"Kurt Vonnegut - Jailbird" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

almost everything of mine and is now prepared to state the single idea that lies at the core of my
life's work so far. The words are his: "Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail."
This seems true to me - and complete. So I am now in the abashed condition, five days after my
fifty-sixth birthday, of realizing that I needn't have bothered to write several books. A seven-
word telegram would have done the job.
Seriously.
But young Figler's insight reached me too late. I had nearly finished another book - this one.

******

In it is a minor character, "Kenneth Whistler," inspired by an Indianapolis man of my father's
generation. The inspirer's name was Powers Hapgood (1900-1949). He is sometimes mentioned in
histories of American labor for his deeds of derring-do in strikes and at the protests about the
executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, and so on.
I met him only once. I had lunch with him and Father and my Uncle Alex, my father's younger
brother, in Stegemeier's Restaurant in downtown Indianapolis after I came home from the European
part of World War Two. That was in July of 1945. The first atomic bomb had not yet been dropped on
Japan. That would happen in about a month. Imagine that.
I was twenty-two and still in uniform - a private first class who had flunked out of Cornell
University as a student of chemistry before going to war. My prospects did not look good. There
was no family business to go into. My father's architecture firm was defunct. He was broke. I had
just gotten engaged to be married anyway, thinking, "Who but a wife would sleep with me?"
My mother, as I have said ad nauseam in other books, had declined to go on living, since she
could no longer be what she had been at the time of her marriage - one of the richest women in
town.

******

It was Uncle Alex who had arranged the lunch. He and Powers Hapgood had been at Harvard together.
Harvard is all through this book, although I myself never went there. I have since taught there,
briefly and without distinction - while my own home was going to pieces.
I confided that to one of my students - that my home was going to pieces.
To which he made this reply: "It shows."
Uncle Alex was so conservative politically that I do not think he would have eaten lunch with
Hapgood gladly if Hapgood had not been a fellow Harvard man. Hapgood was then a labor union
officer, a vice-president of the local CIO. His wife Mary had been the Socialist Party's candidate
for vice-president of the United States again and again.
In fact, the first time I voted in a national election I voted for Norman Thomas and Mary
Hapgood, not even knowing that she was an Indianapolis person. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S
Truman won. I imagined that I was a socialist. I believed that socialism would be good for the


file:///F|/rah/Kurt%20Vonnegut/Jailbird.txt (3 of 96) [8/28/03 1:00:06 PM]
 file:///F|/rah/Kurt%20Vonnegut/Jailbird.txt

common man. As a private first class in the infantry, I was surely a common man.

******

The meeting with Hapgood came about because I had told Uncle Alex that I might try to get a job