Kurt Vonnegut: Humanist Hero
And so it goes...
November 14, 2021
Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
Barbara Lambert Hale
I have been struggling for a good while thinking about accepting the work of certain people. I admire their writing, music, or art but can’t admire or respect the person who produced it. I’m not talking about cancel culture here. I’m talking about people who lived their lives, had a chance at redemption and decided not to take it.
Here’s an example of what I mean. Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. It is a wonderful document with lofty words and ideals. Who can really argue with this: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…
For most of my life these words gave me chills. They are the basis of what I believe to be the best form of government ever conceived by man to date. But as an older adult, I began thinking about the source of the words – Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson, the slave owner. Thomas Jefferson, the philanderer. And looking at it with more depth, I realize that the likes of me weren’t even included in Mr. Jefferson’s ideals. He states that “all MEN are created equal.” He talks about men literally here, not women, and he talks about only some men. That is evident from the fact that he was a slaveowner when he died. So it goes.
But here’s the thing. Is this a moment of needing to throw the baby out with bathwater? After all, these principles touted in the Declaration of Independence have come to trickle down to me over the years and to people of color. And I feel like I must remember that Jefferson was a product of his times. So, what to do? What to do? Should I, can I divorce the words from the man?
This whole thing came to bear on me most deeply after I read a biography of my favorite writer, Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut the man and Vonnegut the writer are two separate creatures according to the biography I read by Charles J. Shields, who seemed to have little respect for the man or the writer. And while comparison to Jefferson may be a bit over the top, it made me think about the man whose work I so greatly admire.
But let’s start at the beginning. Kurt Vonnegut was born in 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana, the third child of three. At the time of his birth, his parents Kurt, Senior, an architect, and Edith Lieber, daughter of a wealthy brewery owner, were affluent and socially active. Their children were a second thought to them and Kurt was cared for by Ida Young, the family’s housekeeper. Kurt’s brother Bernard was very gifted in science, his sister Alice was fun loving, creative and lackadaisical and then there was Kurt who felt inferior to both for most of his childhood, although he and Alice were very close all their lives. Vonnegut used humor eventually to gain attention from his distracted parents. When the Depression hit, the money became scarce, and his parent’s social standing was greatly diminished. This fall from grace had a profound impact on his mother who eventually reacted by taking her own life on Mother’s Day when Kurt was 21 and home on leave from the Army.
Well, I am going to treat this talk a little like a Vonnegut novel right now and jump around in time a bit. Kurt, by the time he was in high school, showed a great talent for humor and writing, but his father and brother poo pooed those talents as unnecessary and ridiculous and convinced Kurt to attend Cornell University to major in chemistry. Kurt had little interest in his classes but found a creative outlet at the college newspaper The Cornell Daily Sun and in the two plus years he attended Cornell, he spent more time writing and editing the newspaper than he did in his classes.
So it was no surprise that the muckety-mucks at Cornell found this unacceptable and gave him his walking papers. The problem was that the second world war was underway and Kurt, who was against the US entering into the war at that time, found himself needing to enlist.
Let’s jump again to the Battle of the Bulge. The unprepared and unhappy Vonnegut found himself smack in the middle of this horrendous event, was captured by the Germans, and was sent with many other prisoners of war to Dresden, Germany. .
In Dresden, the unthinkable happened during a three-day period from February 13 to the 15th, 1945. The Allied troops firebombed the city leveling much of it and killing nearly 25,000 people, primarily civilians. Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners survived only because they were being housed in an underground slaughterhouse – Slaughterhouse Five.
Imagine this. You emerge from underground after living through a horrific series of bombs being dropped above you. The magnificent city that was there the week before is now a pile of rubble. People are found in underground shelters sitting at tables dead from collapsed debris. Your job now is to clean all this up prodded by the bayonets and guns of your enemy. You don’t have enough food or water. You witness an American soldier being executed for stealing a jar of pickles. So it goes. How do you live with that?
To Kurt Vonnegut this was one of the defining moments of his life. But he came back to the United States after the war and tried to make a “normal” life for himself. He married Jane Cox. They had three children and after a stint at General Electric in the publicity department that left him very frustrated, he quit his job and the family moved to Cape Cod so that Vonnegut could write full time.
Imagine this. You are a talented and imaginative writer. But you are an unsuccessful writer because selling your work is difficult and you realize that people don’t really “get” what you are trying to say. In a world that wants happy endings and love stories, you see things differently. You manage to sell enough to keep your family afloat but just barely. You are disciplined about your writing but in a household with three small children life seems chaotic. And then this happens…
In 1958, Kurt and Jane learn that Kurt’s sister Alice was suffering from breast cancer. In those days, this was frequently a death sentence. Alice and her husband Jim Adams had four sons. As Alice lay dying in the hospital, her husband boarded a train to New York City on business. The conductor of that train had a heart attack, and the train went off an overpass and plunged into the Newark Bay. At least 48 people, including Jim Adams, died in this tragic accident. Four days later, Vonnegut’s sister died in the hospital after asking Kurt and Jane to take care of her four sons. So it goes. The chaotic life that was the Vonneguts’ in West Barnstable, Massachusetts, became doubly so, even with one of the boys being sent to live with another relative.
The Vonneguts had six children to support with little money. Jane, who was in charge of everything but the writing, was overtaxed and the kids ran wild. Single-minded, Kurt continued to write and write and write.
Today because we are limited on time, I am going to make this long story short. The aggravations of life – dealing with raising six children, having little money, being frustrated at finding an outlet for the creativity that haunted Kurt Vonnegut – began to wear at the corners of the Vonneguts’ marriage and family. Kurt began to take jobs that allowed him to leave home for extended periods of time. In 1965, he was invited as an instructor to the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop and presumably during that time he was unfaithful to his wife.
Let’s jump again. Vonnegut’s first book Player Piano was published in 1952, followed by The Sirens of Titan. They were not what you would call resounding successes. Then came Cat’s Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. All this time, the bombing of Dresden plagued Vonnegut. He knew he needed to write about it but knew that writing another historical account was not what he wanted. His experiences in the war had made him a pacifist and he certainly didn’t want to glorify the war even if it had been necessary. He visited an old army buddy of his, Bernard V. O’Hare, whose wife Mary found their conversations about their war experiences frustrating. She was certain that Kurt would write a book that glorified war and celebrated his and her husband’s experiences as prisoners of war. She told Kurt this: “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men.” Kurt decided to sub-title Slaughterhouse-Five, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death.
The publication of Slaughterhouse Five catapulted Vonnegut into fame and notoriety. His marriage could not hold up under Vonnegut’s new life and in 1979, he and Jane ended their 34-year marriage, but remained friendly throughout the rest of their lives.
He eventually married photographer Jill Krementz, and they adopted a baby girl. Theirs was not a happy marriage and for the next few years, Vonnegut attempted to divorce her three times but usually went back to their marriage seemingly out of love for their daughter. Still, they lived apart often with Vonnegut living briefly in Northampton, Massachusetts, near his daughter Nanny.
Kurt Vonnegut said he was a free thinker and an agnostic who “adored” Jesus. He said, “If what Jesus said was good, what can it matter whether he was God or not?” He was also a fan of the Sermon on the Mount and said about it, “Being merciful, it seems to me, is the only good idea we have received so far.”
He was honorary president of the American Humanist Association from 1992 until his death. He said, “I am a Humanist, which means in part that I have tried to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after I am dead.”
Kurt Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007. The cause was an injury from a fall he took while walking his dog. And so it goes.
I’ve often wondered if I would have liked Kurt Vonnegut had I met him in person. Maybe not. And yet, I have read all 14 of his novels some of them multiple times. In each novel, I have been entertained greatly and have found something profound to consider. It has occurred to me many times that his writing is as current today as it was at the time he was writing it. He seemed to understand the human condition better than most. I highly recommend picking up a couple of his books if you haven’t read them already. I guarantee you have not read anything like them. From Player Piano that studies the idea of loneliness in contemporary society (a common theme of his) and the dehumanization wrought by technology to Cat’s Cradle (my particular favorite) that explores truth and lies and the purpose of religion to Time Quake that talks about whether or not man truly has free will, I have pored over his words and came away pondering life in all its beauty and ugliness, its blessings and frustrations.
And I have learned this about Kurt Vonnegut. He was a difficult person, a brilliant person, a person who hurt people, a person who was probably not suited to being a parent or to being married, but he tried at both. He was completely single-minded when it came to his writing. He was a lonely person. He was enormously creative and funny. He was often depressed. He could be charming and he could be selfish, abrupt and rude. He was human.
Do I give him the benefit of a doubt? Or do I throw him onto the heap of babies that I threw out with the bathwater because they were human and acted like it? Sometimes I think we should never check into the lives of people whose work we admire. It just lets loose our judgmental selves. But then maybe it’s a good thing to know that the people we admire are truly human – just like we are.
After all, consider this. Would Vonnegut have written Vonnegut if he hadn’t experienced the life he had? Would he have been able to consider the evils of war truthfully had he not experienced the Dresden bombings? Would he have been able to write so effectively about loneliness if he weren’t lonely himself?
The writer Neil Gaiman said this about Vonnegut: “Who on Earth could read a Vonnegut book and think that he was a grandfatherly bundle of warm fuzzy happiness? I mean, I read Vonnegut first as a ten year old, and it was shocking because he could joke in the face of such blackness and bleakness, and I’d never seen an author do that before. Everything was pointless, except, possibly, a few moments of love snatched from the darkness, a few moments in which we connect, or fail to.”
Here's what I have learned from reading 14 Kurt Vonnegut novels:
I am human.
And though I might wake up cranky & feeling the world is against me
At least I’ve not been replaced by a machine.
Not yet, anyway. (Player Piano)
That though the universe (some may call it God) may be utterly indifferent,
I have friends who care and it’s a good idea to celebrate my friendships
And “to love whoever is around to be loved.” (The Sirens of Titan)
That I must be careful to always be myself,
For if I pretend to be someone or something else, I will not be me
And I might become someone I don’t want to be. (Mother Night)
I learned that I need to live by the foma that makes me
“brave and kind and healthy and happy.” (Cat’s Cradle)
That if my enemy’s house is on fire,
I need to step in to help. (God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater)
I learned that there is no good war.
War may be necessary, but it is never ever good. (Slaughterhouse Five)
That I need to look at history and culture
With more critical eyes because it is
“possible for a human being to believe anything,
And to behave passionately in keeping with that belief – any belief.” (Breakfast of Champions)
That family isn’t necessarily bound by blood and genes.
My family, my karass, is all around me and
Wouldn’t the world be wonderful if we could create a world where people would be
“Lonesome No More!” (Slapstick)
I learned that even small acts of kindness have great value. (Jailbird)
That the simple act of shooting a gun into the air.
Can have consequences beyond my understanding. (Deadeye Dick)
I learned that maybe, just maybe,
We deserve what happens to us when our world
Is no longer inhabitable thanks to our stupidity and greed. (Galapagos)
That the destruction of war must never be forgotten. (Bluebeard)
That locking prisoners up for profit
Is a really shirty idea and pretty soon, if we aren’t careful
The “excrement is going to hit the air conditioning.” (Hocus Pocus)
That art is the important element that keeps
All humans humane. (Timequake)
You know, I’ve often told my kids that if someone is rude to them, don’t answer them back with rudeness. Instead consider that you don’t know what is going on in their lives. Give them the benefit of a doubt. It’s possible that their dog just died or that they have been abused in some way or that they are just having a really bad day. After all, that happens to the best of us. So consider this, babies, we really don’t have that much time here on this earth and while we are here, babies, the only thing that makes sense to be kind.
I think I am going to go pull Kurt Vonnegut out of the bathwater. The jury is still out on Thomas Jefferson. And so it goes.
And so it goes...
November 14, 2021
Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
Barbara Lambert Hale
I have been struggling for a good while thinking about accepting the work of certain people. I admire their writing, music, or art but can’t admire or respect the person who produced it. I’m not talking about cancel culture here. I’m talking about people who lived their lives, had a chance at redemption and decided not to take it.
Here’s an example of what I mean. Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. It is a wonderful document with lofty words and ideals. Who can really argue with this: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…
For most of my life these words gave me chills. They are the basis of what I believe to be the best form of government ever conceived by man to date. But as an older adult, I began thinking about the source of the words – Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson, the slave owner. Thomas Jefferson, the philanderer. And looking at it with more depth, I realize that the likes of me weren’t even included in Mr. Jefferson’s ideals. He states that “all MEN are created equal.” He talks about men literally here, not women, and he talks about only some men. That is evident from the fact that he was a slaveowner when he died. So it goes.
But here’s the thing. Is this a moment of needing to throw the baby out with bathwater? After all, these principles touted in the Declaration of Independence have come to trickle down to me over the years and to people of color. And I feel like I must remember that Jefferson was a product of his times. So, what to do? What to do? Should I, can I divorce the words from the man?
This whole thing came to bear on me most deeply after I read a biography of my favorite writer, Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut the man and Vonnegut the writer are two separate creatures according to the biography I read by Charles J. Shields, who seemed to have little respect for the man or the writer. And while comparison to Jefferson may be a bit over the top, it made me think about the man whose work I so greatly admire.
But let’s start at the beginning. Kurt Vonnegut was born in 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana, the third child of three. At the time of his birth, his parents Kurt, Senior, an architect, and Edith Lieber, daughter of a wealthy brewery owner, were affluent and socially active. Their children were a second thought to them and Kurt was cared for by Ida Young, the family’s housekeeper. Kurt’s brother Bernard was very gifted in science, his sister Alice was fun loving, creative and lackadaisical and then there was Kurt who felt inferior to both for most of his childhood, although he and Alice were very close all their lives. Vonnegut used humor eventually to gain attention from his distracted parents. When the Depression hit, the money became scarce, and his parent’s social standing was greatly diminished. This fall from grace had a profound impact on his mother who eventually reacted by taking her own life on Mother’s Day when Kurt was 21 and home on leave from the Army.
Well, I am going to treat this talk a little like a Vonnegut novel right now and jump around in time a bit. Kurt, by the time he was in high school, showed a great talent for humor and writing, but his father and brother poo pooed those talents as unnecessary and ridiculous and convinced Kurt to attend Cornell University to major in chemistry. Kurt had little interest in his classes but found a creative outlet at the college newspaper The Cornell Daily Sun and in the two plus years he attended Cornell, he spent more time writing and editing the newspaper than he did in his classes.
So it was no surprise that the muckety-mucks at Cornell found this unacceptable and gave him his walking papers. The problem was that the second world war was underway and Kurt, who was against the US entering into the war at that time, found himself needing to enlist.
Let’s jump again to the Battle of the Bulge. The unprepared and unhappy Vonnegut found himself smack in the middle of this horrendous event, was captured by the Germans, and was sent with many other prisoners of war to Dresden, Germany. .
In Dresden, the unthinkable happened during a three-day period from February 13 to the 15th, 1945. The Allied troops firebombed the city leveling much of it and killing nearly 25,000 people, primarily civilians. Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners survived only because they were being housed in an underground slaughterhouse – Slaughterhouse Five.
Imagine this. You emerge from underground after living through a horrific series of bombs being dropped above you. The magnificent city that was there the week before is now a pile of rubble. People are found in underground shelters sitting at tables dead from collapsed debris. Your job now is to clean all this up prodded by the bayonets and guns of your enemy. You don’t have enough food or water. You witness an American soldier being executed for stealing a jar of pickles. So it goes. How do you live with that?
To Kurt Vonnegut this was one of the defining moments of his life. But he came back to the United States after the war and tried to make a “normal” life for himself. He married Jane Cox. They had three children and after a stint at General Electric in the publicity department that left him very frustrated, he quit his job and the family moved to Cape Cod so that Vonnegut could write full time.
Imagine this. You are a talented and imaginative writer. But you are an unsuccessful writer because selling your work is difficult and you realize that people don’t really “get” what you are trying to say. In a world that wants happy endings and love stories, you see things differently. You manage to sell enough to keep your family afloat but just barely. You are disciplined about your writing but in a household with three small children life seems chaotic. And then this happens…
In 1958, Kurt and Jane learn that Kurt’s sister Alice was suffering from breast cancer. In those days, this was frequently a death sentence. Alice and her husband Jim Adams had four sons. As Alice lay dying in the hospital, her husband boarded a train to New York City on business. The conductor of that train had a heart attack, and the train went off an overpass and plunged into the Newark Bay. At least 48 people, including Jim Adams, died in this tragic accident. Four days later, Vonnegut’s sister died in the hospital after asking Kurt and Jane to take care of her four sons. So it goes. The chaotic life that was the Vonneguts’ in West Barnstable, Massachusetts, became doubly so, even with one of the boys being sent to live with another relative.
The Vonneguts had six children to support with little money. Jane, who was in charge of everything but the writing, was overtaxed and the kids ran wild. Single-minded, Kurt continued to write and write and write.
Today because we are limited on time, I am going to make this long story short. The aggravations of life – dealing with raising six children, having little money, being frustrated at finding an outlet for the creativity that haunted Kurt Vonnegut – began to wear at the corners of the Vonneguts’ marriage and family. Kurt began to take jobs that allowed him to leave home for extended periods of time. In 1965, he was invited as an instructor to the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop and presumably during that time he was unfaithful to his wife.
Let’s jump again. Vonnegut’s first book Player Piano was published in 1952, followed by The Sirens of Titan. They were not what you would call resounding successes. Then came Cat’s Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. All this time, the bombing of Dresden plagued Vonnegut. He knew he needed to write about it but knew that writing another historical account was not what he wanted. His experiences in the war had made him a pacifist and he certainly didn’t want to glorify the war even if it had been necessary. He visited an old army buddy of his, Bernard V. O’Hare, whose wife Mary found their conversations about their war experiences frustrating. She was certain that Kurt would write a book that glorified war and celebrated his and her husband’s experiences as prisoners of war. She told Kurt this: “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men.” Kurt decided to sub-title Slaughterhouse-Five, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death.
The publication of Slaughterhouse Five catapulted Vonnegut into fame and notoriety. His marriage could not hold up under Vonnegut’s new life and in 1979, he and Jane ended their 34-year marriage, but remained friendly throughout the rest of their lives.
He eventually married photographer Jill Krementz, and they adopted a baby girl. Theirs was not a happy marriage and for the next few years, Vonnegut attempted to divorce her three times but usually went back to their marriage seemingly out of love for their daughter. Still, they lived apart often with Vonnegut living briefly in Northampton, Massachusetts, near his daughter Nanny.
Kurt Vonnegut said he was a free thinker and an agnostic who “adored” Jesus. He said, “If what Jesus said was good, what can it matter whether he was God or not?” He was also a fan of the Sermon on the Mount and said about it, “Being merciful, it seems to me, is the only good idea we have received so far.”
He was honorary president of the American Humanist Association from 1992 until his death. He said, “I am a Humanist, which means in part that I have tried to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after I am dead.”
Kurt Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007. The cause was an injury from a fall he took while walking his dog. And so it goes.
I’ve often wondered if I would have liked Kurt Vonnegut had I met him in person. Maybe not. And yet, I have read all 14 of his novels some of them multiple times. In each novel, I have been entertained greatly and have found something profound to consider. It has occurred to me many times that his writing is as current today as it was at the time he was writing it. He seemed to understand the human condition better than most. I highly recommend picking up a couple of his books if you haven’t read them already. I guarantee you have not read anything like them. From Player Piano that studies the idea of loneliness in contemporary society (a common theme of his) and the dehumanization wrought by technology to Cat’s Cradle (my particular favorite) that explores truth and lies and the purpose of religion to Time Quake that talks about whether or not man truly has free will, I have pored over his words and came away pondering life in all its beauty and ugliness, its blessings and frustrations.
And I have learned this about Kurt Vonnegut. He was a difficult person, a brilliant person, a person who hurt people, a person who was probably not suited to being a parent or to being married, but he tried at both. He was completely single-minded when it came to his writing. He was a lonely person. He was enormously creative and funny. He was often depressed. He could be charming and he could be selfish, abrupt and rude. He was human.
Do I give him the benefit of a doubt? Or do I throw him onto the heap of babies that I threw out with the bathwater because they were human and acted like it? Sometimes I think we should never check into the lives of people whose work we admire. It just lets loose our judgmental selves. But then maybe it’s a good thing to know that the people we admire are truly human – just like we are.
After all, consider this. Would Vonnegut have written Vonnegut if he hadn’t experienced the life he had? Would he have been able to consider the evils of war truthfully had he not experienced the Dresden bombings? Would he have been able to write so effectively about loneliness if he weren’t lonely himself?
The writer Neil Gaiman said this about Vonnegut: “Who on Earth could read a Vonnegut book and think that he was a grandfatherly bundle of warm fuzzy happiness? I mean, I read Vonnegut first as a ten year old, and it was shocking because he could joke in the face of such blackness and bleakness, and I’d never seen an author do that before. Everything was pointless, except, possibly, a few moments of love snatched from the darkness, a few moments in which we connect, or fail to.”
Here's what I have learned from reading 14 Kurt Vonnegut novels:
I am human.
And though I might wake up cranky & feeling the world is against me
At least I’ve not been replaced by a machine.
Not yet, anyway. (Player Piano)
That though the universe (some may call it God) may be utterly indifferent,
I have friends who care and it’s a good idea to celebrate my friendships
And “to love whoever is around to be loved.” (The Sirens of Titan)
That I must be careful to always be myself,
For if I pretend to be someone or something else, I will not be me
And I might become someone I don’t want to be. (Mother Night)
I learned that I need to live by the foma that makes me
“brave and kind and healthy and happy.” (Cat’s Cradle)
That if my enemy’s house is on fire,
I need to step in to help. (God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater)
I learned that there is no good war.
War may be necessary, but it is never ever good. (Slaughterhouse Five)
That I need to look at history and culture
With more critical eyes because it is
“possible for a human being to believe anything,
And to behave passionately in keeping with that belief – any belief.” (Breakfast of Champions)
That family isn’t necessarily bound by blood and genes.
My family, my karass, is all around me and
Wouldn’t the world be wonderful if we could create a world where people would be
“Lonesome No More!” (Slapstick)
I learned that even small acts of kindness have great value. (Jailbird)
That the simple act of shooting a gun into the air.
Can have consequences beyond my understanding. (Deadeye Dick)
I learned that maybe, just maybe,
We deserve what happens to us when our world
Is no longer inhabitable thanks to our stupidity and greed. (Galapagos)
That the destruction of war must never be forgotten. (Bluebeard)
That locking prisoners up for profit
Is a really shirty idea and pretty soon, if we aren’t careful
The “excrement is going to hit the air conditioning.” (Hocus Pocus)
That art is the important element that keeps
All humans humane. (Timequake)
You know, I’ve often told my kids that if someone is rude to them, don’t answer them back with rudeness. Instead consider that you don’t know what is going on in their lives. Give them the benefit of a doubt. It’s possible that their dog just died or that they have been abused in some way or that they are just having a really bad day. After all, that happens to the best of us. So consider this, babies, we really don’t have that much time here on this earth and while we are here, babies, the only thing that makes sense to be kind.
I think I am going to go pull Kurt Vonnegut out of the bathwater. The jury is still out on Thomas Jefferson. And so it goes.