Every time I open a novel by Kurt Vonnegut the same words spring to mind: “Coy,” “Arch,” “Winsome” and “Cute.” But they are equally quickly dispelled. I suspect that Vonnegut’s tone of voice — and a remarkably consistent one it is — either wins the reader over fairly promptly or not at all. In my own case it’s the former effect that occurs, certainly with the category of novel which we can safely demarcate “late” Vonnegut: the sequence of books beginning with Breakfast of Champions and including Slapstick, Jailbird, Palm Sunday (autobiography) and this, the latest.
In these novels — and in Slaughterhouse 5 — the connection between life and art is straightforwardly causal. It seems to me that all the books mentioned emerge directly from the author’s baffled observation of human life and nature and effectively dramatize certain questions (and attempt to come up with some answers) that the observation engenders. Vonnegut considers our swarming damaged planet and contemplates our bizarre behaviour-patterns. He looks at the way we exploit and corrupt each other; he marvels at the multitude of toxic chemicals we happily ingest; he ponders why we spend so much time inventing devices that can so easily bring about our annihilation as a species — and so on, as he would say. But he also focuses his gaze more precisely: on the sex-game, as he terms it; on the connection between love and common decency; on how to cope with the random fatalities of life, with sudden and incomprehensible bereavement. In this sense Vonnegut is the most overtly humane of that remarkable generation of American novelists to which he belongs, and it’s to his undying credit that no sentiment, pap or any kind of emotional sop ever clouds or diminishes the cool, ironic, unapologetic quality of his vision.
In many ways Vonnegut exhibits — in his candour and disarming openness, the way he squares up these Big Issues — an archetypal Americanness. But he avoids the typical American response: an appeal to the heart, whether in the form of God, the flag, Mom or apple pie. He seems to lack the sophistication of a Roth or Heller; he has, in the best sense of the word, the most popular approach. But that type of naivety and simplicity is illusory. Vonnegut’s verdict on the world and its denizens is as hard-nosed and unconsoling as any his peers can offer up. And it’s this seeming paradox — the gum-chewing hick from middle America combined with a brand of cynicism almost classical in its consistency — that makes his work so intriguing.
Deadeye Dick exhibits all these qualities in the most satisfactory ways. The story relates the life of Rudolf Waltz from Midland City, Ohio. Rudy is, in his own terms, a “neuter”—he takes no part in the sex-game. He works as an all-night salesman in Schramm’s drugstore. His main aim in life is to be inconspicuous. This is partly owing to his crippling shyness but is also as a result of an accident he was responsible for when he was twelve. In a moment of elation young Rudy fired a gun over the roof-tops of Midland City. The bullet, falling many miles away, drilled a hole between the eyes of a pregnant woman. Thus Rudy became a double murderer, and thus he earned his nickname, Deadeye Dick.
This sort of picaresque autobiography (Rudy is the narrator) allows Vonnegut’s distinctive style and approach to function at their most effective. Various characters in Midland City are introduced to us and the mundane course of Rudy’s life steadily progresses. People die, people are unkind to and misunderstand each other. In the end a neutron bomb accidentally explodes in Midland City, wiping out the population but leaving the buildings intact. Fortunately, by this time, Rudy and his brother Felix have left and have set up in a hotel they’ve bought in Haiti. Rudy’s final comment is “we are still in the Dark Ages,” but there is no sense of Vonnegut passionately indicting man’s inhumanity to man. His stance is, if anything, more disinterested than ever. The book opens with a warning: “Watch out for life.” Rudy survives — to the extent that anyone survives — through a policy of mental non-engagement. In his attitude to others he is selfless and caring, but intellectually he is entirely uncommitted. Behind the wit and the humour this is the bleakest Vonnegut since Slaughterhouse 5.
1983
W. H. Auden (Review of The Orators)
The Orators by W. H. Auden was published in 1932 when Auden was twenty-five. It is an immensely precocious, rambling, difficult and eccentric work, mainly in prose and almost entirely forgotten. Today, outside libraries, it is only available in The English Auden, a collection of his poems, essays and dramatic writings from 1927 to 1939. The Orators, I suppose, is subsumed under “dramatic writings,” but it’s not in any sense a play, or even a piece for several voices. It is in actual fact an un-classifiable oddity, a maverick work in Auden’s output, impossible to label or pigeonhole. It is fiction, but it’s neither a novel or a short story. It contains parodies, lists, geometric drawings, diagrams, odes, doggerel and straightforward poems too. And, to be honest, it is long-winded occasionally, and, at times, maddeningly opaque with a rich seam of cockeyed, socio-cultural analysis. Auden himself, in later life, said of it, “My name on the title page seems a pseudonym for someone else, someone talented, but near the border of sanity.” So why do I keep on reading it all the time?
Two main answers and lots of minor ones. I re-read it chiefly because it’s very funny and also for the access I gain into an astonishingly vivid, entrancing and daft imagination. Auden is my favourite poet, but in the prose of The Orators the control and discipline of poetry are abandoned. If you like the Audenesque tone of voice, its particular tropes and obsessions, then here you will find it writ large, lavishly piled on. It is, I think, something to be dipped into or picked over and, although it was vaguely designed as a coherent statement, its parts are infinitely richer than its whole.
The Orators is subtitled “An English Study” and is, rather as The Waste Land intended, meant to be a survey of the state of England, and the moral and spiritual health of the populace. This all sounds eminently serious and dull but, being Auden, it is Englishness that comes through rather than gravitas, and the ills of society are very idiosyncratically diagnosed. There is none of the monumental distanced angst striven for in Eliot’s poem. The needs and desires voiced — though genuine — are much more the needs and desires of W. H. Auden Esq., one suspects, rather than the unspoken pleas of a generation.
The book is divided into three sections, sandwiched between a prologue and an epilogue. Part One is called “The Initiates” and is itself subdivided. It opens with an “Address for a Prizeday,” a hectoring speech analysing the current problems of the population. The English, it transpires, can be classed as four different types of lover. Excessive Lovers of Self, Excessive Lovers of Neighbours, Defective Lovers and Perverted Lovers. All this has at root some ostensibly serious purpose, to do largely with Auden’s preoccupation with psychosomatic illness as inspired by people like Groddeck and Layard. But this can be safely set aside, for the “seriousness” of The Orators, it seems to me, is only a starting point — a sort of skeleton of the book which gives it a rough structure and shape but which is really only there to provide support for the fleshing out of the text. It provides Auden’s talent with the excuse it has been waiting for. Having classified the population in this way he can now get on with describing them. The Excessive Lovers of Self: “Habitués of the mirror, famous readers, they fall in love with the voice of the announcer, maybe, from some foreign broadcasting station they can never identify.” The Defective Lovers: “They sit by fires they can’t make up their minds to light, while dust settles on their unopened correspondence … Wearers of soiled linen, the cotton wool in their ears unchanged for months. Anaemic, muscularly undeveloped and rather mean. Hit them in the face if necessary.” And so on for two delightful pages.