Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [15]
She was Hungarian. As the old saying goes: “If you have a Hungarian for a friend, you don’t need an enemy.”
Allie later had her picture taken with Dillinger’s big tombstone at Crown Hill, not far from the fence on West Thirty-eighth Street. I myself came upon it from time to time, while shooting crows with a .22 semiautomatic rifle our gun-nut father gave me for my birthday. Crows back then were classified as enemies of mankind. Given half a chance, they would eat our corn.
One kid I knew shot a golden eagle. You should have seen the wingspread!
Allie hated hunting so much that I stopped doing it, and so did Father. As I’ve written elsewhere, he had become a gun nut and hunter in order to prove that he wasn’t effeminate, even though he was in the arts, an architect and a painter and potter. In public lectures, I myself often say, “If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have nerve enough to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.”
Father supposed he could still demonstrate his manhood by fishing. But then my big brother Bernie spoiled that for him, too, saying it was as though he were smashing up Swiss pocketwatches, or some other exquisitely engineered little pieces of machinery.
I told Kilgore Trout at the clambake in 2001 about how my brother and sister had made Father ashamed of hunting and fishing. He quoted Shakespeare: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!”
Trout was self-educated, never having finished high school. I was mildly surprised, then, that he could quote Shakespeare. I asked if he had committed a lot of that remarkable author’s words to memory. He said, “Yes, dear colleague, including a single sentence which describes life as lived by human beings so completely that no writer after him need ever have written another word.”
“Which sentence was that, Mr. Trout?” I asked.
And he said, “ ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.’ ”
11
I wrote a letter to an old friend last spring about why I evidently couldn’t write publishable fiction anymore, after trying and failing to do that for many years. He is Edward Muir, a poet and advertising man my age living in Scars-dale. In my novel Cat’s Cradle, I say that anybody whose life keeps tangling up with yours for no logical reason is likely a member of your karass, a team God has formed to get something done for Him. Ed Muir is surely a member of my karass.
Listen to this: When I was at the University of Chicago after World War Two, Ed was there, although we did not meet. When I went to Schenectady, New York, to be a publicist for the General Electric Company, Ed went there to be a teacher at Union College. When I quit GE and moved to Cape Cod, he showed up there as a recruiter for the Great Books Program. At last we met, and whether in the service of God or not, my first wife Jane and I became leaders of a Great Books group.
And when he took an advertising job in Boston, so did I, not knowing he had done that. When Ed’s first marriage broke up, so did mine, and now we’re both in New York. My point, though, is as follows: When I sent him a letter about my case of writer’s block, he made it look like a poem and returned it.
He left off my salutation and the first few lines, which were in praise of Reader’s Block by David Markson, who had been his student at Union College. I said David shouldn’t thank Fate for letting him write such a good book in a time when large numbers of people could no longer be wowed by a novel, no matter how excellent. Something like that. I don’t have a copy of my letter as prose. As a poem, though, this is its appearance:
And no thanks to Fate.
When we’re gone, there won’t be anybody
Sufficiently excited by ink on paper
To realize how good it is.
I have this ailment