Kurt Is Up in Heaven Now

"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever."

--Slaughterhouse-Five

By coincidence, today on campus the English Department is hosting a convocation from Charles J. Shields, whose biography of Harper Lee, Mockingbird, is just out in paperback. Shields revealed during his talk that he is writing the biography of Kurt Vonnegut, who died Wednesday night. Shields has been interviewing Vonnegut for the last year or so, and told me that he had come to the point where he and Vonnegut could talk as casual friends, rather than interviewer and subject. Shields said Vonnegut reminded him of his old man, and he was clearly affected by Vonnegut's death. He mentioned to me that he had been fielding requests from the media to comment on Vonnegut, but has declined them in order to allow the family time to deal with their loss.

The contrast between writing a bio of Harper Lee, who does not grant interviews, and Vonnegut, a voluble, opinionated raconteur, is a stark one. Additionally, one might assume that most people who read a biography of Harper Lee are familiar with her only novel, whereas the biographer of someone like Vonnegut must decide how to represent a somewhat larger oeuvre. Shields admitted that he had not decided how to do this yet, but intends his biography of Vonnegut to be appealing to the "Barnes & Noble" reader as opposed to the literary scholar.

Based on his obvious compassion for Vonnegut, and his persistance in writing about an author who did not wish to be written about, it seems that Shields biography will be a worthy one. Of course, this does not diminish the impact of losing a writer as honest, as human, as Kurt Vonnegut.

"I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, 'Isaac is up in heaven now.' It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, 'Kurt is up in heaven now.' That's my favorite joke."

--A Man Without a Country

Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007