Word: vonnegut
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Another writer might be resentful of the past. But Vonnegut holds no grudges. He is, in general, a man more rueful than wrathful. Black-humorist contemporaries often vibrate with a febrile, apocalyptic rage, seeming to feel that America has the market cornered on greed and hypocrisy. Vonnegut takes a longer view. Though he has an old-fashioned Populist's distrust of the rich and powerful manipulators of society, Vonnegut's is closer kin to Twain than Kafka. Deeply pessimistic about the world, he is rarely depressed by it. Part of him, at least, would contemplate even the story...
...Mainstream. Vonnegut does admit, though, to a slight pique at being pejoratively classified as a science-fiction writer. "I'm in the mainstream." he says flatly, and with justice. "Besides, there's no sense in creating a literary ghetto. The implication is it would be serious to write about Portnoy's complaints but frivolous to write about machinery. I just describe characters in terms of the jobs they do, rather than their sexual hang...
Though he once taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he never studied writing. Instead he specialized mainly in chemistry and anthropology at a congeries of colleges (Cornell, Carnegie Tech, Chicago) during and after World War II. To earn a living in the lean years, Vonnegut, who is the son and grandson of prosperous, German-stock architects in Indianapolis, has worked as a crime reporter, a Saab dealer, and flack for General Electric in Schenectady, N.Y. "I started to write," he recalls, "because I hated that job so much." Schenectady keeps turning up in his books as a grim, upstate...
...Vonnegut owns a two-story, clapboard-and-shingle house in Barnstable, Mass., shared with his wife Jane (a Swarthmore Phi Beta Kappa), their own three children and three adopted children, plus a mongrel named Sandy, also known as "the Barnstable Dust Mop." Most of his writing is done at home in morning spurts. Afternoons he is free to paint or contemplate a sign he has on the wall which reads "GOD DAMN IT YOU GOT TO BE KIND...
Rudely stated, this message lies at the heart of Vonnegut's work. For all his roundhouse swinging at punch-card culture, his satiric forays are really an appeal for a return to Christlike behavior in a world never conspicuously able to follow Christ's example. For Vonnegut, man's worst folly is a persistent attempt to adjust, smoothly, rationally, to the unthinkable, to the unbearable. Misused, modern science is its prime instrument. "I think a lot of people teach savagery to their children to survive," he observed recently. Then he added, saying it all, from Cain...