Kurt Vonnegut Nearly Derails A Young Interviewer

Contact:  info(at)vonnegutdoc.com

Almost two decades ago I had the opportunity to write a freelance piece for Screen Printing magazine about Lexington, Kentucky, screen printer Joe Petro, who did art for a disparate range of high profile characters including, but not limited to, Jonathan Winters, Ralph Steadman, Hunter S. Thompson and former president Jimmy Carter.

In the original conception of the article my intent was to write about the screen printed artwork of Jonathan Winters. I interviewed Winters for near forty-five minutes (a rare and highly entertaining privilege, which I hoped one day to turn into a couple articles for this Northland rag) and spent a great deal of energy shaping what amounted to be a very weak piece about screen printing, because Mr. Winters did not do much screen printing. Joe Petro did the screen printing for him.

 

The rejection letter was very kind, leaving the door open for another pitch. I replied that Joe Petro himself would make a great story, since he was doing work for all these high profile people. With a little luck I might get access to some of these. Sure enough, the finished piece appeared in January 2004 under the title, “Serigraphy, Celebrities & Joe Petro.” It was a lot of fun.

 

One of the celebrities in my article happened to be the author Kurt Vonnegut, whose creative output was not limited to the written word. He was also an artist. I called him at his Manhattan home one Sunday afternoon in the fall of 2003. I asked if I was interrupting anything and he said he was sitting in his living room watching a football game. The ten minutes we talked flew past in a snap.

 

I originally wrote the following for my website shortly after Mr. Vonnegut passed on April 11, 2007. He was 84. 

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As the Boomer generation came of age, Kurt Vonnegut became one of its most important voices. When I was in college at O.U. (Buckeye State, not Oklahoma) it seemed that everyone was reading Vonnegut. Beginning with Cat’s Cradle, I read everything he had written up to that time that I could put my hands on. His surly, incisive wit, creative cast of characters, and enthusiasm for smashing sacred cows – nearly all easy targets – had great appeal to young people who were living during an era of confusion and upheaval.

What attracted many readers to Kurt Vonnegut were his pointed social insights packaged in absurd, surreal stories. There is no mistaking Slaughterhouse Five for something that really happened. It is fiction.  But in fiction anything can happen, and in this book it does. The story line, however, is not what the book is about.  Yes, Billy Pilgrim is abducted by aliens; yes, he moves back and forth through time; yes, the story is whimsical yet dead serious.

 

Slaughterhouse Five is about the meaning of life, or the search for meaning after seeing the absurdly horrorific consequences of war. The real story Vonnegut tells is the firebombing of Dresden which resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians who were incinerated in the conflagration caused by thousands of tons of U.S. bombs and incendiaries. Young Kurt Vonnegut was there and he was a survivor. In real life he had been a POW in Dresden. As the incineration took place, a deep truth seared his soul: war is a terrible thing and terrible are those who make it happen.

 

I find it interesting that the Serenity Prayer – help me accept the things that I cannot change and have the wisdom to know the things I can change – appears twice in this book, because the story line of Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater so parallels Franco Zefferelli’s Brother Sun, Sister Moon about the life of St. Francis. The hero, Elliot Rosewater, is a highly decorated war veteran who accidentally bayoneted a 14 year old civilian. He mentally comes unglued.  Or does he? To his rich and powerful family, he behaves like a kook because instead of carrying on the traditions of wealth and power and privilege, he actually chooses to help people. Like I say, it seems like a modern re-telling of the life of St. Francis.

 

Like Ernest Hemingway, Vonnegut was a journalist before becoming a novelist.  Like Mark Twain, he wrote somewhat comic stories with incisive venom. Like Kafka’s Metamorphosis, about a boy who wakes up a cockroach, Vonnegut’s tales yield their best fruit when you buy in to the absurd framework of the story.

 

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A few blocks from the Vonnegut museum in Indy.

Joe Petro met Kurt Vonnegut three decades earlier when the latter came to Kentucky to speak at a local college. Petro worked with Vonnegut to produce the posters for that event. Vonnegut had been a consummate doodler. It came to pass that instead of having doodles all over the margins of his manuscripts, he would eventually make the doodles the featured focal point, whether on T-shirts or posters or framed works of art. Joe Petro helped make it possible. Joe also paved the way for my telephone meeting with Mr. Vonnegut.

For my interview I prepared a series of questions. He was expecting my call. When I spoke with him that October afternoon I began by mentioning that he and Herman Hesse had been the two most influential writers for me when I was in school, a light bit of flattery, adding that I had read nearly everything he wrote. His response caught me completely off guard.

“You must be lonely,” he replied.  He wasn’t too flattered by the flattery.

“Why is that?” 

“Because all of Hesse ’s characters were lonely.”

It knocked me completely off the rails. I wanted to ask my next question, but had an inward whirlwind taking place. Part of me wanted to defend myself. “That was 30 years ago!” Another part of me attempted to assess how much truth was in his words (more than I wanted to admit, actually), and a third part of me had to get back on track, re-connect with the man on the other end of this telephone line.

 

Fortunately he was amenable and began telling me about his friendship with Joe Petro, how he and Joe took some of his art and turned it into prints. It must have gone well because, “Joe said, ‘Why don’t we keep going’ and so we did.”  

 

Vonnegut shared a little of how he came to make art. “I’ve been a painter, a farter around. My father was a painter. So was my grandfather.  They were both architects, but also painted. So Joe and I kept going, and here we are.” 

 

Of the screen printing process, he added, “What a crazy way to make a picture in the age of the computer. In a way it’s very physical. It’s dance. He moves around and there’s all kinds of stuff for his hands to do… a lot of movement.” One could tell by the intonations that he was impressed with the Petro's artistry.

 

I asked how they work together.  “My job is to be satisfied with his reproductions,” Vonnegut said. “What he does is to reproduce exactly what I have done. Sometimes he will suggest a different color background, choose the paper.”

 

First Vonnegut book I read.

Vonnegut asked me about myself and what I was doing. He said, “I like to hear about people who read books.” 

Hearing that I was from Northern Minnesota, he noted, “The most provincial people in the world are New York City people. They don’t know anything about where you are and don’t care. The most terrible crime in sports was to take the Dodgers.”

 

Of the article I was working on he said, “Joe Petro is a worthy story.” 

 

Regarding his initial meeting with Petro half a lifetime ago he said, “A funny thing happened on the way to the lecture.”

 

Near the end of my brief time with him he asked for a little more about myself and my Kentucky roots came up. I mentioned being a descendant of Daniel Boone. He noted, “I was a prisoner of war (in Dresden) with a guy named Boone who was from Kentucky .” No doubt kin in some fashion.

 

After a short time together, it became apparent that he was being courteous to me for the sake of a friendship with his printmaker.

 

As I write these lines, I am aware that Joe himself is probably at near Kurt’s side in New York attending the funeral of his lifelong friend. God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut.

 ~ April 15, 2007

 

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Related Links

Visit www.vonnegut.com for a Joe Petro tribute to this significant German American writer.

 

Read "Another Side of Jonathan Winters"

   

My 2001 Interview With Illustrator and Author Ralph Steadman

In 2004 my feature story on printmaker/artist Joe Petro III of Lexington, Kentucky appeared in Screen Printing Magazine. The story was a couple years in the making and came about like this. I was a huge Jonathan Winters fan as a kid and had been looking, by means of the internet, for recordings of his improvisational insanity. As it turned out, I discovered that Jonathan Winters was also an artist, specifically painting. I learned this through the website of Joe Petro. Petro was a screenprinter for a number of high profile people who also did art on the side, including Kurt Vonnegut, Winters himself and British illustrator Ralph Steadman. As things unfolded I was given the opportunity to interview all three of these major figures for th-s article.

Having previously purchased a book of paintings by Jonathan Winters called Hang-Ups, I used that material as background for the interview he graciously gave me. It was a tremendously fun to be on the receiving end of his compulsive persona-shifting, as captured here in one of my early blog entries.

My interview with Mr. Vonnegut, also pre-arranged, took place on a Sunday afternoon during a New York Giants football game that I could hear playing in the background when he first answered the phone.

This conversation with Mr. Steadman was an overseas call that (I believe) took place in 2001. I'm guessing it took place on a Saturday morning, because otherwise when I get home from work it is middle of the night in Great Britain. Wikipedia identifies Steadman as "a British cartoonist best known for his work with American author Hunter S. Thompson." Certainly his illustrations for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas put him on the map as far as American audiences go. He has illustrated numerous books and won numerous awards including being voted Illustrator of the Year by the American Institute of Graphic Arts in 1979.

EN: What are you working on now?

Ralph Steadman: It’s a picture for an article by Will Self, Tough Tough Toys for Tough Tough Boys. I’m doing a series of drawings for an independent newspaper. It’s a series called Psychogeography.

EN: Your mind has gone quite a ways over the years, hasn’t it.

RS: Tried to. But my intellect is weak.

We talk briefly about various things ending with how I came to be a writer.

EN: I gave up art to try to change the world.

RS: You did the opposite of me. I gave up writing to do art to change the world. Writing’s no good. Nobody reads any more. There’s so much stuff written. Less people read than they ever did.

My favorite Steinbeck is Cannery Row. Then I read The Grapes of Wrath. He’s the kind of writer where you sense his authority in what he says.

EN: I remember Coetze, South African writer…

RS: It’s a sad world, Ed.

EN: Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.

RS: I think there’s something of that in the fertilizer of life.

We talk around other themes and come to this comment on America.

Every conceivable nation on earth has arrived and lived there. That’s a funny thing. That should make it the rich melting pot you were supposed to be. It’s gotten bland. It’s gotten banal. That’s what I think has gone wrong.

In effect, we need to appreciate difference as a virtue.

Travels with Charlie… a wonderful book. He went out to discover his America with his dog.

EN: Do you have a dog?

RS: I did, but he died a couple years ago and I don’t want to replace him. He had to be put down. I went to the vet. His beautiful eyes looking at me. Trusting. That’s the horrible part. Trusting me, and I knew with the injection he would slip away.

I had to do the thing and Anna my wife came with me, and they had to let us out the back door because we were crying too much.

I didn’t think I would think that about dogs because I did a book about dogs…

EN: I’m calling about your relationship with Joe Petro. How did you guys meet?

RS: I’ll tell you how we met. Have you ever heard of Oddbin’s, the English wine merchant? One guy started it, I can’t remember his name now, by going to Europe, France and Germany, and buying odd bins of wine… a batch of wine from one year that wasn’t sold. They’d buy it up, bottle it, and it became Oddbins in England.

The first ever wine merchant in England who appreciated wine and sold it like that. They got good stuff. It wasn’t commercially done, It was by weird guys, making wine. So I did drawings for them.

So I started getting letters and cards from Joe Petro, who actually did drawings for Greenpeace.

Bats Over Barstow

We were on an Oddbins trip and we’d been to George Dickel Kentucky Wines … I was doing whiskey for them, and my wife and I were at the Cincinnati airport and were so near that we said, “Let’s just ring Joe and see if he’s there. If he’s there, let’s go and say hello.”

We rang up and said hello, and we caught him just ten minutes before he was about to leave for Nashville. And he said, “I’ll come and get you.” So he actually came to Cincinnati and got us and we got on great. We liked him very much and became friends. He said, “Would you like to do a print with me?” so we did a print and I said “What should we do?” and he said, “I’d like you to do something from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. So I did Bats Over Barstow. From cold, on a sheet of acetate. So that was the first thing we did. October 10, 1993.

He (Joe) is a nice man, and very conscientious. He knows a lot of people. He gets in touch with Rosenquist, and he gets in touch with Rauschenberg. He’s a friend of Kurt Vonnegut. And he’s a friend of so many people. He’s so likeable. That’s his strong point. He gets along with everybody.

EN: What’s it like to work together?

RS: He had a little studio in downtown Lexington, which is a bit of a mess because they restructured the whole place so it became kind of a no-man’s land. And it was so small, we nearly got ruptured every time we went passed each other around the tables.

Anna does diaries of our various visits, and that is how I even remember how we met because she’s brought it up since. He put off his visit to Nashville to see his mother to come and pick us up to spend two or three days with him.

I did a drawing down in his basement. He had all his stuff down there as well, all his light boxes and things like that. And then we went and printed in his little studio downtown. That was such a lovely thing to do that we did it for several years afterwards.

EN: How often did you come to America then?

RS: Every year. Two or three times as year sometimes.

EN: What is your favorite piece that you collaborated with him on?

RS: When we did the Lizard Lounge together, just to see the colors go down, trying to make it work. It was kind of a big thing, huge. That one to me is one of the best. People can’t quite get it when they see it on the website because it’s small, but it’s a huge f-ing thing.

A discussion on Nietzsche, art, geography and weather followed.

To discover more about Ralph Steadman visit http://www.ralphsteadman.com/ 
or http://www.ralphsteadmanartcollection.com/