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Friday, Nov 27, 2009
The author of "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Breakfast of Champions" talks about Capote and Kerouac, Hillary and Rudy, television and, of course, the end of the world.
Oct 8, 1999 | Listen: This is really it. After entertaining and provoking us with his novels for 50 years, Kurt Vonnegut says he is retiring from the literature business. His last book, "Bagombo Snuff Box," is a short-story collection that harks back to the dawn of his literary career in the 1950s, a Golden Age of magazine fiction long since vanished, when he left his job as a General Electric PR flack and began publishing stories. In his introduction, he calls these new-old (and previously unavailable) pieces -- simple melodramas about materialism, pretense, love and heaven -- "Buddhist catnaps," observing that the short-story form, "because of its physiological and psychological effects on a human being, is more closely related to Buddhist styles of meditation than it is to any other form of narrative entertainment." In "A Present for Big Saint Nick," children expose a gangster's egotism and their parents' hypocrisy. In the title story, a 9-year-old sniffs out an adult's pretensions. A couple of the stories rise to culminating jokes in the vein of Vonnegut's classic tall tale, "Tom Edison's Shaggy Dog," from his only previous collection, 1968's "Welcome to the Monkey House."
I recently met Vonnegut on a blustery day in Manhattan to talk about these stories. We also discussed the loneliness of the writer's life, television, politics and life at the end of the 20th century. Vonnegut, who remembers the Depression and served in World War II, turns 78 next month. He smoked unfiltered Pall Malls throughout the interview. When he laughs, which he does frequently, he squeezes his face up horizontally in the wide-open grin of the Cheshire Cat. He is always ready to pounce with a joke, and the loudest laugh, like the last, is always his.
Is this really it? The last Vonnegut book?
I have one more I'm shopping around, but publishers have found the subject rather dated, and so I guess this probably is my last book. What I've been shopping around is the story of my love affair with O.J. Simpson. [Laughs.]
Tough sell.
Yes, most people have forgotten who he is. And it was so long ago. It was in Buffalo, and I went to the dressing room after the game. I asked him to autograph my football, but I didn't realize that was code.
For?
Well ... the beginning of a love affair. But I felt used. Anyway, nobody's interested, so please, let's go on.
OK, OK. Your introduction to the new collection gives a quick career rundown. Did it make you nostalgic to be writing it for your last published book?
I wanted to repair every story, because the premise of each story was pretty good, and I wanted to do more with it now. But no -- it is archaeology, and the artifact is from the past. I was nostalgic just for the sake of future generations. It was very easy to get started as a writer during the golden age of magazines, before TV. The Saturday Evening Post published five stories every week; Collier's published five stories every week; Cosmopolitan, which is a sex manual now, published five stories a month; and the country was short-
