Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [51]
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I would add that novelists are not only unusually depressed, by/and large, but have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetics consultants at Bloomingdale’s department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.
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I heard a Frenchman in a Madison Avenue bookstore say in English the other day that nobody in America had produced a book in forty years or more. I knew what he meant. He was talking about planetary literary treasures on the order of Moby Dick or Huckleberry Finn or Leaves of Grass or Walden, say. I had to agree with him. No book from this country during my lifetime (1922-?) has been in scale with Ulysses or Remembrance of Things Past or The Tin Drum or One Hundred Years of Solitude or A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch.
Still, now that I contemplate all the Americans on my list of friends, I wish the Frenchman were here so that I could say to him frostily: “You are quite right, mon-sewer, we have not produced a book. All we poor Americans could do was produce a literature.”
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And here is how I spoke well of my friend Joseph Heller’s contributions to that literature in The New York Times Book Review of Sunday, October 6, 1974:
The company that made a movie out of Joseph Heller’s first novel, Catch-22, had to assemble what became the 11th or 12th largest bomber force on the planet at the time. If somebody wants to make a movie out of his second novel, Something Happened, he can get most of his props at Bloom-ingdale’s—a few beds, a few desks, some tables and chairs.
Life is a whole lot smaller and cheaper in this second book. It has shrunk to the size of a grave, almost.
Mark Twain is said to have felt that his existence was all pretty much downhill from his adventures as a Mississippi riverboat pilot. Mr. Heller’s two novels, when considered in sequence, might be taken as a similar statement about an entire white, middle-class generation of American males, my generation, Mr. Heller’s generation, Herman Wouk’s generation, Norman Mailer’s generation, Irwin Shaw’s generation, Vance Bourjaily’s generation, James Jones’s generation, and on and on—that for them everything has been downhill since World War II, as absurd and bloody as it often was.
Both books are full of excellent jokes, but neither one is funny. Taken together they tell a tale of pain and disappointments experienced by mediocre men of good will.
Mr. Heller is a first-rate humorist who cripples his own jokes intentionally—with the unhappiness of the characters who perceive them. He also insists op dealing with only the most hackneyed themes. After a thousand World War II airplane novels had been published and pulped, he gave us yet another one, which was gradually acknowledged as a sanely crazy masterpiece.
Now he offers us the thousand and first version of The Hucksters or The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.
There is a nattily dressed, sourly witty middle-management executive named Robert Slocum, he tells us, who lives in a nice house in Connecticut with a wife, a daughter, and two sons. Slocum works in Manhattan in the communications racket. He is restless. He mourns the missed opportunities of his youth. He is itchy for raises and promotions, even though he despises his company and the jobs he does. He commits unsatisfying adulteries now and then at sales conferences in resort areas, during long lunch hours, or while pretending to work late at the office.
He is exhausted.
He dreads old age.
Mr. Heller’s rewriting of this written-to-death situation took him 12 years.