Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [40]
INTERVIEWER: Slapstick?
VONNEGUT: Sure. We loved Laurel and Hardy. You know what one of the funniest things is that can happen in a film?
INTERVIEWER: No.
VONNEGUT: To have somebody walk through what looks like a shallow little puddle, but which is actually six feet deep. I remember a movie where Cary Grant was loping across lawns at night. He came to a low hedge, which he cleared ever so gracefully, only there was a twenty-foot drop on the other side. But the thing my sister and I loved best was when somebody in a movie would tell everybody off, and then make a grand exit into the coat closet. He had to come out again, of course, all tangled in coathangers and scarves.
INTERVIEWER: Did you take a degree in chemistry at Cornell?
VONNEGUT: I was flunking everything by the middle of my junior year. I was delighted to join the Army and go to war. After the war, I went to the University of Chicago, where I was pleased to study anthropology, a science that was mostly poetry, that involved almost no math at all. I was married by then, and soon had one kid, who was Mark. He would later go crazy, of course, and write a fine book about it—The Eden Express. He has just fathered a kid himself, my first grandchild, a boy named Zachary. Mark is finishing his second year in Harvard Medical School, and will be about the only member of his class not to be in debt when he graduates—because of the book. That’s a pretty decent recovery from a crackup, I’d say.
INTERVIEWER: Did the study of anthropology later color your writings?
VONNEGUT: It confirmed my atheism, which was the faith of my fathers anyway. Religions were exhibited and studied as the Rube Goldberg inventions I’d always thought they were. We weren’t allowed to find one culture superior to any other. We caught hell if we mentioned races much. It was highly idealistic.
INTERVIEWER: Almost a religion?
VONNEGUT: Exactly. And the only one for me. So far.
INTERVIEWER: What was your dissertation?
VONNEGUT: Cat’s Cradle.
INTERVIEWER: But you wrote that years after you left Chicago, didn’t you?
VONNEGUT: I left Chicago without writing a dissertation— and without a degree. All my ideas for dissertations had been rejected, and I was broke, so I took a job as a P.R. man for General Electric in Schenectady. Twenty years later, I got a letter from a new dean at Chicago, who had been looking through my dossier. Under the rules of the university, he said, a published work of high quality could be substituted for a dissertation, so I was entitled to an M.A. He had shown Cat’s Cradle to the Anthropology Department, and they had said it was halfway decent anthropology, so they were mailing me my degree. I’m Class of 1972 or so.
INTERVIEWER: Congratulations.
VONNEGUT: It was nothing, really. A piece of cake.
INTERVIEWER: Some of the characters in Cat’s Cradle were based on people you knew at G.E., isn’t that so?
VONNEGUT: Dr. Felix Hoenikker, the absent-minded scientist, was a caricature of Dr. Irving Langmuir, the star of the G.E. Research Laboratory. I knew him some. My brother worked with him. Langmuir was wonderfully absent-minded. He wondered out loud one time whether, when turtles pulled in their heads, their spines buckled or contracted. I put that in the book. One time he left a tip under his plate after his wife served him breakfast at home. I put that in. His most important contribution, though, was the idea for what I called “Ice-9,” a form of frozen water that was stable at room temperature. He didn’t tell it directly to me. It was a legend around the Laboratory—about the time H. G. Wells came to Schenectady. That was long before my time. I was just a little boy when it happened—listening to the radio, building model airplanes.
INTERVIEWER: Yes?
VONNEGUT: Anyway—Wells came to Schenectady,