Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [98]
Swift does not develop this theme, but the history of the past hundred years or so has surely done it for him. What is it that has allowed civilized human beings to build and operate death camps? Disgust. What has encouraged them to bomb undefended cities, to torture prisoners, to beat up their own spouses and children, to blow out their own brains? Disgust. Yes. In my opinion, Gulliver’s Travels is a remarkable effort to inject us with an overdose of disgustedness, and thus to immunize us from that most dangerous disease.
This Book-of-the-Month Club edition of Gulliver’s Travels is based on the Oxford University Press edition of 1971, which was edited by Paul Turner, Lecturer in English Literature at Oxford. That edition has what this one lacks: an introduction and hundreds of fascinating notes by him. I recommend that edition to all who want the pleasure of relating the tale to Swift’s own adventures and times, and who would like help in speculating as to the plausibleness of Captain Gulliver’s endless lies. Mr. Turner tells us, for example: “The scale of Lilliput is one inch to a foot of the ordinary world. Mogg mentions [F. Mogg, Scientific American, Vol. CLXXIX, 1948] some biological difficulties: a Lilliputian would have room for far fewer cortical cells (so far less intelligence) than a chimpanzee; his head would be too small to carry useful eyes; and he would need eight times as many calories per ounce of body-weight as a full-scale man needs—twenty-four meals a day instead of three.” As for the giants of Brobdingnag, he refers to Mogg again, who “calls a sixty-foot man ’an engineering impossibility.’ The skeleton would need considerable modification to support the weight (about ninety tons): shorter legs, smaller head, thicker neck, and larger trunk (to accommodate adequate internal organs to power such a huge machine).” And so on.
The justification for publishing an edition as naked of notes as this one is, of course, is that the author, like all authors, wished his book to be loved for itself alone. If the ghost of Jonathan Swift is among us, it must resent terrifically my own Yahoolike intrusion here. I apologize. Next to my being in this volume at all, my most serious offense is failing to convey how much rage and joy and irrationality must have gone into the creation of this masterpiece. In praising the sanity of Gulliver’s Travels, I have made it sound altogether too sane.
15
JEKYLL AMD HYDE UPDATED
LEE GUBER, the Broadway producer, became a friend of mine when we served on the New York State Council for the Arts. During the summer of 1978 he asked me to write a modern version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for the musical stage. The original, by the way, is a tiny thing, no more than sixty pages. There is very little characterization in the original, which is surprisingly sketchy and sparsely populated. It was the first piece of writing for which Stevenson was paid.
I never got paid for my version. I consider it excellent, if a little slapdash and short. It is called The Chemistry Professor, and it goes like this:
THE TIME: THE PRESENT, SPRINGTIME.
THE PLACE: SWEETBREAD COLLEGE, A SMALL, LIBERAL-ARTS INSTITUTION OUTSIDE PHILADELPHIA.
SCENE 1: THE COLLEGE GATE, NOON.
[At the rise: A chorus of male and female students is discovered, desperately unhappy, making extravagant demonstrations of grief Aparticularly pretty and scatterbrained coed is named KIMBERLY. Her studious boyfriend is named SAM. Each person has afresh copy of the student newspaper, which has told them that the college is bankrupt, and will probably close forever.]
KIMBERLY: I can’t stand it!
SAM: What kind of a world is this, where a thing like this can happen?
STUDENT 1: What a rotten, stinking society this is!
[And so on. The cries become more musical and the milling more formal, so that a song and dance about outrageous fortune materializes. No mention has yet been made,