"Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

Breakfast of Champions
By
KURT VONNEGUT, JR.
with drawing by the author
Delacorte Press / Seymour Lawrence
In Memory o┬г Phoebe Hurty,
who comforted me in IndianapolisтАФ
during the Great Depression.
When he hath tried me,
I shall come forth as gold.
тАФJOB
Breakfast of Champions
Preface



The expression "Breakfast of Champions" is a registered trademark of General Mills,
Inc., for use on a breakfast cereal product. The use of the identical expression as the
title for this book is not intended to indicate an association with or sponsorship by
General Mills, nor is it intended to disparage their fine products.


The person to whom this book is dedicated, Phoebe Hurty, is no longer among the
living, as they say. She was an Indianapolis widow when I met her late in the Great
Depression. I was sixteen or so. She was about forty.
She was rich, but she had gone to work every weekday of her adult life, so she went
on doing that. She wrote a sane and funny advice-to-the-lovelorn column for the In-
dianapolis Times, a good paper which is now defunct.
Defunct.
She wrote ads for the William H. Block Company, a department store which still
flourishes in a building my father designed. She wrote this ad for an end-of-the-summer
sale on straw hats: "For prices like this, you can run them through your horse and put
them on your roses."


Phoebe Hurty hired me to write copy for ads about teen-age clothes. I had to wear the
clothes I praised. That was part of the job. And I became friends with her two sons, who
were my age. I was over at their house all the time.
She would talk bawdily to me and her sons, and to our girlfriends when we brought
them around. She was funny. She was liberating. She taught us to be impolite in con
versation not only about sexual matters, but about American history and famous heroes,
about the distribution of wealth, about school, about everything.
I now make my living by being impolite. I am clumsy at it. I keep trying to imitate the
impoliteness which was so graceful in Phoebe Hurty. I think now that grace was easier
for her than it is for me because of the mood of the Great Depression. She believed
what so many Americans believed then: that the nation would be happy and just and
rational when prosperity came.
I never hear that word anymore: Prosperity. It used to be a synonym for Paradise.
And Phoebe Hurty was able to believe that the impoliteness she recommended would
give shape to an American paradise.