It’s four and the morning and a coughing spell woke me up. I clicked on Atrios only to learn this:
Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died Wednesday night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.
His death was reported by Morgan Entrekin, a longtime family friend, who said Mr. Vonnegut suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago.
I’d like to think this is all a bad joke, like the mistaken reports of Mark Twain’s death, but I suppose we won’t be that fortunate. The most significant American writer since Twain, he is now gone, and we will be the lesser for losing him.
I don’t know what you think of Vonnegut, and I sure as hell don’t care what literary critics might conclude about his body of work, but I consider him the most original American writer of the last 50 years, and the one with the most searing moral vision. Despite being damned with faint praise as a “cult figure” he was in my view America’s greatest living writer until his death last night. His work consistently grappled with universal themes and addressed the great issues of his times, despite being denigrated as a pornographic mixture of science fiction and black comedy.
He was also a veteran of World War II, and as an American POW of Nazi Germany in 1945, he lived through the hell of the firebombing of Dresden, and the further hell of it’s aftermath. That event would go on to form the basis for Slaughterhouse Five; or, The Children’s Crusade. A semi-autobiographical novel, written in his singular clipped and unpretentious prose style, it would bring him popular acclaim and propel him to cult status when it was first published in 1969 during the height of the Vietnam War.
An atheist, his books were nonetheless filled with discussions of war, poverty and injustice that reflected his progressive beliefs. Some might say he was a pessimist, even a nihilist, but they would be wrong. What he was was a modern day version of the prophet Jeremiah ranting at the America which he loved, but whose failures he did not deny or overlook. Failures he constantly decried in his books, failures of vision, compassion, justice and the everyday betrayal of our highest ideals in the service of our collective greed and lust for power as a nation. He was the antithesis of everything for which George W. Bush stands. We did not deserve him.
Please forgive me Kurt, but God bless you Mr. Vonnegut, and thank you for your service to your country.
