Vonnegut is gone… and so it goes.

So sad today to find out that Kurt Vonnegut died last night. For me, no author did a better job of linking up the scattered bits of horror and humour that constitute the current condition, whatever it is .. post modern? post post? I dunno, but Vonnegut leapt past heaps of meaningless confusion stuff with arms flailing and loud wry laughing and an inability to be dishonest about our history of trauma. I feel like somebody I knew well, and loved like a favorite uncle, has died.

Full disclosure - Vonnegut is the only author I ever wrote a letter to. If it’s still out there somewhere I’m sure it’s embarassing; I think I filled it with all the lonely drama you can imagine in a 13 year old, with parents divorced, who’d moved 6 times already.

His books have connected me to people throughout my life, and his death is revealing more and more of how many of us thought Bokonism was a good idea, and never saw the world the same again after Galapagos or Breakfast of Champions. The first boys I really made friends with had read them, and had more to lend me; that’s how I got my hands on Cat’s Cradle and Bluebeard.

Mother Night was in the busting open old suitcase of books my dad gave me when I was a kid. The idea behind this bag of secondhand and well-thumbed paperbacks was that this was a collection of the books that had made him up, I think. There were some I didn’t get into, and some that got right into me, and Mother Night was one of those. Mother Night is about a spy who can’t come in from the cold, and it’s about two people who make their bed their country when they can’t claim a nationality. My grandma had helped fight the Nazis as a kid in the Danish underground, and had been imprisoned for it, and I’m not sure she ever fully came back from that. Books like Mother Night helped me understand.

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller also showed me something of the horrible irony of that war, in a giddy, spinning, nauseating, inescapable, incomprehensible formation.

But it was when someone slipped me Closing Time, Heller’s dark sequel 40 years later, and there was Vonnegut, a character remembered by another character in the story he couldn’t stop telling - the bombing of Dresden, the time in Slaughterhouse Five - that my Grandma’s 40-years-later-mind became another bit more knowable to me, and led me back to rereading Vonnegut in recent years.

They shared this humour about it all, and a sense of self that was fundamentally realigned and permanently shaken by their encounter with the insane and unexpected creulty of people. Survival tinged with a dark wish not to have survived, and an overarching loving humanism that was all they could make sense of in the aftermath, connected Vonnegut and my grandma and, I think, a lot of people who lived to witness that. She died a few years ago, and now he’s gone, and I guess the onus is increasingly on us to try and make things better in the memory of what that generation lived through, even though we still feel like lonely teens sometimes. As he would say; so it goes.