Kurt Vonnegut, The Art of Fiction No. 64

The Paris Review: Was your sister funny, too?

Kurt Vonnegut: Oh, yes. There was an odd cruel streak to her sense of humor, though, which didn’t fit in with the rest of her character somehow. She thought it was terribly funny whenever anybody fell down. One time she saw a woman come out of a streetcar horizontally, and she laughed for weeks after that.

TPR: Horizontally?

KV: Yes. This woman must have caught her heels somehow. Anyway, the streetcar door opened, and my sister happened to be watching from the sidewalk, and then she saw this woman come out horizontally—as straight as a board, face down, and about two feet off the ground.

TPR: Slapstick?

KV: Sure. We loved Laurel and Hardy. You know what one of the funniest things is that can happen in a film?

TPR: No.

KV: To have somebody walk through what looks like a shallow little puddle, but which is actually six feet deep. I remember a movie where Cary Grant was loping across lawns at night. He came to a low hedge, which he cleared ever so gracefully, only there was a twenty-foot drop on the other side. But the thing my sister and I loved best was when somebody in a movie would tell everybody off, and then make a grand exit into the coat closet. He had to come out again, of course, all tangled in coat hangers and scarves.

Kurt Vonnegut, The Art of Fiction No. 64 / Interviewed by David Hayman, David Michaelis, George Plimpton, Richard Rhodes / The Paris Review

Kurt Vonnegut, The Art of Fiction No. 64

The Paris Review: So every afternoon you would go to the Echo office—

Kurt Vonnegut: Yeah. And one time, while I was writing, I happened to sniff my armpits absentmindedly. Several people saw me do it, and thought it was funny—and ever after that I was given the name “Snarf.” In the annual for my graduating class, the class of 1940, I’m listed as “Kurt Snarfield Vonnegut, Jr.” Technically, I wasn’t really a snarf. A snarf was a person who went around sniffing girls’ bicycle saddles. I didn’t do that. “Twerp” also had a very specific meaning, which few people know now. Through careless usage, “twerp” is a pretty formless insult now.

TPR: What is a twerp in the strictest sense, in the original sense?

KV: It’s a person who inserts a set of false teeth between the cheeks of his ass.

TPR: I see.

KV: I beg your pardon; between the cheeks of his or her ass. I’m always offending feminists that way.

TPR: I don’t quite understand why someone would do that with false teeth.

KV: In order to bite the buttons off the backseats of taxicabs. That’s the only reason twerps do it. It’s all that turns them on.

Kurt Vonnegut, The Art of Fiction No. 64 / Interviewed by David Hayman, David Michaelis, George Plimpton, Richard Rhodes / The Paris Review

Kurt Vonnegut, The Art of Fiction No. 64

Kurt Vonnegut: Slapstick may be a very bad book. I am perfectly willing to believe that. Everybody else writes lousy books, so why shouldn’t I? What was unusual about the reviews was that they wanted people to admit now that I had never been any good. The reviewer for the SundayTimes actually asked critics who had praised me in the past to now admit in public how wrong they’d been. My publisher, Sam Lawrence, tried to comfort me by saying that authors were invariably attacked when they became fabulously well-to-do.The Paris Review: You needed comforting?

KV: I never felt worse in my life. I felt as though I were sleeping standing up on a boxcar in Germany again.

TPR: That bad?

KV: No. But bad enough. All of a sudden, critics wanted me squashed like a bug. And it wasn’t just that I had money all of a sudden, either. The hidden complaint was that I was barbarous, that I wrote without having made a systematic study of great literature, that I was no gentleman, since I had done hack writing so cheerfully for vulgar magazines—that I had not paid my academic dues.

TPR: You had not suffered?

KV: I had suffered, all right—but as a badly educated person in vulgar company and in a vulgar trade. It was dishonorable enough that I perverted art for money. I then topped that felony by becoming, as I say, fabulously well-to-do. Well, that’s just too damn bad for me and for everybody. I’m completely in print, so we’re all stuck with me and stuck with my books.

TPR: Do you mean to fight back?

KV: In a way. I’m on the New York State Council for the Arts now, and every so often some other member talks about sending notices to college English departments about some literary opportunity, and I say, “Send them to the chemistry departments, send them to the zoology departments, send them to the anthropology departments and the astronomy departments and physics departments, and all the medical and law schools. That’s where the writers are most likely to be.”

TPR: You believe that?

KV: I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

Kurt Vonnegut, The Art of Fiction No. 64 / Interviewed by David Hayman, David Michaelis, George Plimpton, Richard Rhodes / The Paris Review