Nothing particularly Hub-oriented about this post, although this obit notes that the great writer once paid his rent by selling Saabs on Cape Cod. However it's impossible to have come of age in the 1960s or '70s without having been influenced by Vonnegut's view of the world as terrible and absurd and hilarious and beautiful. I spoke with him a couple of times, most notably amid the absurd luxury of the TV press tour in Los Angeles one summer in the early 1990s. Showtime was making a rather good series of adaptations of his "Welcome to the Monkey House" stories, and he was to attend the cable network's publicity party at Wolfgang Puck's newest trendy West L.A. restaurant - I think it was a brewpub. A couple of colleagues and I (Shoutout to Duane, wherever you are!) managed to catch the first limo shuttle from the hotel to the party and quickly infiltrated the dining room, which was soon to be full of reporters and famous actors. We found the table where Vonnegut was to sit and, at my instigation, covertly disposed of the place cards of several prominent journalists and replaced them with our own. Vonnegut arrived late and grumped about the slow drink service until his assistant produced a pint of whiskey from her purse. Once he found out that we represented papers in and around Chicago, he cheered up considerably, regaling us with tales from his post-war days as a cub reporter at Chicago's legendary City News Bureau. I seem to recall that the key anecdote involved a tragic and absurd elevator accident, and a subsequent assignment to contact the next of kin and swipe a photo of the deceased. I may be conflating this with someone else's City News anecdote - we all had a few beverages that evening. But Vonnegut lived up to his billing.
Addendum: Thanks to Salon, you can hear Vonnegut read a selection from "Slaughterhouse Five" here.
Addendum II: You must read the New York Times obit, all the way to the end.
Addendum III: A quote from Andre Dubus III, when I interviewed him last year for the Globe. He recalled the days in the 1960s when his father brought the family along to the famed writing workshop at the University of Iowa...
''Every day this guy Kurt would come down from his house on our street to sit down with the four of us kids and watch 'Batman' in the afternoon, chain-smoking. Fill the room with his smoke. He'd say, 'I like False Face, who do you like?' 'I like the Riddler.' He was just kinda Uncle Kurt. But he was Kurt Vonnegut."
First I heard of this. Great writer. I own all of his published works, so far as I know. I had the pleasure of seeing him in person a couple of years back, discussing (with his son) the re-publication of "Eden Express", his son's book. I always expected that he might have one more great work in him, but I guess not - unless published posthumously.
Posted by: Suldog | April 12, 2007 at 11:31 AM