A Man Without A Country (Kurt Vonnegut, 2007)

The critic’s quote on the cover of “A Man Without A Country” reads: ‘This may be as close as Vonnegut ever comes to a memoir.’ And it was. Vonnegut died earlier this year, and AMWAC was his final work.

I finished reading it today, and I am still trying to make out what I think of it. One thing I am sure of is that I enjoyed it immensely. A collection of essays and personal thoughts, anecdotes and even poems, it’s completely different from anything I’ve read by the author of “Slaughterhouse Five” and “Cat’s Cradle.”

And it provides a new insight into Vonnegut’s personal thoughts, musings, beliefs and ideas on subjects such as capitalism, war, President Bush and the environment – notions that are presented much more subtly in his other works and can only really be guessed and grasped at. But in AMWAC, they are presented clearly and concisely in the same language and style that he has used effectively to tell his previous stories.

So, what follows is a collection of the passages from the book that affected me the most and, I think, give the most compelling picture of who Vonnegut really was.

* While we were being bombed in Dresden, sitting in a cellar with our arms over our heads in case the ceiling fell, one soldier said as though he were a duchess in a mansion on a cold and rainy night, “I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight.” Nobody laughed, but we were still all glad he said it. At least we were still alive! He proved it.

* If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or how badly is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a good friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

* Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t the TV news is it? Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.

* Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.

* When you get to my age, if you get to my age, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, “What is life all about?” … I put my big question about my life to my son the pediatrician. Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”

* Abraham Lincoln said this about the silenced killing grounds at Gettysburg:

"We cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow this ground.
The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract."

Poetry! It was still possible to make horror and grief in wartime seem almost beautiful. Americans could have illusions of honour and dignity when they thought of war.

* James Polk was the person Representative Lincoln had in mind when he said what he said. Abraham Lincoln said of Polk, his president, his armed forces’ commander-in-chief:

"Trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory – that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood – that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy – he plunged into war.
Holy shit! And I thought I was the writer!"

On responding to a woman who wrote to Vonnegut about being 43 and pregnant with her first child:

Don’t do it! I wanted to tell her. It could be another George W. Bush or Lucrezia Borgia. The kid would be lucky to be born into a society where even the poor are overweight but unlucky to be in one without a national health plan or decent public education for most, where lethal injection and welfare are forms of entertainment, and where it costs an arm and a leg to go to college. … But I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me, besides music, was all the saints I met, who could be anywhere. By saints I meant people who behaved decently in a strikingly indecent society.

* Requiem:

The crucified planet Earth
Should it find a voice
And a sense of irony
Might now well say
Of our abuse of it
“Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do.”

The irony would be
That we know what
We are doing.

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.

Our Man in Havana (Graham Greene, 1958)

My friends Logan and Amanda just got back from Cuba. Along with a care-package of 50 Cohiba and Monte Cristo cigars they also brought vivid pictures and memories of their brief but fascinating exploration of the Cuban capital.

Logan described Old Havana in sharp detail, painting a mental image of ornate architecture experiencing the slow but steady decay that sea salt combined with a lack of upkeep, causes. He said it looked like it had been under water for 50 years and resembled his idea of the mystical sunken city of Atlantis.

Graham Greene’s “Our Man in Havana” paints a similar picture. In fact, the image Logan conjured up while we sat in Jet Fuel in Cabbagetown last week was a perfect match for Greene’s description of Havana in the 1950s, so I guess not much has changed.

I love the premise of this book. James Wormold, the middle-aged ‘hero’ of the story, is a soft-spoken, mediocre Englishman who has lived in pre-Castro Havana for 20 years running his small, struggling vacuum cleaner shop. He has one friend with whom he spends about six minutes each day, is still in love with the wife who left him a decade earlier, and the possessions he cares about would fit in a single crate.

That sounds like an incredibly boring start, but Wormold has a pretty, spunky 17-year-old daughter named Millie who keeps things interesting right from the beginning. Most of his energy is spent worrying about her and trying to protect her – though she seems capable of handling herself just fine.

When the opportunity to join the British MI6 spy agency comes literally walking though the door of his shop, he decides he needs the money – and probably the distraction --badly enough to join up.

One of his key responsibilities is to recruit Cuban agents to supply intelligence, but rather than doing so Wormold sets about inventing fictional characters to fill the roles, picking names randomly from a list of country club members. The problem is, he does too good a job and his colourful cast of non-existent spies begin bringing in information that makes his superiors in London sit up and take notice.

In response to his good work London decides to boost his bureau staff, and sends Beatrice, a female agent, to work as his secretary along with Rudy, a radio operator disguised as his bookkeeper.

This is where things begin to become complicated for Wormold. His until now seemingly harmless charade suddenly becomes serious, as he needs to strengthen the web he has created around his fake agents in order to make them stand up under scrutiny.

This, he also does well – so well that Beatrice begins to fall in love with Raul, the alcoholic Cuban airline pilot Wormold has ‘recruited’ to fly surveillance missions and collect images of the massive, non-existent military constructions his spies have reported on. One of Wormold’s more colourful character studies, Raul has lost his wife in a massacre during the Spanish civil war and has become disillusioned with both sides, especially the communists, making him an ideal recruit – and an sparking intrigue in Beatrice.

This is a problem for Wormold, who has fallen in love with her and becomes irrationally jealous over the fictional character he invented as a reflection of some of the romantic aspects of his own personality.


Sometimes Wormold felt a twinge of jealousy towards Raul and he tried to blacken the picture.

“He gets through a bottle of whisky a day,” he said.

“It’s his escape from loneliness and memory,” Beatrice said. “Don’t you ever want to escape?”

“I suppose we all do sometimes.”

“I know what that kind of loneliness is like,” she said with sympathy. “Does he drink all day?”

“No, the worst hour is two in the morning, When he wakes then, he can’t sleep for thinking, so he drinks instead.” It astonished Wormold how quickly he could reply to any questions about his characters; they seemed to live on the threshold of his consciousness – he had only to turn a light on and there they were, frozen in some characteristic action.”


But soon, Beatrice’s fascination with Raul becomes the least of his problems, as Captain Segura, a feared member of the Havana police, becomes suspicious of Wormold, and as some of his star spies begin to meet with fatal coincidences, eventually leading to the complete collapse of Wormold’s carefully constructed world and a hasty departure.

Entertaining and clever, OMIH is partly a satirical mockery of the British secret service, and partly a criticism of Cuban corruption in the 50s.

Greene was well positioned to provide first-hand descriptions and criticisms of both. He actually served as an MI6 intelligence agent during the Second World War, attempting to send spies into global hotspots and later working in counter-espionage in Portugal, according to an Amazon review. He also had first hand experience in Cuba and actually met Fidel Castro, whom he supported. All that lends a sophisticated, genuine quality to a comedy of errors story that also works as a political commentary.

I recommend this book and I plan to read more Graham Greene very soon.