In-the-Bone Reading

"In-the-Bone Reading" is an article first published in Biblio, March 1999 and reprinted that same year in the collection For the Love of Books, compiled by Ronald B. Schwartz, in which 115 authors discuss their favorite books, including John Irving, Normal Mailer, William Styron, and John Updike.

Summary

Alexandr Solzhenitsin, 1994

The most influential books Vonnegut read when he was about fifteen years old are The Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters and The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, two fellow Midwesterners. He claims that much of his own writing has been plagiarized from this latter work, which essentially shows how the "manners of the rich and high-ranking" are ludicrous. Calling Master's work "in-the-bone American", he mentions teaching it as a novel when he was at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. He uses the same description for Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, which he calls a work story. Unlike Henry James, Twain is deeply interested in business matters. Another excellent work story is Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Although people often like to hold in contempt books they read when they were young, Vonnegut praises Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe and says that anyone who now speaks badly of it "is, to use a technical word, an asshole". When he was fifteen he found, probably unread, among his parents' books Aristophanes' Lysistrata, which taught him how to be both funny and serious, as did the works of George Bernard Shaw. His paternal grandmother, who "was not a reader", bought an entire set of Shaw's work simply because they were so nicely bound. Vonnegut has particular praise for the preface to Androcles and the Lion: "Christianity? Why Not Give It a Try?" Vonnegut finds it "infuriating" when people haven't read Voltaire's Candide, calling it not "much longer than a Hallmark greeting card", much like his own work, but it "is so compressed".

J. D. Salinger, 1950

Among the ancient Greeks is History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, the story of how, despite being "probably the most intelligent little society" in history, a civilization can be killed after defeat in war. Homer's The Iliad shows that ancient Greeks, like much of modern society, saw masculinity in dying eagerly in battle instead of aging in a commonplace life. This reminds him of once when his child came home from Dartmouth, crying after reading A Farewell to Arms. Re-reading it himself, Vonnegut found that, like the more recent The Bridges of Madison County, it's about a man who gets to have a great love affair without having to marry. He was always "suspicious" of the book from the beginning, since "the guy got off too easy" and because war wasn't actually at all like Hemingway, himself was never a soldier, described it. Vonnegut calls the many American authors born around the same time as him—such as Gore Vidal, Joseph Heller, and Irwin Shaw—the "class of 'twenty-two". The books that most influenced them were the U.S.A. trilogy by John Dos Passos and they were the last generation of writers to be influenced primarily by other books rather than films.

The most influential contemporary to Vonnegut was J. D. Salinger, frequently featured in The New Yorker, whose protagonist in The Catcher in the Rye would probably now be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder. As his characters got more interested in Buddhist mysticism, so did Salinger, who eventually stopped publishing his writings and went on his own quest. Vonnegut has gotten in trouble for his respect for Louis-Ferdinand Celine, a notorious pro-Nazi anti-Semite. His work is Nobel Prize quality, impressing Mailer and Ralph Ellison, but "with such good taste", such as attacking Anne Frank, he was never going to be an acceptable candidate. Finally, The Book of Genesis is a unique creation myth in which all that is given by the divine is taken away again. Even as a third-generation atheist, Vonnegut still finds it worth talking about the Bible.

"Forced to Choose"

In November 1999, American Scientist magazine featured an article with a similar premise, in which various figures, mostly from a scientific background, mention which books most influenced them. Noting that neither of his works involves the physical sciences, Vonnegut again cites the importance to him when he was young of Candide and Theory of the Leisure Class. Although admitting he only knows the film version starring Boris Karloff, not the original book, he called Frankenstein both "provocative" and the "presently most influential novel of all time".