Remembering Vonnegut

This Friday marks the first anniversary of the death of my hero, Kurt Vonnegut. I guess it’s… This Friday marks the first anniversary of the death of my hero, Kurt Vonnegut. I guess it’s not too surprising that I, like so many other college students and so many other aspiring writers, idolize an author who was known for his deceptively complex, often cynical and unquestionably hip work. A year after his death, despite the deluge of things to talk about, like current events, finals and my new favorite song, I couldn’t help wanting to write about this man and everything he meant to me and to the world. It was really getting in the way.

I tried not to fixate on it. I tried to think of other things.

I tried to bake a cake.

But it was a persistent nag, this need to eulogize someone who has been eulogized a thousand times over, and most undoubtedly with more eloquence and justice than I could ever give him.

And the cake burned.

For me, Vonnegut was a well of entertainment, a prose writer who wrote prose that was so poignant and deep that it seemed to transcend whatever form it was in, whether it be short story, essay or novel. He was funny, sure and cynical, but he was also of that rare breed of a compassionate satirist, someone who was able to identify cuttingly the thinning of the cultural fabric while still clearly mourning for what it could be.

Even more, he wrote beautifully, and when someone says something beautiful, I have a tendency to trust whatever he says next.

When Vonnegut died, I was heartbroken, not necessarily because he wouldn’t be writing anymore – his work offers something new every time you return to it – but mostly because I felt that he was one of the few remaining literature writers who believed so wholeheartedly in the magic of the craft.

He wasn’t snobbish or condescending, and he didn’t embrace the celebrity in the patronizing way that many popular authors do now. I think he really believed that writing could change something, even if it was something as infinitesimally small as a single beat of one reader’s heart.

And maybe he had nothing to do with you, but I doubt it. Even if you’ve never read a single word Kurt Vonnegut wrote, which would be surprising since “Slaughterhouse-Five” is a staple of literature classes, chances are you’ve experienced some of the Vonnegut trickle-down. So many authors, artists, television personalities, musicians, teachers and The Pitt News columnists have been moved and influenced by his work. He had a lot to say about the world, even when he had become disheartened by it.

I think that on a grander scale, beyond the writing advice and the pure pleasure of reading his work, the most important thing Vonnegut did for me and for this country was to help clarify the marriage of personal grief and cultural grief.

Vonnegut was a veteran of the Second World War. He saw the firebombing of Dresden – an atrocious act of war that took thousands of lives and was virtually ignored by America until “Slaughterhouse-Five” was released. And Vonnegut also lived through the Great Depression, as well as the Korean, Vietnam, Cold and Gulf wars. He lived through the first bombing of the World Trade Center and then through the Sept. 11 attacks. Needless to say, he experienced a lot of that cultural grief, the stuff that we read about in textbooks and watch on TV that pulls at something very deep inside of us, and we grieve because of it, but we can’t understand it in a way that makes it seem as if it is personal to us.

At the end of the day we can still close the books, and that grief ebbs, if only a little. But Vonnegut managed to show so many of us how personal that grief could be, and I think that might have been his biggest impact.

He had this uncanny ability of finding just the right moment and vehicle for doing this. One moment you might be reading a story that is making you crack up like a little kid, and the next you realize that that same story is making you cry like a little kid, and that you feel that some truth about the universe or human nature or something has been revealed to you. And maybe that story is a story of one of Vonnegut’s characters, who is clownish and helpless but finds himself in a very tricky situation in which he is experiencing this great big grief that you, as a passive reader, just wouldn’t get.

And maybe that truth you realized is that you yourself are clownish and helpless and that you could very easily be in that very tricky situation, and you understand a little better something about grief you wouldn’t understand otherwise, about how personal it can be. And with that understanding of grief, and the compassion that accompanies it, comes a responsibility to address the source of that grief.

That’s the thing Vonnegut really teaches, to abandon that naive passivity – no matter how pleasant it is – and to become an active reader, to become an active human.

And he sure could make me laugh.

E-mail Cassidy at cassidygruber@gmail.com