Palm Sunday

Palm Sunday, described as "an autobiographical collage", is a collection published by Delacourt in 1981. It largely consists of previously uncollected articles, unpublished speeches, a short story, and a musical comedy by Vonnegut, with the addition of an account of his ancestry written by family friend John G. Rauch, a memorial speech by his great-grandfather Clemens written for his own funeral, a letter by his daughter Nanette, and lyrics to two songs by the Statler Brothers. The works are connected throughout by new material by Vonnegut. It is dedicated to his "cousins the de St. Andrés everywhere", asking "[w]ho has the castle now?" An epigraph from Instructions in Morals by Clemens Vonnegut is included after the introduction: "Whoever entertains liberal views and chooses a consort that is captured by superstition risks his liberty and his happiness".

Contents

All works by Kurt Vonnegut unless otherwise noted:

• "Dear Mr. McCarthy"
• "Un-American Nonsense"
• "God's Law"
• "Dear Felix"
• "An Account of the Ancestry of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, by an Ancient Friend of His Family" (John G. Rauch)
• "What I Liked About Cornell"
• "When I Lost My Innocence"
• "I Am Embarrassed"
• "How to Write with Style"
• Self-interview from The Paris Review
• "Who in America is Truly Happy?"
• "Something Happened"
• "The Rocky Graziano of American Letters"
• "The Best of Bob and Ray"
• "James T. Farrell"
• "Lavina Lyon"
• "The Class of '57" (Don and Harold Reid of the Statler Brothers)
• "The Noodle Factory"
• "Mark Twain"
• "How Jokes Work"
• "Do Not Mourn!" (Clemens Vonnegut)
• "Thoughts of a Free Thinker"
• "William Ellery Channing"
• "The Big Space Fuck"
• "Fear and Loathing in Morristown, N.J."
• "Dear Mr. X" (Nanette Vonnegut)
• "Jonathan Swift"
• "The Chemistry Professor"
• "Louis-Ferdinand Céline"
• "Dresden Revisited"
• "Flowers on the Wall" (Lew DeWitt of the Statler Brothers)
• "Palm Sunday"

Summary

Introduction

Declaring it "a very great book by an American genius", Vonnegut says this work—the result of six years of labor—is a new literary form combining the novel and "front-line journalism", with bits of musical theater, a short story, letters, history, and oratory. It reminds him of his brother Bernard's early experiments with radio. Using a home-made transmitter he invented, Bernard once overwhelmed every other signal in the local area. Vonnegut proposes the name "blivit" for this new literary form, which was defined in his youth as "two pounds of shit in a one-pound bag". Other works combining fact and fiction can be called blivits as well, perhaps requiring a third category in The New York Times Book Review. Until then, Vonnegut suggests that this book be ranked in both fiction and non-fiction categories and eligible for the Pulitzer Prize for "fiction, drama, history, biography, and journalism".

This work is comprised of pieces written since his previous collection, Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons in 1974. However, Vonnegut found the fragments could arranged into an autobiographical collage, especially if including some pieces he didn't write, by adding "much new collective tissue". Rather than finding this work to be a masterpiece, he says it is clumsy, raw, and simple. It is dedicated to the de St. Andrés, the maiden name of Vonnegut's maternal great-grandmother which had made his mother thinks she was descended from some kind of nobility. This was an innocent belief, and much of his work has argued that most human behavior, even when awful, is innocent. The actress Marsha Mason who had starred in one of Vonnegut's plays once said to him that the problem with New York City was that nobody there believe "that there is such a thing as innocence".

I: The First Amendment

Vonnegut considers himself a member of perhaps "the last recognizable generation of full-time, life-time American novelists". All of them shared the experience of the Great Depression and World War II, whether they were men or women who served in the military or not. This "era of romantic anarchy in publishing" provided money and mentors to many young writers when the written word was the principle form of communication and storing information. Few publishers now would have encouraged any writers of his generation, since there is now so little demand for their work due to television. Novelists of the future will come individually, born to or married into money, and write only a few works. Of Vonnegut's generation, J.D. Salinger remains the most influential, while the most promising was Edward Lewis Wallant, who died young.

Two years ago James Jones—who was roughly the same age as Vonnegut, served in the war, and was "a self-educated midwesterner"—died, accounting for "the autumnal mood of this book". Both had served as enlisted men, and most members of their literary generation "despised officers and made heroes of sketchily educated, aggressively unaristocratic enlisted men". Once when Jones was offered the chance to meet Ernest Hemingway as a fellow soldier, he declined, saying real soldiers could not come and go as they pleased or take time for food and women. Perhaps most amazing about this generation of writers is that they could say anything without fear of punishment. This may shock future Americans as much as it shocks other nations now. The First Amendment sounds more like a dream than a law and no nation could "raise its children in an atmosphere of decency" under it. Soon it will surely be repealed to protect them. Vonnegut's own books, along with those by Bernard Malamud, James Dickey, and Joseph Heller, have been banned from public school libraries by school board members who openly and proudly admit that they have not read them but know that they are bad for children. Copies of Slaughterhouse-Five were in fact burned in Drake, North Dakota, although Vonnegut says the only offensive word in the whole novel is "motherfucker", spoken by a soldier under fire. Thus did Vonnegut see fit to write to the chairman of the Drake School Board.

• "Dear Mr. McCarthy"

Vonnegut received no reply in the seven years since, but Slaughterhouse-Five was again banned from a school library in Long Island, fifty miles from his home. A legal battle ensued that continues, with lawyers eager to attack the First Amendment "as though it were nothing more than a clause in a lease from a crooked slumlord". In response, he wrote an op-ed for the Long Island edition of the New York Times.

• "Un-American Nonsense"

He would later discuss why ordinary Americans scorn the First Amendment at an American Civil Liberties Union fundraiser at Sands Point on Long Island. The house where he spoke was said to be the model for Gatsby's house in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

• "God's Law"

Later that evening, Vonnegut returned home and wrote a letter to Felix Kuznetzov, a critic, teacher, and officer of the Union of Writers in the Soviet Union. Once he might have written such a letter so late at night "half-bombed on booze", but he no longer drinks. Although he never wrote anything for publication while intoxicated, he used to write many letters that way. Vonnegut and Kuznetzov became friends the previous summer when a delegation of American and Soviet writers attended a meeting in New York City. Although the American writers were well-known and in print in the Soviet Union, none of the Soviets were known to the Americans. Telling their hosts that they should be embarrassed by this, the Americans acknowledged the need to print more Soviet material, but also responded that there are in fact many Soviet writers familiar in the United States and many American writers who could have attended that they would have never heard of.

Vonnegut invited Kuznetzov to his house and the two talked away an afternoon. After Kuznetzov returned to the Soviet Union, an unsanctioned literary magazine called Metropole was published by young writers and editors frustrated by the official constraints on their work. None of it said anything nearly as offensive as "motherfucker", but it was still suppressed and its creators subject to harassment. Vonnegut, along with Edward Albee, William Styron, and John Updike, sent a cable to the Writers' Union denouncing this. Kuznetzov made an official reply that the creators of this work were not writers but "pornographers and other sorts of disturbers of the peace" which was printed in the New York Times. Vonnegut replied personally in a private letter.

• "Dear Felix"

Kuznetzov own reply was "gracious and humane", allowing Vonnegut to believe that they are still friends. Although saying nothing against his union or government, he did not discourage Vonnegut from feeling that all writer were "first cousins, at least". The disagreements between the United States and the Soviet Union are almost "touching and comical" provided they don't lead to war. Each wishes the other's utopia would work better, so that Soviet citizens can have the right to say what they think, while Americans who want jobs can have them and not have to "tolerate the sales of fist-fucking films and snuff films and so on". Neither utopia works any better than the Page typesetting machine, on which Mark Twain lost a fortune. It worked only once while he and the inventor were watching and after it was taken apart never ran again.

II: Roots

• "An Account of the Ancestry of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, by an Ancient Friend of His Family" (John G. Rauch)

III: When I Lost My Innocence

Vonnegut ultimately sees that he left Indianapolis because his inherited comforts and privileges were based on money that had disappeared. Had he married a rich woman like his father, or been allowed to study architecture, he might have stayed as a third-generation Indianapolis architect. However, his father was so angered about the loss of his livelihood during the Great Depression that he and Vonnegut's brother Bernard pushed him to study chemistry. After enrolling at Cornell University, he worked for The Cornell Daily Sun, having previously been editor of his high school newspaper, The Shortridge Daily Echo. Vonnegut, who no longer drinks, was invited to speak at the annual banquet for the Sun on May 3, 1980, a year before the newspaper's centennial.

• "What I Liked About Cornell"

Janey Flanner, 1944

Now living in New York City working as a writer, Vonnegut believes he is the only person from Indianapolis currently in the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Until her death the previous year, there was also Janet Flanner who, under the name "Genêt", was The New Yorker's Paris correspondent for three decades. Once, when he gave her a book inscribed with the message "Indianapolis needs you!", she replied, "How little you know". Flanner also knew Vonnegut's father when she was younger and her family was known for the mortuaries it owned. He considers her "the most deft and charming literary stylist Indianapolis has so far produce" and a "planetary citizen",

Vonnegut telephoned the city desk of The Indianapolis Star to inform them of her death. No one on staff had heard of her or were impressed by her achievements, but agreed to republished her New York Times obituary once he mentioned that she was "somehow related to the people who ran the funeral homes". Vonnegut himself will get an Indianapolis obituary because his family owned a chain of local hardware stores before being put out of business by discount stores after the Second World War. During summers in high school, he would run the freight elevator and work in shipping, liking the honest practicality of their products. Recently, he discovered he was still sentimental about the hardware business when writing an article for the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet.

• "When I Lost My Innocence"

Vonnegut is invited to speak at "all sorts of neo-Luddite gatherings", such as an anti-nuclear rally in Washington, D.C., on May 6, 1979.

• "I Am Embarrassed"

IV: Triage

After doing badly in chemistry, biology, and physics at Cornell University, the Army sent Vonnegut to fail classes in mechanical engineering at Carnegie Tech and the University of Tennessee. Used to being at the the bottom of his class, he recalls a cousin who, when asked why he was doing to badly at the University of Michigan, replied that he was dumb. Vonnegut further did badly in the Army, although he was "an especially deadly marksman" and still able to do "all the dances of close-order drill". At the University of Chicago studying anthropology after the Second World War, he was again a mediocrity. There, as everywhere, triage was practiced, with one group of students clearly capable of becoming anthropologists, a second could probably use what they learned in other fields, and a third who, like Vonnegut, "might as well have been dead". This third was assigned to "the least popular faculty member", a reflection of the department's view of their potential.

Nonetheless, Vonnegut considered this untenured thesis advisor "the most exciting and instructive teacher" of his life, teaching chapters from a book on the mechanics of social change that would never be published. After he graduated, Vonnegut visited his advisor whenever in Chicago, who would never recognize him and often seemed annoyed, especially at the news that Vonnegut had begun being published. Once when drunkenly calling old friends and enemies, he learned that his former advisor had committed suicide at around the age of fifty. If he had one of this man's unpublished essays, he would include it, although it's doubtful his late advisor would appreciate seeing his name "anywhere", much like Vonnegut's own mother who also committed suicide. It was, however, much better to have triage practiced on him at a university instead of a battlefield, while doctors focused on those who could be saved. When teaching creative writing, he would also practice triage, a word which would make a better name for the planet than "Earth", especially since almost nobody owns any land.

In May 1980, Vonnegut wrote a leaflet for the International Paper Company on literary style, despite having nearly flunked a number of science courses and never taking a class in literature or composition. It was intended not for those inclined to be brilliant writers, nor the hopeless, but the middle third of potential writers.

• "How to Write with Style"

V: Self-Interview

• Self-interview from The Paris Review

VI. The People One Knows

• "Who in America is Truly Happy?"

Vonnegut shares with Buckley a "New York friendship", which means you've met a person once. In the sixty seconds the two have spent together, he has been intimidated by Buckley's "cultural and athletic accomplishments" as well as his skill as a debater, whereas Vonnegut says he has no idea how to win an argument and becomes mute in the face of opposition. Although appearing on the Irv Kupcinet Show four times, he has never spoken and yet still is asked back. Once when speaking at the Library of Congress in 1972, a man stood up in the middle of Vonnegut's speech asking what right he had "as a leader of America's young people, to make those people so cynical and pessimistic". Having no response, he left the stage. He is aware that his beliefs are "soft and complicated" and little more than "bowls of undifferentiated mush". However, since the topic of the chapter is friendship, Vonnegut intends to make an alphabetized lists of all the writers whom he has met at least once. His wife, the photographer Jill Krementz, has photographed hundreds of writers and entered their names and numbers of their photographic negatives into a computer, allowing him to produce this list as "a routine miracle of this age of computers".

Were he to return to Indianapolis, Vonnegut would have few stories to tell of these celebrities. Most writers are not witty conversationalists. Some have said Gore Vidal—who once implied in an interview that Vonnegut was the worst writer in the United States—is witty, but Vonnegut thinks "he wants an awful lot of credit for wearing a three-piece suit". His only "shapely anecdote" about a writer was at the Writers' Workshop in Iowa City where he taught from 1965-66. Also there was Vance Bourjaily, Nelson Algren, Richard Yates, José Donoso, George Starbuck, James Tate, Marvin Bell, Donald Justice, and Paul Engle, who founded it. Successful students under them included Jane Barnes, John Casey, Bruce Dobler, Andre Dubus, Gail Godwin, John Irving, and Jonathan Penner. When Vonnegut, Algren, and Donoso first arrived, the three first met each other at the top of a staircase. Learning that Donoso was from Chile, Algren shook his hand but said nothing. After walking down the stairs, Algren finally said "it must be nice to come from a country that long and narrow".

Many have wondered if novelists might be at least marginally schizophrenic, "usefully crazy" for their art form. The psychiatric department at the University of Iowa hospital used the large number of writer on campus to study the issue. They found that many of them are depressives descended from depressives. Although having "the same IQs as the cosmetics consultants at Bloomingdale's", writers have the power of patience, learning that saying the same thing repeatedly and slightly better each time makes even stupid people seem intelligent. Vonnegut once overheard a Frenchman in a Madison Avenue bookstore say that no one in America had produced a book in over forty years. It's true that nothing recent has equaled Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, Leaves of Grass, or Walden in America's past, nor contemporary foreign works like Ulysses, Remembrance of Things Past, The Tin Drum, One Hundred Years of Solitude, or A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. However, thinking of all the authors on his list of friends, Vonnegut realizes he should have replied to that Frenchman that Americans have not produced a book but a literature. He spoke well of one of those friends, Joseph Heller, in a review of his second book.

• "Something Happened"

When offered the review, Vonnegut did not know Heller well and if he had, he wouldn't have taken the assignment. However, shortly after accepting, he rented a summer house that turned out to be near Heller and the two got to know each other well while Vonnegut was writing the review. He told Heller, who was concerned about who would review his book, that Robert Penn Warren had gotten the job. In many ways, literary criticism, especially when filled with "rage and loathing", is like "a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split". Vonnegut admires anyone who finishes a work of art, regardless of the quality. Once at the opening night at one of his plays, a drama critic told Vonnegut that he tried to remind himself that Shakespeare was standing behind him so he would be responsible in his opinions. Vonneugt replied that this was "ass backwards" and that Shakespeare stood behind every playwright foolish enough to face an opening night, no matter how bad the work. Vonnegut praised his friend Irwin Shaw at a banquet in the company of Heller, Frank Sinatra, Adolph Green, Betty Comden, Willie Morris, Martin Gabel, and many other friends.

• "The Rocky Graziano of American Letters"

He also praised his friends, the comedy duo Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, in an introduction to a book of their work.

• "The Best of Bob and Ray"

He spoke also at the funeral of his friend James T. Farrell before his body was taken to a Catholic cemetery in Chicago.

• "James T. Farrell"

VII. Playmates

• "Lavina Lyon"
• "The Class of '57" (Don and Harold Reid of the Statler Brothers)
• "The Noodle Factory"

VIII. Mark Twain

Vonnegut was a child when he began meditating with Mark Twain's mind and he still does. Once he found it encouraging that there was so much wonder on this continent and that there was no need to be awed by other nations. Instead, he would model himself after other Americans. Now he has mixed feelings about how "convenient or attractive" it is to be a purely American person. As both a humorist and serious novelist, Vonnegut was asked to speak at the hundredth anniversary of the completion of Twain's house in Hartford, Connecticut. Although offered the honor to use Twain's own cue to break the balls on a third floor pool table, Vonnegut declined, fearing Twain's ghost might show what he thought of him by "sending the cueball into a corner pocket without touching anything".

• "Mark Twain"

IX. Funnier on Paper Than Most People

Declaring himself better than most other writers at making jokes, Vonnegut shared his insights on, among other things, theories of jokes at a graduation speech at Fredonia College.

• "How Jokes Work"

Vonnegut feels the need to be funny because of his German last name. This reminds most Americans, including himself, of the enemies of two world wars, so it is a good idea to tell a joke immediately. Having met several German veterans of the Second World War now living in America, he notes they do the same thing. Twain may have had similar uneasiness, having briefly served in the Confederate Army and later facing paying audiences likely containing Union veterans and their wives. Most serious American novelists, credited with genius because of the length of their books, can't even be funny when it's appropriate. Books by jokesters are short since jokes deal with ideas so efficiently, but this deprives the authors of any literary respect. When Joseph Heller once said he had an idea for new book, Vonnegut replied that "one idea wasn't nearly enough for a whole book" since Heller is funny. A serious writer can make a trilogy from one idea. As James Thurber noted, the problem with jokesters is that they always "head for a punch line". Vonnegut does not require a "smart young critic" to note that this is his own major flaw. When asked to give advice to young writers, he suggests "looking as much like a bloodhound as possible" from working twelve hours a day on a masterpiece, provided one can say this without cracking a smile.

X. Embarrassment

A friend of Vonnegut's once described the "uneasiness which keeps us moving", never at ease, as an "existential hum". Only once when this friend tried heroin did it not bother him. Vonnegut identifies his own hum as the embarrassment that he has somehow disgraced himself. Many of his Indianapolis relatives would agree, such as his Uncle John. He dedicated The Sirens of Titan to another uncle, Alex, who could not read the book but thought beatniks would like it. Vonnegut's aunt Ella owned Stewart's Bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky and would not stock his "degenerate" works. In the only press write-up Vonnegut had then received in his home town, an article in the October 1976 issue of Indianapolis Magazine said that even family members who don't like his books "agree that he is a nice guy", despite the "tremendous gap between the old world gentility of Vonnegut's relatives and his own contemporary manner of living". Vonnegut surmises that what is more offensive to his family is his divorce, being only the second in his family to do so. At the funeral for his Uncle Alex—at the Flanner and Buchanan funeral home—a cousin to whom Vonnegut had once been close turned her back on him over his divorce.

His Uncle Walter, an actor first cousin of Vonnegut's father, also divorced in the 1930s after a move to New York City. Encouraged by Booth Tarkington, of whom he was a protégé, Walter and his wife Marjorie became well-known stage actors, even including their two children in a production of Eugene O'Neill's only comedy, Ah, Wilderness! When visiting New York City on behalf of General Electric in the late 1940s, Vonnegut was often asked by older people if he was related to the actors. The two divorced when Marjorie fell in love with Don Marquis, creator of Archie and Mehitabel. Unable to work due to increased alcoholism, Walter returned to Indianapolis with his young new wife Rosalie, much to the family's chagrin. The two drank frequently and discussed starting a repertory company before dying shortly thereafter. Vonnegut and his wife Jane separated in 1970 after 25 years of marriage but remain good friends. Like many divorcees, neither really understands the "terrible, unavoidable accident" they have both gone through. It was a good marriage until it wasn't, and perhaps when their children reached adulthood, it left them wondering what compelling reason there was to stay together. However, this is an explanation, and when teaching writing, Vonnegut always instructs students to simply tell what happen, calling it arrogance for writers to assume they know why.

This embarrassment about his failed marriage and disparagement of his work by his relatives is more recent. However, for as long as he can remember, Vonnegut has had a dream that he once killed an old woman, lived a good life afterward, but is now facing the police and their undeniable evidence. This is basically the plot of Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevski, with whom Vonnegut shares a birthday. When asking a psychiatrist if the old woman could be his mother, he was told it might not even be a women. Once when he visited "a Hindu with occult powers" who advertised in The Village Voice to ask if he had killed someone in a previous life, he was told that he had only lived once before and accidentally killed a child. Vonnegut wrote an article for Life magazine about Tony Costa, a serial killer of women in Provincetown, Massachusetts who was found guilty but criminally insane. The two exchanged letters briefly before Costa's suicide, and it was clear that Costa believed that a person as devoted to virtue as he was could not have done such horrible things. Likewise, although Vonnegut doesn't remember ever killing anyone, even in war, he nonetheless awaits the police.

XI. Religion

• "Do Not Mourn!" (Clemens Vonnegut)
• "Thoughts of a Free Thinker"
• "William Ellery Channing"

XII. Obscenity

Riah Fagan Cox of Columbia City, Indiana came from a "good family" whose alcoholic father couldn't hold a job. To save herself and her brother, she sent herself to the University of Wisconsin and received a master's degree in classics. Her thesis on Latin and Greek roots of common English words was adopted as a textbook by schools across the country. With these earnings, she put her brother through medical school, after which he became an obstetrician in Hollywood for many famous actors. She married a lawyer in Indianapolis, where she became the city's representative for touring lectures and musicians and sold occasional short stories. Her daughter, whom Vonnegut married, became a Phi Beta Kappa at Swarthmore. He got along well with his then mother-in-law, but she would often tell him that his use of obscene language—which she assumed he used simply to shock and increase his popularity—had made her friends unable to read his work. The article in Indianapolis Magazine likewise said that while his early works criticized war and unthinking technological innovation, new novels like Breakfast of Champions "were suggestive of a small boy sticking out his tongue at the teacher". Vonnegut notes he was fifty when that novel was published and that he has long outgrown seeking to shock. Instead, he wants his characters to talk as Americans do in real life. None of these terms were unfamiliar to Cox or her friends, but they were "bad manners" and thus should be punished.

Even as a child, Vonnegut suspected that forbidding certain words was a way to stop people from talking about certain subjects. The only time one of his parents ever struck him was when he was in fourth grade. In 1932, during the Great Depression, "two silly upper-class shitheads" who were married friends of his parents came to visit. They arrived in a new Marmon car, the wife in a fur coat and jewelry. When told to admire their finery, the young Vonnegut asked how much it had cost and his father hit him, causing him to angrily go to his room. The two would soon learn that their so-called friends had conned them, saying they had invested in a fictional coal company. Vonnegut's parents found some remaining valuables to sell, which they gave to be invested. Having been taught such nice manners, his parents found it impossible to imagine old friends of the same social class would swindle them, since they lacked the language to even discuss such a thing.

Recently, Vonnegut confided to a cousin that he dreaded returning home since he didn't understand how their relatives could claim to love him but hate his books. She replied that they were too set in their Victorian morals. He reflected on why this queen should object to "any mention of bodily functions". Unable to imagine Queen Victoria being legitimately scandalized by his drawing of his own asshole in Breakfast of Champions and featured in his signature, Vonnegut surmises that obscenity made Victoria realize that "her power to intimidate" was being lightly challenged. By developing a morality that immediately rejects this attack on an utmost edge, topics such as the sufferings caused by colonialism, industrialization, the privileges of the nobility, and the coming world war were untouchable. Thus did she "make people hesitant about discussing their entitlement to more control over their lives". People internalized that only when they stopped thinking of things humans couldn't help thinking about would they be fit to govern themselves. Proper mothers would discipline their children, servants, and husbands, if they could, if they used such language.

Vonnegut considers his dirtiest story one that he wrote for Harlan Ellison's anthology Again, Dangerous Visions. He declares it the first story to have "fuck" in its title and says it will probably be his last short story.

• "The Big Space Fuck"

That story was made up, but once Vonnegut's parents knew a woman "admired for her vivacity and good taste and impeccable manners" who married a German businessman. She returned to Indianapolis after the war, still attractive, talking of how Hitler had been right about most things and that the Germans had almost won. Vonnegut, having recently returned as a POW, told his father of his discomfort with their friend's views. His father replied that that she was simply "a charming, silly, innocent little girl" who understood nothing. Unable to "think coherently about assholes or Auschwitz", she was the epitome of class.

XIII. Children

• "Fear and Loathing in Morristown, N.J."
• "Dear Mr. X" (Nanette Vonnegut)

XIV. Jonathan Swift Misperceived

Even an author of Vonnegut's statute can have his work rejected. Once he was told that a preface he wrote for a new edition of Gulliver's Travels showed no understanding of Swift's life and character.

• "Jonathan Swift"

XV. Jekyll and Hyde Updated

Vonnegut served with Broadway produce Lee Gruber on the New York State Council for the Arts. In the summer of 1978, he asked Vonnegut to write Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a modern musical. Although the first work for which Robert Louis Stevenson got paid, Vonnegut was never paid his version, which he called "excellent, if a little slapdash and short".

• "The Chemistry Professor"

XVI. A Nazi Sympathizer Defended as Some Cost

As previously mentioned, Vonnegut met Kerouac near the end of his life when he could be "pitied and forgiven" for his behavior brought on by alcohol and mental illness. However, there are some like Louis-Ferdinand Céline whose beliefs and behavior were so loathsome that there are many who cannot forgive him or bring themselves to read him, not because of the actual work but the author. When he was "a universally despised old man and war criminal", he said he owed no apologies and never understood why he wasn't awarded a Nobel prize. He probably would not have liked Vonnegut, nor did he seem fond of any human being, although he loved his cat. Nonetheless, Vonnegut continues to defend Céline and went so far as to write new introduction for the Penguin paperback editions of his final three books.

• "Louis-Ferdinand Céline"

XVII. A Nazi City Mourned at Some Profit

In addition to praising a Nazi sympathizer, Vonnegut expressed sorrow over the death of the Nazi city of Dresden, where he was an American POW when it was bombed. However, for much of the city's history, it was an art treasure belonging to all humans, much like Angkor Wat which has more recently been damaged by military action. His presence at the bombing affected him far less than the death of his mother, adopting his late sister's children, all his children's departure upon adulthood, and the break up of his marriage. Even Germans seem uninterested in mourning Dresden any longer. Vonnegut himself "thought no more about Dresden" until asked by the Franklin Library to write a special introduction for a 1976 deluxe edition of Slaughterhouse-Five.

• "Dresden Revisited"

XVIII. The Sexual Revolution

• "Flowers on the Wall" (Lew DeWitt of the Statler Brothers)

XIX. In the Capital of the World

From the fourth floor office of his New York City home, Vonnegut now looks at this report card of his last thirty years. Much like the compulsive gambler, he could not stop himself from writing what he did. His unpublished mentor at the University of Chicago relayed his ideas in ways that were simple and clear. Many critics and academics see this simplicity as a sign of "laziness and ignorance and childishness and cheapness", believing that any immediately understandable idea must be something everyone already knows. Literary experiments that are easy to read and enjoyable are denigrated and only failure is seen as a sign of being "a fearless experimenter". Once at a party, Vonnegut witnessed a music critic discuss several composers highly regarded in their own time but now largely forgotten. He claimed this was because they were "all gesture", with musical promises they were unable to fulfill. Many contemporary literary reputations are based on similar promises. Vonnegut's mentor once asked his class what an artists does. After an hour of discussion, he provided an answer from his never-published book—artists can do little about the chaos surrounding them, but believe they can bring "perfect order" to a square of canvas, piece of paper, or chunk of stone. But, of course, everybody already knows that.

Vonnegut has spent most of his adult life trying to bring order to sheets of paper, which has both helped him survive many personal problems as well as caused them. Both his wives has complained about how little attention he paid to them compared to paper. He can only reply that any success requires total concentration, and that being not very good at life, he hides in his profession. Delilah made Samson weak not by cutting his hair but breaking his concentration. Once in the early 1970s, Vonnegut was due to address the American Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters before he was a member. Already nervous, he asked both his wife, from whom he'd recently separated, and another woman he was also seeing not to attend. Both arrived in fancy dress. All that could save him were pieces of paper. He pities those without an ability to create little perfect orders. Many are now doing it with film, which Vonnegut finds overly expensive.

Vonnegut's childhood home, designed and built by his father, now seems to him more like a museum where he would not wish to live. His current home in New York City was built for no one in particular and he is simply its most recent occupant. His wife Jill's photographic business is in the basement while he works on the top floor, sharing the two floors in between. New Yorkers have been kind to him, as with other strangers recognized for skills in the arts. The "most satisfying kindness" was being asked to address the congregation of St. Clement's Episcopal Church on Palm Sunday of 1980. The front of the church is often used to perform plays and while Vonnegut gave his address, he imaged that the set still on the stage of "the kitchen of a Manhattan tenement of perhaps sixty years ago" was for a work about European immigrants and their children. Vonnegut's own family was the same but settled much further inland, and native New Yorkers often "know nothing and imagine the worst" about such people.

• "Palm Sunday"