A Touch of Genius (cough, cough)

Kurt Vonnegut died last night. He was 84 but it still seems untimely and unfair. His obituary in the NY Times iterates the usual boring platitudes: “he caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation.” However unimaginative, the platitude works in this case and I can attest to it. I was one of that particular generation and I pretty much credit Vonnegut with my becoming the curmudgeonly coot I am today. “Slaughterhouse Five” was the book that did it and I carried the paperback with me for years. Although set during WWII (including the Dresden firebombing in 1945 which he miraculously survived as a prisoner of war) and published in 1969 (well after I, myself, spent three degrading years in the U.S. Army). I totally identified with both its protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, and Billy’s chronicler Kilgore Trout (and, therefore, Mr. Vonnegut) as we slid into the morass of Vietnam and civilization started to collapse, yet again. Luckily, Vonnegut’s sense of humor permeated his writing and he had a quality which he incorporated into a lot of his characters that I perceived as, well…as banal as this may sound…kindness. Vonnegut understood basic human character and as appalling as some of society was, and is, he always seemed to be able to be quirky and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. To this day I count myself as a tithing member of his Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, the reigning religion in his novel “The Sirens of Titan.”

When I moved to New York in the early 70's I went to see an off-Broadway play Vonnegut wrote called “Happy Birthday, Wanda June” and, although I now can’t recall anything at all about the play, Slaughterhouse Five was still metaphorically in the back pocket of my jeans, so I remember vividly having the opportunity to shake his hand. And, you know what? He didn’t mind the intrusion at all; totally recognizing tongue-tied hero worship when he saw it in the flesh. Yes, kindly, he shook my hand and said “Thanks for coming” and coughed a cloud of cigarette smoke in my face. I knew, even then, I was privileged to have touched the hand, and inhaled a lungful of second hand smoke, of genius.