Surviving Niagara

"Surviving Niagara" is an article on the mental illness and recovery of Vonnegut's son Mark, published in The Guardian on January 25, 2003.

Summary

John Coltrane, 1963

Several years after the publication of Mark's 1975 book The Eden Express, Vonnegut received a telephone call from a film actor who needed advice since his own son was suffering from mental illness. When the actor learned that Mark had just graduated from Harvard Medical School, Vonnegut could only reflect that even with similar turbulence, only some people survive "going over Niagara Falls in a barrel". After Mark flung a cue ball through a window at his urban commune in Vancouver, his friends called Vonnegut, saying he needed a father. Mark's mother Jane often told him he was supposed to save the world, and for a time he studied for the Unitarian ministry. At 22, with Vonnegut himself 47, the two drove to a private mental hospital, Mark the jazz saxophonist babbling all the way with "vocal riffs worthy of his hero John Coltrane". Once there, after digging his hands into a bowl of sand and cigarette butts, Mark drew a picture with his dirty fingers on the uniform of the male nurse who greeted them, which he "couldn't have been nicer about".

While browsing the gift shop, Vonnegut considered buying "a pretty object sacred to believers in a faith" unfamiliar to him. When he jocularly asked the attendant if it might bring bad luck, she replied that it depended "on how many hostage you have given to fortune". Looking it up later, he found the full quote from Francis Bacon: "He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune". Mark recovered and the actor's son apparently did not. In the summer of 2002, while the two sat looking at a meadow bounded by woodland, Mark said "our children, meaning America's children", were in the woods, having to cross that meadow to join them on the porch as adults. But now new technologies removed all the guide posts from the meadow, planted landmines, and made it harder to determine what to do with a life. When Vonnegut asked Mark how someone "so crazy a third of a century ago" could be fine now, he replied that his was a mild case.