Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [42]
INTERVIEWER: You believe that?
VONNEGUT: I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.
INTERVIEWER: Let’s talk about the women in your books.
VONNEGUT: There aren’t any. No real women, no love.
INTERVIEWER: Is this worth expounding upon?
VONNEGUT: It’s a mechanical problem. So much of what happens in storytelling is mechanical, has to do with the technical problems of how to make a story work. Cowboy stories and policeman stories end in shoot-outs, for example, because shoot-outs are the most reliable mechanisms for making such stories end. There is nothing like death to say what is always such an artificial thing to say: “The end.” I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that’s the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers.
INTERVIEWER: So you keep love out.
VONNEGUT: I have other things I want to talk about. Ralph Ellison did the same thing in Invisible Man. If the hero in that magnificent book had found somebody worth loving, somebody who was crazy about him, that would have been the end of the story. Céline did the same thing in Journey to the End of the Night: He excluded the possibility of true and final love—so that the story could go on and on and on.
INTERVIEWER: Not many writers talk about the mechanics of stories.
VONNEGUT: I am such a barbarous technocrat that I believe they can be tinkered with like Model T Fords.
INTERVIEWER: To what end?
VONNEGUT: To give the reader pleasure.
INTERVIEWER: Will you ever write a love story, do you think?
VONNEGUT: Maybe. I lead a loving life. I really do. Even when I’m leading that loving life, though, and it’s going so well, I sometimes find myself thinking, “My goodness, couldn’t we talk about something else for just a little while?” You know what’s really funny?
INTERVIEWER: No.
VONNEGUT: My books” are being thrown out of school libraries all over the country—because they’re supposedly obscene. I’ve seen letters to small town newspapers that put Slaughterhouse-Five in the same class with Deep Throat and Hustler magazine. How could anybody masturbate to Slaughterhouse-Five?
INTERVIEWER: It takes all kinds.
VONNEGUT: Well, that kind doesn’t exist. It’s my religion the censors hate. They find me disrespectful toward their idea of God Almighty. They think it’s the proper business of government to protect the reputation of God. All I can say is, “Good luck to them, and good luck to the government, and good luck to God.” You know what H.L. Mencken said one time about religious people? He said he’d been greatly misunderstood. He said he didn’t hate them. He simply found them comical.
INTERVIEWER: When I asked you a while back which member of your family had influenced you most as a writer, you said your mother. I had expected you to say your sister, since you talked sp much about her in Slapstick.
VONNEGUT: I said in Slapstick that she was the person I wrote for—that every successful creative person creates with an audience of one in mind. That’s the secret of artistic unity. Anybody can achieve it, if he or she will make something with only one person in mind. I didn’t realize that she was the person I wrote for until after she died.
INTERVIEWER: She loved literature?
VONNEGUT: She wrote wonderfully well. She didn’t read much—but, then again, neither in later years did Henry