Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [7]
I heard the poet Robert Pinsky give a reading this summer, in which he apologized didactically for having had a much nicer life than normal. I should do that, too.
At least I seized the opportunity this past May to thank my birthplace, as a graduation speaker at Butler University. I said, “If I had it to do all over, I would choose to be born again in a hospital in Indianapolis. I would choose to spend my childhood again at 4365 North Illinois Street, about ten blocks from here, and to again be a product of that city’s public schools.
“I would again take courses in bacteriology and qualitative analysis in the summer school of Butler University.
“It was all here for me, just as it has all been for you, the best and the worst of Western Civilization, if you cared to pay attention: music, finance, government, architecture, law and sculpture and painting, history and medicine and athletics and every sort of science, and books, books, books, and teachers and role models.
“People so smart you can’t believe it, and people so dumb you can’t believe it. People so nice you can’t believe it, and people so mean you can’t believe it.”
I gave advice, too. I said, “My uncle Alex Vonnegut, a Harvard-educated life insurance salesman who lived at 5033 North Pennsylvania Street, taught me something very important. He said that when things were really going well we should be sure to notice it.
“He was talking about simple occasions, not great victories: maybe drinking lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or smelling the aroma of a nearby bakery, or fishing and not caring if we catch anything or not, or hearing somebody all alone playing a piano really well in the house next door.
“Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: ‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’ ”
Another way I was lucky: for the first thirty-three years of my life, telling short stories with ink on paper was a major American industry. Although I then had a wife and two children, it made good business sense for me to quit my job as a publicity man for General Electric, with health insurance and a retirement plan. I could make more money selling stories to The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s, weekly magazines full of ads, which published five short stories and an installment of a cliff-hanging serial in every issue.
Those were just the top-paying buyers of what I could produce. There were so many other magazines hungry for fiction that the market for stories was like a pinball machine. When I mailed off a story to my agent, I could be pretty sure somebody would pay me something for it, even though it might be rejected again and again.
But not long after I moved my family from Schenectady, New York, to Cape Cod, television, a much better buy for advertisers than magazines, made playing short story pinball for a living obsolete.
I commuted from the Cape to Boston to work for an industrial advertising agency, and then became a dealer in Saab automobiles, and then taught high school English in a private school for seriously fucked-up rich kids.
My son the doctor Mark Vonnegut, who wrote a swell book about his going crazy in the 1960s, and then graduated from Harvard Medical School, had an exhibition of his watercolors in Milton, Massachusetts, this summer. A reporter asked him what it had been like to grow up with a famous father.
Mark replied, “When I was growing up, my father was a car salesman who couldn’t get a job teaching at Cape Cod Junior College.”
5
I still think up short stories from time to time, as though there were money in it. The habit dies hard. There used to be fleeting fame in it, too. Highly literate people once talked enthusiastically to one another about a story