Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [41]
INTERVIEWER: How do you feel about Bellow’s winning the Nobel Prize for Literature?
VONNEGUT: It was the best possible way to honor our entire literature.
INTERVIEWER: Do you find it easy to talk to him?
VONNEGUT: Yes. I’ve had about three opportunities. I was his host one time at the University of Iowa, where I was teaching and he was lecturing. It went very well. We had one thing in common, anyway—
INTERVIEWER: Which was—?
VONNEGUT: We were both products of the Anthropology Department of the University of Chicago. So far as I know, he never went on any anthropological expeditions, and neither did I. We invented pre-industrial peoples instead—I in Cat’s Cradle and he in Henderson the Rain King.
INTERVIEWER: So he is a fellow scientist.
VONNEGUT: I’m no scientist at all. I’m glad now, though, that I was pressured into becoming a scientist by my father and my brother. I understand how scientific reasoning and playfulness work, even though I have no talent for joining in. I enjoy the company of scientists, am easily excited and entertained when they tell me what they’re doing. I’ve spent a lot more time with scientists than with literary people, my brother’s friends, mostly. I enjoy plumbers and carpenters and automobile mechanics, too. I didn’t get to know any literary people until the last ten years, starting with two years of teaching at Iowa. There at Iowa, I was suddenly friends with Nelson Algren and José Donoso and Vance Bourjaily and Donald Justice and George Starbuck and Marvin Bell, and so on. I was amazed. Now, judging from the review my latest book, Slapstick, has received, people would like to bounce me out of the literary establishment— send me back where I came from.
INTERVIEWER: There were some bad reviews?
VONNEGUT: Only in The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, The New York Review of Books, The Village Voice, and Rolling Stone. They loved me in Medicine Hat.
INTERVIEWER: TO what do you attribute this rancor?
VONNEGUT: Slapstick may be a very bad book. I am perfectly willing to believe that. Everybody else writes lousy books, so why shouldn’t I? What was unusual about the reviews was that they wanted people to admit now that I had never been any good. The reviewer for the Sunday Times actually asked critics who had praised me in the past to now admit in public how wrong they’d been. My publisher, Sam Lawrence, tried to comfort me by saying that authors were invariably attacked when they became fabulously well-to-do.
INTERVIEWER: You needed comforting?
VONNEGUT: I never felt worse in my Ufe. I felt as though I were sleeping standing up on a boxcar in Germany again.
INTERVIEWER: That bad?
VONNEGUT: No. But bad enough. All of a sudden, critics wanted me squashed like a bug. And it wasn’t just that I had money all of a sudden, either. The hidden complaint was that I was barbarous, that I wrote without having made a systematic study of great literature, that I was no gentleman, since I had done hack writing so cheerfully for vulgar magazines—that I had not paid my academic dues.
INTERVIEWER: You had not suffered?
VONNEGUT: I had suffered, all right—but as a badly-educated person in vulgar company and in a vulgar trade. It was dishonorable enough that I perverted art for money. I then topped that felony by becoming, as I say, fabulously well-to-do. Well, that’s just too damn bad for me and for everybody. I’m completely in print, so we’re all stuck with me and stuck with my books.
INTERVIEWER: Do you mean to fight back?
VONNEGUT: In a way. I’m on the New York State Council for the Arts now, and every so often some other member talks about sending