Vonnegut & Stringer Rubbed Elbows with Deity

I’m a Kilgore Trout junkie. I was first exposed to its affects in high school. I read Cat’s Cradle sophomore year and was hooked. I had almost kicked the habit, till I read Slaughterhouse 5 for Dr. Schwartz’s class in college.

After that class, I asked Dr. Schwartz if he’d be my faculty advisor instead of the philosophy professor I had been assigned. I had nothing against that professor, but he wanted me to be practical and think of practical matters. During Frosh orientation, he had asked each of us what we wanted to be after graduation. I had it all figured out. I had been writing lousy poetry for a couple years and was one of the few incoming freshman with a declared major. I was there to study English so I could be a writer. He said, “That’s great. What do you plan to do for money?” Where the philosophy professor wanted me to think about my future, Dr. Schwartz allowed me to procrastinate for four years while I explored literature in ways completely inapplicable to any career goals. He was the type of English professor you find in novels and independent films: messy office, slightly disheveled appearance, leather satchel full of papers and paperbacks, the light in his office still on long past midnight. Maybe I’m romantizing my memories a bit. He was the type of professor who graded your papers based on the ideas you presented, not how many typos he could find. He engaged me to consider themes and find the author’s points of passion, while never actually betraying any of his own passions, beliefs or biases. In fact it wasn’t until two years ago, while talking at an alumni event, that I learned he was gay. Earlier that year, he had married his partner of 20 something years during the small window when California had legalized gay marriage. I liked Vonnegut before college. I read Vonnegut, but it wasn’t until Dr. Schwartz that I consumed his writing, actively participating in the experience.

I had promised myself when I graduated that I was going to read all of Vonnegut’s novels. While I have read the last few books he published before his death, I have yet to read all of the old dusty books I bought years ago at Bart’s Books in Ojai, CA. The funny thing about being hooked on Kilgore is that it takes a long time to work through your system. I think the last fix I had was A Man Without a Country in 2007. It took three years for me to feel the pangs of withdrawal. Vonnegut’s writing is like that. It sticks with you for a while, much like a most excellent dinner at your favorite restaurant. You may not get to go as often as you wish. When you do make it there, you savor every morsel and if you’re lucky, there are leftovers to devour later on.

I just finished the short Like Shaking Hands with God: A Conversation about Writing featuring Kurt Vonnegut & Lee Stringer. It is the transcript of a public discussion that took place in a bookstore in Manhattan in 1999. Vonnegut had most recently published Timequake, a book, by the way, of which I received two copies for my birthday. One was from my parents, the other from my future husband. Lee Stringer had published his first book entitled Grand Central Winter, a memoir of his life being homeless and writing for “Street News.” I’ve never read it, and honestly wouldn’t even have heard of him if it wasn’t for his relationship with Vonnegut. Vonnegut praised Stringer, comparing him to Jack London.

The 78 pages of Shaking Hands is an interesting read. There are many points where Stringer and Vonnegut debate each other in the good-hearted way that colleagues do. For instance, Vonnegut sees writing as a method of activism. “Anybody reading the book is bound to say: My God, something’s got to be done about this.” He saw Stringer’s story as a call to action. Stringer, however, dismisses Vonnegut’s idealistic optimism that people can affect change. He wrote Winter with the intent for the reader to determine their relationship with homelessness, not do something to help with the problem. “I don’t know if there’s anything to be done about it [homelessness] . . . except to find what your relationship is to it. . . . . Not to eliminate what offends our sense of what should be, or who we are. Just to find a relationship to it. . . . I mean, how as human beings do we relate to each other?” Even when Vonnegut asked Stringer if he would help a friend get off the street, Stringer replied that it was all he could do to help himself.

Overall, I found the transcript of two writers conversing on their craft to be inspiring, particularly thoughts put forth by Vonnegut. I freely admit my bias here. Here are some of my favorite quotes.

On the writing process:

Vonnegut: “If you have a hell of a lot on your mind, the language will arrive, the right words will arrive, the paragraphing will be right.”

Vonnegut in the novel Timequake:

“There is this: Attempted seductions with nothing but words on paper are so stuff for would-be-ink-stained Don Juans or Cleopatras! They don’t have to get a bankable actor or actress to commit to the project, and then a bankable director, and so on, and then raise millions and millions of buckareenies from manic-depressive experts on what most people want.”

Stringer: “I had a lot of fun trying to figure out how I was going to fill up these pages, and then, convinced that I’m not going to figure it out, bingo! Something happens. It’s like shaking hands with God. It’s really a great payoff for the hours you sit around wondering if you can do what you’re trying to do.”

Vonnegut: “But again, I’ve written a hell of a lot of crap. I’m glad I didn’t publish most of it. But there it was. I’d write for three or four hours, or all day, and ‘This is lousy.’”

Vonnegut: “Now we’re talking politics . . . . There was a time, if you were gay, you would cut out anything in the book that would give that away. Because gays were hated. And you don’t want the reader, no matter what a prick he or she may be, to hate you. . . . But that’s no longer a consideration.”

On writers and the reasons they do what they do:

Vonnegut: “And so I said in a piece in Harper’s, or a letter I wrote to Harper’s, about ‘the death of the novel’: People will continue to write novels, or maybe short stories, because they discover that they are treating their own neuroses. And I have said about the practice of the arts that practicing any art – be it painting, music, dance, literature, or whatever – is not a way to make money or become famous. It’s a way to make your soul grow. So you should do it anyway.”

“[Bill] Gates is saying, ‘Hey, don’t worry about making your soul grow. I’ll sell you a new program and, instead, let your computer grow year after year after year . . .’ – cheating people out of the experience of becoming.”

Vonnegut: “I just want to add that virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.”

“Because music gives pleasure as we never can. Music is the most pleasurable and magical thing we can experience.”

Vonnegut: “Novelists do not envy each other, and if a writer succeeds, makes a lot of money, say, that makes all other writers happy.

So it’s a most agreeable field we’re in and I think, in a sense, we are veterans of the same battle and we know what the hell it was like. We’re not like Duke Wayne, who was never in a battle. We know what that fight was like and we respect each other for making it.

And anyone who has finished a book, whether the thing is any good or not, is a colleague of ours.”

On the reading audience:

Vonnegut: “Expecting a large number of people to be literate is like expecting everybody to play the French horn. It is extremely difficult”

(By “to be literate,” Vonnegut means to be able to read using their imagination to envision the story in their mind, to be players and produce a production, if you will, of the story for themselves. By this definition, I was not able to truly read Vonnegut until college.)

Vonnegut: “You cannot fool a reading audience!”

Vonnegut: “Partly it’s about how you hold an audience. Because they can leave.”

Vonnegut: “Nobody gives a fuck about you. They care about the book.”

On experiences of life:

Stringer: “What I’ve taken away is a certain brand of optimism. Even the bad stuff is an opportunity. There are possibilities there. In fact, I see more possibilities in adversity than in, say, lying on satin pillows.”

Vonnegut in the novel Timequake:

“We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different!”

Vonnegut: “Because some people are born musicians, some people are born chess players, or whatever. In school some people could run a lot faster than I could. I could write better than most people could. So, yes, I’m lucky.

Joe Heller and I recently confessed something which is shameful for writers to confess. We’d both had relatively happy childhoods, which is no way for a writer to begin.”

Vonnegut: [Regarding education] “I went to a good high school, and everything was noise after that.”

So now that I’ve had a small taste of the magic elixir that is Kilgore Trout, I need more. I can’t decide which to devour next, Player Piano or God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. What exactly is Kilgore Trout, you say? You’ll have to read Vonnegut’s works to find out.

Vonnegut, Kurt, Lee Stringer, and Ross Klavan. Like Shaking Hands with God: a Conversation about Writing. New York: Seven Stories, 1999.

[Editor’s Note: With the exception of Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse 5 and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the links attached to book titles will take you to a preview of each book on Google Books. If you enjoy the preview, I suggest purchasing the book, either electronically or in hard copy. I recommend hard copy because . . . well that’s a subject for another blog post. The links attached to Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse 5 will take you to entries for the titles on vonnegutweb.com (This is a great site except for the fact that it was evidently abandoned in 2005 and lacks mention of both A Man Without a Country and Vonnegut’s death in April 2007. Otherwise it is a great source of information.), which include short passages and a synopsis taken from Gale Research. These two titles are not available on Google Books, or at least I could not find them. Interestingly enough, both titles are listed among books routinely challenged or banned each year.]