Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [43]
INTERVIEWER: Did your sister try to write for money, too?
VONNEGUT: No. She could have been a remarkable sculptor, too. I bawled her out one time for not doing more with the talents she had. She replied that having talent doesn’t carry with it the obligation that something has to be done with it. This was startling news to me. I thought people were supposed to grab their talents and run as far and fast as they could.
INTERVIEWER: What do you think now?
VONNEGUT: Well—what my sister said now seems a peculiarly feminine sort of wisdom. I have two daughters who are as talented as she was, and both of them are damned if they are going to lose their poise and senses of humor by snatching up their talents and desperately running as far and as fast as they can. They saw me run as far and as fast as I could—and it must have looked like quite a crazy performance to them. And this is the worst possible metaphor, for what they actually saw was a man sitting still for decades.
INTERVIEWER: At a typewriter.
VONNEGUT: Yes, and smoking his fool head off.
INTERVIEWER: Have you ever stopped smoking?
VONNEGUT: Twice. Once I did it cold turkey, and turned into Santa Claus. I became roly-poly. I was approaching 250 pounds. I stopped for almost a year, and then the University of Hawaii brought me to Oahu to speak. I was drinking out of a coconut on the roof of the Hi Kai one night, and all I had to do to complete the ring of my happiness was to smoke a cigarette. Which I did.
INTERVIEWER: The second time?
VONNEGUT: Very recently—last year. I paid SmokEnders 150 dollars to help me quit, over a period of six weeks. It was exactly as they had promised—easy and instructive. I won my graduation certificate and recognition pin. The only trouble was that I had also gone insane. I was supremely happy and proud, but those around me found me unbearably opinionated and abrupt and boisterous. Also: I had stopped writing. I didn’t even write letters anymore. I had made a bad trade, evidently. So I started smoking again. As the National Association of Manufacturers used to say—
INTERVIEWER: I’m not sure I know what they used to say.
VONNEGUT: ’There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
INTERVIEWER: Do you really think creative writing can be taught?
VONNEGUT: About the same way golf can be taught. A pro can point out obvious flaws in your swing. I did that well, I think, at the University of Iowa for two years…. I taught creative writing badly at Harvard—because my marriage was breaking up, and because I was commuting every week to Cambridge from New York. I taught even worse at City College a couple of years ago. I had too many other projects going on at the same time. I don’t have the will to teach anymore. I only know the theory.
INTERVIEWER: Could you put the theory into a few words?
VONNEGUT: It was stated by Paul Engle—the founder of the Writers’ Workshop at Iowa. He told me that, if the Workshop ever got a building of its own, these words should be inscribed over the entrance: “Don’t take it all so seriously.”
INTERVIEWER: And how would that be helpful?
VONNEGUT: It would remind the students that they were learning to play practical jokes.
INTERVIEWER: Practical jokes?
VONNEGUT: If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.
INTERVIEWER: Can you give an example?
VONNEGUT: The Gothic novel. Dozens of the things are published every year, and they all sell. My friend Borden Deal recently wrote a Gothic novel for the fun of it, and I asked him what the plot was, and he said, “A young woman takes a job in an old house and gets the pants scared off her.”
INTERVIEWER: Some more examples?
VONNEGUT: The others aren’t that much fun to describe: Somebody gets into trouble,