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

played,
                                       Singing of Mount Abora.
     
    A dulcimer is a glockenspiel shaped like a trapezium, an ugly shape if there ever was one.
    “If the person from Porlock had been my servant, and I had known exactly what Coleridge was doing on the other side of the door, I would have sent him in the instant the poet had written only this much:
                                           
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
                                       A stately pleasure-dome decree:”
     
    (And there that piece ends, having said all it had to say at the two-thirds mark.)
    I myself make pictures from time to time. A typical lithograph by me appears on the title page of the Appendix. I actually had a one-person show of drawings a few years back (1980) in Greenwich Village, not because my pictures were any good but because people had heard of me.
    I took a photograph of my wife, Jill Krementz, for the jacket of a book by her. She set the camera and told me where to stand and how to click it. When the book came out, with my name under the picture, a gallery owner offered me a one-person show of my photographs. It wouldn’t have been just a one-person show. It would have been a one-photograph show. Such is celebrity. Eat your heart out.
    (I am the third member of the American branch of my family, after my daughters Nanette Prior and Edith Squibb, to have a one-person show. I am the second, after my son Mark, to spend any time whatsoever in a laughing academy. I am the first to divorce and remarry. I will say more later on about my committing myself to a bughouse for a short stay. That is quite a bit in the past now, three or four books ago.)
    I would eventually write a book about a painter,
Bluebeard.
I got the idea for it after
Esquire
asked me for a piece about the Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock. The magazine was putting together a fiftieth-anniversary issue to consist of essays on fifty native-born Americans who had made the biggest difference in the country’s destiny since 1932. I wanted Eleanor Roosevelt but Bill Moyers already had her.
    (Truman Capote, a summertime neighbor of mine on Long Island, promised to write about Cole Porter. But then, at the last possible moment, he handed in an essay on my Manhattan neighbor Katharine Hepburn, take it or leave it.
Esquire
took it.)
    “Jackson Pollock (1912–1956),” I wrote, “was a painter who, during his most admired period, beginning in 1947, would spread a canvas on his studio floor and dribble or spatter or pour paint on it. He was born in Cody, Wyoming, which is named in honor of a legendary creator of dead animals, ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody. Buffalo Bill died of old age. Jackson Pollock came east to the State of New York, where he died violently at the age of forty-four, having, as the foremost adventurer in the art movement now known as Abstract Expressionism, done more than any other human being to make his nation, and especially New York City, the unchallenged center of innovative painting in all this world.
    “Until his time, Americans were admirable for their leadership in only one art form, which was jazz. Like all great jazz musicians, Pollock made himself a champion and connoisseur of the appealing accidents which more formal artists worked hard to exclude from their performances.
    “Three years before Pollock killed himself and a young woman he had just met, by driving his car into a tree on a quiet country road, he had begun to move away in his work from being what one critic called ‘Jack the Dripper.’ He was laying on much of the paint with a brush—again. He had started out with a brush, and as an enemy of accidents. Let it be known far and wide, and especially among the Philistines, that this man was capable of depicting in photographic detail the crossing of the Delaware by the Father of our Country, if