWN STORY.”
The German quotation means this, and I take it seriously: “Whatever it is that you have inherited from your father, you are going to have to earn it if it is to really belong to you.”
3
WHEN I LOST MY INNOCENCE
AND MY STORY seems to be this to me:
I left Indianapolis, where my ancestors had prepared so many comforts and privileges for me, because those comforts and privileges were finally based on money, and the money was gone.
I might have stayed if I had done what my father had done, which was to marry one of the richest women in town. But I married a poor one instead. I might have stayed if my father had not told me this: be anything but an architect. He and my older brother, who had become a chemist, urged me to study chemistry instead. I would have liked to be an architect, and an architect in Indianapolis at that. I would have become a third-generation Indianapolis architect. There can’t be very many of those around.
But Father was so full of anger and sorrow about having had no