So long, Kurt

I came to Kurt Vonnegut's writing later in life. It's a self-defeating habit at times, my resistance to reading a popular writer because of a contempt for popularity. At other times, it's served me well; for example, I delayed reading John Irving for a long time, and then about 50 pages of "The World According to Garp" convinced me I'd been "right" all along.

But I wish I'd read Kurt Vonnegut when he first made a splash back in the late 60's. "Slaughterhouse Five" was a mesmerizing book. It's amazing what a talented writer who endured World War II can come up with. Think of them, James Jones, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut. All brilliant writers. Their youths had been seared by the most cataclysmic drama of modern times, and it colored everything they wrote.

Kurt had a style that was instantly recognizable and sui generis. A sort of fantasy realism. Stories and characters that were both familiar and essentially alien. They were a vehicle for his desire to express his disappointment with the unsatisfactory character of the human race, its penchant for cruelty and selfishness, its essential short-sightedness. It would have been difficult for him to have a different view. A depressive who, as a young POW, was on corpse patrol after the firebombing of Dresden. That would do it.

Kurt, in his later years, became as bitter as the aging and raging Mark Twain, to whom he often referred. He called the human race a disease of Mother Earth, and archly suggested that global warming was her "fever," by which she meant to burn us out of existence. I think that's the depression talking. Humans are what they are, and if we say we're flawed, a "disease," it's because we're mammals with the capacity to imagine ourselves otherwise. Kurt also knew, like the Dalai Lama, that the only true palliative for all that war, destruction, disappointment, sadness and death was human kindness, which he promoted as his only true religious impulse. Another thing I like about him.