A Little of Me Died Today

Kurt Vonnegut died today at his home in New York City;
however, Elliot Rosewater and Kilgore Trout live on!
by Charlie Leck [12 April 2007]

Here on the bookshelves in my library, behind me, I have first edition copies of all of Kurt Vonnegut’s books – or should I have said “of each” of Kurt Vonnegut’s books? Vonnegut would have known. The extraordinary man and author died today “at his home in Manhattan” as they said on the radio. (So it goes!) They played a long clip of Vonnegut reading a chapter from his block-buster novel, Slaughterhouse Five. I remember first reading that book. It was sometime in the early 1970s, I’m sure. It was a number of years after it was published. Though I can’t remember the year that I read it, I certainly do remember how the book stirred and rattled me. It was one of the finest novels I had ever read to that point, ranking right up there with such extraordinary works as Tess of the d’Urbervilles and The Old Man and the Sea and The Grapes of Wrath.

Here’s the point. I fell in love with Kurt Vonnegut. We didn’t have this incredible, wonderful Internet back then, and it was difficult for me to come up with stuff. At the Minneapolis City Library I met a delightful librarian who told me about some of Vonnegut’s early work – Player Piano (1952) and the Sirens of Titan (1959). I immediately read those and found them quite delightful but nowhere near as powerful as Slaughterhouse. For some reason, the librarian hadn’t mentioned God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. When I found that and read it and reread it, I knew Vonnegut was a person who was very special and important to me – and always would be.

“… laughter… God knows, that’s the soul seeking some relief.” (Vonnegut)

Eliot Rosewater, President of the Rosewater Foundation became one of the most important characters in life or fiction for me. He became a pal and a nearly constant companion. He had a moral compass that I wanted to duplicate. Rosewater, however, had a soul that I sadly knew I couldn’t replicate in my own life. Nevertheless, I tried.

“And Eliot became a drunkard, a Utopian dreamer, a tinhorn saint, an aimless fool. Begat he not a soul.” (Eliot Rosewater, writing of himself)

Obviously, the man’s opinion of himself is not as elevated as mine is of him. You should decide if I am correct about this matter by introducing yourself to him through a thorough reading of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel.

Eliot’s father, Lister, became a member of the House of Representatives, for a time, representing Rosewater County in Indiana, and then was elected as one of Indiana’s U.S. Senators.

“That he is or ever was an Indiana person is a tenuous political fiction.” (Eliot Rosewater, writing of his father)

Eliot, like his parents, was born, raised, educated and indoctrinated as an easterner. He was highly educated (Harvard) and sailed often on Cape Cod and skied winters away in Switzerland. On the day following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he dropped out of Harvard Law to join the infantry. He distinguished himself and rose to the rank of Captain. Suffering combat fatigue, he was sent to Paris to recuperate. There he “wooed and won” a Parisian beauty, Sylvia DuVrais Zetterling, for his wife. By Eliot’s own admission, “she came to hate him.”

After the war, he returned to Harvard Law and received his law degree and then went on to get a doctorate in international law. Soon after, he was “handed” the head job at the Rosewater Foundation, which had been set up several years earlier by his father. The foundation controlled approximately 87 million dollars, which was a lot of dough in those days.

Under Eliot’s leadership the foundation “…fought cancer and mental illness and race prejudice and police brutality and countless other miseries, encouraged college professors to look for truth, bought beauty at any price.”

“Many, many good things have I bought! Many, many bad things have I fought.” (a couplet composed by Eliot Rosewater)

Eliot drank heavily. One time, while on a binge, he crashed a convention of science-fiction writers. This incident seems to have made all the difference.

“The hell with the talented sparrowfarts who write delicately of one small piece of one mere lifetime, when the issues are galaxies, eons and trillions of souls yet to be born.” (Eliot Rosewater, on science-fiction writers)

It’s at this point that I begin to really love Eliot Rosewater. He introduces me to Kilgore Trout, a science-fiction writer who Eliot calls “the greatest writer alive today.”

“I leave it to you, friends and neighbors, and especially to the immortal Kilgore Trout: think about the silly ways money gets passed around now, and then think up better ways.” (Eliot Rosewater, concluding a speech he delivered upon interrupting a convention of science fiction writers)

Eliot’s wanderings began in earnest after that convention. He would hitch-hike from coast to coast, spellbound by volunteer fire-fighters, spending some evenings in jail and certain that a revolution was coming to America that would redistribute the nation’s wealth.

“In America – among the rickety sons and grandsons of the pioneers.” (Eliot Rosewater, telling his wife about his wanderings and that he had returned home to Rosewater County, Indiana)

You must read about Eliot and Sylvia setting up their residence in the old Rosewater mansion and their lives among these common folk of Indiana. And you must read about Eliot’s constant wanderings and meanderings and his divorce and his practice as a notary public in the town named after his family. There, in that grungy office, he receives phone calls day and night from people in need – in need of all kinds of help. He personally takes every call. He also answers the emergency phone for the Rosewater Volunteer Fire Department.

“I think it’s terrible the way people don’t share things in this country. I think it’s a heartless government that will let one baby be born owning a pig piece of the country, the way I was born, and let another baby be born without owning anything. The least a government could do, it seems to me, is to divide things up fairly among the babies. Life is hard enough, without people having to worry themselves sick about money, too. There’s plenty for everybody in this country, if we’ll only share more.” (Eliot Rosewater, speaking on the phone to his father, Senator Lister Rosewater, who has asked Eliot if he is a communist)

Move on to the part where Eliot is threatened by a snake of a lawyer, representing the Rhode Island Rosewaters, vowing to have the courts declare the head of the Rosewater Foundation legally insane and therefore forcing Eliot to give up control to the lawyer’s clients. Read how Eliot whips the lawyer and confounds again his dear, old dad.

“Go over to her shack, I guess. Sprinkle some water on the babies, say ‘Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of babies: God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’” (Eliot Rosewater, explaining to Sylvia what he will say when baptizing the twins of Mary Moody)

Who, please tell me, could declare such a person insane?

To read more about Kilgore Trout and Eliot Rosewater, move on to Vonnegut’s novel, Breakfast of Champions. As the back fold of the dust jacket on the first edition of that book says, “This book answers once and for all the question, ‘To what extend are human beings sacred, and to what extend are they machines?’”

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis (1922), the son and grandson of architects, and he attended Cornell University in up-state New York. Both of those settings appear time and again in his work.

Here’s the great dream I’ve carried through the last 35 years. I wanted to write like Vonnegut. I wanted to write serious stuff with plenty of bold fiction and lots of pointed humor. I wanted to write about people with lots of heart and soul. I wanted to write about justice and injustice and about goodness and evil – all with a sense of humor. I tried a half-dozen times. I mean, seriously tried. I produced long, carefully written works of fiction. When I’d compare them to Vonnegut’s work I’d nearly throw-up and I stuffed them into desk drawers and cabinets here and there and everywhere.

Vonnegut was a writer with inestimable consciousness and a sensitive conscience. His sense of morality was gigantic. He thought being good and just should be easy.

And how he could write! He owned each book he wrote and he believed he could break the rules when he wanted and twist and bend a plot to serve a moment. He did it with a talent that will not be read again.

“Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.“Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.“And every day my Government gives me a count of the corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.“My father died many years ago now – of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.” (Kurt Vonnegut, in a literary interruption of his novel, Slaughterhouse Five)

Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at his home in New York City. Unfortunately, so it goes!
So many called him a cynic. He wasn’t a cynic. He was our conscience, calling us to be just and good and fair – talking to us as if we were Mary Moody’s twins.

I have to admit that I also loved him because he was a compassionate and sincere liberal who believed government should be there to help people who can not and could not help themselves. He wasn’t afraid to speak out and he often did.

“American ‘conservatives,’ as they call themselves, on Wall Street and at the head of so many of our corporations, have stolen a major fraction of our private savings, have ruined investors and employees by means of fraud and outright piracy. And now, having installed themselves as our federal government, or taken control of it from outside, they have squandered our pubic treasury and then some. They have created a public debt of such appalling magnitude that our descendants, for whom we had such high hopes, will come into this world as poor as church mice.”

“Humor,” he told Christian Century Magazine, “is an almost physiological response to fears…” And, that is how he wrote. He was deeply afraid of injustice and maniacal world leaders. He saw what they could do in World War II, in Vietnam and in Iraq.

“What are the conservatives doing with all the money and power that used to belong to all of us? They are telling us to be absolutely terrified, and to run around in circles like chickens with their heads cut off. But they will save us. They are making us take off our shoes at airports. Can anybody here think of a more hilarious practical joke than that one? Smile America. You’re on Candid Camera.”

Oh, his will be a voice that will be missed; a sense of humor that we’ll sorely miss; and a sense of creativity that we’ll not easily replace.

Kurt Vonnegut did not believe in a life after death. As he said more than once: “I love sleep, don’t you?”

“Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince; and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” (Horatio in William Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, scene ii)