Leaving the Monkey House

In tribute, Kurt Vonnegut, 1922 - 2007.

by Joelle Renstrom

Perhaps the saddest aspect of Kurt Vonnegut’s death last week isn’t that he’s gone—it’s that he had to wait so long to die. Vonnegut had a complicated relationship with life and with death. On Mother’s Day in 1944, his mother committed suicide. Later that year, Vonnegut was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was freed six months later, one of seven surviving American POWs in Dresden.

Vonnegut’s father, a man Vonnegut compared to Hemingway because of both his obsession with guns and his sheer misery in old age, was “proud” that he didn’t succumb to suicide. Caught in the tangle of not wanting to live but not being able to die, Vonnegut both cheated death and chased it throughout his life. He makes a brief cameo in his 1973 book Breakfast of Champions:

“This is a very bad book you’re writing,” I said to myself.
“I know,” I said.
“You’re afraid you’ll kill yourself the way your mother did,” I said.
“I know,” I said.

In 1984, Vonnegut tried to kill himself with pills and alcohol. He blamed his limp on death’s elusiveness. In 2000, he was in bed watching the Super Bowl when his ashtray overturned and started a fire.

Hospitalized in critical condition for smoke inhalation, he was released four days later. From the age of 12, Vonnegut smoked unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes, calling them a “classy way to commit suicide.” He joked about suing Pall Mall’s manufacturer: “I’m eighty-three years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me. Their cigarettes didn’t work.” He smoked because the worst that could happen was the hastening of death, which for Vonnegut was also the best that could happen.

In an interview in 2005, Vonnegut called suicide bombers “very brave people” and expressed longing for the promise of death: “You would know death is going to be painless, so the anticipation—it must be an amazing high.” A suicide bomber’s knowledge of how and when and where he will die brings him closer to death and begins the transition from death to reality. Vonnegut spent a good part of his life anticipating death, but death never seemed near enough to derive comfort from its certain eventuality.

At the time of his suicide attempt in 1984, Vonnegut still had eight books left in him (including Fates Worse Than Death and God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian). But even then it seems like he was dragging life behind him like a consolation prize.

Vonnegut suffered from the sort of depression that grants reprieves but no real pardons, yet he managed to achieve what many of us only dream of: he had a wife, children (three biological and four adopted), he won the Pulitzer Prize and he was a hero to countless readers. Perhaps Vonnegut’s death wish reflects just how well he understood the world and the people in it. His writing captures the irony, morbidity, logic and ridiculousness of life. Maybe he understood too much.

A longing for death may be the most convincing reason to believe in God. Vonnegut was an atheist, or “at best a Unitarian,” and as such he could never console himself with the idea that he would die when the time was “right” or that there was a holy plan for his life or his death. When Vonnegut waited to die, he wasn’t waiting for God or a burst of white light. He was just waiting, resisting suicide “so as not to set a bad example for [his] children.”

In August 2006 Vonnegut reported that he’d given up on his forthcoming novel If God Were Alive Today. He said, “I’ve written books. Lots of them. Please, I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do. Can I go home now?”

It makes sense, then, that when he gave up writing, he would give up living. For Vonnegut, life was a mammoth sentence that meandered and looped in a seemingly endless journey. “When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon,” he said in 2006. Vonnegut’s sentence has finally ended; its period is pleased with itself for being so final.

On Kurt Vonnegut’s website there’s an empty birdcage with the door open. He has finally been given permission to explore the unknown, to venture to the place that has called to him for decades. He is free. Here’s hoping that he finds in death what he never could find in life.

(Image from chauss513's flickr.)

Comments

[bryan]

beautiful

[Liz]

Great essay J. This is the best peice about Vonnegut I've read so far.