Sent to take dictation from God: Writer Obits

On April 11th, my hero died.

Kurt Vonnegut’s words made me want to be a writer with all my heart. His ease and candor on the page assured me that it might not actually be completely impossible to be one. He was my Shakespeare. His death marks the passage of a truly great American thinker and essence. I was always so happy just knowing he was alive.

His mother committed suicide on Mother’s day. In many ways, it is surprising that he was alive for so long. He smoked too much, setting his bed on fire after dropping a lit cigarette on himself when he was in his late seventies. While a prisoner of war in Germany, Vonnegut was one of a handful of men to survive the fire bombing of Dresden that killed over 300,000 on February 13th-14th. He became what he described in the intro to Mother Night, a corpse miner, going into fallout shelters and retrieving charred remains. He said they often died with valuables clutched in their laps.

Words and advice of Vonnegut would come into my head unbidden. I took his advice on marriage (after a long marriage punctuated with an exclamation mark of a divorce after 27 years) when he advised that husband and wives should each join one hundred clubs soon, after the union begins, that the other one is not a member of. When my marriage ended, I thought often of how right he was. At least, after 10 years together, I was a member of one hundred clubs that my husband did not belong to. And so it goes.

When my book was rejected cruelly by a man who said among other things, “It’s terribly rude of me to do armchair psychiatry, but it feels the writer of this manuscript has, er, issues, and tried to vent them by writing this. I am NOT an expert, but the anger and disgust that the protagonist carries around is so dismaying, I cannot imagine anyone spending time with her, even if they identify with some part of her miserable life. I don’t mind dislikable protagonists, but this woman is horrid.” I did find it rude of this reviewer (whose four-page hate-filled rant caused the publishing company to reject my novel) to practice armchair psychiatry, but I was comforted by Vonnegut’s wisdom when he said, “Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.” Vonnegut had the heart of a writing teacher. Teaching kept him writing. He believed deeply in the writer as a teacher, a learner and a friend to those who were largely friendless.

In his collaborative book Like Shaking Hands with God, Vonnegut and Lee Stringer talked together about writing. Stringer is the genius behind the memoir Grand Central Winter that chronicles Stringer’s decade long battle with crack addiction. The book tells about how a person can make writing a train that takes them out of hell. Vonnegut’s lifelong despair was treated by him with writing. He, like Stringer, needed to write to survive. He was called to testify.

Writing didn’t always sooth him. Vonnegut attempted suicide in 1984. He failed, in part, I’d like to think in order to write this line, “By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.”What do you say about a man who radically altered all of the things you thought you knew about how to write when writing was and is what matters to you? It was often as if the words Vonnegut spoke or wrote were previously known to me, were true in my inner self, like he’d stolen my thought just to offer it back to me.

I hate that he isn’t alive anymore. It was a world much improved by the fact it had created him, and housed him. His final words thanked us, his readers and fans for listening to him for all of these years.

Elizabeth Hardwick

She was a writer, and not a female novelist (except for the damning fact that she was female and wrote mainly obtuse, dense and postmodern novels that many, including this author, find inaccessible). Hardwick’s gift was her literary criticism and essays. She is the reason my beloved New York Times Book Review exists, the holy bible of aspiring American writers. Hardwick was surrounded by the great writers, and helped define an era. The precise, eloquent language of her reflective essays always came from a distance as if taped from a lecture and then copied into a second language. Maternal, homey, sweet, soft were not adjectives that Hardwick’s writing would have suffered. Her style became the style of the times, defining more than reflecting that New York intellectual literary assumption of standard bearing back when there were standards to bear, before the corrosive sixties ruined everything in American culture.

Hardwick was married to Robert Lowell, the poet who eventually dallied with other women which led to a long separation. The romantic New York love story that was their marriage ends when Lowell died en route to move back in with Hardwick, in the cab on his way over. He’d married and was living in London, but his last act before dying was to return to Elizabeth, to make his way back to her. I’m imagining that it was raining, if it wasn’t it should have been.

Hardwick modeled decency in criticism. She chose her words wisely; her compliments were richly detailed, but her impatience with self-indulgence in language came through in her observations about certain texts. Her passing marks the end of an era.

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