Episode 23: “A Strange Way to Live”

What attracts me most is Vonnegut’s willingness, as an artist, to let the air out of the tires of what he had good reason to believe would be his masterpiece. On page two, the narrator calls the novel his “lousy little book.” Who is this guy? I thought. Why is he trashing his own book before I’ve even read it? Is this an author’s note I could have skipped? No, it says right here, it’s Chapter One. “I would hate to tell you,” he writes, “what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time.” These are my favorite twenty-something pages written in our language. The man, “an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls, with his sons full grown,” saying that he is a failure, and his greatest accomplishment is a failure.

Vonnegut had to open his masterpiece with a bit of self-sabotage. I can understand that.

Linda Kuehl’s 1978 Art of Fiction interview with Joan Didion, also featured in this episode, begins as follows:

INTERVIEWER

You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you why.

JOAN DIDION

It’s hostile in that you’re trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It’s hostile to try to wrench around someone else’s mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

INTERVIEWER

Are you conscious of the reader as you write? Do you write listening to the reader listening to you?

DIDION

Obviously I listen to a reader, but the only reader I hear is me. I am always writing to myself. So very possibly I’m committing an aggressive and hostile act toward myself.