Mike Ryerson

WHAT WAS IT ELIOT ROSEWATER SAID?

This morning, as is his habit, my favorite radio commentator will deliver a little slice of life, the contents of which include so many near misses that I feel compelled to paraphrase him and share these connections.

[Today is Veterans Day, honoring Americans who have served in the armed forces.

November 11 was originally called Armistice Day because it was on this day in 1918 that the First World War came to an end. The armistice was signed at 11:00 AM, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year. After four years of brutal trench fighting, nine million soldiers had died and 21 million were wounded. It was called “The War to End All Wars,” because it was the bloodiest war in history up to that point, and it made many people so sick of war that they hoped no war would ever break out again.

Many intellectuals and artists were disillusioned by the war. The philosopher Bertrand Russell said, “All this madness, all this rage, all this flaming death of our civilization and our hopes, has been brought about because a set of official gentlemen, living luxurious lives, mostly stupid, and all without imagination or heart, have chosen that it should occur rather than that any one of them should suffer some infinitesimal rebuff to his country’s pride.”]

[Today is the birthday of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, born in Moscow (1821). He had just graduated from engineering school with no real prospects when he wrote his first novel, Poor Folk (1846), about a young clerk who’s so poor that he lives in the corner of a dirty kitchen, spends all his time pouring his heart out in letters to the girl he loves, even though she eventually marries someone else. When he finished the novel, he gave it to some friends, and they stayed up all night reading it. At 4:00 in the morning, they pounded on Dostoyevsky’s door to wake him up and tell him that he’d written a masterpiece. He later said that was the happiest moment of his life.

Poor Folk was a best-seller when it came out in 1846, and then Dostoyevsky got involved in politics. He joined a group of utopian socialists, and in 1849, the Russian government arrested him along with a group of other writers for planning to distribute political pamphlets advocating socialism and the emancipation of the serfs. They were told they’d been sentenced to death, they were led out to the firing squad, blindfolded and bound to stakes.

Dostoyevsky later wrote to his brother, “Being the third in the row, I concluded I had only a few minutes of life before me. I thought of you and your dear ones and I contrived to kiss [my friends] who were next to me, and to bid them farewell. Suddenly the troops beat a tattoo, we were unbound, brought back upon the scaffold, and informed that his Majesty had spared our lives.” Two of Dostoevsky’s friends never recovered their sanity.

Dostoyevsky spent four years in a Siberian prison and went on to write many novels, including Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868), The Possessed (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880).]

[It’s the birthday of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., born in Indianapolis, Indiana (1922). He’s the author of many novels, including Cat’s Cradle (1963), Hocus Pocus (1990) and, most recently, Timequake (1997).

His father forced him to go to college to study biochemistry, though he wanted to be a journalist. Vonnegut said, “[College] was a boozy dream, partly because of booze itself, and partly because I was enrolled exclusively in courses I had no talent for.” He was failing almost all of his classes when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and he jumped at the chance to join the army and get out of school.

In December of 1944, Vonnegut was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was imprisoned in a slaughterhouse in Dresden, and forced to work in a factory producing vitamin-enriched malt syrup for pregnant women. On the night of February 13, 1945, British and American bombers attacked Dresden, igniting a firestorm that burned up the oxygen in the city and killed almost all the city’s inhabitants in two hours.

It was more than twenty years later when he published Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), about a man named Billy Pilgrim who experiences the bombing of Dresden and loses his mind, believing he has traveled to an alien planet where time does not exist. Vonnegut said it was an anti-war book. But he also said, “Anti-war books are as likely to stop war as anti-glacier books are to stop glaciers.” He has since become one of the most popular guest lecturers at universities across the country.]

At that beautiful and terrifying point in my life when I became aware of the depths of my own ignorance and the seemingly hopeless task of educating myself, I compiled a reading list with the help of my friends, and tried to read a book a week. Well, that was my goal but, of course, it was also an example of my naïveté. But in the first year I did read nearly three a month.

Someone gave me a copy of the collection of Russell essays titled ‘Why I am not a Christian’ which I devoured. Also included in that first year was Karamazov which a friend said was superior to Crime and Punishment, so I read it twice. Later, I read Vonnegut and Heller. I wrote a shameless fan letter to Russell. I was on fire. I memorized Rosewater and in his honor took to carrying a copy of The Brothers Karamazov.

I slept outdoors and in my truck. I wrote poetry and slept with songwriters. I flirted with alcoholism. I discovered that self indulgent place where it’s possible to accept responsibility for your life and reject guilt. I had a note from Russell, an actual answer from him. I wrote again, this time trying to contain myself and making what I hoped would strike him as a perceptive and thoughtful comment. I had another brief note and then he died.

I read Milton and Whitman and Melville. I tried therapy. I listened to young men talking and crying but I was dry, unblinking. Guy says ‘write it down’ and I asked ‘what?’ and he says ‘all these things you’re thinking here but won’t say’, I see a couple of guys across the circle nodding. So I buy a nice new tablet and sit down with a ball point pen poised ever so precisely and wait. Finally I write, ‘Sergeant King was killed on a Saturday morning, shot through the throat.’ I put the tablet behind the seat of my truck.

Yesterday, I talked briefly about sitting in a hole in the ground and being shelled. It was only a little corner of the truth. Another part of it is contained in that anecdote about Dostoyevsky’s comrades, bound and blindfolded, waiting and listening and driven mad.

Vonnegut tells of Eliot Rosewater coming home from his war and into the arms of a waiting psychiatrist. At one point he says, ‘… everything there was to know about life was in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, but that wasn’t enough anymore.’

Another time, Rosewater told the psychiatrist that they would have to come up with a whole lot of new lies, or people wouldn’t want to keep living.

I have a friend who speaks of suicide. He was in the war and saw bad things. That’s the way it works. I think, he thinks he did bad things, too. Maybe he did. Anyway, sometimes he mentions suicide in passing; never about himself but still wistfully. I worry about him. He lives in a place with a very high suicide rate. I wish there was a way to reach across the abyss. There isn’t.