Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Kurt Vonnegut (2) (Review of Deadeye Dick)

Every time I open a novel by Kurt Vonnegut the same words spring to mind: “Coy,” “Arch,” “Winsome” and “Cute.” But they are equally quickly dispelled. I suspect that Vonnegut’s tone of voice — and a remarkably consistent one it is — either wins the reader over fairly promptly or not at all. In my own case it’s the former effect that occurs, certainly with the category of novel which we can safely demarcate “late” Vonnegut: the sequence of books beginning with Breakfast of Champions and including Slapstick, Jailbird, Palm Sunday (autobiography) and this, the latest.

In these novels — and in Slaughterhouse 5 — the connection between life and art is straightforwardly causal. It seems to me that all the books mentioned emerge directly from the author’s baffled observation of human life and nature and effectively dramatize certain questions (and attempt to come up with some answers) that the observation engenders. Vonnegut considers our swarming damaged planet and contemplates our bizarre behaviour-patterns. He looks at the way we exploit and corrupt each other; he marvels at the multitude of toxic chemicals we happily ingest; he ponders why we spend so much time inventing devices that can so easily bring about our annihilation as a species — and so on, as he would say. But he also focuses his gaze more precisely: on the sex-game, as he terms it; on the connection between love and common decency; on how to cope with the random fatalities of life, with sudden and incomprehensible bereavement. In this sense Vonnegut is the most overtly humane of that remarkable generation of American novelists to which he belongs, and it’s to his undying credit that no sentiment, pap or any kind of emotional sop ever clouds or diminishes the cool, ironic, unapologetic quality of his vision.

In many ways Vonnegut exhibits — in his candour and disarming openness, the way he squares up these Big Issues — an archetypal Americanness. But he avoids the typical American response: an appeal to the heart, whether in the form of God, the flag, Mom or apple pie. He seems to lack the sophistication of a Roth or Heller; he has, in the best sense of the word, the most popular approach. But that type of naivety and simplicity is illusory. Vonnegut’s verdict on the world and its denizens is as hard-nosed and unconsoling as any his peers can offer up. And it’s this seeming paradox — the gum-chewing hick from middle America combined with a brand of cynicism almost classical in its consistency — that makes his work so intriguing.

Deadeye Dick exhibits all these qualities in the most satisfactory ways. The story relates the life of Rudolf Waltz from Midland City, Ohio. Rudy is, in his own terms, a “neuter”—he takes no part in the sex-game. He works as an all-night salesman in Schramm’s drugstore. His main aim in life is to be inconspicuous. This is partly owing to his crippling shyness but is also as a result of an accident he was responsible for when he was twelve. In a moment of elation young Rudy fired a gun over the roof-tops of Midland City. The bullet, falling many miles away, drilled a hole between the eyes of a pregnant woman. Thus Rudy became a double murderer, and thus he earned his nickname, Deadeye Dick.

This sort of picaresque autobiography (Rudy is the narrator) allows Vonnegut’s distinctive style and approach to function at their most effective. Various characters in Midland City are introduced to us and the mundane course of Rudy’s life steadily progresses. People die, people are unkind to and misunderstand each other. In the end a neutron bomb accidentally explodes in Midland City, wiping out the population but leaving the buildings intact. Fortunately, by this time, Rudy and his brother Felix have left and have set up in a hotel they’ve bought in Haiti. Rudy’s final comment is “we are still in the Dark Ages,” but there is no sense of Vonnegut passionately indicting man’s inhumanity to man. His stance is, if anything, more disinterested than ever. The book opens with a warning: “Watch out for life.” Rudy survives — to the extent that anyone survives — through a policy of mental non-engagement. In his attitude to others he is selfless and caring, but intellectually he is entirely uncommitted. Behind the wit and the humour this is the bleakest Vonnegut since Slaughterhouse 5.

1983