© TIMES NEWSPAPERS LIMITED (LONDON)
November 10, 1991

Sermons from the Mount
by J G Ballard

FATES WORSE THAN DEATH: An Autobographical Collage of the 1980s
by Kurt Vonnegut

Novelists are not the nicest people. Touchy, unloved and aware that the novel's greatest days lie back in the age of steam, we occupy a rung on the ladder of likeability somewhere between tax inspectors and immigration officials, with whom all too many of us share an unworthy interest in money and social origins.

The one great exception is Kurt Vonnegut, whose sheer amiability could light up all the cathedrals in America where, in fact, many of the homilies and lay sermons that make up this entertaining collection were originally delivered. Vonnegut's heart, by now a prized American totem, i at least as big as Mount Rushmore, and in his latest photographs he looks as if he is already up there, a huge man, craggy and serene, slightly eroded by the winds of fate, but admired for his rugged kindliness. Reading these essays and speech-day addresses, one senses that Vonnegut, against all the odds, has forgiven us everything. Only plague, famine and Richard Nixon seem to lie beyond the reach of his vast compassion. He rambles away in his affable, cracker-barrel fashion, intoning his trade-mark ''so it goes'', spinning a cocoon of the sweetest sugar around our failings and foibles. Yet all this sentimentality is surprisingly bracing it's a challenge in itself to find someone who has looked the world straight in the eye and never flinched.

Is it an act? Or, at least, a desperate stratagem that the young Vonnegut devised after witnessing the destruction of Dresden? ''I didn't give a damn about Dresden,'' he remarks here. ''The fire-bombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about what I
write and what I am.'' But this is scarcely borne out by his endless references to Dresden and his obvious qualms over his German ancestry, a sense of unease that I suspect is the main engine of his imagination.

For a sometime science-fiction writer whose subject was the far future, Vonnegut is unusually obsessed with his own past. He talks frankly about his Indianapolis childhood, marred by his unhappy father, who eventually killed himself, and by his mother, who loathed her husband and later became insane. A self-described depressive from a family of depressives, Vonnegut concludes that ''you cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed''.

Fortunately for his readers, he began his career on a cheerier note. He comments that American humorists tend to become unfunny pessimists if they live past a certain age, which he estimates to be 63 for men and 29 for women, though the reverse seems true to me Imelda Marcos and Vanessa Redgrave have yet to reach their hilarious prime, while Vonnegut, now 68, is droller than ever.

His early SF novels, Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan, are far less sentimental than his later work, and are filled with irony and black humour, though in God Bless You, Mr Rosewater a woozy bonhomie was already breaking through. Vonnegut's alter ego, Kilgore Trout, addresses his fellow American sf writers with the resonant words, ''I love you sons of bitches'', a generous tribute to one of the most mentally shuttered and mutually loathing groups in existence.

With Slaughterhouse Five, based in part on his wartime experiences as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Vonnegut broke away from sf into the mainstream novel and, his greatest test, international celebrity. Success often destroys American writers, or at least derails them Hemingway, Kerouac and Truman Capote never lived up to the popular images of themselves in a way difficult to grasp on this side of the Atlantic. Americans may not read but, like the French, they take books and writers seriously, whereas the British view their writers in a vaguely adversarial way and success usually comes with a live round still in the chamber.

One feels that for Americans fame is always unexpected, whereas British writers have thought of nothing else from the first rejection slip, like people I have known whose choice of Desert Island Discs has been fixed for 20 years before the producer's telephone call. Anyone who has done the classic book- promotional tour of American cities, and stood in those vast shopping malls in the anonymous suburbs of Chicago or Seattle, has sensed the planetary loneliness of America and wondered how one would then cope with success, an even more demanding challenge than failure.

Vonnegut's sensible and savvy response was to become his country's itinerant preacher and pin-pricker, dispensing folksy wisdom along with a strong dose of purgative. As in these lectures, he mixes fortune-cookie philosophising with acid satire. God, or at least our notions of God, he finds a constant provocation. ''The more violent picture of Him you create, the better you'll do...any God you create is going to be up against Miami Vice and Clint Eastwood and Sylvester Stallone. And stay clear of the Ten Commandments those things are booby-trapped.''

He scorns people who get divorced because th no longer love each other. ''That is like trading in a car because the ash-trays are full.'' Or is it because the battery is flat, or the CD player has been stolen? Either way, Vonnegut insists that life is unserious. However, he himself has a long memory for a slight after Salman Rushdie's hostile review of Hocus Pocus, he writes: ''I was so upset I considered putting a contract out on him'', an example of mafia humour at its most awesome.

Objecting to the line in the requiem mass, ''let light perpetual shine upon you'', he visualises his dead sister trying to fall asleep in her grave with the lights on, and devises a rival mass with the words, ''let not light disturb their sleep'', which a composer friend sets to music. Some time after its Buffalo premiere Vonnegut's wife bumps into Andrew Lloyd Webber, and informs him that her husband has also written a requiem, to which Lloyd Webber, sensing that he has started a fad, retorts with the best line in this book: ''I know. Everybody is writing requiems...''

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