All I Am Doing is Pouting That There’s No Tennis Today (Well, Not All)

I’m also reading God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and wondering why I’m not as excited about it as I have been about Vonnegut in the past. I guess its more overtly political than I’m used to. I think Fountainhead perverted my acceptance of political messages in fiction. Vonnegut is overtly political in much of Man Without a Country, but being nonfiction I don’t care so much. Mother Night was about Nazis, ostensibly, but less about the obviously horrendous politics and policy of Nazis — because who needs a novel to tell you that Nazis are bad — and more about personal responsibility. Writing fiction about politics seems to invite you into the same pitfalls as writing period-piece fiction, it ties any message or emotional content to a context that by definition can’t be as universal. It’s not that I disagree with the things Vonnegut’s trying to say but I don’t feel like I’m learning anything new. I don’t particularly care for being a part of a choir being preached to.

Let me start over. I just finished reading God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and I wonder why I’m not as excited about it as I have been about Vonnegut in the past. Rosewater, the character not the novel, is yurodivy I guess. I haven’t read The Idiot, and probably should, but I’m gonna go ahead and make a broad statement about this type of fiction anyway. A novel about a yurodivy should either: 1. Allow the correctness of the yurodivy be revealed over the course of the novel, or 2. Have a sizable portion of the narrative not be about how correct the yurodivy is. Rosewater, the novel not the character, sets up the character as correct right off the bat. Or is this just because I’m used to Vonnegut’s political ideals and read his stuff in the wrong order? What if I read Rosewater before Man Without a Country? The most interesting part of the book, for me, was the content about the Rhode Island Rosewaters — this is the part of the narrative that’s not about the correctness of the yurodivy — but Vonnegut after a fashion simply stops talking about them. These are his roundest characters and then poof! he abandons them.

I am, sadly, disappointed.

Interviews with Old Men

I’ve been having fun reading “Art of Fiction” interviews from the Paris Review. Two days ago I started with Ray Bradbury, because of course I’ve been all about him in the week following his death. The man just seemed so happy, and a large portion of the interview was conducted in 2010, after his stroke and the death of his wife, at age 89. Anyone who can still be that genuinely happy at that age after those events is someone who deserves a bit or a lot of your respect. My favorite quote, about why he tends to write short stories instead of novels: “ The novel is also hard to write in terms of keeping your love intense. It’s hard to stay erect for two hundred days.”

Bradbury also apparently didn’t like Vonnegut — it was mutual — and this honestly surprised to me. “I’m glad Kurt Vonnegut didn’t like me either. He had problems, terrible problems.” He didn’t elaborate too much on it, but I got the impression that he is dismissive of Vonnegut because of his general darkness the same way that Bradbury has apparently gotten shit for being overly optimistic. The funny part is I think that Bradbury can be just as dark as Vonnegut — ever read “The Veldt,” from The Illustrated Man? — and Vonnegut has flashes of incredible happiness mixed in with his horribly, horribly sad writing.

So what do I do? I go ahead and read Vonnegut’s Paris Review interview. (I think that sentence was based on a joke from the movie High Fidelity. Remember when he sleeps with Marie de Salle?) Bradbury did have a point when he said Vonnegut has terrible problems, but hearing him — reading him, rather — his sadness is so flat, and he accepts it so effortlessly, that it can also come off as dispassion. The first chunk of the interview is about his WWII experiences, which I’m relatively familiar with through Slaughterhouse V and various things he’s written about the book. I might not have been quite as impressed with the interview because I’m more familiar with Vonnegut outside of his books than Bradbury, but there were still some gems in there I’d like to share.

On his theory of writing: “It was stated by Paul Engle—the founder of the Writers Workshop at Iowa. He told me that, if the workshop ever got a building of its own, these words should be inscribed over the entrance: ‘Don’t take it all so seriously.’”

On literature today being less pervasive than in previous eras: “There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass or readers. I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check.”

On love in stories and novels: “I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that’s the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers.”

On Slaughterhouse Vbeing considered obscene: “My books are being thrown out of school libraries all over the country—because they’re supposedly obscene. I’ve seen letters to small-town newspapers that put Slaughterhouse Five in the same class with Deep Throat and Hustler magazine. How could anybody masturbate to Slaughterhouse Five?”

On that note, I’m done for the day. Next up: Pablo Neruda and his translator W.S. Merwin in two separate interviews. Oh, and Hunter Thompson, of course.

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Just thought I’d mention. I get to add to it every once in a while, which one of the bright spots in my work day. Most recently I wrote about finding out that Kurt Vonnegut had died, and a little thingy about Margaret Atwood, who I sometimes forget is an amazing writer. That second one should be posted soon.

(Also I just found out I can publish this as an “aside,” which means it isn’t featured as a full post. Cool, WordPress.)