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vonnegut, looming
large
On May 2, 1969, acclaimed writer Kurt
Vonnegut sat at a table at Indianapolis' top
bookstore, pen handy, copies of his new
best-seller handy, fully expecting to move
some merchandise.
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That's not quite true -- not one person
outside Vonnegut's family showed up.
Vonnegut was crushed and wrote a note to
his friend and fellow Indianapolis-born
novelist, Dan Wakefield: "I sold three copies
-- all of them to relatives, I swear to God."
But how things have changed.
Vonnegut already had published five novels
and was "an unimitative and inimitable
social satirist," Harper's Magazine said at
the time. He was "our finest black
humorist," Atlantic Monthly said.
In 2007, Mayor Bart Peterson proclaimed
"The Year of Vonnegut" and urged all
citizens to read "Slaughterhouse-Five." The
Indiana Historical Society earlier proclaimed
Vonnegut a "Living Legend," an actual,
official designation of the society (though
now a stretch because Vonnegut died in
2007). A painting three stories tall of
Vonnegut (looking avuncular,
nonthreatening) has taken shape on the
side of a building on Massachusetts
Avenue.
Vonnegut lived in New York but had
returned to his hometown, to the L.S. Ayres
bookstore in Downtown Indianapolis, in
triumph.
And last year, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial
Library opened Downtown to host lectures
and display Vonnegut memorabilia such as
paintings by him, his Purple Heart and a
His "Slaughterhouse-Five" had just been
released, a book that would be hailed as
one of the greatest books ever written
using English.
It was a perfect spring day, warm and dry,
and Hoosiers were certainly up and about.
A sellout crowd of 1,300 filed into the
Murat Temple's Egyptian Room for the
annual "500" Festival Breakfast, where
Mayor Richard Lugar handed "the key to
the city" to, for reasons that are today
foggy, TV actor Clu Gulager.
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Several blocks away at the Vonnegut
appearance, however, not one person
showed up.
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re-creation of his writing studio. The library
was launched with a $50,000 grant from
Lilly Endowment -- philanthropy in
Indianapolis doesn't get any more
mainstream than that. In October,
comedian Lewis Black was named to the
museum's honorary board of directors.
So revered has Vonnegut become that even
his cigarettes are iconic. On display at the
library, safe behind glass, are some Pall
Malls purchased by the great man himself
(he died before he could get at them).
The latest Vonnegut extravaganza is Nov.
11, which would have been the writer's
89th birthday (numerically the date is
11/11/11, if that means anything).
A panel of writers and scholars (including
Wakefield) will discuss Vonnegut as part of
the annual Spirit & Place Festival in the
Eugene and Marilyn Glick History Center.
That same day, the release of "Unstuck in
Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut's
Life and Novels" by historian and Vonnegut
scholar Gregory D. Sumner, will be
celebrated at the library.
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words," said Majie Failey, 88, a former
society editor of The Indianapolis News
who recently published a memoir of her
lifelong friendship with Vonnegut. "I think it
was just an attention-getter, the bad
language, and I told Kurt I thought his
language was terrible, and he just said,
'Now Mary Jane.' "
But it wasn't just Vonnegut's language that
was off-putting to a Nixon-era
Indianapolis. "He was critical of the military,
critical of the country," said Jim Powell, a
fiction writer who teaches "SlaughterhouseFive" in his "Introduction to Fiction" course at
IUPUI.
"He mocks the Boy Scouts and the Postal
Service. He loves bonds between two
people, but he's anti-institutional. He puts
Hoosiers in his books, and they're always
over-talkative and helpful when you don't
want help. They're oblivious."
Midland City in Vonnegut's "Breakfast of
Champions," which many people take for
Indianapolis, is a very silly place populated
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The story of Vonnegut's veneration in his
hometown is a story not so much about
Vonnegut as about Indianapolis.
Vonnegut didn't change -- he remained
the irreverent, insightful oracle/wise guy,
often pessimistic but always pure-hearted
and joke-prone.
It's Indianapolis that changed.
"My generation hated Kurt's four-letter
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by comically unsophisticated people.
Vonnegut's writing "did not register with old
Indianapolis, or even with his own family,"
said Richard Vonnegut, a distant cousin
born and raised in Indianapolis and living
here still. "It was the college-age crowd
that first adopted Kurt."
He was on their side when most World War
II veterans weren't.
And their side won, or at least gained
steam culturally -- Bob Dylan is a hero, J.
Edgar Hoover a villain.
Vonnegut's popularity snowballed as some
of those students later got jobs as English
teachers, and from that perch assigned
Vonnegut to their students the way their
predecessors had assigned J.D. Salinger,
whose "Catcher in the Rye" was seminal for
an earlier time.
"Vonnegut entered the canon of the people
who try to draw students into the world of
literature," said retired Butler University
historian George Geib.
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teacher who wrote his master's thesis on
Vonnegut, took a bit of a risk a few years
ago by substituting Vonnegut for C.S. Lewis
on the senior AP syllabus -- a risk because
Lewis is a celebrated Christian and V
onnegut a celebrated secular humanist,
and Hopkins' employer is Covenant
Christian High School on the Westside. (His
parents at one point had raised a stink
over Salinger.) "I wasn't intending to be
shocking," Hopkins said. "I felt my role was
to expose students to some writers they
hadn't seen before."
Vonnegut "was an instant hit," Hopkins
said. "He's addressing deep-hearted
issues of humanity with a great sense of
love for humanity and also sadness. And
the dark humor, the punchiness -- highschoolers can relate."
And the parents? So far, so good, Hopkins
reports.
Just as Indianapolis was slow to warm to
Vonnegut, Vonnegut for a while kept his
distance from Indianapolis. Wakefield,
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"And he's convenient for that purpose:
Vonnegut had a blunt content that grabs
and holds one's attention in a way 'Silas
Marner' never could. I hate 'Silas Marner.' "
Vonnegut's books notably are all still in
print. "Slaughterhouse-Five" is even still
being banned (last summer from a school
in Republic, Mo.), and if that's not a badge
of relevance, what is?
Kyle Hopkins, a 26-year-old English
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whose 1970 novel "Going All The Way" is
set in Indianapolis and was offensive to
some Hoosiers, understood Vonnegut's
trepidation.
Like Vonnegut, Wakefield left Indianapolis
after high school and never moved back. In
1984, the public library here invited him to
give a lecture.
"I asked if it was 'safe' to come now,"
Wakefield said. "There was a lot of hostility
when 'Going All The Way' came out." (In his
review of it, Vonnegut wrote: "Having
written this book, Dan Wakefield will never
be able to go back to Indianapolis. He will
have to watch the 500-mile race on
television").
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graduated from high school.
"I called Kurt a few years ago," Richard
Vonnegut said. "He was coming to town to
give a speech, and I thought we could
maybe get together, have a couple drinks,
just him and me, maybe settle into some
chairs in a corner, and, you know, bridge
the gap.
"He said, 'No, tight leash. No time.' He was
kind of abrupt, and then he died like a
week later, maybe it was two weeks."
Call Star reporter Will Higgins at (317)
444-6043.
But 14 years later, Wakefield accepted the
library's offer to speak -- and felt welcome
(and to bring that story full circle, "Going All
The Way" later was republished by IU
Press).
By that time, Vonnegut, too, felt welcome.
In 1986, he gave a lecture to a capacity
crowd in Indianapolis at which he said: "All
my jokes are Indianapolis. All my attitudes
are Indianapolis. My adenoids are
Indianapolis. If I ever sever myself from
Indianapolis, I would be out of business.
What people like about me is Indianapolis."
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But Vonnegut never connected with Richard
Vonnegut, his cousin. Not that Richard
Vonnegut was a big fan -- he managed to
get through just one of Kurt Vonnegut's
books, "Slaughterhouse-Five." But that book
moved him. He read it when it came out, in
the summer of 1969, the summer he
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