Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [45]
INTERVIEWER: No joke.
VONNEGUT: A tragedy. I just keep trying to think of ways, even horrible ways, for young writers to somehow hang on.
INTERVIEWER: Should young writers be subsidized?
VONNEGUT: Something’s got to be done, now that free enterprise has made it nearly impossible for them to support themselves through free enterprise. I was a sensational businessman in the beginning—for the simple reason that there was so much business to be done. When I was working for General Electric, I wrote a story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” the first story I ever wrote. I mailed it off to Collier’s. Knox Burger was fiction editor there. Knox told me what was wrong with it and how to fix it. I did what he said, and he bought the story for seven hundred and fifty dollars, six weeks’ pay at G.E. I wrote another, and he paid me nine hundred and fifty dollars, and suggested that it was perhaps time for me to quit G.E. Which I did. I moved to Provincetown. Eventually, my price for a short story got up to twenty-nine hundred dollars a crack. Think of that. And Knox got me a couple of agents who were as shrewd about storytelling as he was—Kenneth Littauer, who had been his predecessor at Collier’s, and Max Wilkinson, who had been a story editor for MGM. And let it be put on the record here that Knox Burger, who is about my age, discovered and encouraged more good young writers than any other editor of his time. I don’t think that’s ever been written down anywhere. It’s a fact known only to writers, and one that could easily vanish, if it isn’t somewhere written down.
INTERVIEWER: Where is Knox Burger now?
VONNEGUT: He’s a literary agent. He represents my son Mark, in fact.
INTERVIEWER: And Littauer and Wilkinson?
VONNEGUT: Littauer died ten years ago or so. He was a colonel in the Lafayette Escadrille, by the way, at the age of twenty-three—and the first pilot to strafe a trench. He was my mentor. Max Wilkinson has retired to Florida. It always embarrassed him to be an agent. If some stranger asked him what he did for a living, he always said he was a cotton planter.
INTERVIEWER: Do you have a new mentor now?
VONNEGUT: No. I guess I’m too old to find one. Whatever I write now is set in type without comment by my publisher, who is younger than I am, by editors, by anyone. I don’t have my sister to write for anymore. Suddenly, there are all these unfilled jobs in my life.
INTERVIEWER: Do you feel as though you’re up there without a net under you?
VONNEGUT: And without a balancing pole, either. It gives me the heebie-jeebies sometimes.
INTERVIEWER: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
VONNEGUT: You know the panic bars they have on the main doors of schools and theaters? If you get slammed into the door, the door will fly open?
INTERVIEWER: Yes.
VONNEGUT: The brand name on most of them is “Vonduprin.” The “Von” is for Vonnegut. A relative of mine was caught in the Iroquois Theater Fire in Chicago a long time ago, and he invented the panic bar along with two other guys. “Prin” was Prinz. I forget who “Du” was.
INTERVIEWER: O.K.
VONNEGUT: And I want to say, too, that humorists are very commonly the youngest children in their families. When I was the littlest kid at our supper table, there was only one way I could get anybody’s attention, and that was to be funny. I had to specialize. I used to listen to radio comedians very intently, so I could learn how to make jokes. And that’s what my books are, now that I’m a grownup—mosaics of jokes.
INTERVIEWER: Do you have any favorite jokes?
VONNEGUT: My sister and I used to argue about what the funniest joke in the world was—next to a guy storming into a coat closet, of course. When the two of us worked together, incidentally, we could be almost as funny as Laurel and Hardy. That’s basically