It is glorious outside, a twilight saturated with gold light on the University of California at Davis campus.
Frisbees fly and you can smell the smoke from the barbecue fires off campus, almost taste the beers being pounded down.
But here in this room in Freeborn Hall, the Doctor Doom of American belles lettres sucks in carcinogenic gases from the latest in the chain of cigarettes smoked for 52 of his 66 years, and spreads layers of gloom like one of those modern artists who uses a trowel instead of a brush.
The Earth is not dying, Kurt Vonnegut is saying, it is dead.
”I`m so disturbed about our killing the planet. Hitler was bad enough, but the death of the atmosphere and ocean is even worse.”
Perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union? A joke doomed to failure.
”People will in fact find their lives are no better than before, and they will be furious.
”A Russian emigre who teaches at Columbia told me that state socialism may be the best they can do. Freedom is a luxury, and the idea that it leads to prosperity is simply not true.”
Books, says Vonnegut, who has written 16 of them, ”are an archaic form of communication. But we really don`t need any more stories. We have enough.” What`s going to happen, he wonders, with all those 200,000 semiautomatic assault rifles in the hands of private individuals in this country come the next Depression?
”Don`t I worry?” he asks.
”I`ve given up. I`m just writing an epitaph for humanity now,” Vonnegut says.
Instead of getting bummed out, people laugh at these and other of Vonnegut`s mordant pronouncements, both now and later in a talk before 1,308 students and professors.
It`s another stop for the Mark Twain of his generation-an author making a tidy living by lecturing.
Maybe they laugh because Vonnegut does, gallows-fashion. It is a liquid laugh sometimes strangled by coughing. All those cigarettes.
Also, existential despair never falls out of fashion among the educated young. Nor does idealism, and Vonnegut wears his on his sleeve like a chevron. The same with his disillusionment.
Beyond that, the man is funny.
”There is no sense of shame in this country anymore,” he says, deadpan. ”I think the head of Exxon should have committed suicide after the oil spill.”
Or, ”I`ve been traveling around the country like Willie Nelson, except that I don`t have a bus and I don`t have any friends.”
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With his tousled mop of curls, droopy moustache and sad poached-eggs eyes, Vonnegut is a caricaturist`s dream.
Now that Capote`s dead, maybe Vonnegut is the most recognizable of the nation`s famous authors.
He`s famous still, 21 years after ”Slaughterhouse Five,” his black comedic masterpiece about the firebombing of Dresden, a book made a best-seller by a generation opposed to the Vietnam War.
Famous still, despite a critical consensus that Vonnegut is no longer in the front rank of novelists, that he has been repeating himself for a long time.
The same avant-garde anti-novel fiddling with time-space continuum and narrative line, sure, but his special brand of absurd is somehow more dry and cerebral now than when the belly`s fire burned hotter.
It`s surprising that the glass Vonnegut looks through is not even darker than it is.
When he was a child, the Depression settled in for a long stay and his prospering father, an architect impoverished overnight, gave up on life. His mother committed suicide.
”I learned a bone-deep sadness from my parents,” he once said.
Then, during World War II, Vonnegut was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge.
He and a few other Americans were being held captive in a Dresden slaughterhouse when it was firebombed by the Allies, a tragedy that claimed more lives than either of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Now, on the $10,000-a-stop lecture circuit, life isn`t bad.
He is welcome everywhere. The very rich crave his company, and he indulges their craving (”I am a collectible, a curio”), even though the intolerable gap between the rich and the poor causes him pain.
”Marry money,” he advises.