Weeks 11–13: Deadeye Dick

In our post for Jailbird, I found myself returning to the opening lines of Slaughterhouse-Five's final chapter as an elegant evocation of 1970s cultural malaise that began with a few violent acts in the late 60s. Now, as we begin our time with Vonnegut's 1982 novel, Deadeye Dick, we return to it once more — not to memorialize Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King, but rather for the mention of Kurt Vonnegut's father and his gun collection, which factors heavily into the setting of Deadeye Dick.  

As we've discussed in regards to several of the novels we've read this semester, Vonnegut had issues with both of his parents that made their way into his writing. Still, it's not until we reach Deadeye Dick that we have Vonnegut's most sustained critique of his upbringing and his parents' failings, mixing thinly-veiled autobiography with fictional inventions to create the KV-analogue, Rudy Waltz. This frankness was a long time coming — Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. died in 1957, but it's notable Vonnegut kept the "Jr." suffix through Breakfast of Champions (a novel that represents, appropriately, a death-of-the-self). Conversely, it's fascinating to read the Waltz family against the hypothetical depiction of Vonnegut and his parents in heaven that begins Jailbird (which, though frustrated at times, does start with the touching wish that Vonnegut and his father might be better friends in the afterlife than they were on earth). Also, take note that once again we find ourselves in Midland City, the setting for Breakfast of Champions, and while the Waltzes don't appear in the earlier book we will encounter several families we already know: the Hoovers, the Barrys, the Maritimos.

In a long and lavish review of Deadeye Dick for The New York Times — one marked, appropriately enough, by a retrospective mood  — Benjamin DeMott addresses Vonnegut's detractors and offers a lovely summation of what marvelous gifts he offers to readers of all kinds, along with a prediction of how their (and perhaps your) appreciation for his work might evolve in time:

I know that on some days this very odd writer is good medicine, whatever one's age: on the day when, for instance, you hear that the shelling hasn't stopped, or that the liveliest young mind in your acquaintance can't find work, or that it's been decided, in the newspapers, that the operations mutilating a loved one are no longer regarded as correct procedures. One reason for this is that Vonnegut's inexplicables are admirably plain, homely, abundant, up front; there's no epistemological complication, few philosophical conundrums, just the improbable mess of any probable human week. And the other reason is that there's no cruelty in the man. He is, evidently, playing; take away the ever-present question (namely, How on earth can you explain this?) and his activities might not be easily distinguishable from those of a child setting up and batting down toy soldiers on a rug. But gloating and meanness are excluded from the game, and the observing eyes are sad, humorous, kind.

I predict that many Vonnegutians will grow up and away from their favorite author. I also predict that, a decade or two after they do so, many will grow back. The old rule applies: As soon as you put on weight on this earth, you discover it makes a kind of sense to lose it.

Here's our reading schedule for Deadeye Dick:

• Fri. November 4: preface–ch. 9
• Mon. November 7: chapters 10–18
• Weds. November 9: No Class — Prof. Conference
• Fri. November 11: No Class — Veterans Day (formerly Armistice Day; also Kurt Vonnegut's birthday) 
• Mon. November 14: chapters 19–25
• Weds. November 16: ch. 26–epilogue

And here are a few supplemental links:

• full text of Benjamin DeMott's New York Times review: [link]
• Walter James Miller interviews Vonnegut, focusing on Deadeye Dick, "a story of 'gun nuts and nukes,'" on WNYC-FM in 1983: [link]
• Vonnegut discusses Deadeye Dick with novelist Martin Amis (via the British Library): [link]
• Impress your friends with your knowledge of dreadful 90s one-hit-wonders — the band Deadeye Dick, best known for their 1994 single "New Age Girl," has obviously read Vonnegut: [link]

Weeks 10–11: Jailbird

It's a lean decade from 1969's Slaughterhouse-Five to 1979's Jailbird. Why? Well, as we've discussed several times in class, after the disheartening lean years leading up to Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut had a very difficult time dealing with his success, fan's expectations of him and his desires to remain financially solvent (along with the dissolution of his marriage to Jane Marie Cox and his son Mark's institutionalization). In essence, the author lost touch with himself and his talents, transforming himself into a popular persona à la Mark Twain that was a mere caricature of his former self (to get some sense of this change, along with some of the hypocrisies of this new self, you can read this excerpt from Charles Shields' excellent KV bio from the bottom of pg. 297 to 301). As a result, he followed the critical and popular success of Slaughterhouse-Five with two of his most poorly-received novels (both in terms of critics' opinions and his own appraisal): Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday! (1973) and Slapstick, or Lonesome No More! (1976). While we'll try to find redeeming qualities in for former, there's perhaps no hope for the latter.

During this same time, America was undergoing its own identity crisis as the hopeful politics of the 1960s dissolved into hopeless malaise as the 70s unfolded. For a population already reeling from the the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the Manson murders, race riots, and the long quagmire of the war in Vietnam, the Watergate scandal was the last straw. Taken together, these internal and external dilemmas form the context for Jailbird, wherein Vonnegut, approaching his sixtieth birthday, seeks answers in the lessons and convictions of his past. Walter F. Starbuck, the novel's protagonist, who's just been released from prison after serving time for minor crimes as part of Watergate, finds himself in the exact same situation, and his (and Vonnegut's) retrospective soul-searching will cross paths with a veritable pantheon of secular American saints cut from the same cloth as Eliot Rosewater, including Eugene V. Debs, Powers Hapgood, Sacco and Vanzetti, and others.

In a 2003 interview with David Barsamian in The Progressive, Vonnegut talks about the strange interplay of socialism and Christianity within his ethics, mentioning some of the historic figures who factor positively into Jailbird:

Vonnegut: It’s perfectly ordinary to be a socialist. It’s perfectly normal to be in favor of fire departments. There was a time when I could vote for economic justice, and I can’t anymore. I cast my first vote for a socialist candidate—Norman Thomas, a Christian minister. I had to cast it by absentee ballot. I used to have three socialist parties to choose from—the Socialist Labor Party, Socialist Workers Party, and I forgot what the other one was.

Q: You take pride in being from Indiana, in being a Hoosier.

Vonnegut: For being from the state that gave us Eugene Debs.

Q: Eugene Debs of Terre Haute on the Wabash.

Vonnegut: Where Timothy McVeigh was executed. Eugene Debs said (and this is merely a paraphrase of the Sermon on the Mount, which is what so much socialist writing is), “As long as there’s a lower class, I’m in it; as long as there’s a criminal element, I’m of it; as long as there is a soul in prison,” which would include Timothy McVeigh, “I am not free.” What is wrong with that? Of course, Jesus got crucified for saying the same thing.

Q: With two million souls in prison today in the United States, Debs would be very busy.

Vonnegut: Debs would’ve committed suicide, feeling there was nothing he could do about it.

Q: There is another Hoosier you write about who is unknown, Powers Hapgood of Indianapolis. Who was he?

Vonnegut: Powers Hapgood was a rich kid. His family owned a successful cannery in Indianapolis. Powers was radicalized. After he graduated from Harvard, he went to work in a coal mine to find out what that was like. He became a labor organizer. He led the pickets against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. I got to know him late in his life when he’d become a local CIO official. There was some sort of dustup on a picket line, enough to bring the cops into play. Hapgood was testifying in court about what was to be done about CIO members who had made trouble. The judge stopped the proceedings at one point and said, “Hapgood, why would a man with your advantages, from a wealthy, respected family, Harvard graduate, lead such a life?” Powers Hapgood replied, “Why, the Sermon on the Mount, sir.” Not bad, huh?

While we're on the topic of Vonnegut's moralists, it's worth noting that good old Kilgore Trout appears in Jailbird as well, however in very different circumstances that we have (or will) see him elsewhere. Try not to get too hung up on the differences — not unlike the radical differences between the Diana Moon Glampers you met in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and her namesake in "Harrison Bergeron" or the two Francine Pekfos, we can, perhaps, chalk this up to authorial carelessness.

Here's our reading schedule for Jailbird:

• Weds. October 26: prologue–chapter 3
• Fri. October 28: chapters 4–9
• Mon. October 31: chapters 10–18
• Weds. November 2: chapter 19–epilogue

And here are some supplemental readings:

• John Leonard's New York Times review of Jailbird: [link]
• full text of Vonnegut's 2003 interview with David Barsamian in The Progressive: [link]
• Kirkus Reviews' appraisal of the novel: [link]
• Wikipedia page on the Watergate scandal: [link]
• Walter James Miller interviews Vonnegut, focusing on Jailbird, "his Watergate novel," on WNYC-FM in 1979: [link]

Weeks 9–10: "Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday"

After a well-earned day off for Fall Reading Days on the 14th, we'll begin the downhill slide towards December with our sixth novel of the semester, Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday! (1973). It's a highly-polarizing book within the Vonnegut canon and even the author himself has mixed feelings about it, giving it the grade of C (only his two collections of scattered essays and the novel Slapstick got equal or lower grades) when evaluating his own work in 1981's Palm Sunday.

"Anybody can write a great novel, one great novel," a character observes in Don DeLillo's Mao II, and though it took him six tries to do so, he finally managed to tell his Dresden story on his own terms. Thus, just as the Shah of Bratpuhr asks EPICAC "what people are for" Vonnegut found himself questioning his purpose in the aftermath of the success of Slaughterhouse-Five. "After I finished Slaughterhouse-Five I didn't have to write at all anymore if I didn't want to," he told Playboy in 1973, and even several years before that friends and the media were speculating that he had jettisoned an early version of the novel and was done. That his marriage fell apart soon thereafter and his kids, now all grown up, were leaving home only added to the confusion as he approached his 50th birthday.

A Vonnegut self-portrait taken
 from Breakfast of Champions

Reaching the half-century mark put things in perspective, however, and he reengaged with the novel as a means of "clearing his head of all the junk in there," including attachments to characters from earlier books (cf. Kilgore Trout, Eliot Rosewater, and in name only, Francine Pefko and Kashdrahr Miasma). Even Dwayne Hoover, the car salesman at the heart of the novel, is a re-adaptation of the original character design for Billy Pilgrim (the two novels started as parts of the same project). At the same time, we meet characters here who'll recur through later novels (he entire Hoover family, Fred T. Barry and his mother Mildred, Rabo Karabekian, the Maritimo brothers and even Kazak the dog), and through the creation of Midland City, OH (a counterpart to Illium, NY), Vonnegut set the stage for the latter half of his career: Deadeye Dick would be set there and it would come up in Bluebeard and Galápagos as well.

Beyond that, though, there's a more important catharsis at work, as age has made Vonnegut wiser, but also wearier in the process. As the idealism of the 60s gave way to 70s malaise, as Watergate eroded trust in public officials and Vietnam took more and more lives, and as racism (particularly the well-entrenched prejudices one might easily encounter in flyover America like Midland City) continued to be a divisive force, Vonnegut grew more disillusioned. He'd tried being rational, tried charming his audience with humor, and it hadn't worked, so now he'd be painfully frank and let the ugliness present in American culture be seen plainly.

That's a lot of baggage for one novel, and that's perhaps why it's been easy for me to leave this book off of the reading list until this semester. Still, it's an important book to recon with, and the rawest expression Vonnegut has to offer —going so far as inserting himself into the narrative — which is likely why for every reader that dislikes the book there's one who thinks it's his finest.

Here's our reading schedule for the novel:

• Mon. October 17: preface to chapter 8
• Weds. October 19: chapters 9–14
• Fri. October 21: chapters 15–18
• Mon. October 24: chapter 19 to epilogue

And here, as usual, are some supplemental readings that might be of interest:

• Christopher Lehmann-Haupt reviews the novel for The New York Times: [link]
• Walter James Miller interviews Vonnegut, focusing on Breakfast of Champions in particular, on WNYC-FM in 1974: [link]

Here's a 92nd Street Y podcast featuring Vonnegut's first public reading from the novel three years before its publication:

Like Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night, Breakfast of Champions was turned into a film in 1999. Despite featuring an all-star cast, it doesn't have much to recommend it, as you can see from the trailer below. Nonetheless, Consequence of Sound's Blake Goble begs for a worthy remake of the film in a 2015 article: [link]