My father first introduced me to Pink Floyd when I was about 11 years old.
I remember listening to it on my Walkman, lying back on the bed late at night. I expected rebellious rock-and-roll but instead I got helicopters and screaming, the sound of a cash register clanging open and heavy, deep soundscapes that reverberated in stereo sound from one ear to the other.
I thought: “What is this??” and wondered if I was too young to be listening to it. (I probably was)
But my dad had recommended it and that carries great weight between a son and a father, so I kept trying, kept listening, and slowly I began to understand, appreciate, and finally to love that album, and the band -- the kind of appreciation that some people call blissful, because it takes work to get there, but is always worth the effort.
I had a similar experience the first time I picked up a Kurt Vonnegut novel, also on my dad’s recommendation, and again, probably at too young an age.
I think it was “Slaughterhouse-Five” – a semi-biographical account of Vonnegut’s experience during the Second World War, combining science fiction, satire and black humour in a tale that mixes time travel and a first hand account of the aftermath of the fire bombing of Dresden.
As with Pink Floyd, my senses were bombarded and I was overwhelmed and I wasn’t sure I liked it. But I was stubborn, and somewhere about halfway through I began to see the beauty in the short sentences and clever vocabulary and simple but smart storytelling that painted such vivid pictures.
Since then I’ve read almost all of his novels – many of them several times. And in honour of his death just over one month ago at 84, I have just finished re-reading “Mother Night” for the third time.
What a brilliant book. I recommend all of Vonnegut’s work – you should read them and own them too – but Mother Night, as a novel and a concept, is incredible.
Vonnegut’s introduction to the novel begins as follows: “This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don’t think it’s a marvelous moral, I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
It’s about a man named Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American playwright living in Germany, married to a beautiful German actress named Helga Noth, prior to the Second World War.
The story begins in an Israeli prison where Campbell is awaiting trial on war crimes, and writing his memoirs, but as he tells his story the scene quickly shifts to Greenwich Village where Campbell lived-out the post-war years in obscurity, for the most part all alone, his family dead and his existence forgotten.
As the story develops, we learn that Campbell is considered a war criminal because of the work he did as a propagandist for the Nazis. He was an anti-Semitic radio broadcaster all through the war, and was responsible for some of the most fantastic, unbelievable lies ever fabricated about the Jewish people.
But we also learn that before the war began, Campbell was recruited by an American spy to broadcast secret messages – using strategic pauses and stumbled sentences as his means of delivery -- over the radio to U.S. agents, which he did consistently throughout the entire war.
“From the simplicity of most of my instructions, I gather that I was usually giving yes or no answers to questions that had been put to the spy apparatus. Occasionally, as during the build up for the Normandy invasion, my instructions were more complicated and my phrasing and diction sounded like the last stages of double pneumonia,” he explains.
Simultaneously, Campbell was the best spy the Americans ever had, and the greatest Nazi who ever lived.
The story raises big questions about truth and identity and whether an inherently good act can compensate for a lie, but in typical Vonnegut style it’s caustic and cynical and bitterly funny all at the same time, and provides no clear answers to any of the questions it poses.
I like the fact that the story begins with a moral -- a simple, humble truth presented more as a nugget of wisdom than as a point in a sermon, then sets about proving it in gentle terms through Campbell’s life.
I like that style of story telling. Vonnegut was a master at it, as proven in Player Piano, Sirens of Titan, Deadeye Dick, Breakfast of Champions, and many more.
It’s sad to say goodbye.
But here goes…
Goodbye.
Kurt Vonnegut
Born: Nov. 11, 1922, Indianapolis, Indiana
Died: April 11, 2007, New York
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