Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [65]
“I am moved on this occasion to put into a few words the ideal my parents and Twain and the rest held before me, and which I have now passed on. The ideal, achieved by few, is this: ’Live so that you can say to God on Judgment Day, “I was a very good person, even though I did not believe in you.” ’ The word ’God,’ incidentally, is capitalized throughout this speech, as are all pronouns referring to Him.
“We religious skeptics would like to swagger some in heaven, saying to others who spent a lot of time quaking in churches down here, ’I was never worried about pleasing or angering God—never took Him into my calculations at all.’
“Religious skeptics often become very bitter toward the end, as did Mark Twain. I do not propose to guess now as to why he became so bitter. I know why I will become bitter. I will finally realize that I have had it right all along: that I will not see God, that there is no heaven or Judgment Day.
“I have used the word ’calculations.’ It is a relative of that elegant Missouri verb, ’to calculate.’ In Twain’s time, and on the frontier a person who calculated this or that was asking that his lies be respected, since they had been arrived at by means of arithmetic. He wanted you to acknowledge that the arithmetic, the logic of his lies, was sound.
“I know a rowdy joke which is not fit to tell in mixed company in a Victorian home like this one. I can reveal the final line of it, however, without giving offense. This is it: ’Keep your hat on. We may wind up miles from here.’ Any writer beginning a story might well say that to himself: ’Keep your hat on. We may wind up miles from here.’
“This is the secret of good storytelling: to lie, but to keep the arithmetic sound. A storyteller, like any other sort of enthusiastic liar, is on an unpredictable adventure. His initial lie, his premise, will suggest many new lies of its own. The storyteller must choose among them, seeking those which are most believable, which keep the arithmetic sound. Thus does a story generate itself.
“The wildest adventure with storytelling, with Missouri calculation, of which I know is A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. It was written in this sacredly absurd monument—as were The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Tramp Abroad, The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi, from which I have quoted, and the world masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn. Twain’s most productive years were spent here—from the time he was thirty-nine until he was my age, which is fifty-six. He was my age when he left here to live in Europe and Redding and New York, his greatest work behind him.
“That is how far down the river of life he was when he left here. He could not afford to live here anymore. He was very bad at business.
“About A Connecticut Yankee: Its premise, its first lie, seemed to promise a lark. What could be more comical than sending back into the Dark Ages a late-nineteenth-century optimist and technocrat? Such a premise was surely the key to a treasure chest of screamingly funny jokes and situations. Mark Twain would have been wise to say to himself as he picked up that glittering key: ’Keep your hat on. We may wind up miles from here.’
“I will refresh your memories as to where he wound up, with or without his hat. The Yankee and his little band of electricians and mechanics and what-have-you are being attacked by thousands of English warriors armed with swords and spears and axes. The Yankee has fortified his position with a series, of electric fences and a moat. He also has several precursors to modern machine guns, which are Gatling guns.
“Comically enough, thousands of early attackers have already been electrocuted. Ten thousand of the greatest knights in England have been held in reserve. Now they come; I quote,