This is a letter I wrote to Kurt Vonnegut years ago. I still think it has merit today. I wrote it a long time ago...longer than the date suggests.
June 2, 1992
Mr. Kurt Vonnegut
c/o G. P. Putnam's Sons
200 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Dear Mr. Vonnegut,
I've been meaning to write to you since Sunday, October 27, 1991.
On that day I was sitting with my wife in a birthing room at Brigham and Women Hospital in Boston, the same birthing room, I might add, in which my first daughter was delivered. My wife was being induced into labor in order to deliver our second child, Kathryn, who today is a delightful, blue-eyed seven-month-old. My wife and I had been told we were going to have a lot of time on our hands as the labor-inducing medication slowing dripped into her veins, so, along with the the Boston Globe and New York Times, I brought along a copy of Fates Worse Than Death.
I was delighted by the book. I have been reading your books since I was a teenager, and Fates, along with Palm Sunday, Slaughterhouse Five, and Deadeye Dick is one that I pick up periodically to reread.
But that's not the reason I've been wanting to write to you, although I am glad for the opportunity to tell you how much I have always enjoyed your work.
I wanted to tell you that on the day I was waiting for my daughter to be born, with my wife connected to a slow-drip IV and surrounded by beeping, winking, shiny medical gizmos, while women from surrounding rooms periodically shrieked and screamed and cried out in pain during their own deliveries, I found it rib-splitting hilarious that Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, a Times book reviewer, told you that he couldn't stand to read you anymore, and that you were treated like something the cat dragged in by Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America. Imagine that, you wrote.
Imagine that, indeed.
Personally, I couldn't think of a better book for any prospective parent to be reading during the final hours before the birth of a child. Very few people can write as simply and truthfully as you do about what is happening to our world. (With kids, as you probably well know, the best thing to do is stick with the truth.) Your writing voice has always been as clear and sharp as the peeling of a bell, or a good karate kick to the ribs. A reader knows exactly what you are trying to say. I've learned a lot from your books, and I've always found delight, not despair, in what you have to say, not just because you are truthful in saying what you believe, but because I believe you are correct in your evaluation of the human condition.
I work as a corporate hack at a computer company, a position you probably have more experience at than you'd like to admit. Occasionally, after giving a speech, a vice president will ask me what I thought, and if I had any suggestions on how he or she might improve his or her delivery. I'm always so sorely tempted to tell the truth: "You found your way to the podium on your first try, you said all the words in correct order, you didn't fall down on your way back to your chair. You did beautifully." But instead I tell them they did fine, or make some benign suggestion to give them the feeling we are working together because I have a beautiful wife and two beautiful children who I want to provide the best for, whatever that may be.
I also write for the local paper, a job for which I earn the kingly sum of $10.00 per column and which my wife refers to as my real job. I just faxed off a column in which I said Ross Perot articulates his thoughts like a yahoo who drank too much Lone Star beer at a barbecue. I'm really proud of that line because it is the truth as I see it. My father-in-law, however, also will consider me with all the regard of something the cat dragged in. (No offense, Mr. Vonnegut, but he also regards you in the same light. He and I can discuss books as long as I stay away from you and Raymond Carver, neither of whom he's read, and stick with his favorites such as Elmore Leonard and John LeCarre, who I also enjoy. I'm willing to do this because he's only human and I love him dearly as a second father, which is a lesson I learned from your books.)
You and your writing also fill me with pride regarding my Midwestern and German heritage. My mother, whose maiden name was Knecht, which translates from the German word for servant, was born on a farm her grandfather gave to her father on the occasion of his marriage. That farm is now listed as a homestead in Brookville, Indiana. She died from cancer in 1985 in a hospital in Boston, far from her home in Cincinnati, and her death affected me as deeply as it seems your mother's affected you.
That's really all I wanted to say. Uncle Walter and the venerable NYT aside, there are still many people who want to know what's kicking around in your head.
Regards,
John Greiner-Ferris
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