Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 5, 1991 TAG: 9103050058
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER NEW RIVER VALLEY BUREAU
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
At Virginia Tech Sunday night, the best-selling novelist criticized the conduct of the Persian Gulf War, poked fun at higher education and President Bush and his choice for vice president, and predicted that the nation was on the verge of a massive economic depression.
He got a standing ovation.
Vonnegut, 68, uses satire and self-deprecating humor to tell people things they might not otherwise be willing to read - or hear.
"I make my living saying all kinds of crazy things," he said.
In a talk at the University of Virginia a few years ago, for instance, he noted that its revered founder, Thomas Jefferson, owned slaves. Jefferson was "the Hugh Hefner of his time," Vonnegut told the UVa audience.
"I haven't been invited back, and I don't suppose you will invite me back either," Vonnegut told his Tech audience of about 1,000 people. His visit was sponsored by the Virginia Tech Union.
He said a UVa history professor with a hurt look cornered him after his talk to explain that Jefferson couldn't free his slaves until he and they were up in years because he still owed money on them.
"Imagine that. It used to be legal to mortgage human beings," Vonnegut said. "What a shame. When you're running a little short of cash, you can't take the cleaning lady down to the hock shop."
Only in his own lifetime, he said, has there been serious talk of giving women and minorities anything like full economic rights. It was as close as he came to saying anything upbeat - but his audience seemed to enjoy his talk, just the same.
Vonnegut survived the World War II Allied fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, where he was a prisoner of war. It became the focus of his 1969 novel, "Slaughterhouse-Five," which became a movie in 1972.
"Only one person profited from that bombing," he said. "That's me. I got $5, approximately, for each person killed there."
Likewise, he said, President Bush will profit from the Iraqi deaths in the Persian Gulf by being re-elected.
But, he said, "I think many of our pilots, as older persons, are going to be very sad . . . about machine-gunning and rocketing the troops retreating from Kuwait."
Vonnegut, a native of Indiana, observed that his state also produced Dan Quayle. He called Bush's choice of Quayle as vice president an insult telling the American people, in effect, that if anything happened to him "a nitwit will be a perfectly satisfactory custodian of our hopes and dreams and power."
Although Vonnegut went to Cornell University and the University of Chicago, he said the public schools he attended in Indiana were better than any university he was ever in.
He had a simple solution for improving education: "Dammit, cut the classes down to 18!"
Surrounded after his talk by a handful of students and reporters, the seemingly world-weary writer was more interested in continuing to discuss the Persian Gulf War than answering questions about his writing.
"It trivializes absolutely everything else," he said. "Look how long people watch this show . . . TV gives us history without consequences."
Television audiences have been trained to see life as a series of stories with neat endings, he said, rather than a continual progression.
He also gave TV some of the blame for eliminating magazine markets for short fiction, which were plentiful when he was starting out.
"That industry no longer exists, so there are very few short story writers left," he said. "Young writers are not being encouraged as I was being encouraged."
Talented people who could be successful writers can't afford to take the time from making a living to write a book, he said. And he suggested that writing is not that much fun.
"You have to sit still . . . You have no companionship . . . and so a lot of people who could be writers just say `To hell with it, it's not worth it,' Just because you're talented doesn't mean you have to do something with it . . . Nobody's in any hurry to see what you've done."
In his first novel, "Player Piano" (1952), he depicted a group of idealists who tried to overthrow a future society in which decision-making has been surrendered to machines.
The idealists lose.
He got some of his inspiration from his job as a publicist at General Electric.
"I was in the same department as Ronald Reagan. He was on his way down and I was on my way up."
Vonnegut has created characters who turn up from one book to another, ranging from time-tripping Billy Pilgrim to alien beings called Tralfamadorians. One seemingly came to life - science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout, who actually published a novel in 1975. Philip Jose Farmer wrote "Venus on the Half-Shell" using the Trout pseudonym.
Although Vonnegut successfully resisted classification as a sci-fi writer, TV sought him out, along with Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury, for comment on the first manned moon landing in 1969.
Vonnegut was the only one not enthusiastic about it, saying the only thing he heard the space program produced was Teflon - and later he learned it hadn't even done that.
Irate telephone calls followed. Most viewers were as enthusiastic about the moon landing then as about the Gulf War now.
Vonnegut also played himself in the 1986 movie "Back to School," in which Rodney Dangerfield hires him to write a paper about his work for Dangerfield's literature class.
Vonnegut didn't know until he saw the movie that Dangerfield flunks when his teacher realizes that somebody else wrote the paper and says whoever it was "doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut."
Vonnegut's latest book, "Hocus Pocus," came out last fall.
His advice to would-be writers?
"I have suggested to people to do what Mark Twain did, and that was to marry money."
by CNB