Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) by Kurt Vonnegut
Authors: Kurt Vonnegut
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photographs.
“Her books aren’t theory. They are evidence, take it or leave it, wholly organic, growing out of the topsoil of this moist, blue-green planet like an apple tree.
“Scientists of the future will want to know if any of the photographs of Jill in this book have been retouched. No. Let them explain, if they can, why it was that the older she was the more beautiful she became.”
The Festschrift ended with this clever sonnet, “To Jill Turning Fifty,” by one of Jill’s favorite photographic subjects, the man of letters John Updike:
The comely soul of self-effacement, you
can be admired as the twinkle in
a thousand authors’ eyes where you, unseen,
perform behind the camera. How do
you soften up those hardened visages,
all pickled in the brine of daily words?—
Eudora, Tennessee, Anaïs, Kurt,
Saul, Gore, Bill, Jim, Joan, Truman, Toni, Liz?
And children, too, grow docile in your lens,
and stare like lilies toward your clicking sun
while how it feels to be a very young
whatever is elicited. Now ends
your fifth decade. Live henceforth, Leica queen,
as Jill all candlelit, the seeress seen.
X
John Updike lectured in Indianapolis soon after Jill’s fiftieth birthday. Before he went, he asked me what he should know about the city of my birth. I said that I myself had become a stranger there when Jill was an itty-bitty baby. “I get invited out there to lecture, too,” I said, “and when I go I don’t feel as though I’m going home.” It was one more nice enough American city where nice people would come to hear me. There would be some people who knew me from long ago, or whose parents did, but that could happen to Updike, too. I didn’t have to go to my hometown for that to be the case, and neither did he. I had met old high school classmates or their children in San Diego, in Portland, Oregon, in Iowa City, in Manhattan.
(The sublime actress Meryl Streep, whom I had never met, came up to me in a movie theater lobby one time to tell me that she had been the roommate at Vassar of the daughter of a girl I used to date in high school.)
The Class of 1940 of Shortridge High School had its Fiftieth Reunion recently, and those in charge sent out a list of members who had vanished entirely as far as Indianapolis was concerned. I was able to report back that one of them was anything but a ghost to fellow biochemists in Boston, where he was an expert on the aging process. Another, I wrote, was a good deal more than a memory to music people in New York City, since he was a manager of the musical estates of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein.
(I didn’t go to the reunion. I was afraid of it because, like everybody else, I had had some really lousy times in high school. I probably would have gone anyway and had a swell time and lots of laughs. But then I was lucky enough to come down with the disease of the moment in the Hamptons, which was Lyme disease. I get sick only when it’s useful, knock on wood. Viral pneumonia got me out of trying to be a chemist in 1942.I went briefly apeshit in the 1980s in an effort to get out of life entirely, and wound up playing Eightball in a locked ward for thirty days instead.)
I told John that Indianapolis, as far as I knew, was the only human settlement in all of history whose location was determined by a pen and a straightedge. The new State of Indiana was approximately a rectangle, but with a jagged bottom edge which had been scrawled by water obeying gravity, not by men. Men next drew on a map a great X, connecting the corners of the new state with diagonals. Where the diagonals intersected, no matter what was there, there would be the capital, whose name was to be Indianapolis. And it came to pass. (There was no navigable waterway there for cheap transportation, but the railroads would find it quick enough.)
The city-to-be was laid out on featureless land as flat as a pool table (Eightball, anybody?), according to a plan by the French-born architect Pierre
“Her books aren’t theory. They are evidence, take it or leave it, wholly organic, growing out of the topsoil of this moist, blue-green planet like an apple tree.
“Scientists of the future will want to know if any of the photographs of Jill in this book have been retouched. No. Let them explain, if they can, why it was that the older she was the more beautiful she became.”
The Festschrift ended with this clever sonnet, “To Jill Turning Fifty,” by one of Jill’s favorite photographic subjects, the man of letters John Updike:
The comely soul of self-effacement, you
can be admired as the twinkle in
a thousand authors’ eyes where you, unseen,
perform behind the camera. How do
you soften up those hardened visages,
all pickled in the brine of daily words?—
Eudora, Tennessee, Anaïs, Kurt,
Saul, Gore, Bill, Jim, Joan, Truman, Toni, Liz?
And children, too, grow docile in your lens,
and stare like lilies toward your clicking sun
while how it feels to be a very young
whatever is elicited. Now ends
your fifth decade. Live henceforth, Leica queen,
as Jill all candlelit, the seeress seen.
X
John Updike lectured in Indianapolis soon after Jill’s fiftieth birthday. Before he went, he asked me what he should know about the city of my birth. I said that I myself had become a stranger there when Jill was an itty-bitty baby. “I get invited out there to lecture, too,” I said, “and when I go I don’t feel as though I’m going home.” It was one more nice enough American city where nice people would come to hear me. There would be some people who knew me from long ago, or whose parents did, but that could happen to Updike, too. I didn’t have to go to my hometown for that to be the case, and neither did he. I had met old high school classmates or their children in San Diego, in Portland, Oregon, in Iowa City, in Manhattan.
(The sublime actress Meryl Streep, whom I had never met, came up to me in a movie theater lobby one time to tell me that she had been the roommate at Vassar of the daughter of a girl I used to date in high school.)
The Class of 1940 of Shortridge High School had its Fiftieth Reunion recently, and those in charge sent out a list of members who had vanished entirely as far as Indianapolis was concerned. I was able to report back that one of them was anything but a ghost to fellow biochemists in Boston, where he was an expert on the aging process. Another, I wrote, was a good deal more than a memory to music people in New York City, since he was a manager of the musical estates of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein.
(I didn’t go to the reunion. I was afraid of it because, like everybody else, I had had some really lousy times in high school. I probably would have gone anyway and had a swell time and lots of laughs. But then I was lucky enough to come down with the disease of the moment in the Hamptons, which was Lyme disease. I get sick only when it’s useful, knock on wood. Viral pneumonia got me out of trying to be a chemist in 1942.I went briefly apeshit in the 1980s in an effort to get out of life entirely, and wound up playing Eightball in a locked ward for thirty days instead.)
I told John that Indianapolis, as far as I knew, was the only human settlement in all of history whose location was determined by a pen and a straightedge. The new State of Indiana was approximately a rectangle, but with a jagged bottom edge which had been scrawled by water obeying gravity, not by men. Men next drew on a map a great X, connecting the corners of the new state with diagonals. Where the diagonals intersected, no matter what was there, there would be the capital, whose name was to be Indianapolis. And it came to pass. (There was no navigable waterway there for cheap transportation, but the railroads would find it quick enough.)
The city-to-be was laid out on featureless land as flat as a pool table (Eightball, anybody?), according to a plan by the French-born architect Pierre
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