And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life by Shields Charles J

Author:Shields, Charles J. [Shields, Charles J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2011-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

11: Cultural Bureaucrat

1971–1974

IN FEBRUARY 1971, Mark Vonnegut went without food and water for twelve days at his farm on Powell River in British Columbia, after months of living on lentil stews and vegetables. The farm had turned into a commune, and he had become its mystic, staring into a candle flame—once for twelve hours—and starving himself, as the sweet odor of marijuana hung about the farmhouse like incense. With him was a chessboard formerly belonging to his grandfather Vonnegut, handmade, on which the following lines were carved in Gothic lettering: “I do warn you well / It is no child’s play.” The admonition had great meaning to him now, as many things did, revealing to him from an invisible source that his girlfriend had died, his father had committed suicide, and the world was going to be rocked by natural cataclysms. At the end of a run of sleepless, manic nights, he collapsed, and friends put him in the bottom of a boat to ferry him to someplace safer.1

His father arrived looking “very worried, very nervous,” and so out of place in a crummy apartment in Vancouver.2 Mark’s friends were standing watch over him in the apartment because earlier he had run outside naked and sprinted around the block. Trying to make sense of his father being there, Mark was bewildered at seeing him in the role of rescuer. “I could not relate to him as a physical presence. I wasn’t really sure it was him.”3

Kurt had come three thousand miles because one of his son’s “flower children friends,” he later said, “telephoned me to say he was in need of a father.”4 He helped Mark downstairs and into a hired car. They drove east to the town of New Westminster on the Fraser River where there was a mental health facility with the unlikely name of Hollywood Hospital.5 Later, trying to portray his boy as a creative soul having some kind of apocalyptic experience, Kurt insisted that as they headed toward the “Canadian laughing academy,” Mark was singing “vocal riffs worthy of his hero John Coltrane.”6

The car reached Hollywood Hospital, and Mark stumbled into the lobby with Kurt holding him up. While they waited, Mark grabbed the cue ball from a pool table in the lobby and flung it through a window. He played with the ashes in a cigarette tray and when a male nurse arrived he drew streaks on the man’s white lab coat. Following an intake interview, Kurt signed papers to have his son committed.7

A few days later, the phone rang at Walter Vonnegut’s home in Anacortes, Washington. It was Kurt, his cousin from Lake Maxinkuckee days, apparently drunk, on the other end. He wanted to talk about Mark’s hospitalization, and the purpose of the call, as far as Walt could surmise, was just to “get it off his chest.”8

In the seclusion room where Mark was placed, there was a hole in the door large enough for a man to put his hand through. Kurt visited

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