Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

to capture several important truths about Alex, including a hint of disappointment. Uncle Alex was a proud graduate of Harvard, who would rather have been a scholar of literature than an insurance man.
    “When Father finished the portrait, made sure every square inch of masonite had its share of paint, Uncle Alex had disappeared entirely. We had a drunk and lustful Queen Victoria instead.
    “This was terrible.
    “Now then: The most notorious interrupter of a masterpiece in progress, surely, was ‘the person on business from Porlock,’ who broke for all eternity the concentration of Samuel Taylor Coleridge on his poem
Kubla Khan.
But if there had been such a person to intrude regularly on my father in the deathly still attic of our house in Indianapolis during the Great Depression, Father might now be remembered as a minor Hoosier painter—as well, let it be said, as a good father and fine architect.
    “And I will argue that interruptions are commonly beneficial, once a work of art is well begun. I myself, when reading a novel or watching a play or a film, with many chapters or scenes still to come, hear my brain saying a variation on my sister’s ‘Got it, got it, got it,’ which is, ‘End it, end it, end it. For the love of God, please end it now.’ Yes, and after I have written only about two-thirds of a novel or play of my own, I suddenly feel silly and relieved, as though I were running before the wind in a little sailboat, and headed home.
    “I have done all I hoped to do, and more, if I’ve been really lucky, than when I put to sea.
    “That confession will seem as damning and barbarous to humorless persons as my sister’s fantasy of whizzing through the Louvre on roller skates. At least it has the virtue of truthfulness. And I beg them to forget my own jerry-built creations, and to consider instead the tragedy of
Hamlet
, by William Shakespeare, act 3, scene 4—with two more acts, nine more scenes, to go. Hamlet has just killed the innocent, faithful, tiresome old man Polonius, having mistaken him for his mother’s new husband. He discovers who it is that he has murdered, and declares with emotions which are mixed, to say the least: ‘Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!’
    “Got it, got it, got it. All freeze. Bring in a person from Porlock. Lower the curtain. The play is done.
    “Even in an essay as short as this one, what I will call the ‘Two-thirds of a Masterpiece Is More Than Enough’ rule is often applicable. I’ve had only one point to make, and I’ve made it. I will do what my mother called ‘finishing it,’ which, if I am not going to unmake the point again, has to be as empty as talk at the end of a party, on the order of ‘Goodness, look how late it is’ and ‘It seems we’ve run out of ice’ and ‘Do you remember where you put your coat?’ and so on.
    “There is a formula for a well-made three-act play, which came from I know not where, which goes like this: ‘First act, question mark. Second act, exclamation point. Third act, period.’ And since normal people want only question marks and exclamation points for works of art of every sort, I place as much value on a period as on the painting careers of my father and my sister, which is zero—zip.
    “As for the person from Porlock on his quotidian errand, and what he did to Coleridge: I have to ask if he deprived poetry lovers of anything. Coleridge had committed thirty lines to paper before the wretched, rash, intruding fool crashed in, and toward the bottom was this:
                                           
A damsel with a dulcimer
                                       In a vision once I saw:
                                       It was an Abyssinian maid,
                                       And on her dulcimer she