There Was Still Beauty in the World

I discovered Kurt Vonnegut’s work at the onset of that long fever known as adolescence. We didn’t have smartphones back then to rescue us from the twin plagues of doubt and boredom. So we walked around with ancient devices tucked into our back pockets. These devices had only one app. You opened them and scanned their lines of code, and for a few minutes strange lovely movies played inside your head. I watched Vonnegut’s movies over and over again. They were sad and funny. They made me feel a little less alone.

Some years later, in college, I would write an undergraduate thesis entitled Authorial Presence in the Works of Kurt Vonnegut. Here is a summary of that document’s major intellectual conclusions:

1. Kurt Vonnegut rules.
2. You should totally read his books.
3. I will never ever be an academic.

I met the great man only once, a decade ago, at a literary panel in Hartford. I had come to ask if he would work with me on a book I hoped to write about his literary legacy. I expected a towering figure, somewhere in the neighborhood of thirteen feet tall. But age had tamped him down. A minder held his brittle elbow.

At the panel, someone asked him to identify the single most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. “My Lord,” he said, “that’s a tough question, because there’s so much beauty, really; it’s what keeps me going in life, is just glimpsing beauty all the time. I suppose the most beautiful thing, though you can’t see it exactly, is music.”

The moment I remember most clearly from that evening occurred at intermission. The other writers onstage got up and walked to the wings, leaving Vonnegut alone. It was tough to watch, because he was so frail. The stage was booby-trapped with thick black audio cables. Vonnegut

rose slowly and took one tentative, shuffling step. “Oh my God,” the woman next to me whispered. “He’s going to fall.”

A few months later Vonnegut did fall, in his brownstone in New York City. He suffered brain injuries, then descended into a coma and died.

And a few months after Vonnegut’s passing, my own mother fell for the first time. She had some help from a pickup truck, actually, which ran into her while she was walking to the supermarket. The impact cracked her pelvis, caused internal bleeding, and left her body mottled with bruises.

This happened during a family vacation. My new baby girl was there, in a little rented house by a deep blue lake. She was learning to walk and sometimes affixed herself, gratefully, to her grandmother’s new walker.

I should tell you that my mother is the person who brought me to reading, and therefore to Vonnegut. So they travel together in my mind, part of the same vast and tender congregation.

She was also one of five women in Yale Medical School’s class of 1960, a psychoanalyst, and later the author of a book called The Monster Within, which is about maternal ambivalence and specifically women’s fears of giving birth to monsters. I have tried not to take this personally.

Three years ago, my mother fell a second time, on the path outside her office. This second fall had a curious effect. It sent her tumbling back to the Bronx, where, many years before, she had been the bright, sensitive daughter of a schoolteacher and an actuary. She kept asking where her mother was. She was certain I was her uncle. Sometimes she would wake to find herself lying in a strange white room with needles and tubes taped to her arms. Then she would close her eyes and become unstuck in time again.

“Stevie,” she would whisper. “I’ve just had the most terrible dream.”

I thought of Billy Pilgrim, the time-traveling hero of Vonnegut’s most famous novel, Slaughterhouse­Five.

By then, I was flying home every few months to visit. All my old Vonnegut novels were still there, in tatters. I read them at night, in my room, after my father and I had grown weary of discussing home health-care options.

I read about Billy Pilgrim and his capture by the Germans. Here is how Vonnegut rendered the event: Lying on the black ice there, Billy stared into the patina of the corporal’s boots, saw Adam and Eve in the golden depths. They were naked. They were so innocent, so vulnerable, so eager to behave decently. Billy Pilgrim loved them.

He is describing human beings, of course.

Then he writes this:

Next to the golden boots were a pair of feet which were swaddled in 
rags..........Billy looked up at the face that went with the [feet]. It was the
face of a blond angel, of a fifteen-year-old boy.
The boy was as beautiful as Eve.

I mention this because I think Vonnegut is too often reduced to a comic moralist when he was, in fact, something closer to a romantic. He understood that human beings—in addition to our lust for violent progress—crave beauty and music and laughter. These are what allow us to live within our disappointments and beneath the shadow of death.

By the end of it, my mother suffered four cancers, three chemos, two surgeries, and radiation. These robbed her of her fierce intellect, her career, her passion for words. In the final months, her life became elemental.

My father would take her on short hikes into the Stanford hills, where she would pause to examine the wild flowers, to caress a petal between her fingertips, to drink in its color. She gazed at the oak trees and their black skirts of shadow. Some instinct deep within her knew time was drawing short, that she wouldn’t have the beauty of the earth much longer. She turned toward the sun and closed her eyes. She listened to the birds.

My mother’s family didn’t have much money, but as a child, she was granted the privilege of piano lessons, at which she excelled. For most of my childhood, the music of Mozart and Bach and Brahms washed through our home.

Toward the end of her life, in the midst of one of her bouts of chemo, she managed to attend a local concert of works by Schubert, her favorite composer. She had entered the concert hall so weak that my father had to support her. But as the music played, she felt flushed by a strange euphoria. “I don’t know how to explain this,” she wrote to me. “It was as if there was still beauty in the world.”

My mother was sad and often humiliated by the process of dying. And there came a point, too, when fatigue overruled her ability to walk or enjoy music or even read. She became a kind of hostage. I worried constantly that she would fall.

One day, I came into her bedroom to check on her and saw that she had escaped her bed. The bathroom door was shut. Then I heard splashing.

She had somehow managed to get herself into the bath but lacked the strength to get out. It was left to my brother Dave and me to lift her from the tub and dry her skin and wipe away the trickles of blood from where she had tried to shave her legs. She was trembling violently the entire time, in tears, clutching at a towel, panicked at the thought that her sons would see her ravaged body.

But her body looked beautiful. She looked like Eve.

I can see now that I have failed to convey how terrifically funny my mother was. Let me therefore submit into evidence the observation she offered after her final, doomed surgery: “The doctors tell me there’s not much left for them to take out. That’s the good news.” And still later she greeted an old friend who’d come to visit by rolling her eyes and doing a double take. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said. “Not to get ahead of myself.”

She was like Vonnegut in this way, too. Like all depressives, they understood the comic impulse as a form of self-forgiveness, a miracle of alchemy: the conversion of grief into laughter by means of courage and imagination.

My mother was active in the civil rights and antiwar movements. Like Vonnegut, she was furious at the cruelty she witnessed in the world, and more often heartbroken. I sometimes wonder what they would have made of the vulgar and savage symptoms of our current historical moment. But I think I know what they would have said: They were naked. They were so innocent, so vulnerable, so eager to behave decently. Billy Pilgrim loved them.

Slaughterhouse­Five is often touted as Vonnegut’s great antiwar novel. But the reason I picked it up again after my mother died in March is because it remains the only book I know that offers a reasonable solution to the astonishing cruelty of death. Its central idea is that people don’t really die, any more than they are born. They exist outside the prison of time, immortal within the minds and hearts of those who love them. So perhaps it is Vonnegut’s great antideath novel, though its ultimate subject, I would argue, is life.

Vonnegut’s essential mission was to comprise a manual for the living. To be human, he tells us, over and over again, is to fall. To fall in love and to fall from grace, into various forms of mischief and misfortune. We are, in this sense, a fallen species.

It is our job to find meaning within our falling, by seeking out and holding fast to beauty and music and laughter. Only when we turn away from these blessings can human beings be said to have damned our souls.

You will have figured out by now that Vonnegut did not take me up on my offer to collaborate. It doesn’t matter. He had already given me what I came to ask him for. I honestly believe that Vonnegut was sent back into my life to help me bear the death of my brave and brilliant mother.

He had more to say to me, and to the world. That is the work that we take up in reading, work that allows us to mourn and keeps us alive.

Read more from Issue 16.1.