Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [53]
(The place where Slocum works, incidentally, is unnamed, and its products and services are undescribed. But I had a friend of a friend of an acquaintance ask Mr. Heller if he minded naming Slocum’s employers. Mr. Heller replied with all possible speed and openness, “Time, Incorporated.” So we have a small scoop.)
Just as Mr. Heller is uninterested in tying a tin can to anything as localized as a company with a familiar name, so is he far above the complaining contests going on between men and women these days. He began this book way back in 1962, and there have been countless gut-ripping news items and confrontations since then. But Heller’s man Slocum is deaf and blind to them. He receives signals from only three sources: his office, his memory and home.
And, on the basis of these signals alone, he is able to say, apparently in all seriousness: “The world just doesn’t work. It’s an idea whose time is gone.”
This is black humor indeed—with the humor removed.
Robert Slocum was in the Air Force in Italy during World War II, by the way. He was especially happy there while demonstrating his unflagging virility to prostitutes. So it was also with John Yossarian, the hero of Catch-22, whose present whereabouts are unknown.
There will be a molasses-like cautiousness about accepting this book as an important one. It took more than a year for Catch-22 to gather a band of enthusiasts. I myself was cautious about that book. I am cautious again.
The uneasiness which many people will feel about liking Something Happened has roots which are deep. It is no casual thing to swallow a book by Joseph Heller, for he is, whether he intends to be or not, a maker of myths. (One way to do this, surely, is to be the final and most brilliant teller of an oft-told tale.) Catch-22 is now the dominant myth about Americans in the war against fascism. Something Happened, if swallowed, could become the dominant myth about the middle-class veterans who came home from that war to become heads of nuclear families. The proposed myth has it that those families were pathetically vulnerable and suffocating. It says that the heads of them commonly took jobs which were vaguely dishonorable or at least stultifying, in order to make as much money as they could for their little families, and they used that money in futile attempts to buy safety and happiness. The proposed myth says that they lost their dignity and their will to live in the process.
It says they are hideously tired now.
To accept a new myth about ourselves is to simplify our memories—and to place our stamp of approval on what might become an epitaph for our era in the shorthand of history. This, in my opinion, is why critics often condemn our most significant books and poems and plays when they first appear, while praising feebler creations. The birth of a new myth fills them with primitive dread, for myths are so effective.
Well—I have now suppressed my own dread. I have thought dispassionately about Something Happened and I am now content to have it shown to future generations as a spooky sort of summary of what my generation of nebulously clever white people experienced, and what we, within the cage of those experiences, then did with our lives.
And I am counting on a backlash. I expect younger readers to love Robert Slocum—on the grounds that he couldn’t possibly be as morally repellent and socially useless as he claims to be.
People a lot younger than I am may even be able to laugh at Slocum in an affectionate way, something I am unable to do. They may even see comedy in his tragic and foolish belief that he is totally responsible for the happiness or unhappiness of the members of his tiny family.
They may even see some nobility in him as an old soldier who has been brought to emotional ruin at last by the aging process and civilian life.
As for myself: I can’t crack a smile when he says, ostensibly about the positions