Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) Read Free Page A

maiden with a unicorn’s head in her lap, she was at worst merely mystified.)
    Our father when I, his youngest child, got to know him was, understandably, desperate for uncritical friendship from a member of the reputedly compassionate sex, since our mother (his wife) was going insane. Late at night, and always in the privacy of our own home, and never with guests present, she expressed hatred for Father as corrosive as hydrofluoric acid. Hydrofluoric acid can eat its way out of a glass bottle, and then through a tabletop and then through the floor, and then straight to Hell.
    (Actually, hydrofluoric acid can’t eat through wax. A joke going around Cornell DU in my day, when most of my brothers were studying engineering of some sort, was, “If you happen to discover a universal solvent, what will you store it in?” And again actually, water is much closer to being a universal solvent than hydrofluoric acid. It just can’t eat through glass.)
    I made the strong suggestion in
Palm Sunday
that my mother’s untreated, unacknowledged insanity was caused by bad chemicals she swallowed rather than created within herself, principally alcohol and unlimited quantities of prescribed barbiturates. (She did not live long enough to have a doctor pep her up with some sort of amphetamine.) I am willing to believe that her ailment was hereditary, but I have no American ancestors (fully accounted for in
Palm Sunday)
who were clinically crazy. In any case, what the heck? I didn’t get to choose my ancestors, and I look upon my brain and the rest of my body as a house I inhabit which was built long before I was born.
    (My actual house here in Manhattan was built on spec in 1862 by somebody named L. S. Brooks. It is eighteen and a half feet wide and forty-six feet deep, and three stories high. Brooks built twenty identical houses all at one whack!)
    At the time of the disgraceful Bush vs. Dukakis campaign for the Presidency of the United States of America (at which time the eventual winner was promising to protect rich light people everywhere from poor dark people everywhere), I was an invited speaker at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Philadelphia. My inherited brain and voicebox said this to those assembled:
    “I greet you with all possible respect. It is tough to make unhappy people happier unless they need something easily prescribed, such as food or shelter or sympathetic companionship—or liberty.
    “You have honored my own trade, which is the telling of stories for money, some true, some false, by inviting my friend and colleague Elie Wiesel and then me to speak to you. You may be aware of the work of Dr. Nancy Andreassen at the University of Iowa Medical Center, who interviewed professional writers on the faculty of her university’s famous Writers’ Workshop in order to discover whether or not our neuroses were indistinguishable from those of the general population. Most of us, myself included, proved to be depressives from families of depressives.
    “From that study I extrapolate this rough rule, a very approximate rule, to be sure: You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed.
    “A rule we used to be able to extrapolate from cultural history, one which doesn’t seem to work anymore, is that an American writer had to be an alcoholic in order to win a Nobel Prize—Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, John Steinbeck, the suicide Ernest Hemingway. That rule no longer works, in my opinion, because artistic sensibilities are no longer regarded in this country as being characteristic of females. I no longer have to arrive at this lectern drunk, having slugged somebody in a bar last night, in order to prove that I am not what was a loathsome creature not long ago, which is to say a homosexual.
    “Elie Wiesel made his reputation with a book called
Night,
which is about the horrors of the Holocaust as witnessed by the boy he used to be. I made my reputation with a book