© 1991 The Washington Post
August 29, 1991

Vonnegut on Vonnegut, Again
by Alex Heard

FATES WORSE THAN DEATH: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s
By Kurt Vonnegut

Talk about coasting. In 1980, Kurt Vonnegut published Palm Sunday, which he describes in the first chapter of Fates Worse Than Death as ''a collection of essays and speeches by me, with breezy autobiographical commentary serving as connective tissue and splints and bandages.'' Palm Sunday is like William F. Buckley's Overdrive, but with even looser wheels and a dragging muffler: a rambling scrapbook full of book intros, graduation and after-dinner remarks, written-strictly-for-the-money journalism (Vonnegut included his ''How to Write With Style'' essay, done for the International Paper Co.'s literacy campaign), and a few things he didn't even write, like a letter his daughter wrote to a crabby restaurant patron and '''Do Not Mourn!' -- a speech written by KV's great-grandfather, Clemens Vonnegut, to be read at his own funeral.'' Fates Worse Than Death is Palm Sunday redux. It uses the same approach and covers much the same ground. For the most part, the ''1980s'' in the title merely refers to the fact that Vonnegut gave these speeches and wrote these essays during the '80s. Vonnegut grapples with the Reagan era here and there, but too often the result is a BB-gun potshot at a dirigible-sized target. ''The older I get, the less willing I am to stand behind anything I say or do,'' he writes. ''Then again, all I do is louse up paper, whereas Ronald Reagan, who used to work for General Electric, too, loused up the whole country.''

You don't get the feeling Vonnegut is trying hard. I think he's angling for the readerly version of music fans who will pay top dollar for scratchy bootleg dubs of basement tapes. Treated again in full are KV's upbringing in Indianapolis, his years at Cornell, his thoughts on Celine, Twain, Irwin Shaw and James Jones, and his World War II experiences as a POW on the ground during the Allied firebombing of Dresden. He even recycles many of the same anecdotes and one-liners. Palm Sunday, for example, contains ''a special introduction to a deluxe [Franklin Library] edition'' of Slaughterhouse-Five, in which KV naughtily concludes: ''Dresden ... was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me. ... One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed.''

This time the occasion is a speech at the National Air and Space Museum, altered a bit to reflect mounting royalties: ''The firebombing of Dresden was an emotional event without a trace of military importance. ... Only one person on Earth clearly benefited, and I am that person. I got about five dollars for each corpse, counting my fee tonight.'' In Fates you can review, among much else, the fact that James Jones turned down an opportunity to meet Hemingway and swap war stories. (Jones didn't consider Hemingway a soldier, because Papa was allegedly able to drop his weapon and go trout-fishing and onion-sandwich-eating whenever he felt the urge, whereas real soldiers had to stay put.) And the fact that the First Amendment is ''more like a dream'' than a law.

Stylistically, there is rampant violation of a rule Vonnegut laid down in ''How to Write With Style'': Don't ramble. I would never suggest that essays always must track in a straight line, but it helps if the side trips serve a purpose other than whimsical space-filling. Fates contains dozens of these moments. Some chapters are so heavily parentheticalized that you get the sensation of reading while riding bumper cars. A typical stretch:

Casualties have been heavy among American writers I have cared a lot about. (Actuaries for life insurance companies would be unsurprised by such an announcement by a man 67 years of age.) There was a memorial service for Bernard Malamud, dead at 71, four days after Barthelme's. (I missed it. I was sick. If I had been there, I would have read aloud from his own work.) My Long Island summer neighbors James Jones and Nelson Algren and Truman Capote and Irwin Shaw have all been augered in. Barthelme ... was only fifty-eight. (The average age of a killed American in World War II was twenty-six. In Vietnam it was twenty. What a shame! What a shame!)

Chapter 6 begins parenthetically. ''(Trivia: Aldous Huxley died on the same day as John F. Kennedy. Louis-Ferdinand Celine died two days after Ernest Hemingway.)'' The subject, we read in the second paragraph, is Requiems. In the third paragraph, Vonnegut quotes from one: "Rest eternal grant them, O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon them." Okay, fair enough. Then, in parentheses again, comes the payoff for the strange opening. ''(A credulous and literal-minded person might conclude from this that Huxley and Kennedy and Celine and Hemingway and my sister and my first wife and all the rest of the dead are now trying to get some sleep with the lights on.)''

My high school English teacher would know what to say about this. (High school, in Kansas, meant grades 10 through 12. My teacher, Miss Barbee, later went back home to Arkansas, which some Kansans pronounce R-Kansas. She liked to read Faulkner, one of a long line of alcoholics to win the Nobel Prize, who wasn't from Arkansas, but from Oxford, Miss. My dad was too. As a boy he met Faulkner and later pronounced him ''unfriendly.'') She would say (in red pencil; I'm told that teachers still use those; they don't teach ''Ivanhoe'' anymore), "What's the point?"

The point is that Vonnegut didn't like the Requiems he heard, so he wrote one of his own. It's loooong, and it is, of course, reprinted in full in Fates Worse Than Death.

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