So It Goes

Kurt Vonnegut has passed on, apparently from a brain injury caused by a fall. He was 84. No wonder he fell.

Thousands upon thousands of words will be typed and uttered on Vonnegut's behalf, most of them useless, many attaching grand themes to his work and philosophical outlook. But it's really simple: Kurt Vonnegut had a first-rate imagination, wrote clear prose, and proposed that people be kind to one another. He distrusted authority and painted those looking to rule us as clowns. He smoked for much of his adult life and did not suffer from emphysema or cancer. It happens.

Most Vonnegut fans praise "Cat's Cradle" and "Slaughterhouse-Five" as his greatest works, and indeed they are top-notch. But my sentimental favorite is "Breakfast Of Champions," a funny, tragic book that did not tickle the reviewers, and that Vonnegut himself believed to be among his lesser efforts, giving it a C. Not me -- the tangled tale of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout still resonates with me whenever I dip into it, and Trout remains my favorite fictional character in American lit, just ahead of Myra Breckinridge.

Trout was a prolific but largely-failed science fiction writer whose better stories appeared in porn mags. One I still remember was "The Smart Bunny," about a rabbit born with a human-sized brain who hops to the city to have it chopped down, given that a human brain is useless to a rabbit. On his way there he is shot and killed by a hunter, who upon noticing the rabbit's large cranium believes him to be mutated and therefore inedible. So the dead rabbit is simply thrown away. The end.

There's a lesson there for all of us, I think.

I met Vonnegut once, in 1990 at some fancy lit gathering in Indianapolis, our mutual hometown. He was nice but a bit gruff, spoke quickly and wheezed when he laughed. He also reeked of cigarette smoke. We chatted about being Hoosiers in New York, where we both lived, and agreed that New York was a great city and there was nothing like it. He then excused himself to have another smoke.

We crossed paths again, kind of, in 1995, at Terry Southern's memorial service at the Unitarian Church of All Souls on 80th and Lexington Ave. Vonnegut was one of the speakers, as was my friend Nelson Lyon, who worked with (well, propped up, actually) Southern at "SNL", and was Michael O'Donoghue's screenplay writing partner and main inspiration for the character Mr. Mike. As the service wound down, Nelson and I went outside for some air, and just to our right stood Vonnegut, alone and puffing on a butt. He stared at us intensely.

"Nels," I said in a low voice, "Kurt Vonnegut is staring at us. What should we do?"

"One writer at a time, Den!" boomed Nelson in his robust voice. "Today we honor the late Mr. Southern!"

Vonnegut didn't go to the post-memorial cocktail party at George Plimpton's apartment. At least, I didn't see him there. Maybe he was outside, smoking.

Vonnegut said that early in his career, he almost became a writer for Bob and Ray, but didn't feel he was funny enough. Herman Wouk once wrote for Fred Allen, and I don't recall "The Caine Mutiny" to be a laff-fest. There are worse pairings. I think Vonnegut would've done fine. But we'll never know.

Kurt Vonnegut was a free thinker, an atheist who believed that instead of the Ten Commandments, public buildings and courtrooms should display the Sermon on the Mount. At the height of his lit fame, he said that he wrote as simply as he could so that his ideas could be grasped by Generals in the Pentagon. He cracked wise to the end, and now he's dead.

So it goes.