Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [45]
The great critic H. L. Mencken, himself a German-American, but living all his life in Baltimore, Maryland, confessed that he had difficulty in concentrating on the novels of Willa Cather. Try as he might, he couldn’t really care a whole lot about Czech immigrants in Nebraska.
Same problem.
I will say for the record that my grandfather Albert Lieber’s first wife, Alice, née Barus, namesake of my sister Allie, died giving birth to her third child, who was Uncle Rudy. Mother was her first. The middle child was Uncle Pete, who flunked out of MIT, but who nonetheless sired a nuclear scientist, my cousin Albert in Del Mar, California. Cousin Albert reports that he has just gone blind.
It isn’t radiation that has made cousin Albert blind. It is something else, which could have happened to anybody, in or out of science. Cousin Albert himself has sired a non-nuclear-type scientist, a computer whiz.
As Kilgore Trout used to exclaim from time to time, “Life goes on!”
The point I want to make is that Mother’s father, the brewer, Republican big shot, and neo-aristocratic bon vivant, married a violinist after his first wife died. She turned out to be clinically bughouse. Face it! Some women are! She hated his kids with a passion. She was jealous of his love for them. She wanted to be the whole show. Some women do!
This female bat out of hell, who could play a fiddle like nobody’s business, abused Mother and Uncle Pete and Uncle Rudy so ferociously, both physically and mentally, during their formative years, before Grandfather Lieber divorced her, that they never got over it.
If there had been a significant body of potential book-buyers who might care about rich German-Americans in Indianapolis, it would have been a piece of cake for me to bang out a roman-fleuve demonstrating that my grandfather in fact murdered my mother, albeit very slowly, by double-crossing her so long ago.
“Ting-a-ling, you son of a bitch!”
Working title: Gone With the Wind.
When Mother married my father, a young architect in moderate circumstances, politicians and saloonkeepers and the cream of Indianapolis German-American society gave them a treasure trove of crystal and linens and china and silver, and even some gold.
Scheherazade!
Who could doubt then that even Indiana had its own hereditary aristocracy, with useless possessions to rival those of horses’ asses in the other hemisphere?
It all seemed like a lot of junk to my brother and my sister and our father and me during the Great Depression. It is now as widely dispersed as the Class of 1940 of Shortridge High School.
Auf Wiedersehen.
42
I always had trouble ending short stories in ways that would satisfy a general public. In real life, as during a rerun following a timequake, people don’t change, don’t learn anything from their mistakes, and don’t apologize. In a short story they have to do at least two out of three of those things, or you might as well throw it away in the lidless wire trash receptacle chained and padlocked to the fire hydrant in front of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
OK, I could handle that. But after I had a character change and/or learn something and/or apologize, that left the cast standing around with their thumbs up their asses. That is no way to tell a reader the show is over.
In my salad days, when I was green in judgment, and never having asked to be born in the first place, I sought the advice of my then literary agent as to how to end stories without killing all the characters. He had been fiction editor of an important magazine, and a story consultant for a Hollywood studio as well.
He said, “Nothing could be simpler, dear boy: The hero mounts his horse and rides off into the sunset.”
Many years later, he would kill himself on purpose with a twelve-gauge shotgun.
Another friend and client of his said he couldn’t possibly have committed suicide, it was so out of character.
I replied, “Even with military training, there is no way a man can accidentally blow his head off with a shotgun.”
Many years earlier, so long