Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [95]
Nobody was killed or seriously hurt, thank God.
Jim Adams was not the only one of my children to come close to actual combat with a major literary figure. About the time Jim and Yevtushenko were menacing each other on the Amazon, Mark Vonnegut was considering a fight with Jack Kerouac in our kitchen on Cape Cod. These confrontations even took place in the same time zone, but in different hemispheres.
I knew Kerouac only at the end of his life, which is to say there was no way for me to know him at all, since he had become a pinwheel. He had settled briefly on Cape Cod, and a mutual friend, the writer Robert Boles, brought him over to my house one night. I doubt that Kerouac knew anything about me or my work, or even where he was. He was crazy. He called Boles, who is black, “a blue-gummed nigger.” He said that Jews were the real Nazis, and that Allen Ginsberg had been told by the Communists to befriend Kerouac, in order that they might gain control of American young people, whose leader he was.
This was pathetic. There were clearly thunderstorms in the head of this once charming and just and intelligent man. He wished to play poker, so I dealt some cards. There were four hands, I think—one for Boles, one for Kerouac, one for Jane, one for me. Kerouac picked up the remainder of the deck, and he threw it across the kitchen.
It was then that Mark came in, unexpectedly home for a weekend from Swarthmore College, where he was a religion major. He was also a middleweight wrestler in very good shape. He wore a full beard and a work shirt and blue jeans, and carried a duffel bag. Everything about his costume and even his posture might have been inspired by Kerouac’s books.
The moment Kerouac saw him, Kerouac stood and looked him over smolderingly from head to toe. The calm before a fight settled dankly over the room.
“You think you understand me,” said Kerouac to Mark. “You don’t understand me at all. You want to fight about it?” Mark said nothing, not knowing who Kerouac was or what he was so mad about.
Kerouac praised himself as a fighter, asked Mark if he really thought he was man enough to take him on.
Mark understood this much, anyway: that he might really have to fight this person. He didn’t want to, but then again, he wouldn’t have minded fighting him all that much.
But then Kerouac sat back down in his chair heavily, shaking his head and saying over and over again, “Doesn’t understand me at all.”
Later on that night, after Kerouac and Boles left, Mark and I talked some about Kerouac, who was then completing his seventeenth and last book. He would die very soon.
It turned out that Mark had never read Kerouac.
• • •
And Mark is a physician now, married to Pat O’Shea, a schoolteacher, and they have one son, Zachary Vonnegut, the firstborn of my grandchildren, now three years old, and the only one so far to carry on my own curious last name. Mark is the first Vonnegut in America to be a healer, and only the second one to earn a doctor’s degree of any sort. My brother Bernard, of course, has a doctor’s degree in chemistry.
And Conrad Aiken, the poet, the one time I met him, told me that a child will compete with its father in an area where the father is weak, in an area where the father mistakenly believes himself to be quite accomplished. Aiken himself did this, by his own account. His father was a Renaissance man, a surgeon, an athlete, something of a musician, something of a poet, and on and on. Aiken said that he himself became a poet because he realized that his father’s poetry really wasn’t very good.
So what am I, if I believe that, to make of myself as mirrored in my own children, who cheerfully compete in every area, including writing, in which