KURT IS UP IN HEAVEN, NOW - Steve Daugherty

“New book?” my sixteen-year-old son asked, pointing to Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions on the kitchen table.

“Technically, no,” I said. I explained that though I’d just bought this copy, it first came into the world a couple years before I did. “This was the first Vonnegut I ever read, and I think I was your age when I did so.” His interest felt like a green-light, so I kept talking.

I explained that a fellow student had handed me a brightly colored book in the high school library. I could tell by her smirk that we’d be coconspirators the second I read what her fingers had pinched. She was trying to get me to focus on one particular drawing on page 5, a large, hand-drawn asterisk.

“Wanna hear the first Vonnegut I ever read?” I asked my son, picking up the book from the table.

“Sure.”

“‘To give an idea of the maturity of my illustrations for this book, here is my picture of an asshole:’” I showed my son the asterisk that followed it. My son, who normally only stares at me when I show him a meme or a cartoon my comparatively geriatric mind finds hilarious, actually laughed.

“I didn’t know he was funny,” he said. “I thought he… just wrote books.” 

I could only manage “Oh, man….” in response. Just write books? Where to start? When to stop? Funny? Wait till you find out what he could be funny about. There was far more going on inside me than jumping at a chance to bond with my son. I felt like it was a moment to introduce him to a friend and hero. To acquaint him with the headwaters of my love for writing and storytelling and for finding a way to turn life’s hells into opportunities for kindness and art. If I’d had a pack my son and I would’ve went to the back porch to smoke a Pall Mall and search the night sky for Tralfamadore. But “Oh man,” was about all I got out before he moved on something else.

* 

When I was five, Kurt preached a sermon. I wouldn’t find out about this sermon until I was in my thirties and Kurt was dead, by which time I was a professional sermon preacher myself. I don’t know the circumstances whereby a professed non-Christian was allowed to preach a Palm Sunday sermon in a church, but it happened. In the message, Kurt referred to himself as a “Christ-worshiping agnostic.” It was a term that made the tumblers in my mind line up so something good could open. “Me too!” I confessed to an empty room. For all my desire to be a good citizen and devout man of faith, what I actually had become was a deeply doubtful human kaleidoscope that had lost interest in the absolutes I was expected to dole, but who increasingly thought love and honesty might be enough. In that same sermon, Kurt said, “I am enchanted by the Sermon on the Mount. Being merciful, it seems to me, is the only good idea we have received so far. Perhaps we will get another idea in that good by and by – and then we will have two good ideas…” I was deeply moved. This wasn’t theology, or even philosophy. It was good news from the war front.

The man who helped me see you can tell more truth with absurdist science fiction had now given me permission to know what I knew; That we often complicate things to avoid the labor of human decency. That kindness, mercy, compassion, are enough. That politicians and preachers do a similarly deft work of ensuring a certain amount of self-serving unfairness remains, while regular folk just want to live and work and play in peace. Kurt had been to hell and back and wasn’t willing to complicate what he knew: “Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies -God damn it, you've got to be kind.” 

Maybe he was invited to preach a sermon at a church because it was guaranteed to pack the pews. But maybe he was also invited because it was understood that he’d be thoughtful, funny, and honest. We needed it when I was five, and we need it now.  To this day, whenever I’m in front of listening ears or a blinking cursor, “thoughtful, funny, and honest” are the only guidelines that matter to me. Thanks, Kurt.

*

If a documentary’s job is to present the factual record, then maybe KURT VONNEGUT: UNSTUCK IN TIME is something more than a documentary. Director Robert Weide chronicles the life and happenings of perhaps the most beloved fiction writer of the Twentieth Century, and does it well. At the same time it’s Bob’s love letter, his family photo album, his behind-the-scenes look into half of his own life. Plenty have attempted to make an account about Vonnegut, but this film will no doubt be the definitive offering. Not only because it so skillfully tells the writer's winding story from early childhood, to The Depression, to Dresden, to Broadway, to his final days, but because it’s the only film that can ever show the rest of us what it was like for the man to love you. Of the several times during the film I felt my eyes threaten to overflow, Weide finding himself listed as a friend in the farewell scene in the novel Timequake about did me in. How many of us get to be such great pals, and then get to publish each other’s names for the world to know it forever?

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

from THE SIRENS OF TITAN, 1959

.. As it happened, as it was meant to happen, right after watching the film I got to have a conversation with Bob Weide on November 11th, Veterans’ Day. Kurt’s birthday. The following is a transcript of our talk, somewhat edited for clarity and length.

Steve: I’m so happy to be talking to you Bob, how are you?

Bob: I’m doing just swell. It is, what would be, Kurt’s 99th birthday, so what a lovely day to be talking about him.

Steve: I hate to not live in the moment but it makes me think about next year.

Bob: Publicity wise, we’re referring to today as the eve of Vonnegut’s Centennial. So we’re releasing the movie on the eve of his centennial. How’s that?

Steve: That’s a helluva marketing angle, I like it.

Bob: [laughs]

Steve: So let me start by saying what a beautiful film. I really think you stuck the landing, for what that’s worth.

Bob: That’s funny you use that phrase, because once the decision was made for me to be in it, which was a very difficult decision to make but ultimately one that had to be made, early iterations were trying to get the balance of how much of me, or how little. My co-director, Don Argott, whose job it was to film this meta-element, kept arguing for more of me, and I kept saying “no no, less of me, less of me!” And that was always the struggle. In early cuts of the film, the phrase we kept using was “The device [of the director being in the film] seems to work but we haven’t stuck the landing yet.” But as we kept revising with different editors along the way and finally I said, “I think we’ve stuck the landing.”

Steve: When the movie was over, I had a lot of feelings, but one of them was, I don’t know Bob, but I’d like to buy him a beer and say, “I don’t know how you did it but you did it.”

Bob: Thank you. I’m not a fan of beer but I do drink martinis, which Kurt actually started me on. In Indianapolis, he made sure that I was gonna have my first martini before we left town. Now that’s my drink, so you can buy me a martini.

Steve: Done. I read in an interview from some years back that said it wasn’t an exaggeration to say you and Kurt were best friends. I can imagine that not only comes with a sense of privilege but maybe a pressure that you’re something like a custodian of his memory for the rest of us.

Bob: First of all, I hated that that quote appeared in print, I don’t remember where it came from. I grimace when I see it because that’s exactly the kind of thing I hate; “Oh yes, this famous person and I were best friends…” I don’t really believe in having “best friends,” but he was certainly one of my best friends.  I had two friends at my wedding as Best Men because I couldn’t decide between the two! But no, I never felt any pressure, it was nothing but an honor. Everybody has some fantasy about meeting somebody that they admire; a creator, and artist, a playwright, a musician or whatever. And you think  “If only we could meet, they would like me, and we would be friends. We would have lunch and drink and tell jokes and laugh.” Well, that’s a borderline psychotic fantasy. It never really happens. The fact that we did wind up with such a close friendship is really rather astounding. So the film is a nice, accessible entry point for people to see this story about a young guy who wrote basically a fan-letter — proposing a documentary at that time to his literary hero — and having his life quite changed by the connection and the friendship that evolved. It’s not supposed to actually go that way and in this case it did. 

Steve: In the film we see there were countless versions of Slaughterhouse-Five that Kurt attempted in this years-long struggle to get that book right. Obviously that struggle was literary in nature. A struggle over form. But you also spoke of him attempting to purge his soul of what happened in Dresden, by way of writing that book. Did you observe an ongoing struggle in him to face—or evict—his demons?

Bob: No. The whole idea of purging his soul, he would have denied that. It was my own observation. Just the fact that he was that consumed with trying to tell the story and get it right; it was a step beyond an author just trying to figure out the best way to tell a story. There was something very important to him to get right. And he had been touching on the Dresden experience through a lot of his earlier work, metaphorically, such as in Cat’s Cradle, which is an end-of-the-world story, in God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, there’s actually a fantasy about Indianapolis being consumed by a firestorm, in his short stories there are references to his experience during the war. It seems as though he was trying to finally get this out of his system once and for all. And he did it. He succeeded. 

Now, as you see in the film, if you ask him about the impact Dresden had on him, he always underplayed it. There’s a line in the film where he says that the dogs in his neighborhood had more influence on who he was than the war, and of course his kids say that’s bullshit. And some people think he had PTSD. But this was ancient history to him. I think if he had not written Slaughterhouse Five, maybe he would still be carrying it around with him. And if he was still carrying it around with him, only a psychiatrist could sorta forensically arrive at that conclusion, not me certainly. The main thing I remember is a lot of laughs— a lot of laughter. There was a lightness to our friendship. A lot of jokes, a lot of stories. A lot of recounting favorite scenes from Marx Bros movies or Laurel and Hardy movies.  There was a lightness to it that you never get with your own parents. Other people’s parents are always easier than your own. Now, he was my father’s generation, so it’s not like we are contemporaries, but you wouldn’t that if you saw us hanging out. We were really just pals, and that was a great honor of mine.

Steve: In his latter years Kurt was described as cranky, a bit lonely. Even famously said “We live too long”. And yet your film shows an old man laughing to the very end. 

Bob: Mmhm!

Steve: Was that intentional on your part to show him so ready to laugh and to love and to say out loud when he was happy? 

Bob: I think that in him, there was a mix, as there is in all of us. He could still laugh, but he thought the world situation was so bleak in his last few years. He basically felt like this isn’t funny anymore. This is a guy who is able to find dark comedy in World War II and the firebombing of Dresden. But by the end of his life he was so disgusted by the Bush/Cheney administration and our incursion into Iraq, and what he had done to the planet, environmentally – he just thought, alright this isn’t funny anymore. The only saving grace he had was that he was going to be out of here soon. He felt terrible about how we had left things for future generations. He was very apologetic about what we had done. So he had trouble finding humor in the world situation, and he was basically throwing in the towel. But on a day-to-day basis, he could still laugh. And there were days that he was depressed. Days where I could tell he was in a dark mood and a little bit sulky, but who isn’t on a occasion?

“If flying-saucer creatures or angels or whatever were to come here in a hundred years, say, and find us gone like the dinosaurs, what might be a good message for humanity to leave for them, maybe carved in great big letters on a Grand Canyon wall? Here is this old poop's suggestion: WE PROBABLY COULD HAVE SAVED OURSELVES, BUT WERE TOO DAMNED LAZY TO TRY VERY HARD…AND TOO DAMNED CHEAP.”

from FATES WORSE THAN DEATH, 1991

Steve: You must have thought a lot in the last half decade or so about what he’d have to say now about our politics and conspiracy theories and our refusing to act meaningfully on climate change. A lot of what he had already said applies, of course, but you must find yourself thinking often about what he would say now.

Bob: Well, all the things we’re saying now about it maybe being too late environmentally; he would have told you that decades ago because his brother was an atmospheric scientist who was talking about global warming and the Greenhouse Effect decades ago. They knew back then that we’d soon reach the tipping-point, where we’re past the point of no return. I also remember when Obama was elected, his daughter, Nan and I saying how thrilled he would’ve been. And of course when Trump was elected, I kept thinking it’s a good thing Vonnegut is not here because this would’ve been so depressing to him. It would have put him in a funk he would have never come out of. 

Steve: I have to admit, in 2016, I had the thought that Kurt Vonnegut would know just what to say about all this. And then I thought, he went through enough, this would’ve been too much. 

Bob: Yeah. I spoke to him on 9/11. At that point he had been in New York longer than he had been in Indianapolis or Cape Cod, so this was his city. And there was a resignation to his voice. He wasn’t up in arms, he wasn’t angry. There was almost a neutral tone to the conversation. And we hung up the phone and I thought, Yeah, of course, he’s already seen this. This time he isn’t pulling out the bodies and torching them [as he was ordered to in Dresden], but he’s been through this. It was the ultimate been-there-done-that. 

Steve: Bob, I know this film’s final completion is sort of an acknowledgement of Kurt’s passing. When the film was over I realized one of the things I felt was a desire to say to you, I’m sorry for your loss. The rest of us lost a hero but you lost a good friend, and that is profoundly different. 

Bob: Thank you. I will say that the pleasure of knowing him far exceeds the sense of loss with his passing. And he was certainly ready to go. It was tough, and I miss him everyday, but our home—our lives—are filled with all kinds of mementos and memories of him. Nobody lives forever, and he lived as long as he wanted to live. So, as he would say it, if this isn’t nice, what is?

KURT VONNEGUT:UNSTUCK IN TIME in theaters and video on-demand November 19th.

Steve Daugherty is an ordained minister, award-winning storyteller, and author hailing from the Research Triangle NC with his wife Kristi and three children. Make his interests yours at stevedaugherty.net