An Interview with Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr., 1922 - 2007
by Carey Horwitz -- Library Journal, 4/12/2007
This article originally appeared in the April 15, 1973 issue of Library Journal.
"Am I going to have to talk into a microphone?" Kurt Vonnegut Jr. had just completed two straight days of taping in the studios of Caedmon Records, who will soon be releasing the fruits of the sessions—three stories from Welcome to the Monkey House ("Harrison Bergeron," "New Dictionary," and the title story) and a large reading from Slaughterhouse-Five, and he had had quite enough of mikes. Tall and gaunt, with eyes that normally express a weary melancholy but make frequent excursions into delightful mirth to accompany a booming laugh, he settled down to talk about his writing in general and his new work, Breakfast of Champions, specifically. He had stated , in Slaughterhouse-Five, that "the next [book] I write is going to be fun." Was his prediction correct?
"I had hoped that writing Breakfast of Champions would be easy, but it wasn't. I did enjoy doing it though." How did he feel about saying farewell to Rosewater, Trout, and all the other characters and settings from his past works? "I felt exhilarated. They've all become friends to me, but I enjoyed letting them go. It's nice to be able to start over fresh at the age of 50." He explained that he was getting acquainted with a new group of people—the Swain family—in preparation for the book he has recently begun writing. Vonnegut writes for himself—"for some part of me that I really don't know too much about"—but avoids giving opinions of his work, preferring to hear what others think. Though he does not often reread his completed books, he obviously enjoys doing it: his reading throughout the recording sessions projected the rhythms of a natural storyteller and the pleasure of someone involved in the act of rediscovery.
Vonnegut as a storyteller is a central characteristic of all his works, but one that often is obscured by the strangeness of intrusive events or the discontinuity of chronological structure found in a number of his books. Breakfast of Champions is no exception, containing as it does a wealth of digressive discussions on every subject imaginable as well as jumps into the story's past and future that become numerous enough to render the the present completely fluid. The central themes, however, remain constant. As always, Vonnegut is concerned with man's capacity to retain an awareness of his humanity in the midst of an arbitrarily determined, mechanistic universe and a society that works very hard at turning people into robots.
Vonnegut expresses through Kilgore Trout a kind of ex post facto fatalism ("There was only one way for Earth to be: the way it was … It had to be there."), but as he explains, "I don't see any casual relationship between awareness and fatalism. Someone can be walking down a street and fall into a manhole. It's absurd, but it happens. It exists coincidentally with a man's awareness of himself." It is this awareness that Vonnegut searches for in Breakfast, becoming himself a participant in the novel as he draws near his goal. Ironically, in the character of Rabo Karabekian, a minimal artist whose work consists exclusively of straight lines of paint, who explains awareness as "all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us … a vertical and unwavering band of light."
"I had seen some minimalist paintings at the Museum of Modern Art. Just some lines of color on canvas," Vonnegut said. Intending to introduce the subject into the book as satire, he found instead that it provided the key top his search. "I was really surprised when Karabekian said what he did about the band of light."
Vonnegut expressed no surprise, however, at the censorship problems some of his books have run into with public schools in parts of Michigan and Ohio [see SLJ, October 1972, p. 66 (LJ, October 15, p. 3408), and SLJ, January 1973, p. 14 (LJ, January 15, p. 206) for details]. "It's the same thing every time. They ban something of mine, the ACLU jumps in, loses the case in the lower court, and wins the appeal. After all," he stresses optimistically, "they can't win. What they're doing is unconstitutional."
He went on to talk about libraries and their social function, and again displayed an optimistic attitude. "They're at least as good as television," he drawled laconically. He sees no danger that books will become tools of a lost art. "People read as much, or more, than they ever did." His own early experiences with libraries appear to have been quite positive: "I discovered and read all of O. Henry's stories going through the library when I was a kid," an adventure which he says was "like sticking your prick into a light socket." So it goes.
Of the future of his own works on library shelves, Vonnegut is unsure but unconcerned. "I expect that libraries stockpile books, and can bring them out in the future if they have to." One person who figures Vonnegut to be around for a while is Marianne Mantell, who along with Barbara Haldridge is cofounder of Caedmon. "We hope that the writers we record will endure; in that respect, we try to outguess time." Judging by Caedmon's track record with Dylan Thomas, e.e. cummings, Carl Sandburg, Ernest Hemingway, et al., the odds are strong that the works of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. will reside in library collections for a long time to come.
