There really are such things as destined moods. At a certain point, usually in late middle age, something congeals and solidifies and encysts itself – and that’s your lot, that’s your destiny. You’re going to feel this way for the rest of your life. You have found your destined mood, and it has found you, too.
You know, Kurt Vonnegut is statistically the favourite writer of very many of your peers; and I bet you have an affection for his stuff, as do I – its originality and charm. All right, his flights of inventiveness sometimes felt undercontrolled, and he was too strongly attracted to what Clive James called ‘gee-whiz writing’ (‘So it goes’); but what is inarguable is the quality of his ear. And I don’t just mean an ear for dialogue (an eavesdropper’s attention to varying rhythms of speech), though he excelled at that too. I mean the mind’s ear – your mind’s ear, which as we’ll see is the conductor, the musical director, of your prose.
Kurt was an effervescently affable man who, in his final decade, lost all his mirth, turning away from the world and starting to fold inwards. My first encounter with the Later Kurt left me slightly shocked – and slightly hurt (I realised at that moment how fond I’d grown of him). We were in the antechamber of a function in New York; formerly he had always greeted me with his characteristically spluttering enthusiasm, but that night he just nodded distantly and gazed elsewhere. His face seemed drained of its responsiveness; it was resignedly static. And his bearing was different too: stolid, erect, even soldierly – no longer donnishly gangly and loose. He was on duty. And at that gathering his wheezily breathless laugh went unheard.
Now Kurt did describe himself as a hereditary ‘monopolar depressive’ (his mother was a suicide); but psychological disorder, as an explanation, tends to frustrate all human curiosity; and besides he had lived with that for most of his adult life. In his Letters, it should be duly noted, he went on being affectionate, generous, and playful with relatives and old friends, right up until his death;*1 but with everyone else he could offer only a distant civility.
As I see it (and I am only a remote observer), there were two other elements. His amatory timeline – a crucial determinant here – almost exactly corresponds to that of my father: born in 1922, early marriage and early children, divorced in his forties, second marriage terminated by second wife (after he discovered that ‘she had stockpiled a guy’ in her studio next door), and, thereafter, celibacy. And as Kingsley told me, late on, ‘it’s only half a life without a woman’. Bear in mind too that Kurt was far more uxorious (and monogamous) than Kingsley. Still, the result was the same: romantic defeat and an internal ‘snarl of disappointment’.
The other component, for Kurt, had to do with literary pride. For writers, this is the rule of thumb: those who sell a lot want to be taken seriously, and those who are taken seriously want to sell a lot (and the latter ambition is clearly the more ignoble). Kurt, who sold a lot, wanted to be taken seriously; he felt under-esteemed. And don’t ever forget that the authorial ego is – and has to be – vulgarly and queasily vast. Probably not that many novelists and poets, argued Auden, would like to be the only novelist or poet who has ever lived; but most of them wouldn’t mind being the only novelist or poet who is living now.
‘I have to keep reminding myself that I wrote those early books,’ he said to me (in the course of an interview in 1983). Those early books – pre-Slaughterhouse 5 – were the ones he thought were the most cruelly skimped. ‘The only way I can regain credit for my early work is – to die.’ The very last time I saw Kurt was at a literary gala in the very early 2000s: he mounted the stage to receive a career-achievement award – and also to receive by far the longest and loudest ovation of the night. His response was dignified and subdued. I very much hoped that some alleviation and even some pleasure managed to filter through to him.
Like Elmore Leonard,*2 Vonnegut was a popular – or demotic – artist gifted with an exceptional inner ear. Which meant that his prose was almost wholly free of ‘false quantities’ (in the non-technical sense): free of rhymes, chimes, repetitions, toe-stubs, letdowns, free of anything, in short, that makes the careful reader pause without profit. A near-frictionless verbal surface is usually the result of much blood, toil, tears, and sweat. I’ll be giving you a few tips on how to streamline the process.
∗
For example, when I am reading – this applies to fiction especially but not just to fiction – I partly imagine that what I have on my lap is a provisional draft of something that might have been written by me. So I’m thinking, Mm, I wouldn’t put it quite like that, I’d avoid that repetition, this phrase isn’t precise enough, that word should’ve been tucked in earlier in the sentence, and – again and again – is that rhyme/half-rhyme/alliteration intended or is it unintended? Et cetera.
Going on being a writer while you are reading becomes second nature and helps train the ear. As for getting the prose to flow smoothly – that’s more mysterious. But certitude of rhythm can be cumulatively acquired. With Kurt, and with Elmore, it seemed to be innate. So we can marvel at them, but we can’t learn from them.
∗
Let me assure you that you do have an inner ear – everybody does; and it is a vital instrument (and helpmate), almost as vital as your subconscious. But before you can bond with it, you first have to find it. So let’s find
