Goodbye Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut is dead.

He made it to 84, not bad for a depressive man who had lived through the firebombing of Dresden and his mother's suicide.

Living through death, any death, is like taking a blow to the head or the guts, as you know if you've been there. Something as simple as holding my own mother's hand as she exhaled her last breath in a hospice in Arizona left me depressed, shell-shocked and angry for years. Kurt Vonnegut's mother suffered from bouts with extreme depression and mental illness, and sometimes, during the Great Depression, vented it on Vonnegut's father in plain earshot of the son: "When my mother went off her rocker late at night, the hatred and contempt she sprayed on my father, as gentle and innocent a man as ever lived, was without limit and pure, untainted by ideas or information," he has written. She killed herself.

As a prisoner of war of the Germans in World War II, Vonnegut was locked in a basement in Dresden and put on a work detail, making vitamins, when the Allied bombs hit. He emerged the next day with his captors, who put him to work combing the vaporized ruins, gathering up the torched, rotting corpses, of which there were many. He was a very very young person, like the 19- and 20- and 21-year-olds we have sent to stare too damn long and hard at death in Iraq. Like them, Vonnegut stared at death and the madness of war and human cruelty more deeply than many of us ever have to. I'd like to say more deeply than anyone should.

Vonnegut took the blow of his mother's suicide and withstood the pounding of cleaning up corpses in Dresden. It may not feel like it when you read books like Slaughterhouse 5, but in the end his withstanding that hit, taking that blow, and staying on his feet, communicating with us, for the next 60-plus years, is the kind of triumph of spirit that he would surely pooh-pooh. He spun his depression into a satirical, dark art that was hilarious and profoundly depressing at the same time. He did what we all want to do: he made meaning out of all this sad awful shit we're surrounded with.

He pushed ahead in his ambling, rambling way, and before he got done, he had written some of the most influential stories of the twentieth century. Kids like me read them, and our older siblings, and some of our parents -- the people in the 1960s and 1970s who saw through the curtain of deceit and technocracy to the brutality underneath. Kurt Vonnegut was the antidote to all those cruel, detached geniuses of the 20th century, Robert MacNamara, to Adolph Hitler, to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and Pol Pot and the rest of the corrupt, bankrupt geniuses who could work so hard and burn so bright on the scientific and highly rationalized project of ripping flesh from bone.

Vonnegut brought those bastards low, because he made death and human frailty real to us.

When I was a kid, in the 1970s, there were three artistic voices that called most loud and clear to me: Bob Dylan, Robert Altman, and Kurt Vonnegut. Their work steeped me in a brew of pathos, humor, violence, and sorrow that, it's no exaggeration to say, made me what I am today. They were the guys who were a generation older than my peers, who kind of made the map I've used. I can't say for certain if they mapped only what is really there and offered a way through the bloody mess with integrity, or if they simply chose to travel only on the roughest terrain, ignoring the easy roads. Eithher way, for me, it's been tough going following in the tracks they laid down.

Unlike the kids a scant half-generation after me, who came of age in the Reagan era's boosterism and willfull detachment from hard reality, I never could trust any leader. Never could accept a pat answer. Never could stop laughing at the self-serious, or crying at the way we waste our brief moment on the earth. Dylan, Altman, and Vonnegut, as formative material, made it hard for me to believe in having a career, a country, or a calling. I have never been good at pretending that spending lots of money on meaningless crap was a good way to live, or that something as silly as a story about God could redeem us.

The problem is, the cynicism of Kurt Vonnegut is not really of the armor-plated, diamond-hard variety one sometimes detects in the voice of a T. Coreghessan Boyle or a Frank Zappa. Vonnegut's was the jaundiced eye with the tear in it.

Altman's humor, Vonnegut's pathos, and Dylan's cruel jokey wordplay all grew from, and in turn triggered in me and my generation, a kind of laughter that tried, in vain, to hold back the tears.

With Altman and Vonnegut both leaving the planet this year, I can only feel a sense of wonder that I have made it this far myself. I recently got a wonderful job; I am raising my daughter with a joyfulness I never expected to find in myself; and I write a little to give vent to this sorrow the world inspires in me. No one save my own parents has had a more profound influence on me than these masters of the darkest terrain. But I have found, as I believe they all did, that the point of mastering the darkness is to make it through.

Kurt Vonnegut tried to take his own life at least once, with booze and pills -- in the 1980s, unsurprisingly. And rereading Slaughterhouse-5 and some of his essays earlier this year, it came clearer to me in middle age than it ever did in my youth just how dark and unyielding was his view of our futility. And yet...

And yet he came to feel like a fixture in the world, and he never died until he was old.

So it goes.

His work may not offer a lot of reasons to be cheerful. But his work, and the fact that he made it to 2007 at all, offer plenty of reasons to stick it out.