Which is almost zero, but I needed a lead-in. I might furnished him with a smidgen of royalties through purchasing his paperbacks at the Little Professor Book Store in Naples, Florida, thirty years ago.
But Kurt Vonnegut, who died yesterday at 84 from a fall, had a major literary influence in my life. I still remember reading "Slaughterhouse 5" in practically one sitting at fifteen. After that I read novel after novel he wrote, ans some of his collections of short stories like "Welcome to the Monkey House". But, like hundreds of thousands of others, "Slaughterhouse Five" was special. For one thing it put me on a course to write my own book on time travel, which I did years later, something called "Cursed Spite". (See shameless plug below, if you don't already know what I'm talking about. Otherwise, just skip it.)
It started with having to do a class project in 10th grade where I had to pick three books by a famous author that the teacher approved of and write about him or her. After flirting with Charles Dickens--I had just read "Oliver Twist" and thought I could get one book out of the way right there, so I started reading "A Tale of Two Cities". Then a classmate of mine was reading Vonnegut and suggested we might pool our resources.
And so it goes.
What looked like a tiresome assignment became a load of fun. Then came the bleak "Breakfast of Champions", with Vonnegut's surrogate fiction representitive, the writer Kilgore Trout. Then "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater", then I went on after the assignment was done with the his other fantastic World War II novel, "Mother Night" (1961) and "Cat's Cradle", the last three from the 1960's. Vonnegut broke out of his niche as a science fiction writer later in that decade and was seen as a modern Mark Twain. Along with Gore Vidal's provocative and contrarian American history novel "Burr" and Joseph Heller's "Catch-22", Mr. Vonnegut's books were my favorite contemporary books as a high school-er. For whatever warped reason, I stopped reading Vonnegut after he wrote "Jailbird"--the story of an ex-Watergate criminal who learns to be a bartender in prison and "Galapagos". They were all good books--acerbic and witty and not afraid to go anywhere and pronounce anything. I later read some of his recent essays and was impressed with the way he cut to the core of any issue--about politics, for instance, and got you right to his sharp and uncompromising point. What he said about the Iraq War just about scalded your eyes to read. I think Twain would have liked this guy. (Vonnegut wrote an introduction to a collection of "The Essential Mark Twain", which I bought and I suppose he was was grateful I sent a few more pennies his way.)
Seriously, I still cherish that non-sexual rush I felt back in October 1975 on a late Friday Night in my bedroom at my parents apartment, opening up "S-5" for the first time and reading about ex-soldier Billy Pilgrim and his being "unstuck in time" and having to relive his POW times and the horrific Feburary, 1945, RAF and US Army Air Corps fire bombing of Dresden. (Vonnegut later claimed he was the only human being to get anything good out of the bombing--his book.) Pilgrim is later on display in a zoo in a sci-fi future with a beautiful woman and, being unstuck, we flash over to his ordinary life in the 1970's suburbs with a less-attractive mate and so on. It's a wonderful book--like everybody reading this probably didn't already know that--and the first book I had devoured in one sitting since I was maybe twelve. I now want to read it again badly.
Wish I had wrote to the guy and told him how much I enjoyed his work--but I blew that. Now Joseph Heller's dead, too. Hmmm. "The ranks are thinning", as WC Fields said after his friend John Barrymore died. Looks like I'd better get that overdue fan letter to the ever conspiracy-minded expatriate Mr. Vidal out now while there's still time.
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