• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I am often asked to give advice to young writers who wish to be famous and fabulously well-to-do. This is the best I have to offer:

While looking as much like a bloodhound as possible, announce that you are working twelve hours a day on a masterpiece. Warning: All is lost if you crack a smile.

10

EMBARRASSMENT

A FRIEND OF MINE once spoke to me about what he called the “existential hum,” the uneasiness which keeps us moving, which never allows us to feel entirely at ease. He had tried heroin once. He said he understood at once the seductiveness of that narcotic. For the first time in his life, he was not annoyed by the existential hum.

I would describe the hum that is with me all the time as embarrassment. I have somehow disgraced myself.

My Indianapolis relatives may actually feel that I have done so. They are not enthusiastic about my work. I have already described my Uncle John’s distaste for it. As for my Uncle Alex: I dedicated The Sirens of Titan to him, and he said he could not read it. He supposed that beatniks would think it was wonderful. My Aunt Ella, who owned Stewart’s Bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky, would not stock my books. She found them degenerate, and said so.

The only big write-up I have so far received in my home town appeared in the October 1976 issue of Indianapolis Magazine, a publication of the Chamber of Commerce. It began like this:

“Whether they like his book or not (some don’t), most of those who know Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., agree that he is a nice guy.

In Indianapolis his aunts, cousins and old friends call him Kay, and their memories of him are fond and lively. His Aunt, Irma Vonnegut Lindener, says warmly, “He’s a dear, awfully nice,” and her eyes light up with affection as she recounts thoughtful things he has done for the family over the years. He shared an enviable rapport with his uncle, Alex Vonnegut … though they were worlds apart in their convictions.

The tremendous gap between the old world gentility of Vonnegut’s relatives and his own contemporary manner of living, thinking and writing has not dimmed the fondness that exists between them. Mrs. Lindener, an intellectual, articulate woman, admits that she has not read Breakfast of Champions, and doesn’t intend to. She is also puzzled by some of his other books, but her pride in his achievement as a major novelist is not diminished by a difference in point of view …

More offensive to my relatives than my books, even, I think, is the fact of my being divorced. In the history of my family in America, I am only the second member to have been divorced. When I returned to Indianapolis for the funeral of Uncle Alex, at the Flanner and Buchanan funeral home, a girl cousin I had once been very close to turned her back on me—because I had not stuck with my first wife through thick and thin.

• • •

The only other Vonnegut to get divorced was my Uncle Walter—again, a first cousin of my father. He, too, had the hubris to seek his fortune in the arts in New York City—as an actor on the stage. He was a protégé of the then premiere novelist of Indianapolis, who was Booth Tarkington. I never met Mr. Tarkington, although I lived for a while only a block from his home on North Meridian Street, where he died in 1946. His use of black people for comic relief in some of his stories, no matter how kindly Mr. Tarkington’s intentions, makes the stories sound somewhat dated today.

Be that as it may, Mr. Tarkington was a first-rate playwright on top of everything else, which I am not, and he saw Uncle Walter in amateur productions in Indianapolis, and urged him to come here in the late 1920s, which Uncle Walter did.

He was an instant success as a supporting actor, appearing, for example, with Humphrey Bogart in The Petrified Forest. His wife Marjorie also did well as a supporting actress, and Uncle Walter and Aunt Marjorie and their two children, Walter, Jr., and Irma Ruth, were all in the cast of Eugene O’Neill’s only comedy, Ah, Wilderness!,