And The Twain Shall Meet
Lecture, library trip reveal connections between two titans of fiction
 © Jill Krementz Kurt Vonnegut
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Vonnegut lecture Dec. 2 “How to get a job like mine,” Kurt Vonnegut. Wisconsin Union Theatre, |
You can almost hear the cosmic creaking of the planets as they move majestically into alignment, marking the arrival at UW–Madison of a great American author two days after the birthday of another great American author who, though thoroughly dead, lives on in a rich repository on campus. And the two of them, who happen to look like biological brothers, have written their sardonic way through a century and a half of America, skewering society with common speech and uncommon wisdom.
Best-selling novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who’s not only part of the same pantheon of American writers as Mark Twain but also seems to hang out at the same pillar, will give advice on “How to Get a Job Like Mine” on Tuesday, Dec. 2, at 7:30 p.m., in the Wisconsin Union Theater. It’s part of the Wisconsin Union Directorate’s Distinguished Lecture Series.
Author of 18 books, including Cat’s Cradle, The Sirens of Titan and the new Timequake, Vonnegut is a writer with a satirical voice, dark humor and imaginative flights, such as Billy Pilgrim’s ability in Slaughterhouse Five to become “unstuck in time.” And, like Twain, Vonnegut is to language as a sorcerer is to spirits, able to conjure English into shapes that sing with meaning.
The son of an architect and product of Indianapolis public schools, Vonnegut has served stints as a battalion scout, corpse miner (as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany), police reporter, Saab salesman, corporate flack and professor.
Literary fame came to him in 1969 with the publication of Slaughterhouse Five, which was made into a film. The novel gained another kind of notoriety in 1973 when 32 copies of it, ordered for the high school English class in Drake, N.D., were burned by the school custodian on order of the school board. It was, said board members, “pornographic.”
Free tickets for the Vonnegut lecture will be available for those with a UW ID or Wisconsin Union membership Monday, Nov. 24, at the Theater Box Office. Tickets are limited to one per person. A limited number of free tickets will be available to the public Monday, Dec. 1. Box office hours are 11:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m., Monday-Friday, and noon-5 p.m., Saturday.
Vonnegut looms large as a literary lion of the 20th century, of course. But to many, he and Twain seem like time-traveling soulmates:
They share a birthday month, Vonnegut on Nov. 11 and Twain on Nov. 30 … they share an eerie physical resemblance … both were journalists early in their careers … both were in major wars … their writing is biting, even black at times … both are regularly the object of censorship in libraries and schools … and their imaginative powers pop and crackle.
“Vonnegut’s Indiana and Twain’s Missouri are similar in Middle Western outlook,” says Al Feltskog, professor of English. “Both writers have an innocent indignation over things that others around them don’t recognize or respond to. Twain uses the Civil War and Vonnegut World War II as symbols of the impending loss of American innocence. Their characters are children, common people and the walking wounded who don’t yet recognize their suffering.”
The similarities don’t stop there, he adds: “Both rely on American vernacular – Twain in Huckleberry Finn and Vonnegut in Deadeye Dick, for instance – as an index of innocence and a criticism of more cultured people. For them, vernacular is truth-telling.”
You can experience Vonnegut’s truth-telling in the flesh Dec. 2. But to check out the 19th century side of the Vonnegut-Twain nexus, let’s ride the elevator to the ninth floor of Memorial Library. A visit to the parqueted-floor spaces of Special Collections will yield us a ripping-good repository: the Norman Bassett and George Brownell collections, which offer Twain-seekers about a thousand items for on-the-premises perusal.
Not just arcane stuff of interest only to scholars, either. For starters, there are first editions galore of Twain classics, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade) (1885) and Life on the Mississippi (1883). (Special Collections also owns several Vonnegut works in its 21st Century Collection of Modern First Editions.)
Each of these three books – and here’s some of the leather-bound joy of exploring such a collection – can tell you intriguing stories. And the stories are richer if you have the help, as we do today, of librarians Yvonne Schofer, James Woods and Jill Rosenshield.
Let’s ask them for the first editions of Life and Huckleberry Finn and a special 1904 edition of Tom Sawyer for browsing in the reading room.
Because Life on the Mississippi is a first edition, it doesn’t contain Chapter 48 of Twain’s manuscript. The chapter was not accidentally omitted, it was suppressed. The publisher decided it might have a “detrimental effect upon the Southern buyer” because Chapter 48 deals with slavery in the south. The chapter was later discovered after Twain’s death in 1910 and published separately three years later (in the collection, too).
Now turn to page 184 in Huckleberry Finn. Woods will show you how the original page has been sliced off near the binding and replaced, and for good reason: The engraving on that page of Twain character Silas Phelps had somehow been altered near the fly on his trousers to make it look “ribald,” as one bibliophile delicately put it. The defacement was caught after printing and binding but luckily before distribution, followed by a gala cut-and-paste party.
Finally, look at the inside cover of Tom Sawyer that Schofer is showing you. There’s a personal inscription to 8-year-old Norman Bassett: “Few things are harder to bear than the annoyance of a good example.” It was signed by an old man who still seemed to know how little boys think: “Truly Yours, Mark Twain.”
Bassett visited Twain with his mother in 1906. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1914 and became a successful businessman in Madison. That copy of Tom Sawyer was the first item in a growing collection of Twain materials he later donated to his alma mater.
There’s much more of Twain inside the climate-controlled vaults of Special Collections, such as photos and clippings from the period. You also can read his articles in periodicals, including a story in an 1866 Harper’s Magazine by that fine young writer – bad day for the typesetter – Mark Swain.
Before we leave, ask Rosenshield for the box of Twain’s personal correspondence, neatly arranged by year from 1867 to 1910. A letter to a friend posted from Naples, Italy, in August 1867: “Italy is a beautiful land, and its daughters are as fair as the moon that holds her silvery course above their heads…. I like Italy.”
A letter from Bermuda to a friend back home in February 1910, two months before his death, shows a man in his 70s still alive to the burning beauties of life: “Several hours swift skimming over ravishing blue seas under a brilliant sun….” He closed by showing what he still quintessentially was – as Vonnegut is – in the sunset of his career: a writer.
“Please send me the Standard Unabridged that is on the table in my bedroom. I have no dictionary here.”