To Hell with Marriage

"To Hell with Marriage" is an essay printed in the collection Heaven is Under Our Feet: A Book for Walden Woods, edited by Don Henley and Dave Marsh and published by Longmeadow Press in 1991. The work was created to support the Walden Woods Project, a non-profit organization that was founded to acquire and preserve historic and environmentally significant sites around Walden Pond, made famous by Henry David Thoreau. Vonnegut's article opens with a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson's eulogy to Thoreau and closes with one from Walden.

Summary

Walden Pond, 2023

Vonnegut didn't like his freshman English teacher at Cornell and the feeling was mutual. Since he was majoring in chemistry, he didn't particularly care until the teacher threatened to eject him from the course. The assignment that stood between Vonnegut and his continued studies was fortunately an essay on Thoreau, with whom he was already familiar from his "hot-shit, overachiever, impossibly conceited high school" where he read not only Walden but Moby Dick, Life on the Mississippi, Leave of Grass, The Devil's Dictionary, The Red Badge of Courage, and other "terrific American stuff". Enraged, Vonnegut produced what he thinks may have been the best thing he ever wrote and is glad he doesn't have a copy, since it would only show that his skills have declined for half a century. The teacher praised it and asked Vonnegut why he never wrote anything that good before, who replied that he was in the sciences and writing was "a tiresome chore".

In the essay, Vonnegut argued that Thoreau was "a sensualist, a voluptuary, and a debauchee" but without the need for money or other people, leaving him with "the decency not to get married or reproduce". Thoreau's most famous quote that most people "lead lives of quiet desperation" is in fact a warning against marriage, stating that others will "wear us out" and that life can only be truly appreciated in solitude. Thoreau was not only a naturalist and the "most accurate and direct user of the English language so far", but ancestor to all comedians who say horrible things about human beings, except he never tempers it by adding "Only kidding, folks". It has been suggested that his death in 1862, in the midst of the American Civil War, was due to malnutrition from his simple lifestyle. However, during the Great Depression many Americans were forced to eat the same way and survived. Even now, many attempt to voluntarily live the cheap and solitary life that Thoreau did, and Vonnegut envies and admires them, regretting that his own mind "is not the perfect companion that theirs must be".

See Also

• "Only Kidding, Folks?", a 1978 review of the works of Stanisław Lem, collected in Vonnegut By The Dozen
• Gil Berman, comedian from Vonnegut's unfinished final work, "If God Were Alive Today", who often ends his cultural criticisms with "only kidding, folks"
• "Opening Remarks in The Unabridged Mark Twain", in which Vonnegut proposes that every modern comedian who ends attacks on society with the phrase "only kidding, folks" is an heir to Twain.