VONNEGUT MUST BE IN HEAVEN NOW

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is up in heaven now. That's his favorite joke, he
wrote in "A Man Without a Country."

He also wrote, "If I should die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
'The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.' "

Thanks to Vonnegut, who died April 11 at 84, every Dogwood Fine Arts
Festival since the first one in 1993 has been anti-climactic. That's
because the first visiting author happened to be my literary John Lennon.

Some others worthy of chiseling on my Mount Writemore followed - John
Updike, the late Joseph Heller and Norman Mailer, who called Vonnegut
"our own Mark Twain" - but I only succumbed to blatant hero worship
with Vonnegut.

He autographed "Slaughterhouse-Five," his 1969 science fiction
anti-war novel inspired by his capture by the Nazis and Feb. 13, 1945,
survival of the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, which rendered him a
Purple-Hearted pacifist.

"If it weren't for World War II, I'd now be the garden editor of The
Indianapolis Star," he said.

There was a sense of urgency in bringing him to Dowagiac because how
long could a man last puffing unfiltered Pall Malls since he was 12,
coughing incessantly? "A fire at one end and a fool at the other," he
described his vice.

"I've been a coward about heroin and cocaine, LSD and so on, afraid
they might put me over the edge. I did smoke a joint of marijuana one
time with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead just to be sociable ... I
never did it again ... Here's what I think the truth is: We are all
addicts of fossil fuels and in a state of denial. And like so many
addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing
violent crimes to get what little is left of what we're hooked on ...
We have squandered our planet's resources, including air and water, as
though there were no tomorrow, so now there isn't going to be one."

Before I met him, I phoned and conducted an intimidating interview
during the writing of "Timequake."

I remember him lecturing me about the difference between cynicism and
skepticism.

Eager for college life, I devoted the summer of 1975 to reading a
Chicago Tribune list of essential campus books, including
"Slaughterhouse-Five" and 1973's "Breakfast of Champions," his
self-indulgent, almost plotless 50th birthday present to himself.

Good ol' Billy Pilgrim, "unstuck in time," sliding back and forth
between the nightmare of bombing and prison to his peaceful life as an
optometrist in Ilium, N.Y.

Vonnegut offered it all, from time-tripping and Tralfamadore to the
tantalizing moral of "Mother Night": "We are what we pretend to be, so
we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

"Mother Night" is the novel in which Howard W. Campbell Jr. spouts
propaganda he doesn't believe to convey messages he doesn't understand.

Even as Vonnegut waxes sentimental about the possibilities of love, he
remains skeptical of its actual practice.

"Breakfast of Champions" I first read at 17. It is an absurd and
pessimistic satire of American culture through an encounter between
his recurring literary alter ego, Kilgore Trout, and Pontiac dealer
Dwayne Hoover.

Vonnegut stuffed his fresh start with advertising slogans, graffiti,
crude drawings and even explains the autograph I so avidly sought on
May 12, 1993.

The author is present throughout, a character in the "sidewalk strewn
with trash" that he constructs to purge his mind, intruding into the
action and constantly reminding us who's writing. Vonnegut vowed it
would be his last novel, setting his characters free at the end.

Vonnegut consistently depicted man as a powerless puppet, victim of
forces he does not understand. Yet man is driven to try to divine
order and purpose, doomed to failure because the universe is chaotic.

Any meaning man divines is an illusion he creates to
cope.

Sometimes these illusions are pleasing and harmless.

But sometimes the consequences are dire.

All of his protagonists had been puppets plagued by their lack of free
will, controlled and manipulated by others or fate.

As the writer, of course, Vonnegut was the puppetmaster steering their
movements.

Ironically, freedom does not satisfy Trout, who wants youth, proving
man will never be satisfied with his lot, whatever it might be.

Vonnegut has been my literary hero for more than 30
years.

I own 19 books by him or about him.

The Beach Boys believe in "Heroes and Villains," but Vonnegut didn't.
His books lack individual villains. They don't really contain heroes,
either.

Even the Nazis in "Mother Night" aren't purely evil.

And Mr. Rosewater, lover of all mankind, isn't purely
good.

Reality is more complicated.

Vonnegut was born Nov. 11, 1922, in Indianapolis and his Midwestern
values inform his worldview. His German-American family had a
tradition of atheism and pacifism.

Being the youngest of three children made him funny because a joke was
the only way a child could enter adult conversation.

He first wrote as a reporter for the Shortridge High School Daily Echo
- - the first daily high school newspaper in the country.

His painter and architect dad warned him away from the arts because he
was so hurt by the Depression, so Vonnegut majored in chemistry at
Cornell.

"I've brought scientific thinking to literature," he said. "There's
been very little gratitude ... someone decided that I was a science
fiction writer. I did not want to be classified as one" after writing
about his short stint with General Electric in Schenectady, N.Y., in
his first book, "Player Piano." It "seemed a fantasy of the future to
critics who had never seen the place."

It was 1968 - 23 years - before he felt "grown up enough" to write
"Slaughterhouse-Five."

"About 135,000 people were killed ... in one night ... it was the
largest massacre in European history."

"Cat's Cradle," his third novel in 1963, gave us Vonnegut's invented
religion, Bokononism, and the great line, "All of the true things I am
about to tell you are shameless lies."

"There are these very short chapters" in "Cat's Cradle," he said.
"Each one of them represents one day's work, and each one is a joke
. A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work
pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap ...
Humor is a way of holding off how awful life can be, to protect
yourself ... If a hundred years from now people are still laughing,
I'd certainly be pleased."

"Cat's Cradle" satirizes both religion and science as ways to codify
human knowledge - the former relying on satisfying lies, the latter
dealing with horrifying truths. A scientific discovery, Ice-Nine,
which melts at a high temperature, destroys the world.

Vonnegut continued to be cool, appearing on "The Daily Show with Jon
Stewart" and leaving the host tongue-tied with admiration.

And he kept speaking out.

Which brings us full circle to Vonnegut's desire for a musical
epitaph.

I can do no better than this quote: Music "makes practically everybody
fonder of life than he or she would be without it. The function of the
artist is to make people like life better than they have before. When
I've been asked if I've ever seen that done, I say, 'Yes, the Beatles
did it.' " And so did Kurt Vonnegut.