Bluebeard

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

May I say, too, that much of what I put in this book was inspired by the grotesque prices paid for works of art during the past century. Tremendous concentrations of paper wealth have made it possible for a few persons or institutions to endow certain sorts of human playfulness with inappropriate and hence distressing seriousness.

Having written “The End” to this story of my life, I find it prudent to scamper back here to before the beginning, to my front door, so to speak, and to make this apology to arriving guests: “I promised you an autobiography, but something went wrong in the kitchen. It turns out to be a diary of this past troubled summer, too! We can always send out for pizzas if necessary. Come in, come in.”

What a lovely first paragraph :)

So we were a very tiny family indeed in this great big house, with its two tennis courts and swimming pool, and its carriage house and its potato barn—and its three hundred yards of private beach on the open Atlantic Ocean. One might think that my two sons, Terry and Henri Karabekian, whom I named in honor of my closest friend, the late Terry Kitchen, and the artist Terry and I most envied, Henri Matisse, might enjoy coming here with their families. Terry has two sons of his own now. Henri has a daughter. But they do not speak to me. “So be it! So be it!” I cry in this manicured wilderness. “Who gives a damn!” Excuse this outburst.

“So be it! So be it!” I cry in this manicured wilderness. “Who gives a damn!” Excuse this outburst.

All of our servants quit soon after Edith died. They said it had simply become too lonely here. So I hired some new ones, paying them a great deal of money to put up with me and all the loneliness.

She and her friends ignore me, as though I were a senile veteran from some forgotten war, daydreaming away what little remains of his life as a museum guard. Why should I be offended? This house, in addition to being a home, shelters what is the most important collection of Abstract Expressionist paintings still in private hands. Since I have done no useful work for decades, what else am I, really, but a museum guard?

I don’t think he writes much anymore. And, as I say, I don’t paint at all anymore. I won’t even doodle on the memo pad next to the downstairs telephone. A couple of weeks ago, I caught myself doing exactly that, and I deliberately snapped the point off the pencil, broke the pencil in two, and I threw its broken body into a waste-basket, like a baby rattlesnake which had wanted to poison me.

“Paul—why don’t you sell your house and get a little walking-around money, and move in here? Look at all the room I’ve got. And I’m never going to have a wife or a lady friend again, and neither are you. Jesus! Who would have us? We look like a couple of gutshot iguanas! So move in! I won’t bother you, and you won’t bother me. What could make more sense?”

Paul Slazinger says, incidentally, that the human condition can be summed up in just one word, and this is the word: Embarrassment.

So I elected not to swim, but to sunbathe some distance away from her. I did, however, come close enough to say, “Hello.” This was her curious reply: “Tell me how your parents died.” What a spooky woman! She could be a witch. Who but a witch could have persuaded me to write my autobiography? She has just stuck her head in the room to say that it was time I went to New York City, where I haven’t been since Edith died. I’ve hardly been out of this house since Edith died. New York City, here I come. This is terrible!

But what sticks in my mind like a thorn now, and I haven’t thought about this for years: he would have had no hesitation in razzing his own son, in razzing me. So, thanks to the conversation Mrs. Berman struck up with me on the beach only two weeks ago, I am in a frenzy of adolescent resentment against a father who was buried almost fifty years ago! Let me off this hellish time machine!

I certainly will keep this a secret, too, if only to save the life of Paul Slazinger. If he finds out who she really is now, after all his posturing as a professional writer, he will do what Terry Kitchen, the only other best friend I ever had, did. He will commit suicide. In terms of commercial importance in the literary marketplace, Circe Berman is to Paul Slazinger what General Motors is to a bicycle factory in Albania! Mum’s the word!

And it was in Cairo that they met the criminal Vartan Mamigonian, a survivor of an earlier massacre. “Never trust a survivor,” my father used to warn me, with Vartan Mamigonian in mind, “until you find out what he did to stay alive.”

“The titles are meant to be uncommunicative,” I said. “What’s the point of being alive,” she said, “if you’re not going to communicate?”

Several of my teachers were so impressed that they suggested to my parents that perhaps I should pursue a career as an artist. But this advice seemed so impractical to my parents that they asked the teachers to stop putting such ideas in my head. They thought that artists lived in poverty, and that they had to die before their works were appreciated. They were generally right about that, of course. The paintings by dead men who were poor most of their lives are the most valuable pieces in my collection. And if an artist wants to really jack up the prices of his creations, may I suggest this: suicide.

“That’s the secret of how to enjoy writing and how to make yourself meet high standards,” said Mrs. Berman. “You don’t write for the whole world, and you don’t write for ten people, or two. You write for just one person.”

Much to my surprise, Father began to blossom as an artist, too. In all the guessing about where my artistic talent might have come from, one thing seemed certain: it hadn’t come from him or from anybody on his side of the family. When he still had his shoe repair shop, I never saw him do anything imaginative with all the scraps lying around, maybe make a fancy belt for me or a purse for Mother. He was a no-nonsense repairman, and that was all. But then, as though he were in a trance, and using the simplest hand-tools, he began to make perfectly beautiful cowboy boots, which he sold from door to door. They weren’t only tough and comfortable: they were dazzling jewelry for manly feet and calves, scintillating with gold and silver stars and eagles and flowers and bucking broncos cut from flattened tin cans and bottle caps. But this new development in his life wasn’t as nice for me to see as you might think. It gave me the creeps, actually, because I would look into his eyes, and there wasn’t anybody home anymore. • • • I would see the same thing happen to Terry Kitchen years later. He used to be my closest friend. And suddenly he began to paint the pictures which make many people say today that he was the greatest of all the Abstract Expressionists—superior to Pollock, to Rothko. That was fine, I guess, except that when I looked into my best friend’s eyes, there wasn’t anybody home anymore.

That was an ordinary way for a patriotic American to talk back then. It’s hard to believe how sick of war we used to be. We used to boast of how small our Army and Navy were, and how little influence generals and admirals had in Washington. We used to call armaments manufacturers “Merchants of Death.” Can you imagine that?

So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else to start anew. I wasn’t like my parents. I didn’t have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends and relatives to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been more of philosophical value than in the United States. “Here goes nothing,” says the American as he goes off the high diving board. Yes, and my mind really was as blank as an embryo’s as I crossed this great continent on womblike Pullman cars. It was as though there had never been a San Ignacio. Yes, and when the Twentieth Century Limited from Chicago plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with its lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal. Ten minutes later I was born in Grand Central Station, wearing the first suit I had ever owned, and carrying a cardboard valise and a portfolio of my very best drawings. Who was there to welcome this beguiling Armenian infant? Not a soul, not a soul.

simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world’s champions. The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an “exhibitionist.” How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, “Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!”

Sad

But let’s forget me for the moment, and focus on the works of Gregory. They were truthful about material things, but they lied about time. He celebrated moments, anything from a child’s first meeting with a department store Santa Claus to the victory of a gladiator at the Circus Maximus, from the driving of the golden spike which completed a transcontinental railroad to a man’s going on his knees to ask a woman to marry him. But he lacked the guts or the wisdom, or maybe just the talent, to indicate somehow that time was liquid, that one moment was no more important than any other, and that all moments quickly run away. Let me put it another way: Dan Gregory was a taxidermist. He stuffed and mounted and varnished and mothproofed supposedly great moments, all of which turn out to be depressing dust-catchers, like a moosehead bought at a country auction or a sailfish on the wall of a dentist’s waiting room.

Let me put it yet another way: life, by definition, is never still. Where is it going? From birth to death, with no stops on the way. Even a picture of a bowl of pears on a checkered tablecloth is liquid, if laid on canvas by the brush of a master. Yes, and by some miracle I was surely never able to achieve as a painter, nor was Dan Gregory, but which was achieved by the best of the Abstract Expressionists, in the paintings which have greatness birth and death are always there. Birth and death were even on that old piece of beaverboard Terry Kitchen sprayed at seeming random so long ago. I don’t know how he got them in there, and neither did he. I sigh. “Ah, me,” says old Rabo Karabekian.

I complained to Slazinger and Mrs. Berman at supper last night that the young people of today seemed to be trying to get through life with as little information as possible. “They don’t even know anything about the Vietnam War or the Empress Josephine, or what a Gorgon is,” I said. Mrs. Berman defended them. She said that it was a little late for them to do anything about the Vietnam War, and that they had more interesting ways of learning about vanity and the power of sex than studying a woman who had lived in another country one hundred and seventy-five years ago. “All that anybody needs to know about a Gorgon,” she said, “is that there is no such thing.” Slazinger, who still believes her to be only semiliterate, patronized her most daintily with these words: “As the philosopher George Santayana said, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ ”

Lol

Where was Dan Gregory? I could not see him at first. He was motionless and silent—and shapeless in a voluminous black caftan, displaying his back to me, and low, hunched over on a camel saddle before a fireplace in the middle, about twenty feet from me. I identified the objects on the mantelpiece above him before I understood where he was. They were the whitest things in the grotto. They were eight human skulls, an octave arranged in order of size, with a child’s at one end and a great-grandfather’s at the other—a marimba for cannibals. There was a kind of music up there, a tedious fugue for pots and pans deployed under a leaking skylight to the right of Gregory. The skylight was under a blanket of melting snow.

I planned to catch a train back the next afternoon, but met a fellow East Hamptonite, Floyd Pomerantz, at breakfast. He, too, was headed home later in the day, and offered me a ride in his Cadillac stretch limousine. I accepted with alacrity. What a satisfactory form of transportation that proved to be! That Cadillac was better than womblike. The Twentieth Century Limited, as I have said, really was womblike, in constant motion, with all sorts of unexplained thumps and bangs outside. But the Cadillac was coffinlike. Pomerantz and I got to be dead in there. The hell with this baby stuff. It was so cozy, two of us in a single, roomy, gangster-style casket. Everybody should be buried with somebody else, just about anybody else, whenever feasible.

Slazinger said afterwards that there ought to be some way to persuade people like Pomerantz, and the Hamptons teem with people like Pomerantz, that they had already extorted more than enough from the economy. He suggested that we build a Money Hall of Fame out here, with busts of the arbitrageurs and hostile-takeover specialists and venture capitalists and investment bankers and golden handshakers and platinum parachutists in niches, with their statistics cut into stone—how many millions they had stolen legally in how short a time.

When I walked into my foyer after my trip to New York City, though, a scene so shocking enveloped me that, word of honor, I thought an axe murder had happened there. I am not joking! I thought I was looking at blood and gore! It may have taken me as long as a minute to realize what I was really seeing: wallpaper featuring red roses as big as cabbages against a field of black, babyshit-brown baseboards, trim and doors, and six chromos of little girls on swings, with mats of purple velvet, and with gilded frames which must have weighed as much as the limousine which had delivered me to this catastrophe.

“After I found out who she was,” he said, “and the way you’d kept it from me, I became more enthusiastic than she was about redoing the foyer. I said that if she really wanted to make you happy, she would paint the woodwork babyshit brown.” He knew that I had had at least two unhappy experiences with the color practically everybody calls “babyshit brown.” Even in San Ignacio when I was a boy, people called it “babyshit brown.”

My most thrilling accomplishment, however, was this: I finished a meticulously accurate painting of Gregory’s studio in only six months! The bone was bone, the fur was fur, the hair was hair, the dust was dust, the soot was soot, the wool was wool, the cotton was cotton, the walnut was walnut, the oak was oak, the horsehide was horsehide, the cowhide was cowhide, the iron was iron, the steel was steel, the old was old and the new was new. Yes, and the water dripping from the skylight in my painting was not only the wettest water you ever saw: in each droplet, if you looked at it through a magnifying glass, there was the whole damned studio! Not bad! Not bad!

Back to the past: When Dan Gregory burned up my painting, why didn’t I do to him what he had done to Beskudnikov? Why didn’t I mock him and walk out and find a better job? For one thing, I had learned a lot about the commercial art world by then, and knew that artists like me were a dime a dozen and all starving to death. Consider all I had to lose: a room of my own, three square meals a day, entertaining errands to run all over town, and lots of playtime with the beautiful Marilee. What a fool I would have been to let self-respect interfere with my happiness!

“People think we’re in love,” I said to her on a walk one day. And she said, “They’re right.” “You know what I mean,” I said. “What do you think love is anyway?” she said. “I guess I don’t know,” I said. “You know the best part—” she said, “walking around like this and feeling good about everything. If you missed the rest of it, I certainly wouldn’t cry for you.” So we went to the Museum of Modern Art for maybe the fiftieth time. I had been with Gregory for almost three years then, and was just a shade under twenty years old. I wasn’t a budding artist anymore. I was an employee of an artist, and lucky to have a job of any kind. An awful lot of people were putting up with any sort of job, and waiting for the Great Depression to end, so that real life could get going again. But we would also have to get through another World War before real life could get going again. Don’t you love it? This is real life we are now experiencing.

Won’t she read them in this manuscript, and easily guess the rest? No. She keeps her promises, and she promised me when I began to write that, once I reached one hundred and fifty pages, if I ever reached one hundred and fifty pages, she would reward me with perfect privacy in this writing room. She said further that when I got this far, if I got that far, this book and I would have become so intimate that it would be indecent for her to intrude. And that is nice, I guess, to have earned through hard work certain privileges and marks of respect, except that I have to ask myself: “Who is she to reward or punish me, and what the hell is this: a nursery school or a prison camp?” I don’t ask her that, because then she might take away all my privileges.

He leafed through my portfolio while saying things like this, very quietly, thank God, so his students could not hear: “Oh, dear, dear, dear,” and “My poor boy,” and “Who did this to you—or did you do it to yourself?” I asked him what on Earth was wrong, and he said, “I’m not sure I can put it into words.” He really did have to think hard about it. “This is going to sound very odd—” he said at last, “but, technically speaking, there’s nothing you can’t do. Do you understand what I’m saying?” “No,” I said. “I’m not sure I do, either,” he said. He screwed up his face, “I think—I think—it is somehow very useful, and maybe even essential, for a fine artist to have to somehow make his peace on the canvas with all the things he cannot do. That is what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call “personality,” or maybe even “pain.”” “I see,” I said. He relaxed. “I think I do, too,” he said. “It’s something I’ve never had to articulate before. How interesting!” “I can’t tell if you’ve accepted me as a student or not,” I said. “No, I’ve rejected you,” he said. “It wouldn’t be fair to either one of us if I were to take you on.” I was angry. “You’ve rejected me on the basis of some high-flown theory you just made up,” I protested. “Oh, no, no, no,” he said. “I rejected you before I thought of the theory.” “On the basis of what?” I demanded. “On the basis of the very first picture in your portfolio,” he said. “It told me, ‘Here is a man without passi...

The Only Way to Have a Successful Revolution in Any Field of Human Activity. For what it is worth: Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening team with a peculiar membership goes to work on them. Otherwise, life will go on exactly as before, no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright dumb that life may be. The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise, the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail. The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius—a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in general circulation. “A genius working alone,” he says, “is invariably ignored as a lunatic.” The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find: a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. “A person like that working alone,” says Slazinger, “can only yearn out loud for changes, but fail to say what their shapes should be.” The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain anything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. “He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting,” says Slazinger. “Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would ...

How did I come to possess Kim Bum Suk’s invaluable doctoral thesis at precisely the moment I must write about my reunion with Marilee in 1950? We have here another coincidence, which superstitious persons would no doubt take seriously. Two days ago, the widow Berman, made vivacious and supranaturally alert by God only knows what postwar pharmaceutical miracles, entered the bookstore in East Hampton, and heard, by her own account, one book out of hundreds calling out to her. It said that I would like it. So she bought it for me. She had no way of knowing that I was on the brink of writing about Florence. Nobody did. She gave me the book without herself examining the contents, and so did not know that my old girlfriend’s palazzo was therein described. One would soon go mad if one took such coincidences too seriously. One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

“Now tell me what you’ve been doing with all these years,” she said. “For some reason I find myself dismayingly uninteresting,” I said. “Oh, come, come, come,” she said. “You lost an eye, you married, you reproduced twice, and you say you’ve taken up painting again. How could a life be more eventful?” I thought to myself that there had been events, but very few, certainly, since our Saint Patrick’s Day love-making so long ago, which had made me proud and happy. I had old soldier’s anecdotes I had told my drinking buddies in the Cedar Tavern, so I told her those. She had had a life. I had accumulated anecdotes. She was home. Home was somewhere I never thought I’d be.

Slazinger was there, too. That was where I met him. He was gathering material for a novel about painters—one of dozens of novels he never wrote. At the end of that evening, I remember, he said to me: “I can’t get over how passionate you guys are, and yet so absolutely unserious.” “Everything about life is a joke,” I said. “Don’t you know that?” “No,” he said.

When we sauntered back to this house through the darkness, she held my hand, and she said I had taken her dancing after all. “When was that?” I said. “We’re dancing now,” she said. “Oh,” I said. She said again that she couldn’t imagine how I or anybody could have made such a big, beautiful painting about something so important. “I can’t believe I did it myself,” I said. “Maybe I didn’t. Maybe it was done by potato bugs.” She said that she looked at all the Polly Madison books in Celeste’s room one time, and couldn’t believe she’d written them. “Maybe you’re a plagiarist,” I said. “That’s what I feel like sometimes,” she said. When we reached this house, and although we had not and never would make love, our moods were postcoital. May I say, without seeming boastful, that I had never seen her so languorous?