I first met Kurt Vonnegut at an anti-war demonstration I covered many years ago, across the street from the United Nations in New York. I approached him with my tape recorder and microphone, and was promptly struck dumb with awe.
My best friend had loaned me a copy of The Sirens of Titan in high school, and we reveled in all of his novels as they came out, or as we discovered them in second hand book stores. In some ways, I still like The Sirens of Titan the best...
It's the one that made it easiest to argue that Vonnegut wrote science fiction, and validated the field. But he sure didn't play the games of those steeped in the genre, and that was OK too. When Slaughterhouse Five came out, I wrote about it in the very obscure Science Fiction Review... I gave it a five star rave, as if my opinion made much difference. For what it's worth, it seemed to me that his best work ended with that novel, that something was lost after he won his long struggle to write about the indescribable... the bombing and subsequent firestorm he survived as a prisoner of war in Dresden. But as amazing, and as important as his books are, there was a great deal more to Kurt Vonnegut's life.
That day, on the sidewalk outside the U.S. Mission to the U.N., an inept young reporter struggled to find questions for the great man. I wish I'd asked him the difference between the war he fought in Europe, and the conflict in Vietnam... I wish I'd asked him to compare his experiences as a POW, with the men being held in the Hanoi Hilton, I wish I'd asked him why he felt compelled to use a celebrity he despised, to speak out against a war he despised even more. If memory serves, what I did ask him, was what he was doing. "Committing suicide by cigarette," he told me.
And then he kindly went on, to explain why he was there that day and allow me to escape with the sound bite I needed. I have to think he'd be amused that, in the end, it wasn't the cigarettes or the alcohol or the depression that killed him. And while I stopped reading his work some time ago, I never stopped listening. And I will revisit The Sirens of Titan when I get home this weekend.
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