Kurt Vonnegut Interview with Hank Nuwer

    Author Kurt Vonnegut submits to an interview conducted at high noon on a warm winter’s day in Dallas. He is slumming here in Texas, instead of working back in his New York four-story home, to promote his latest novel, Galapagos. Vonnegut interviews are rare, because as he points out in his autobiographical Palm Sunday, he objects to interviews metaphorically slicing open the top of his skull to fish inside for imprisoned ideas. Nonetheless, he seems quite cordial and relaxed despite the trepanning he suffers. He straddles a white couch in the lobby of Loews Anatole Hotel, a big-as-Texas glass and steel building that looks as if a hung-over, third-rate sci-fi writer on Quaaludes had designed it.

Vonnegut punctuates his comments with sputtering snickers when something delights him. He uses his spectacles as a yo-yo when he talks, occasionally waving them like a teacher’s pointer. The writer wears a blue go-to-town suit that seems to have two extra yards of fabric in the fanny. His voice is low and un mistakenly Midwestern. He is, after all, an aging Indianapolis boy who made good.

    Much of the interview concerns Galapagos, Vonnegut’s fourteenth book which shows early signs of matching his triumphs of Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five. The novel is a table narrated by Leon Trotsky Trout, a ghost, over a time frame of one million years. Back in the twentieth century, a bacterial disease that destroys the ovum of human beings is responsible for the end of the human race, expect form some comic stragglers aboard a waylaid cruise ship who land on Santa Rosalia in the Galapagos Islands. These characteristics include an Indiana schoolteacher named Mary Hepburn man named James Wait, a fur-covered mutant named Akiko Hiroguchi whose mother survived the bombing of Hiroshima, and a ridiculous old poop of a sea captain named von Kleist. Since the book lasts one million years, these characters, of course, must all die. Whenever any of them is about to die, the playful Vonnegut warns the reader putting an asterisk in front of the doomed character’s name.
 
    According to Vonnegut, time future has bad news and good news. The bad news is that the race has evolved into brainless, furry seal-like critters that roam the seas in search of raw fish. The good news is that everyone is perfectly content to do just that. Since the world in one million years is without technology, the ghostly narrator writes his book with out technology, the ghostly narrator writes his book without pen or paper, scribbling “air on air” with his non-existent finger.

NUWER: Do you have a flair for dialogue?

VONNEGUT: Well. It’s Indianapolis talk, I think. There are a lot of funny people in Indianapolis, a lot of unfunny ones, too. I don’t know. I’m responsive to jokes. If I were to put an Englishman with a major part into a book of mine, I’d hire an English writer to do him, I wouldn’t trust myself. I’m not a good mimic. You get some people with wonderful ears. There’s Jack Hawes who’s one; he’s a fine mimic. Terry Southern’s a fine mimic. I can’t even do a comedy German. So, no, I don’t have a good ear, I don’t think. I remember jokes, that’s all. (Chuckles)

NUWER: Your books seem to hammer the home message that there is no here and now, that technology is changing our misconceptions and preconceptions about time itself.

VONNEGUT: Yeah, well things do seem to be becoming unstuck. Just drive around this city [Dallas]. Have you done that?

NUWER: Some.

VONNEGUT: Well, this is what human beings have to inhabit. There are no sidewalks, no neighborhoods. Extremely hostile environment here. This [lobby of Lowes Anatole Hotel] might as well be a moon colony. I suppose moon colonies will be like this. There’s everything you could want; there’s a drugstore and a swimming pool. I think technology is making large parts of the planet uninhabitable, as Tokyo seems to me no place for a human being to be. New York and Boston remain quite congenial; you can walk everywhere.

NUWER: What they also sell down there are cans of “Bullshit Repellant,” in case of literary questions like this next one.

VONNEGUT: Oh? What is it, aerosol?

NUWER: Yeah, an aerosol can that says “Bullshit Repellant.” Here’s the question: Why do you use time fast-forwarding, glimpses into a strange and curious future, and other so- called scientific motifs?

VONNEGUT: Well, they’ve sometimes been useful. Usually what you do is obsess the reader: Is the boy going to get the girl? Is the person going to get revenge, or, are they going to find the money, whatever. Once you get bogged down in plot, on rails like that, that’s all the reader can think about. And so to change my focus, I will chop the damn thing up, and I will keep a narrative thread going, but I want to talk about this or that along the way. You have to be entertaining while you do it, too, because it’s annoying. But one reason people have complained is how little love interest there is in my stories. The problem is once you set that story in motion, the mating story, for that’s what it is, is a mating dance—this is such an absorbing subject to all human beings that you can’t talk about anything else. The example I’ve given is Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. That book is as thick as the Indianapolis phone directory. If he had ever found the right woman, that would have been the end of his seeking. Hell, they would have fallen into each other’s arms; they would have been much relieved after making love; they would have had breakfast together and gotten an apartment; they would have had a baby and all that and Ellison would never have been able to discuss what it was like to be black in the United States, if he had introduced a love scene, So, that’s why I stay clear of it, too. Because just to fall into each other’s arms is a wonderful answer to a heluva lot of problems, It’s very much like heroin; suddenly, everything’s all right. (Laughter)

NUWER: I have some biographical questions.  You briefly mentioned once that you taught at a high school for “mildly unusual” high school students. Mildly unusual?

VONNEGUT: It was a school for disturbed kids—disturbed rich kids since it cost a lot of money to go there—in Sandwich, on Cape Cod. I was the whole English department for kids who were of high school age, many of whom could not read or write very much. These kids, for one reason or another, became highly inconvenient to their parents. Occasionally the police department said, “Either this kid goes to a structured school, a structured environment, or we’re going to put him in jail.” There were brain-damaged kids and all sorts of kids who had something wrong with them.

NUWER: Were you there a year?

VONNEGUT: For a year, yeah.

NUWER: Is the L S Ayres building in Indianapolis, the one with the big clock, the work of your family?

VONNEGUT: That was my grandfather. My father did the headquarters for Bell Telephone Company. That’s more noteworthy than Ayres. It’s more interesting. He also did Block’s [a downtown Indianapolis department store]. He did the Lyric Theatre. I don’t know if it still exists. It’s quite close to the circle. The one building which is a national architectural treasure, whatever it is, can’t be fooled with—I forget what they call it [National Register of Historic Places] is the Atheneum, which my grandfather did. The whole damned thing. My father did most of the Bell Telephone buildings in the whole damned state. I used to, when I was a kid, ride around with him to see how the one was coming in Muncie, or in Bloomington.

NUWER: What was your father’s attitude toward his buildings?

VONNEGUT: Well, you don’t have much fun working with the phone company, usually. They want a box. But he did get to play some with the headquarters. And I wrote a piece about that for Architectural Digest, which they ran last year. ‘Course the phone company, when Father was still alive, added five more stories to the building and gave the job to somebody else. Which was a major heartbreak in his life. Although he didn’t complain much.

NUWER: Is that the architect in you who is so playful in the novels and puts an asterisk in front of characters’ names who are about to die [in Galapagos] and comes up with expressions like “So it goes” [in Slaughterhouse-Five].

VONNEGUT: Oh, I hope so.

NUWER: What about the Vonnegut hardware Company of Indianapolis? Your relations?

VONNEGUT: Yeah. The first Indianapolis settlers, which would be my great grandfather’s generation, opened a general store on Washington Street there. They had rifles, axes, and gunpowder—all of it. They continued to be a big general store there, selling sporting goods, and bicycles, and all that. And it’s quite an old company. They had a manufacturing arm which made panic bars on doors, on theater doors, and all that—if you get slammed up against the door, the thing flies open. That was a very valuable patent. But they sold the whole business, the entire Vonnegut hardware company, to a conglomerate. I forget which one it is now, but I think what they were after was the panic bar patent.

NUWER: Until I read what you’d written about panic bars in Palm Sunday, I had always taken them for granted.

VONNEGUT: A relative of mine was caught in the Iroquois [Theater] fire in Chicago, where people just jammed up against the door. The person closest to the doorknob couldn’t turn it, I guess, or didn’t have the brains enough to turn it.

NUWER: So the bodies just stacked up.

VONNEGUT: Yeah.

NUWER: Ever indulge in Midwestern vice of gluttony?

VONNEGUT: Yeah, at breakfast. A farmer’s breakfast has always attracted me.

NUWER: I don’t think I’ll be able to eat any kind of food again without thinking of [your funny line in] Galapagos: “Gobble, gobble, yum, yum. Excrement and memories.”

(Laugher of both men)

NUWER: Could you tell me a little bit about the importance of Ida Young in your life?

VONNEGUT: There was a joke back then; it still may be a joke now. “Things are getting so bad that the white folks are raising their own children.” (Laughter) But I was essentially raised by a [black] woman who was Ida Young. A thing which is not acknowledged when the black problem is discussed is that these people are largely white. They’re really relatives of ours and they’re part of the white race. She surely was. She was a very bright black woman who must have been aware that she was mostly white. This is never discussed. She was humane and wise and gave me decent moral instruction and was exceedingly nice to me. So she was a great influence on me as anybody.

NUWER: From what to what age?

VONNEGUT: From birth to ten, I would guess. She was a cook and she did all kinds of things around the house, She wasn’t a nanny.

NUWER: Do the moral values in your book stem from the values your parents taught you to respect?

VONNEGUT: I think so, and also Ida Young. The compassionate, forgiving aspects of my beliefs came from Ida Young who was quite intelligent and from my parents, too. They were not vengeful people; that much I’ve learned. Revenge is a very poor idea. Of course, we have this huge literature, which is driven by revenge. So many stories do depend upon revenge as a setting. It’s the person who’s going to settle old scores. But it’s never a good idea and that much I’ve learned. If it were a good idea I’d be all for it.

NUWER: It’s remarkable to me that despite the fact your father was educated in Strasbourg, [the American College] Germany, you have not had schooling in German culture.

VONNEGUT: None whatsoever. One person in four is descended from Germans – has German ancestors – in the United States. It was by far the largest wave of migration; next was the Irish, next was the Italians. I think that’s how it goes. I think Germans in business with successful businesses going dropped the German culture for business reasons. I’m asked to speak to German associations in Chicago and Milwaukee and so forth; these people didn’t have architectural firms, or whatever. So they continued to speak German at home and to celebrate the literature and all that. But no, absolutely not – it was almost perverse, I think, that my father would cut me off from the past in such a way. And I think Germans are the most American of all people; [Dwight D.] Eisenhower was as American as a McDonald’s hamburger.

NUWER: Go back to the time you were flunking out of Cornell. Did you or your family at that time think it was disgraceful that you were having academic problems?

VONNEGUT: I think their [my parents’] feelings about it – as I was very close to being thrown out and would have been thrown out for academic reasons because I had no gift for science really, and that’s what I was in – was that they would have said, “That’s it.” But I myself wanted to be a journalist and wondered if I wanted to go to college at all. Their wish was that I go to college, and I wasn’t so sure I wanted to. I thought maybe I’d go to work for the Indianapolis News or the [Indianapolis] Star or Times. The one problem was I didn’t look old enough to be a very effective reporter. But you didn’t need a college education to get a job, not even a good job in those days, so there wasn’t much of a risk then.

NUWER: Your brother Bernard is a nationally known scientist who did quite well in school. Do you and your brother appreciate each other’s work and lives? When I was researching this piece on you, I was struck by the wide variety of articles he himself has published on his own research.

VONNEGUT: Yeah, in a way. His sort of imagination is very much like mine. It’s a form of practical joking. An experiment is a practical joke involving nature. You build an unnatural situation and Nature’s bound to stumble over it and reveal something about herself. Such a gadget doesn’t ordinarily exist unless my brother builds it. He will turn thins upside down and inside out and say – “What if?” – and that’s essentially what I do. He’s quite a successful scientist. He starts with premises that would never occur to most people; they’re simply too absurd, or too silly, or not serious enough. But the lack of seriousness has led to all sorts of wonderful insights.

NUWER: Has he helped you, for example, with scientific theory in your creation of ice-nine in Cat’s Cradle?

VONNEGUT: He was very helpful with that, because he gave me the image of the cannonballs on the courthouse lawn and all that, but I was working for General Electric at the time and hanging around the research laboratory. The character of Dr. Hoenikker [in Cat’s Cradle] is based on a scientist there, Irving Langmuir, who was the old man in my brother’s group of surface chemists – which is what they were into; they got into weather just realizing that nobody knew anything about it.

NUWER: I understand that Irving Langmuir once left a tip under his plate at home for his wife.

VONNEGUT: Yeah. Proving he wasn’t absent-minded; he was so proud of doing the right thing. (Laughter)

NUWER: Did the people you worked with at General Electric write or call you after the publication of Player Piano to tell you they were miffed?

VONNEGUT: Well, the people I was closest to there agreed with me, and they went on to quite interesting careers elsewhere. We had a remarkable bunch of people there at G.E., because the company decided after the Second World War to experiment with bringing public relations people in from journalism rather than trying to produce them within the company. It was quite a success, but at the same time it was a group of screwballs as far as the rest of the company was concerned.

NUWER: A lot of independent thinkers.

VONNEGUT: Yeah. It worked out well (Laughter), except that we weren’t promotable; there was no kind of higher job they cared to give us.

NUWER: I gather G.E. doesn’t send you its annual stock report or anything like that.

VONNEGUT: No, but they have an alumni association, and it’s a great big thing. They have tee shirts and a newsletter. I was Man-of-the-Year last year on their anniversary—the 25th anniversary of the alumni association of G.E. They gave me a banquet, a certificate and a tee shirt in New York. I tell you, it was a heluva good company, General Electric was. I was lucky to have worked for such an interesting company. One of the things I said [at the banquet] was that the General Electric Company that loaded up the Hudson River with PCBs sure as hell wasn’t the company that I worked for. They used to be very good citizens and not cynical. I was horrified that they’d poisoned the Hudson valley. I got a big round of applause from the other guys who were my age.

NUWER: Was the deer scene [a frightened deer is surrounded by men in an industrial plant] from the movie, The River, taken from your short story [“Deer in the Works,” set in another plant similar to G.E.]?

VONNEGUT: Yeah. Yeah, it was. A guy from the Denver Post called me up and said, “Hey, do you know they’ve got your short story in this movie?” He wanted to get a reaction from me. Well, it’s really quite close to the story. I didn’t do anything about it, really. I’m not about to sue; I don’t feel damaged. But I wanted my lawyer to write the author and tell hi we thought he was a schmuck. (Laughs) The only legal action I was going to take my lawyer declined. (Laughter)

NUWER: Would the student you were way back when in Shortridge have been delighted to know that one day people would stand in line just to have you sign their books and put your asshole on them [Ed. Note: Vonnegut’s autographs all feature a mark, resembling an asterisk, which, in Palm Sunday, he revealed was “my asshole in my signature.”]

VONNEGUT: (Laughter) Yes. (Chuckles) His humor was very much the same back then.

NUWER: What was the most outrageous prank you pulled during your Shortridge days?

VONNEGUT: I don’t know. They weren’t terribly good jokes; there’s nothing I’m terribly proud of. I remember grotesque ones. There were these show windows on every corner [in the halls] for exhibits by different clubs. But the one next to the principal’s office was street situations where people were breaking laws. (Laughter) “What mistakes can you see in this?” We would arrange it so that two dogs would be fucking in an intersection and traffic would be tied up in all directions. Ah, that’s not very funny. I remember that we were all supposed to bring in a poem about June. My poem was “Thirty days hath September, April, June…” There wasn’t a whole lot of funny stuff, but it was a heluva faculty. Gee, that was a great high school.

NUWER: If there ever was a Shortridge writers’ reunion would you attend [Ed. Note: Graduates of Shortridge include Vonnegut, novelist Jeremy Larner, sportswriter Bill Libby, and journalists John Bartlow Martin and Wally Terry.]

VONNEGUT: Well, there would be a remarkable lot of writers, not all famous, but there would be a heluva lot of people who were editors of magazines, trade journals, or whatever. Out of my generation there’s myself and there’s Dan Wakefield and there was a woman named Madeleine Pugh, who was head writer on the I Love Lucy show. We were the ones who became most famous, but there were lots of other people in good editorial positions—Jim Goode, for instance, who was a senior editor at Playboy and also at Penthouse and an awful lot of schlock magazines. He was an absolutely first-rate editor.

NUWER: Last I heard of him, he was working in Atlanta for an outfit that put out The Robb Report and Platinum.

VONNEGUT: I’d wondered what the hell had become of him.

NUWER: I once read that you called up an old high school coach who embarrassed you when you were a skinny kid by giving you a Charles Atlas bodybuilding set.

VONNEGUT: Yeah.

NUWER: Have you ever had a temptation to call I your severest critics such as [The Washington Post’s] Jonathan Yardley—

VONNEGUT: —I’ve been tempted to put them in books, and what I do is this. Peter Prescott at Newsweek has [criticized me] my whole career, starting with Slaughterhouse-Five. He said, “to give you an idea of the sort of book this is, the reader cries a lot.” (Chuckles) Anyway, we run into each other at parties.  I always sit next to him and talk to him.

(snickers) In Gogol, this character [in the humorous novel Dead Souls] takes a tremendous liking to [the comic hero] Chichikov for no reason at all. He holds him by the arm, taking him around and introducing him to all these people. ( Laughter) I do that with Prescott, and I would do it with Yardley, but our paths don’t cross.

NUWER: If I were an editor at Esquire, I’d send you around the country to drop in on Yardley, Prescott and some others. It would be funny to have you comment on their lives and what they themselves have written.

VONNEGUT: Of course what’s at issue here is that I will guess that Yardley went to a prep school. The people who get jobs at Newsweek, Time, The Washington Post and all that have their credentials in perfect order. “ Where did you go to school?” “ Well, I went to Andover or Groton, and then I went to Harvard or Princeton or whatever.” Class A credentials. Well, perfectly fantastic literary biases come with such an education:  a love for old-fashioned novels, for instance, and a mistrust of the new.

NUWER: The idea that no novels worth reading were written in the twentieth century and that sort of thing.

VONNEGUT: You’re never immune to them. I mean, they’re not stupid and they’re not uneducated. They have very narrow tastes usually. So yeah, I try to learn something from them. And when I teach writing I say if the reader has really a bad time, it’s your [the writer’s] fault, not his, which is the proper point of view to have.

NUWER: Jim Harrison, the novelist, says he’s encysted in scar tissue and can’t be penetrated by criticism any longer.

VONNEGUT: Essentially, I guess, that’s the way we all are. [William] Styron has been hideously attacked; [Norman] Mailer had been hideously attacked. Some people haven’t, Updike for instance. He’s what James Dickey calls the A+ student. (Laughs) He’s awfully good and hands in nothing but good work

NUWER: Does your marriage to photographer Jill Krementz affect you as a fiction writer? By that I mean, do you perhaps look at life through a lens now?

VONNEGUT: No. For one thing, she wouldn’t invite me to do that, because she herself is not a salon photographer, she’s a photojournalist. She sees photos as a way of telling stories and not as striking images, although they often are. She’s in the tradition of Life magazine where its juxtaposition of photographs that matter and they tell a story. If she’d been a painter and wanted me to think about just one image at a time, she might have influenced me to think about just one image at a time, she might have influenced me. But she doesn’t. She’s essentially in the same business that I am of telling stories any which way. So, we’ve been in parallel areas. So no, she hasn’t changed me, just because of the kind of photographer she is. I certainly would be glad to learn something from her; no doubt have, but not that.

NUWER: Is Jill an editor of your work?

VONNEGUT: No, I’ve been married twice, and I’ve also had a couple of love affairs and that dumps everything out, because the person who is asked to be editor can’t candid. If the person is candid, one, the person could be wrong; two, the person could be right but at any rate, it’s very destructive emotionally. So, I don’t ask anybody to run that risk for me. I’ve lost friendships with other authors who’ve given me something and said, “ Tell me what you really think,” so I have. And so I lose a friend for a little while. (Chuckles)

NUWER: These next questions concern Galapagos. I’ve heard it said that you get nosebleeds after writing 250 pages. Do you consider your 300-page novel Galapagos to be a “swooper” or “basher” ending? [Editor’s note Vonnegut has said that there are two kinds of endings. “Swoopers” go on and on; “bashers” are short and have “the end” slapped onto the story.]

VONNEGUT: That was bashing and it was heavy bashing. The technical problems were very hard of how to make a story last a million years. Who’s going to observe it [point-of-view], because the reader is going to insist upon knowing who the hell is watching this? As an atheist I couldn’t have God watch. So technically, it looked hopeless for a long time. The problems were enormous as to how the hell to get away with this. I had to kill everybody on the mainland, too, and get away with it. How much can you get away with in a book? So, technically, it was very hard to do.

NUWER: I anticipated, in Galapagos, that the end of the world was coming, and I wrongly expected you to blot out the race in a nuclear holocaust. Instead, you devised a way of having the human race blotted out by having human ovum destroyed by bacteria, everywhere but on Santa Rosalia, thereby calling a halt to reproduction except on that island. It’s one of the nice surprises in the book.

VONNEGUT: It [the destruction of ovum] is exactly what happened to the [Galapagos Island] tortoises. That’s why the only tortoises are on the islands. Rodents evolved that came along and ate all their eggs. There weren’t any rodents in Sumatra, and there weren’t any rodents on the Galapagos Islands, so these great big impractical animals still exist there and nowhere else.

NUWER: What do you think would have happened if some other women [other than the post-menopausal women, the cannibal women, and so on] made the trip on the ship to provide genes for future generations?

VONNEGUT: I think it would have ended the same way. Where they were lucky was that they had a baby covered with fur, almost from the beginning, because of the atom bomb. I got a very nice letter from Stephen J. Gould who’s the great zoologist at Harvard about this. He thought it was a wonderful roman a clef about evolutionary theory and also proves how random the selection is. He said that the fur-covered baby was a good mutation, that it was a common one. So its reputable scientifically; I worried as much about that one as anything.

NUWER: Did that concept come to you from reading?

VONNEGUT: Well, I had read a lot of Stephen J. Gould, who is the leading theoretician and a radical thinker, too. The fossil record doesn’t quite bear out what Darwin said. Gould has been telling his colleagues, “Come on, let’s see what the fossil record really does show and then explain that,” instead of saying, “We’re still missing links; we’ve got to dig some more.” What the record shows is that changes [in evolutionary development] are quite sudden. New models have all suddenly appeared in fossils, rather than with a whole lot of easy, rather imperceptible, steps.

NUWER: Was there a little of Hillis L. Howie in your character, Mary, the schoolteacher heroine of Galapagos? [Ed. Note: Galapagos is dedicated to Howie, an Indiana naturalist who took Vonnegut on a camping trip to the American Southwest in the summer of 1938.]
VONNEGUT: I would think so. It took me a long time to realize what a great man Hillis Howie was. That’s part of the American experience is to suddenly come across a truly great person who never becomes rich or famous, but who is enormously beneficial just to those near him. Hillis Howie was such a person, a great naturalist, very kind and strong with boys. Well, he ran these expeditions to the West and they still go on. But it was his invention. We had a truck and three station wagons, and we traveled all over the West. We had specific missions from the Field Museum in Chicago. I was a mammalogist, for instance, and I put trap lines out every night. In fact, when I went out, which was about 1938, I caught a subspecies of the tawny whitefoot mouse, which had not been seen before, and presumably its pelt is at the Field museum if anyone wants to look at it. When I was in the army telling someone abut this, he immediately named it Meesis Vonnegeesis.

NUWER: Ha. I love that. What part of the West specifically [did he take you to]?

VONNEGUT: New Mexico, around the Four Corners.

NUWER: That summer of ’38 must have been something, with World War Two just a couple years away.

VONNEGUT: Yeah, there was a big glacier coming and everybody knew about it. I think everybody pretty much prepared to be a soldier or a sailor then.

NUWER: Was it a romantic time for you?

VONNEGUT: Oh, yes. I mean, that war must be fought. I was in Japan a couple of years ago at an International P.E.N. Congress. I was invited to come over there as a guest, and I went. We were invited to express our regrets at Hiroshima (chuckles) and hope that it never happened again. Well, it was the militarism of Japan in the early Thirties that turned us into a garrison state. If we are a military monster now, we certainly were not headed in that direction. We were proud of our pacifism and wanted nothing more to do with foreign entanglements. We were corrupted by the Germans and the Japanese, who had gone insane. We, in response, became a militaristic state, and quite permanently so now. But it’s their Goddamn fault. Really, this was quite a naïve, idealistic, isolationist country at one time. When I was educated in the public schools of Indianapolis, we were proud that we had no military men in the government. I can remember that. Whereas, you’d see cabinet meetings of Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, whatever—and a whole lot of military hats sitting around the table. Not us. Ours was civilian control. And damn it, they radicalized us.

NUWER: I like your choice of an Anne Frank quote [“In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.”] for the epigraph of Galapagos.  After observing the cremation of Dresden, the crimes of a past American president, and the abuse of such writers as Kilgore Trout—in spite of everything—do you still believe that people are really good at heart?

VONNEGUT: Yeah, though I question our leaders. The people down blow field grade are marvelous. There’s an enormous national resource in the American yeomanry, which tends to be intelligent, well-informed and all that, and very narrow sorts of people rise to the top, as witness our president who does not read at all and has people around him who know no history and who know no technology. So, I think we’re badly read and it’s surely true in the Warsaw pact countries, too. So, we have a problem of how to get the proper leaders. Otherwise, we’re in pretty good shape.

NUWER: The same sort of thing is true of England. Lady Di [during her visit to America] invited Clint Eastwood to the White House instead of [any writers, artists or Nobel Peace Prize winners].

VONNEGUT: Oh, did she? I didn’t know that. Of course, that’s never been thought of as a very bright family—the Windsors.

NUWER: No. (Pause) This is more a comment than a question. Any other author who has left the last of the [human] race on an island has left a couple fine-looking breeders or intellects to carry on the species. You’ve left a ship of puds to pass on their genes.

VONNEGUT: Of course, out of any sort of breeding stock you get an extraordinary variety of human beings. I think one of the most interesting genetic experiments was performed by the Nazis in Poland, where they killed every educated person they could catch. They called a faculty meeting at the University of Krakow in order to plan courses for the coming semester, supposedly. They just loaded them up on trucks and took them out and killed them. They tried to kill every person with an advanced degree, and you would think it would affect the breeding stock. It didn’t. It completely regenerated an intelligentsia out of a peasant population.

NUWER: That’s nice to hear. I didn’t know that. You’ve also said about our country that we are a people suspicious and ferocious enough to use thermonuclear weapons. We obviously would stop at nothing. DO you think deep down that our human race is doomed?

VONNEGUT: Again, by bad leadership, yes—[when you have] a leader [Ronald Reagan] who describes our chief competitor on the face of the Earth [U.S.S.R.] as ‘the evil empire,’ then yes. Because what you are supposed to do is obliterate the evil empire. Of course, he is a very old man. He’s an old-fashioned sort of American that scarcely exists any more. He’s ignorant and provincial, and stubborn in his own beliefs. We’re living now in the era of information. We have photographs of every square foot of it [Russia] and know exactly what the people are really like and all that. He represents an America that was ignorant of the rest of the world and had fantasies about it. SO, yeah, I think it’s very dangerous. I don’t think that the leaders of the Soviet Union are nearly as ignorant about us as our leaders are about them.

NUWER: Ever wish you could force-feed books to our nation’s leaders?

VONNEGUT: Yeah, [although] not my books. Why not Socrates and why not Montaigne and why not Jefferson—That’s what I wish they had read, and to have some sense of history. I wish Ed Meese knew the reasoning that had gone into the construction of the Constitution by reading The Federalist papers. But they all start from simply zero, forming opinions from those around them when there are these marvelous things [books] in libraries which discuss these large issues: civic responsibility and that sort of thing. But they simply are not interested. Yeah, not my books but—

NUWER: —some books. Uh, huh.

VONNEGUT: I think they ought to read Karl Marx to understand what the attractiveness of the ideas is, whether they are misbegotten or not. (Chuckles) They just regard him as the devil, offering terrible advice.

NUWER: Without being able to give two direct quotes [from Marx].

VONNEGUT: Well, you know in February, I went to Poland, I went to East Germany, I went to Czechoslovakia to see how writers were doing over there and to talk to them privately to see what we could do to help. One of the things they said was that socialism in practice would be even worse. (Laughter)

NUWER: Had the United States the means to do so in 1942, ’43, or ’44, would the government have dropped incendiaries on all Germany to simply blot out the country?

VONNEGUT: It’s something I don’t understand yet—how ineffectual the bombing was in slowing down production. I would think that one stick of dynamite someplace in the cafeteria of a ball bearing factory (laughter) would bring all production to a halt. But Jesus, we blew the shit out of all of Germany, and everything that looked like a factory we blew up. And production did go down a little, but it sure didn’t stop. They were still making airplanes right there at the end, and tanks, and shells, and all of it. SO, I would say, essentially, we tried [to do] it.

NUWER: I’ve often wondered why the Mercedes Benz people and factory owners who used slave labor weren’t punished for war crimes after the war.

VONNEGUT: The feeling is that they’re quite able. We want them on our side. Heinrich Boll and I did what was shown as a one-hour [TV] conversation that actually went on for three hours. This was last February, not long before he died. I was telling him that Americans believed, and I believed, that the German army was the greatest army in the history of military science. He said, “It was a terrible army.” It was such a surprise to hear him say so. I mean what we really want to stop the Russians is not our army, but an invincible German army. (Laughter)

NUWER: What was the significance in Galapagos of alluding to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony a dozen times or so—saying, “Oh, well, he never was going to write Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony anyway”?
VONNEGUT: Simply a masterpiece.

NUWER: I like that refrain.

VONNEGUT: (Chuckles) Yeah. Although the Fifth [Symphony] is a better piece of music. I kept yo-yoing back and forth between the Ninth and the Fifth.

NUWER: Between those two.

VONNEGUT: Yeah.

NUWER: Galapagos provides a wry retort to Darwinists. Do you ever wonder how in so short a period of time the National Football League has produced all those elephants and the National Basketball Association all those giraffes?

VONNEGUT: (Chuckles) Hawaii! Because there are now tall Japanese. It’s amazing. I know the reason I’m tall supposedly is the massive quantity of dairy products I had as a kid, which apparently makes people tall. I don’t know if much is known about it.

NUWER: [Editor’s note: In Galapagos, Mandarax was an invention, a shell “of high-impact black plastic, twelve centimeters high, eight wide, and two thick” that “heard spoken language, and… translated them into words on its screen.” Among other talents, Mandarax could “recall on command any of twenty thousand popular quotations from literature.”] Your Mandarax strikes me as a sort of comic invention much like Woody Allen’s Orgasmatron. How did that evolve?

VONNEGUT: Well, I got interested in Bartlett’s and in the Oxford Book of Familiar Quotations. In going through those—which I’ve used over the years to see who the hell ever said this or whatever—while going through these things I started thinking how long people have been on Earth, how much talking they’ve done and how little they’ve said that’s worth remembering.

(Laughter) Bla, bla, bla! This hotel today is filled with voices; but there’s nobody saying anything worth writing down. Then you’ve got these volumes, that aren’t that thick, of things that have been said that are worth remembering.

NUWER: Was the name of your character, Captain von Kleist, inspired by the last name of the tragic playwright?

VONNEGUT: Yes. I had just heard a lecture on von Kleist; there’s a big boom in von Kleist starting. There was a lecture at NYU [New York University] given by the German department.  I went and listened to that and got very interested in him.

NUWER: Was the name of huckster James Wait inspired by James Watt?

VONNEGUT: No.

NUWER: I say that because the names are similar and the physical description of Wait is similar to that of Watt.

VONNEGUT: Huh. Oh, well. Maybe it was. But James Wait is the nigger [Joseph Conrad’s character] on the Narcissus.

NUWER: Naw!

VONNEGUT: No one’s picked it up.

NUWER: I should have. Glad I asked, anyway. Was the name of [your character] Howard W. Campbell, Jr. in Mother Night inspired by John W. Campbell, Jr. [leading editor of science fiction magazines Astounding Science Fiction and Analog]? I read some criticism [by critic James Lundquist], which said it might be. Was it?

VONNEGUT: Not at all. I know who he [John W. Campbell, Jr.] is, but I never had a damn thing to do with him. No. I guess he had enemies, but I don’t know that much about him. But I gather that he was a controversial person.  Hell, no.

NUWER: Galapagos is set on the tiny island of Santa Rosalia. I wasn’t able to locate it in an atlas. Is there such a place on Earth?

VONNEGUT: No.

NUWER: It’s fictional then.

VONNEGUT: Yeah, because biologists know so much about every one of those islands that I had to make up one of my own.

NUWER: I found it of interest that in Galapagos, the furry, seal-like humans of one million years in the future know true happiness, something we, with our so-called “big brains,” do not know—even though we try out things like Transcendental Meditation in hopes of finding happiness.

VONNEGUT: I tried that [Transcendental Meditation]. It gave me a terrible headache. (Laughter) Yeah. Well, if you saw the seals and sea lions on the Galapagos Islands, that’s the life you would want. Gee, it’s an incredible, amusing life they have. They play practical jokes on the other animals; they don’t have that much to do. I mean, they’re quite smart, and they’ve got a lot of time on their hands. Sharks are what they have to look out for—and killer whales. A lot of them have scars because they’ve been hit by big fish. There are these big iguanas, who with great labor will swim out from shore, eat seaweed on the bottom, and bob up to the top to swim back to the islands. Well, the seals will come and catch them by the tail and drag them back. (Laughter) They let them go almost to shore and then drag them out to sea. And if you go swimming there, they will come underneath you, look at you, and swim all around you. Only in mating season does it become very dangerous to fool around with them, because they get territorial, the males do.

NUWER: In my opinion, Galapagos has many devices also found in Shakespeare: a disappearing and reappearing ghost, the character of James Wait who assumes many identities, a wonderful villain—in this case the “big brain” of twentieth-century man—, female cannibals who play a comic role much as the tinkers do in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

VONNEGUT: Yeah. I think everybody does that. For most writers, well, there’s no way of avoiding it, really. These dramatic devices are fundamental ones you could scarcely do without. It’s hard to write a science fiction story without picking out a theme that H.G. Wells dealt with because he dealt with them all, that’s all. Shakespeare used absolutely every device for beguiling an audience.

NUWER: What I was leading up to was to say that of all your books, Galapagos, I think, might be turned into a three-act play and set on stage.

VONNEGUT: Maybe it would. What’s interesting is what things play [on stage]. I have a theory I haven’t been able to interest anybody in, so I’m sure you won’t find it interesting either. (Laughter) It’s a big mystery how Christianity spread when it was so much like other religions which were competing with it at the same time—with the virgin birth and all that. [There were] almost no records of Christ; I guess the one record was Josephus, that’s all, and every chance Christ never existed. And yet this religion so much like others already around, set that whole part of the world afire. Well, couple that puzzle with the fact that people are writing plays all the time, which do not play. The producer will read it, the actor will read it, and say, “Well, it’s a wonderful piece of writing, but it will not play.” Well, the gospels will all play. I think they were plays. I think these were scripts for plays that were put on late at night and were utterly convincing. People come and go. They speak a few lines—so, you won’t find that interesting, either.

NUWER: I think it’s interesting to consider, particularly today when you can have a science fiction writer like Ron Hubbard start a new religion [Scientology] that attracts millions of people.

VONNEGUT: Yeah, he’s doing all right. He’s got his followers.

NUWER: So I can see how the gospels could have been literature. (Pause) What grade would you give Galapagos—the way you graded all your other books in Palm Sunday?

VONNEGUT: In terms of technique I think it’s A+. I think technically what I undertook was impossible. I think I solved the technical problems, and it was miraculous to me that I was able to do that.

NUWER: You gave your novel Slapstick a D and called it “shit” in public lectures. Would it be a good thing if authors were allowed to recall their mistakes the way Detroit automakers recall cars?

VONNEGUT: You know they used to catch people in the Louvre—painters—touching up their own work.

NUWER: I didn’t know.

VONNEGUT: The guards would have to throw them out. (Laughter)

NUWER: That would be a funny scene in a book.

VONNEGUT: F. Scott Fitzgerald did it, of course. He called a book back, changed the order, and it was worse. I think everybody agreed it was worse after he straightened it out. There’s a columnists for the Daily News named Jimmy Breslin, a friend of mine. Breslin denounced one of his books and withdrew it. I don’t know anyone else who has ever done this. He decided it was a damaging book and a dumb book; that was The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, which made fun of gangsters. What caused him to do this was a bunch of hit men walked into a saloon and shot a whole bunch of wrong people, then left. They were in the wrong saloon. (Chuckles) Breslin said, “You know, there’s nothing funny about these people. There’s nothing redeeming about them at all.” Breslin is the only person I know who’s done that.

NUWER: The book jolts readers who are writers by debunking the idea one’s work has immortality. Your narrator, Leon Trotsky Trout, at the end has no paper even on which to write. He writes Galapagos with air on air.

VONNEGUT: Well, it’s almost like that now. I’ve seen, experienced, the deaths of several world-class writers now, who were friends of mine. I mean, when they’re dead it’s the end of their careers, really. There’s very little that’s going to live after them. One case is Nelson Algren, surely a world-class writer, unknown now and virtually out of print.

NUWER: They just ended the fiction award in his honor at Chicago magazine. You know, that annual $5,000 award for short fiction—

VONNEGUT: —They ended it?

NUWER: Just a month or so back. Don Gold, the old Playboy managing editor, took over Chicago magazine and decided he didn’t want to run fiction. Anyway, they ended that award even though its backers said money was there [to continue it indefinitely].

VONNEGUT: I was a friend of Nelson’s and some people wanted me to put this award on its feet. And what I wanted to use money for, and was willing to contribute money to, was keeping his books in print. I thought that was more important than giving the Nelson Algren Award, because twenty years from now, people would say, “I won a Nelson Algren Award.” “Well, who was Algren?” “I don’t know, probably some meatpacker who left money.”

NUWER: Yeah. Does it pain you that some deserving current writers such as William Price Fox, the Southern humorist, have labored long without earning the larger general public’s applause?

VONNEGUT: Yeah, but it’s unsurprising. There aren’t that many readers in this country, and so, the chance for an explosive response is very slight. If we had literacy on the order of Poland’s or Cuba’s, then there would be a chance for a large number of people to simply be crazy about Fox and buy everything he wrote.

NUWER: He’s a stitch to read.

VONNEGUT: Yeah, he’s very funny. But he’s got himself his professorship at South Carolina, so he’s not a hardship case. I’m just sorry there aren’t more readers to appreciate his books. I’m sorry that somebody in government doesn’t quote from a book that was printed in the last five years.

NUWER: Maybe they’ll quote from some celebrity’s book now and then.

VONNEGUT: There’s this big coffee table book out about Frank Sinatra. I wish they’d quote from that. (Laugher) But anyway, Irwin Shaw, a world class writer. He’ll be forgotten soon. Truman Capote. “Wasn’t he that funny little guy on telly you don’t see any more?” (Chuckles) I’m very suspicious of people’s fondness of Mark Twain, because everybody pretends to have read him and very few people have. Take my own kids, for example. I have a lot of kids with college educations. I’m a little suspicious of them when they talk about Twain. I don’t think they know very much about him or are ever going to find out much about him.

NUWER: I was lucky that my son read both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn before he was 11.

VONNEGUT: Good! That’s because his father is a book lover. Most aren’t. If you go out to Hannibal, as I did a few years ago, the motels and all that are named after Twain characters. That’s a big tourist attraction. They assume that people know about Tom Sawyer and that’s all. There’s no reference to the riverboat pilot in Life on the Mississippi—

NUWER: —or probably to Pudd’nhead Wilson.

VONNEGUT: No mention of Pudd’nhead Wilson. Just Tom and Becky and Huck and the aunt who raised Tom; that’s as far as they dare go.

NUWER: Or there would be no visitor recognition.

VONNEGUT: Yeah.

NUWER: I’ve read much about your love of Mark Twain. Have you observed Halley’s Comet?

VONNEGUT: No. I have a telescope, and so I’m in good shape to look at it, but I’d have to get out of New York City to see it. It’s not going to be like it was last time when it was really something. My favorite comet is Kohoutek [sighted in January, 1974], I guess. There was big talk about that one, but, in fact, I guess it was a complete fizzle. I guess nobody saw it. I took that as a very important omen from the skies that help is not going to come from the outside. Any problems we have here on Earth we’re going to have to solve alone.

VONNEGUT: I’ve thrown away a lot of stuff, so effectively I’ve done that. I think all my books are technically difficult since they’re in the comic mode, which depends upon the construction of jokes. It’s hard to build those. If I were writing in the tragic, solemn mode, there’d be this oceanic rise and fall, and there wouldn’t have to be this steady arrival of amusing moments that the comic mode requires.

NUWER: Your readers form a sort-of granfalloon, your invented term for “a proud and meaningless association of human beings.” Do you know your audience?

VONNEGUT: Well, I can tell from letters that are largely from people my own age. Yeah, I hear from a lot of scientists. Kids can’t write, so how the hell are they going to write (laughter) a letter to tell me they liked my book?

NUWER: You once said at a lecture I heard at Indiana University that you were looking for an answer to the question, “What are people for?” Have you come up with the answer?

VONNEGUT: My son Mark, who is a good writer—he wrote Eden Express—is now a pediatrician and very busy, so that he doesn’t have time to do any writing.

NUWER: A friend of mine who had schizophrenia said he was save from madness by reading that book.

VONNEGUT: It’s a swell book, and it’s helped a lot of people, particularly the very end of it which tells people who are starting to go under what they’re going to be in for. But he said, “We’re here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” And that’s a satisfactory answer to me. The Darwinian answer, of course, would be that nature doesn’t approve of this sort of sentimentality, and that really you should rough other people up and test them some. That’s social Darwinism; it has nothing to do with Charles Darwin. It’s a misreading of Darwinism.

NUWER: Speaking of Darwin, I thought it as funny that the San Joes Mercury News contains a review of Galapagos by a writer named Peter Beagle.  

VONNEGUT: (Chuckles) Id he know it was funny?

NUWER: I don’t think so; at least he didn’t comment if the thought so. But I thought it was funny. Let’s see—have you ever counted how many books and stories your fictional sci-fi writer, Kilgore Trout, has written in your novels?

VONNEGUT: The [Bob] Guccione science magazine—what is it?

NUWER: Omni.

VONNEGUT: Yeah. Omni sent me an essay on Kilgore Trout where they put it all together. Of course I don’t look back in my books to see what Trout was [like] in a previous book, or what I said about him, so he’s different in every book.

NUWER: Is it true that he was inspired by Theodore Sturgeon, the sci-fi writer?

VONNEGUT: Yeah. In fact, it said so in his obituary in [The New York] Times.

NUWER: I didn’t know that.

VONNEGUT: Yeah. I was so pleased. Sturgeon got a nice big obituary in the Times, eight-ten inches, something like that. I was just delighted that it said in the middle of it that he was the inspiration for the Kurt Vonnegut character of Kilgore Trout.

NUWER: Do you see yourself as the gadfly of American letters?

VONNEGUT: I suppose that every writer is a gadfly; the crude term for what every writer would like to do is mind-f-. It’s to get into somebody else’s head. In a Bible-belt area like here it would be a felony to mind-f- somebody. I heard Norman Mailer talk the other night. He was talking about the fact that most people don’t have much time to think about life. They don’t think about it because their jobs set such stern requirements and all that. So you have this specialized class of persons who things about life itself and thinks strategically while nobody else has time to do it.

NUWER: If a message came over the loudspeaker that a nuclear warhead was but twelve seconds away from obliterating us, what are your last words?

VONNEGUT: It’s a swan song. It ought to be a very special thing. My favorite is Cook County [Illinois] electric chair story. They got the guy strapped in and everything, but before they put the hood on him they asked him if he had anything to say. He said, “Yes. This will certainly teach me a lesson.” The deal is to say the last thing God himself ever expected to hear.

NUWER: Zap!