Current weather:  38° F   mostly cloudy, breezy

sponsored by:

Interview with Kurt Vonnegut

April 14, 2004

Even at age 81, Kurt Vonnegut still smokes his trademark unfiltered Pall Malls.

He’s been doing so since he was 11, and he’s not about to stop now.

But, hey, this guy has survived worse. He was a prisoner of war in Germany during World War II. He was in the city of Dresden when the British bombed it, killing an estimated 135,000 people.

He once worked in advertising.

And he survived as a writer for nearly 15 years before he really attracted a following of devoted readers drawn to the gently pessimistic, always skeptical views that he put forth in such novels as “Player Piano,” “The Sirens of Titan,” “Mother Night,” “Cat’s Cradle” and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.”

The breakthrough came in 1969 with his novel “Slaughterhouse Five.” The story is of Billy Pilgrim, an ordinary man who becomes unstuck in time. One minute he’s an optometrist in small-town Indiana, the next he’s slogging through the woods during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. Then he’s living with a Hollywood movie star named Montana Wildhack on a far distant planet called Tralfamadore.

Based on his personal experiences as a prisoner of war, “Slaughterhouse Five,” is one of the most gently horrific anti-war commentaries ever published. Contrast it with his 1963 novel “Cat’s Cradle,” which blends an end-of-the-world scenario with an offbeat variation on Eastern religion called Bokononism, and you can see why Vonnegut has been the kind of author whom college students in particular love to read.

As critic Jerome Klinkowitz wrote, “(I)n the late 1960s, as the culture as a whole exploded, Vonnegut was able to write and publish a novel, ‘Slaughterhouse Five,’ which so perfectly caught America’s transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age.”

More recently, Vonnegut’s work has fallen off in both quantity and quality. “God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian” is a slim volume based on a series of 90-second radio spots that he did for a New York City station. The theme: Vonnegut bargains with the famous doctor of death to kill him, let him go to heaven and interview people such as John Brown and William Shakespeare, then return and talk about it.

As the reviewer for Publishers Weekly wrote, “This may be Vonnegut (or his publisher) scraping the bottom of the barrel, but no matter: There are few writers whose scrapings we’d rather have.”

“Look,” Vonnegut says, “every writer who’s lived as long as I have has written crap at the end.”

Maybe. But few writers have maintained their popularity as long as Vonnegut has, with 15 novels, a couple of plays, two collections of short stories and three collections of nonfiction.

And it is his literary stature, along with his unflinching sense of liberal politics, that makes him a popular speaker. In any event, Vonnegut is one of the feature draws of Get Lit!, the sixth annual Inland Northwest Literary Arts Festival.

Vonnegut was put as headliner of a Saturday-night program at the 750-seat Metropolitan Performing Arts Center. Following the show, he was to meet with more dedicated fans (those who can afford the $100-a-head tickets) in a special reception at The Catacombs Pub.

But a couple of weeks before his appearance, he took the time to answer a few questions, offer a few opinions and in general converse over the phone from his New York home.

When asked about the writing of “Slaughterhouse Five,” he related the story that makes up the novel’s first chapter, which entailed visiting his former wartime buddy and, at least initially, having to endure his buddy’s wife’s wrath.

“You were just children,” she said, a cry that inspired Vonnegut to finally finish the war novel that he had been writing since the war’s end.

Then he asked what was the best novel to come out of Vietnam.

“Tim O'Brien’s ‘The Things They Carried,’ ” I said.

The conversation then moved to the notion of just wars and WWII and how even in wars that need to be fought, horrible things happen.

And he mentioned Air Marshall Arthur Harris, the British officer who ordered the Dresden bombing

Vonnegut: “And just 20 years ago, but long after the war, it was proposed that a monument be put up to him in Trafalgar Square or somewhere. And RAF guys protested because they were so ashamed of bombing civilians. Dresden was a British atrocity. We just came along to help in the daytime. I talked to one RAF guy, who was just a bureaucrat in uniform, and he said that it was purely momentum. ‘Hell, we’ve got all this gasoline, we’ve got all these airplanes and all these bombs. What are we going to do tonight?’ ”

Webster: We could look at Vietnam. Look at My Lai, and My Lai wasn’t the only incident that happened. It was certainly on a smaller scale (than Dresden), but the horror is every bit as great for those people involved.

Vonnegut “Of course. Have you seen that that documentary on McNamara? (“The Fog of War”)”

Webster: Yes, I have.

Vonnegut “Where he decided, ‘Jesus, we didn’t know what we were doing.’ ” (laughs)

Webster: You know, I may be the only film critic in the country who didn’t like that movie. And it’s not that I don’t think that it’s well made. Errol Morris makes good movies. But he needed another voice to keep McNamara honest. He just let McNamara run off at the mouth, and so a lot of people today who didn’t go through that time who are 30 years or younger are going, ‘Wow, it’s such a wonderful movie.’ And, I’m sorry, it didn’t work on me like that. That guy still has a lot to pay for, I think.

Vonnegut “And isn’t paying much for it either.”

Webster: Well, personally, he may be. His wife died, his family fell apart, some of his children hate him, apparently.

Vonnegut “I hope, I hope, I hope.”(Pause) “Well, what should I say to those kids out there.”

Webster: Good question. One of the things that I was going to ask you was. . . Thinking of your early career as a writer, I know that you didn’t have it easy. You just worked and worked and worked and worked. What about writers today? What would you tell them about getting into the business of writing?

Vonnegut “(Coughs) Well, you can knock television if you want. But there’s this new kind of writing now — and on occasion it’s created masterpieces — which is team writing. God almighty, I look at episodes of ‘Law & Order,’ most of them, and they’re better than any play on Broadway. And dealing with larger issues. So, yeah, I’d say join the team and see if you can’t do a really good job. For the individual writer, well, you do that for therapy for one thing. What I do say about the arts is if you do practice the arts, whether good or badly, it’s a way to make your soul grow, whether you’re making a picture or whatever. My big joke of the evening is, I guess, ‘If you want to hurt your parents and you don’t have the nerve to be a homosexual the least you can do is go into the arts.’ ”(laughs)

Webster: So what is your writing habit today. Do you get up and writing the morning or. . . ?

Vonnegut “Well, I’m facing a particular responsibility now for this crowd in Spokane (pronounces it Spo-Kahn, then Spokane). Why is it Spo-kann and not Spo-kahn?”

Webster: Because it’s an Indian name that was originally spelled with no “e” on the end. You know, when I was in Poland a few years ago, in Lublin, Poland, of all places, and I was talking to some of the students there who were English literature students. And your name came up. Yours and Sherman Alexie’s.

Vonnegut “Among the very last guards that I had at the end of the war, was Ukrainian SS. And they enjoyed the German army because they had such a terrible experience under Stalin. They welcomed the Germans when they came in. They must have all been shot after the war.”

Webster: I heard so many horror stories. It was so interesting to go around Poland and look at the beautiful country and think that 60 years before the place had been drenched in blood.

Vonnegut “Yes.”

Webster: But then again I guess you could say that about everyplace.

Vonnegut “Well, Gunter Grass is a friend of mine.”

Webster: Is he still alive, too?

Vonnegut “Sure. He was just a little kid in the war. He said, ‘When were you born?’ And I said, ‘1922.’ And he said, ‘There’s no man your age for you to talk to.’ It was the ideal age to get killed.”

Webster: Of course. Bringing that up, you and I both were in wars that lasted years. What do you think the wars these days that take three weeks to finish to actual fighting and then the rest of it, the mopping up, seems to go on forever.

Vonnegut “It’s the dumbest thing that I ever heard of. These people in Washington are like kids that follow the boys club. And they’re gonna do this and do that. Hell, all they did was stir up a hornet’s nest. We’re in much worse danger now. We’re hated all over the world, which is great. And also, these great fortunes are being made out of it. It’s just horrible. I’ve got a lot of grandchildren whose treasure has been totally cleaned out and spent on weapons. I would have liked to have left them a nation with a health plan, where it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to go to college. But they don’t dare travel anywhere now.”

Webster: I’m going to travel to Europe in another month. I just always say that I’m from Canada.

Vonnegut “Another good passport is Irish.”

Webster: That’s always been a good one. OK, let me ask you this: Bush, Kerry, Nader or none of the above?

Vonnegut “Well, I smoke a lot, you know.”

Webster: Pall Malls?

Vonnegut “I’ve got a lawsuit against Brown & Willliamson now. Because I have been chain-smoking Pall Malls since I was 11. And on their package they promised to kill me.” (laughs)

Webster: They’ve done a very poor job of it.

Vonnegut “But, Christ, to decide between two multimillionaire members of Skull and Bones? It’s ridiculous. But if Kerry wins, I pity him the mess he has to clean up. The enormous national debt, empty treasure, hated all over the world, with just these few kids sprinkled over the Middle East. These kids are getting killed over there all the time. I don’t know, I’ll try to end on an optimistic note. I begin every speech saying, ‘No matter how bad things get the music will still be wonderful.’ And that was true in the Vietnam War.”

Webster: That’s true. If you saw the extended version of “Apocalypse Now,” to me that’s a masterpiece. And that scene where they’re playing “Satisfaction,” I said, “That is truth right there. There it was.” Let me ask you this: Even in the face of criminal actions by government and multinational corporations, the Canadian geneticist and ecologist David Suzuki consistently puts forth a message of hope. I don’t understand how he can do that. I can’t do that.

Vonnegut “No. Isaac Asimov’s dead. But I was on a panel with him, this must have been 20 years ago, and someone asked him, ‘How much longer have we got to go?’ He got out a pad and said, ‘Water, topsoil, air. Pick out a number for each one as to how much longer we can go on like this.’ No, obviously the weather is all going to hell right now. I was just with an astronomer named Michael Schwartz, who has his own telescope in Arizona. And, of course, he’s looking through the atmosphere all the time. And he said, ‘You know, it’s about over.’ He said, ‘Global warming is really going to be something.’ ”

Webster: Which is amazing, because up until a few years ago they were denying its existence. Governments were, certainly.

Vonnegut “Well, look (coughs), I worked for General Electric, and they poisoned the Hudson with PCBs, and there were scientists going around saying, ‘That doesn’t hurt anything.’ You know who has one of the biggest estates in Palm Beach: Rush Limbaugh. Making fun of the feminazis and the tree-huggers.”

Webster: You know, I have lost friends over the past couple of years over this war, over Bush’s administration, and these people come from North Idaho, working-class backgrounds, and I ask them, “How in the world can you align yourself with someone who would sell you out in a second? They’re rich and you’re not.” And I could never get a straight answer.

Vonnegut “They’re just trying to get along. Talk about Poland, they were occupied by Nazis. And they tried to get along the best way they could.”

Webster: And then by Russians. Every one of those Polish kids that I knew spoke Russian and Polish, and English better than many people I know. Look, I don’t want to take up too much of your time. . .

Vonnegut “I’m having a good time.”

Webster: . . . I tell you what, the joy is mine. Your fiction to me is amazing because there always is a sense of hope there, but it’s a sense of hope betrayed. And I was always wondering: Is that it, or is it that you’re fighting off just cynicism?

Vonnegut “Well, skepticism. I’m always skeptical what people say. Sure, we have many criminals in our midst, people betraying us. One thing I’m liable to say, I probably will say there, is that when you get to be my age, which is I’m 81, you start asking your kids who are middle-aged, what the hell life is all about. And I asked my son Mark Vonnegut, Dr. Mark Vonnegut — who wrote a good book, incidentally, called ‘The Eden Express’ . . .

Webster: Which I read.

Vonnegut “. . . And he came up with a very good sound bite. He said, ‘We’re here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.’ And that’s pretty good. And then I came up with a more pessimistic sound bite, which is, ‘Life is no way to treat an animal.’ ”

Webster: I was laughing reading one of the lines that you wrote last night. By the way, my wife met your grandson Alexander in Montenegro last summer. She wanted me to tell you. How many grandchildren do you have?

Vonnegut “Hell, I don’t know. About 12 I guess.”

Webster: Do they read your fiction?

Vonnegut “I have no idea. My kids do. And, yes, some do and some don’t.”

Webster: I read somewhere that you hadn’t read “Eden Express.” Have you?

Vonnegut “Of course I have. It’s a swell book. About one letter in 10 that I get asks about Mark and says how much the end of the books has been helpful to them. The end of that book is telling people, ‘In case you’re going crazy, this is what it’s going to be like.’ ”

Webster: How did he recover?

Vonnegut “Luck. That’s all. It’s just simple luck. Mark recovered well enough to graduate from Harvard Medical School. Luck is all there is to it.”

Webster: Well, how many more books do you have in you?

Vonnegut “I’m through.”

Webster: You’ve said that before, though.

Vonnegut “No. Look, every writer who’s lived as long as I have has written crap at the end.”

Webster: I don’t know. Twain wrote some pretty damned good stuff in those last few years.

Vonnegut “It was so pessimistic that it wasn’t published until 10 years after he had died.”

Webster: That’s true. But at the same time that I was reading “Slaughterhouse Five,” I was also reading “Letters to the Earth.” And that year after I got back to Vietnam and went to college, I just read and read. I read everything I could get my hands on. And somehow, “Letters to the Earth” spoke to me. There was that inner rage that was building. . .

Vonnegut “Well, he gave up on the human race, where I think we’re awful animals.”

Webster: So you haven’t given up?

Vonnegut “Sure, I’ve given up.”

Webster: But you haven’t given up on the human race?

Vonnegut “Well, I’m smoking as much as I can.”

Webster: Damn, you’ve got to keep writing just to pay for those cigarettes. They’re nowhere near as inexpensive as they once were.

Vonnegut “That’s true. And I have to stay outdoors a lot, too, which isn’t good for me.”

Webster: Well at least that keeps you out of the bars, in New York at least.

Vonnegut “Who owns your paper?”

Webster: It’s owned by a family here in Spokane.

Vonnegut “So, it’s completely local. It’s not Murdoch.”

Webster: No, and that’s a good thing. We try to put out a straight newspaper rather than one that is like the Murdoch papers in the world.

Vonnegut “But make sure to call our soldiers over in Iraq ‘The Coalition,’ all right?”

Webster: You bet. Thanks for talking to me.

Vonnegut Thank you.

back to top