Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [65]
Colonel Littauer sold a dozen or more of my stories, several to Knox, making it possible for me to quit my job with General Electric and move with Jane and our then two kids to Cape Cod as a free-lance writer. When the magazines went bust because of TV, Knox became an editor of paperback originals. He published three books of mine as such: The Sirens of Titan, Canary in a Cathouse, and Mother Night.
Knox got me started, and he kept me going until he could no longer help me. And then Seymour Lawrence came to my rescue.
Also in the flesh at the clambake were five men half my age who made me want to keep on going in my sunset years because of their interest in my work. They weren’t there to see me. They wanted at long last to meet Kilgore Trout. They were Robert Weide, who in this summer of 1996 is making a movie in Montreal of Mother Night, and Marc Leeds, who wrote and had published a witty encyclopedia of my life and work, and Asa Pieratt and Jerome Klinkowitz, who have kept my bibliography up-to-date and written essays about me as well, and Joe Petro III, numbered like a World War, who taught me how to silk-screen.
My closest business associate, Don Farber, lawyer and agent, was there with his dear wife, Anne. My closest social pal, Sidney Offit, was there. The critic John Leonard was there, and the academicians Peter Reed and Loree Rackstraw, and the photographer Cliff McCarthy, and other kind strangers too numerous to mention.
The professional actors Kevin McCarthy and Nick Nolte were there.
My children and grandchildren weren’t there. That was OK, perfectly understandable. It wasn’t my birthday, and I wasn’t a guest of honor. The heroes that evening were Frank Smith and Kilgore Trout. My kids and my kids’ kids had other fish to fry. Perhaps I should say my kids and my kids’ kids had other lobsters and clams and oysters and potatoes and corn on the cob to steam in seaweed.
Whatever!
Get it right! Remember Uncle Carl Barus, and get it right!
63
This is not a Gothic novel. My late friend Borden Deal, a first-rate southern novelist, so southern he asked his publishers not to send review copies north of the Mason-Dixon line, also wrote Gothic novels under a feminine nom de plume. I asked him for a definition of a Gothic novel. He said, “A young woman goes into an old house and gets her pants scared off.”
Borden and I were in Vienna, Austria, for a congress of PEN, the international writers’ organization founded after World War One, when he told me that. We went on to talk about the German novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who in print found humiliation and pain so delectable at the end of the previous century. Because of him, modern languages have the word masochism.
Borden not only wrote serious novels and Gothics. He wrote country music. He had his guitar back in his hotel room, and was working, he said, on a song called “I Never Waltzed in Vienna.” I miss him. I want a look-alike for Borden at the clambake, and two luckless fishermen in a little rowboat right offshore, dead ringers for the saints Stanley Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
So be it.
Borden and I mused about novelists such as Masoch and the Marquis de Sade, who had intentionally or accidentally inspired new words. Sadism, of course, is joy while inflicting pain on others. Sadomasochism means getting one’s rocks off while hurting others, while being hurt by others, or while hurting oneself.
Borden said doing without those words nowadays was like trying to talk about life without words for beer or water.
The only contemporary American writer we could think of who had given us a new word, and surely not because he is a famous pervert, which he isn’t, was Joseph Heller. The title of his first novel, Catch-22, is defined this way in my Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary: “A problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem.”
Read the book!
I told Borden what Heller said in an interview when he was asked if he feared death. Heller said he had never experienced