Jesus' best joke, according to Kurt Vonnegut

Triumphal entry from the notebooks, Palm Sunday, April 14, 2019. Posted on Good Friday, April 10, 2020. Unstuck in time, Palm Sunday, March 28, 2021.

From the opening credits scene in the 1972 movie adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five.

Posted this one on Palm Sunday last year. I’m posting it again today because it’s Palm Sunday, but as the Tralfamadorians would say, I have always posted it and I always will post it. Seen from their point of view, this blog is one long post stretching back to September 2004 and forward from there to now and however many more years I keep at this. So, listen: This blog is unstuck in time...

Last month [March 31, 2019.] was the 50th anniversary of the publication of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five.” I was surprised when I learned this. I thought it was older. If you’d asked me I’d have said it was published in 1965. I don’t know why 1965. I read it in 1971. I thought of it as a classic. I thought classics were old. Like “Huckleberry Finn” and “Moby-Dick”, classics I had already read. 

Of course I knew it wasn’t that old.

I knew when World War II was. I knew Vonnegut was still alive. But In 1971, 1965 seemed a long time in the past to me. I couldn’t imagine that a book that famous had only recently landed in the bookstores. That it was as new as the last Hardy Boys mystery I’d read, which probably actually was the last Hardy Boys mystery I read.

How could I go back to reading about those two teenage sleuths and their chums solving mysteries in Bayshore after reading what happened to Billy Pilgrim in Dresden?

In February of 1945, when the allies firebombed Dresden, Billy was only a few years older than Frank and Joe.

Vonnegut himself, who was in Dresden that day as a POW, was only twenty-two.

If I could work my will every future edition of “Slaughterhouse-Five” would come minus the first chapter. The first chapter is about how Vonnegut came to write the novel. It doesn't get the story rolling. It's really an author's introduction. If I could work my will it would be noted as such, what's now Chapter 2 would become Chapter 1, and the novel proper would begin where the story begins and with what then would be one of the greatest opening lines in American literature.

“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”

Vonnegut is echoing Melville. He might as well have begun “Listen: Call him Billy.” But what he wrote is better than Melville. “Call me Ishmael” doesn’t get the story rolling. It doesn’t even mean anything, at least not to any readers who aren’t well-versed in their bible reading and know who the Ishmael in the Book of Genesis was. “Call me Ishmael” is just Melville clearing his throat. It’s the second paragraph where he hoists the mainsail and sets sail.

That’s not just a metaphor.

If I could work my will I’d seriously consider eliminating “Call me Ishmael” from all future editions of “Moby-Dick”. The second paragraph is one of the greatest opening paragraphs in American literature. It’s one of the greatest paragraphs ever written.

Back to “Slaughterhouse-Five”.

“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time” is actually printed as two lines. “Listen:” is the whole first paragraph. I think Vonnegut made a mistake there. So I’ve always corrected it in my head. I’ve corrected it here because I can work my will here.

“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”

I'm surprised Vonnegut used a colon there.

Vonnegut hated semicolons.

“All they do is show you’ve been to college,” he declared.

I’ve always assumed he felt the same about colons.

On the other hand, James Baldwin seems to have liked them: he used them frequently.

Maybe an editor stuck it in.

It seems appropriate to put “Slaughterhouse-Five” in the line of American classics that arguably begins with “Moby-Dick.”

Hemingway had his opinion. I have mine.

I’m open to the argument that I’m wrong. I argue with myself about it. All American literature began with Melville. Or it began with Hawthorne.

If it didn’t, it began with Washington Irving, specifically “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”.

Or it began with “Huck Finn”. Hemingway could be right.

It’s more than appropriate to mention Twain and Vonnegut in the same breath.

If all American literature did begin with “Huckleberry Finn”, it runs in a straight line to “Slaughterhouse-Five”, barely taking a breath at anything Hemingway himself wrote.

For the record, the novel by Twain I think pairs best with “Slaughterhouse-Five” is “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”. I probably think this because I read them at about the same time. Close enough in time that I might as well have read them back to back. To make the case “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “A Connecticut Yankee” are books separated at birth by eighty years I would have to read them back to back now.

I don’t have the time or the mental or physical energy.

An interesting thing has happened concerning my love for Vonnegut.

Somewhere along the line “Slaughterhouse-Five” stopped being my favorite of his books.

“God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” took over.

Eliot Rosewater makes a cameo appearance in “Slaughterhouse-Five”.

He and Billy Pilgrim share a room in the psychiatric ward at the veterans hospital. Billy, unstuck in time again, has traveled back to 1948, when he was still in optometry school. He had had a nervous breakdown. Eliot Rosewater was “tired of being drunk all the time.” Vonnegut gives him one of my favorite lines in the novel.

Another time Billy heard Rosewater say to a psychiatrist, “I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren’t going to want to go on living.”

In one of their scenes together, Rosewater tells Billy that everything there is to know about life is in “The Brothers Karamazov” by Feodor Dostoevsky.

I think everything there is to know about life in these United States is in “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater”.

The reason I think that is “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" is about money.

Vonnegut puts it right there in the first paragraph.

A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.

Not as good an opening paragraph as "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time" or even "Call me Ishmael" but it's pretty good.

"God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" is another one I need to re-read to make the argument. I last re-read “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” two and a half years ago when I was in the hospital recovering from back surgery (July 2016). Two and a half years feels like ages ago.

In 1971, I might have started out to read “Slaughterhouse-Five” in the line of classics I’d already read: “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn”; “Moby-Dick”; “Treasure Island”; “Last of the Mohicans”; “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”. But very quickly in I realized it was a break with those books. I knew it for the first adult novel I would read. Those other books were adventure stories. Boys’ adventure stories. “Huck Finn” is a boys adventure story. “Slaughterhouse-Five” centers around what a boy like I was could consider a boy’s adventure. I was used to adventure stories set in during World War II. One of my favorite books at the time, “The Guns of Navarone”, is an adventure story set during World War II.

In 1971 when I first read “Slaughterhouse Five”, I read it at the house Mom and Pop Mannion had just bought on Lake George. The previous owner left-behind all her furniture. That included a bookcase full of books that were Book-of-the-Month Club selections going back several years. “Slaughterhouse Five” was one of them.

Pop Mannion became a Vonnegut fan about a week before I did. He read that same copy of “Slaughterhouse Five” and then passed it on to me.

Pop’s birthday is coming up. April 27. It’ll be the first one without him. Pop didn’t like us to make a fuss about his birthday. He used to like to say whenever his birthday was coming and he saw us starting to make plans for a party, “What does the fact the earth has made another trip around the sun have to do with me?” On the 27th the earth will have made just three days short of three-quarters of another trip around the sun without him. He died on August 1 of last year.

You know what recurring line from “Slaughterhouse-Five” goes here, don’t you?

Kurt Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007. The earth has made twelve trips around the sun without him, almost to the day.

This time I’m not going to resist.

So it goes.

Today is Palm Sunday. It’s a good occasion to re-tell what Vonnegut called the only joke in the New Testament. It occurs in the gospel of John. Chapter 12, verses 1-8, to be exact. It’s the scene in which Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with oil and Judas objects. The oil is expensive. Judas complains that the money spent on the oil could have been better spent on feeding the poor. Jesus tells Judas to leave Mary alone. “The poor,” he says, “you always have with you, but you do not always have me.”

Conservative Christians and Republicans have taken great satisfaction in using that passage to argue against the government safety net.

“What’s the use of wasting the taxpayers’ money on programs that won’t eliminate poverty?” they will propound, as if the only point of SNAP, Medicaid, housing subsidies, the ACA, school lunches, unemployment benefits, universal preschool, and other welfare programs was social engineering and evening out the wealth. “They don’t work. There’s always going to be poor people. Jesus himself said so.”

Vonnegut contended that Jesus was being ironic at Judas’ expense. The nuns who taught us at St. Helen’s taught us the same thing. It was six days before Passover. Jesus had a week left to live. He knew what was ahead of him, and he knew who was going to bring it about. And he was letting Judas know that he knew.

“You can help the poor later,” he was tacitly saying, “you know, after I’m arrested, tortured, condemned to death, marched up to Golgotha, crucified, die in agony and doubt, and am buried, which is going to happen within the week, thanks to you.”

Vonnegut gave his exegesis of John’s gospel in a lay sermon he preached at the invitation of the pastor of an Episcopal church in New York City many trips around the sun ago. He tells that story and recounts his sermon in an essay in “Palm Sunday”, a book he subtitled “An Autobiographical College.”

Often his non-fiction was better than his fiction.

Vonnegut sometimes called himself a Christ-worshiping agnostic. He was closer to being a Christ-worshiping atheist. His friend Isaac Asimov was a straight-up atheist. Asimov died in 1992.

So it goes.

He died on April 2, ten days before Palm Sunday that year. I think he’d have liked to have died a day sooner. I think he’d have thought April Fool’s Day was a more appropriate death date for himself.

Vonnegut delivered a eulogy at a memorial service for Asimov which was sponsored by the American Humanist Association. He opened with what he called his best joke. “Isaac is up in heaven now.” Vonnegut said that it was the funniest thing he could have said to a roomful of humanists. Had the mourners rolling in the aisles. He said he wanted someone to rewrite the joke for his funeral when the time came: “Kurt is up in heaven now.”

I hope someone did.

There are several spots in that second-to-the-last paragraph where I could have worked in a semicolon or a colon. I left them out in Vonnegut’s memory. And to be funny. I think Vonnegut himself would have recognized the joke and laughed. If he were up in heaven now.

The picture up at the top of this post is from the opening sequence of the movie adaptation of “Slaughterhouse-Five”. It’s one of the best film adaptations of a great novel I can name. It was directed by George Roy Hill in 1972 and starred Michael Sacks as Billy Pilgrim. I’ve always wondered why Sacks didn’t go on to have a better career than he did. He was good as Billy at every stage of Billy’s adult life. George Roy Hill was in the middle of an already great career. Hill directed his last movie in 1988. He died in 2002.

So it...you know.

Pop Mannion liked the movie too. But he thought Hill got the ending wrong. The movie ends on the planet Tralfamadore with Billy and Montana Wildhack celebrating the birth of their child. Montana Wildhack is the adult film star the Tralfamadorians brought from Earth to be Billy’s companion and mate.

Montana Wildhack was played by the to my teenage eyes mind-bogglingly voluptuous Valerie Perrine. Perrine’s another one I wonder about. Why didn’t she have a more stellar career? She fared a bit better than Sack in the ‘70s. She had major roles in several more good movies after “Slaughterhouse-Five. “Lenny”. “Superman”. “Superman II”. After that though it was mostly cameo appearances in which she often played parodies of herself and guest appearances on TV shows.

She should have been the Judy Holliday of the 70s and 80s.

She was that good and that funny.

The Tralfamadorians celebrate with Billy and Montana. The last image of the movie is of fireworks bursting in the night sky above the geodesic dome that’s Billy and Montana’s home and cage and the two of them waving to their invisible, skyborne hosts/captors/keepers. Pop Mannion thought the movie shouldn’t have ended there. He thought the story should have come unstuck in time one last time and jumped back to where it began, with Billy back in Europe in World War II, trudging through the snow, on his way to being captured by the Germans and sent to Dresden.

I think Pop was right. So…

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time…

 

Comments

[William Heaps]

Great article! I am 75 and falling farther and farther behind on my reading list. Now I have to go back and re-read! So it goes.

[Robert Alexander]

Thank you Lance!

[Bill Altreuter]

I love the first chapter of Slaughterhouse Five because it lays it out for us: this novel is the only way I can tell this story, which is a true story about what happened to me, but which tortures me so much that I have to distance myself from it. Even though I try to distance myself, though, and even though the passage of time should be some balm I cannot, and it is not.

[Procopius]

Judas has always been given a bad rap. If God's purpose was the sacrifice of Jesus for the purpose of remission of sins for all mankind, then Judas's act was essential to fulfilling God's plan. He should be treated as a hero.