Vonnegut's Clean, Approachable, Hilarious, Melancholy Style
A measuring stick for all modern writing
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In my post on Hemingway I described a test that any great stylist of prose should pass, that given just a page of the author’s writing you can be sure they were the one who wrote it. Hemingway passed it with flying colors, and so does Kurt Vonnegut.
Like Hemingway, Vonnegut wrote in a very modern, stripped-down style. Nevertheless, there is an almost unbelievable range of possibilities that meet that description, which perhaps cannot be shown more clearly than by comparing the two. Hemingway can be so terse it practically hurts. Vonnegut goes down smooth. But Vonnegut’s writing is not only simple and easy to read, it’s powerful, and it’s effused with personality.
Let’s examine a sample of Slaughterhouse-Five that I think captures the essence of Vonnegut’s style. In this scene Billy Pilgrim, who suffers from war trauma and “has come unstuck in time,” is kept company in the mental ward by his mother and fellow patient and veteran Eliot Rosewater:
There was a still life on Billy’s bedside table—two pills, an ashtray with three lipstick-stained cigarettes in it, one cigarette still burning, and a glass of water. The water was dead. So it goes. Air was trying to get out of that dead water. Bubbles were clinging to the walls of the glass, too weak to climb out.
The cigarettes belonged to Billy’s chain-smoking mother. She had sought the ladies’ room, which was off the ward for WACS and WAVES and SPARS and WAFS who had gone bananas. She would be back any moment now.
Billy covered his head with his blanket again. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward—always got much sicker until she went away. It wasn’t that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality. She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high-school education.
She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy really didn’t like life at all.
Billy heard Eliot Rosewater come in and lie down. Rosewater’s bedsprings talked a lot about that. Rosewater was a big man, but not very powerful. He looked as though he might be made out of nose putty.
And then Billy’s mother came back from the ladies’ room, sat down on a chair between Billy’s and Rosewater’s bed. Rosewater greeted her with melodious warmth, asked how she was today. He seemed delighted to hear that she was fine. He was experimenting with being ardently sympathetic with everybody he met. He thought that might make the world a slightly more pleasant place to live in. He called Billy’s mother “dear.” He was experimenting with calling everybody “dear.”
“Some day,” she promised Rosewater, “I’m going to come in here, and Billy is going to uncover his head, and do you know what he’s going to say?”
“What’s he going to say, dear?”
“He’s going to say, ‘Hello, Mom,’ and he’s going to smile. He’s going to say, ‘Gee, it’s good to see you, Mom. How have you been?’”
“Today could be the day.”
“Every night I pray.”
“That’s a good thing to do.”
“People would be surprised if they knew how much in this world was due to prayers.”
“You never said a truer word, dear.”
“Does your mother come to see you often?”
“My mother is dead,” said Rosewater. So it goes.
“I’m sorry.”
“At least she had a happy life as long as it lasted.”
“That’s a consolation, anyway.”
“Yes.”
“Billy’s father is dead, you know,” said Billy’s mother. So it goes.
“A boy needs a father.”
And on and on it went—that duet between the dumb, praying lady and the big, hollow man who was so full of loving echoes.
There’s a very gentle, inviting simplicity to this prose. And such emotion: In trademark Vonnegut fashion the tone here take on an almost bipolar mix of humor and melancholy. One second people are “bananas,” Rosewater is made out of nose putty, the bedsprings talk. The next, Billy is ashamed because he doesn’t like living. Parents are dead. Billy’s mom is dumb and Rosewater is hollow. This scene includes the famous refrain of the novel, so it goes, which is both played for laughs with the water and used in its normal tragic sense, the resigned acceptance to death.
Something very touching in Vonnegut’s writing, which is seen here, is the way he portrays humans as such vulnerable, sometimes ridiculous creatures: Billy hiding under his blanket, or Rosewater being overly, self-consciously kind.
I find myself imagining Vonnegut’s prose as a sort of benchmark against which all other modern writing is judged. I think he perfectly implemented all the typical rules of writing people share today: cutting the unnecessary, preferring simple words to complex ones, etc. The result is prose in which you can find no fault: delicate, precise and almost humble, but not the least bit lacking in substance. And it feels timeless; the excerpt above could have been written yesterday and I don’t think anyone would notice. If I had to provide aliens with an author that exemplified English prose after World War II, I’d point them to Vonnegut. For that reason I think he’s an especially important writer to study, to develop a general instinct for writing in a modern style. And it goes without saying he’s well worth studying as a humorist too.
Vonnegut is a writer I think this newsletter will be returning to from time to time for more lessons. If you enjoyed this one, I’d love to hear it in the comments. Otherwise, I’ll see you in the next.
—Floyd
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James Franco read me this book.