Kurt Vonnegut - Bluebeard

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Bluebeard

The Autobiography of Rabo Karabekian (1916-1988)

by Kurt Vonnegut

a.b.e-book v3.0 / Notes at EOF

Back Cover:

"Vonnegut is at his edifying best!" -- The Philidelphia Inquirer

Kurt Vonnegut is a master of contemporary American literature. His black humor, satiric

voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America's attention in The Sirens of Titan in

1959 and established him as "a true artist" with Cat's Cradle in 1963. He is, as Graham Greene

has declared, "one of the best living American writers."

Bluebeard ranks with Vonnegut's most imaginative works. Broad humor and bitter irony

collide in this fictional autobiography of Rabo Karabekian, who, at seventy-one, wants to be left

alone at his Long Island estate with the secret he has locked inside his potato barn. But then a

voluptuous young widow badgers him into telling his life story -- and Vonnegut tells us the plain,

heart-hammering truth about man's careless fancy to create or destroy what he loves.

"Vonnegut is George Orwell, Dr. Caligari and Flash Gordon compounded into one writer. . . A

zany but moral mad scientist." -- Time

A DELTA BOOK

Published by

Dell Publishing

a division of

Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

1540 Broadway

New York, New York 10036

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and

incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are

used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design: Carin Goldberg

Cover illustration: Gene Greif

Book design: Nancy Field

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage

and retrieval system, without the written permission of the

Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address:

Delacorte Press, New York, New York.

The trademark Delta® is registered in the U.S. Patent and

Trademark Office and in other countries.

ISBN: 0-385-33351-X

Reprinted by arrangement with Delacorte Press

Manufactured in the United States of America

Published simultaneously in Canada

October 1998

10 9 8 7 6

BVG

Author's Note

This is a novel, and a hoax autobiography at that. It is not to be taken as a responsible

history of the Abstract Expressionist school of painting, the first major art movement to originate

in the United States of America. It is a history of nothing but my own idiosyncratic responses to

this or that.

Rabo Karabekian never lived, and neither did Terry Kitchen or Circe Berman or Paul

Slazinger or Dan Gregory or Edith Taft or Marilee Kemp or any of the other major characters in

this book. As for real and famous persons I mention: I have them do nothing that they did not

actually do when tested on this proving ground.

May I say, too, that much of what I put in this book was inspired by the grotesque prices

paid for works of art during the past century. Tremendous concentrations of paper wealth have

made it possible for a few persons or institutions to endow certain sorts of human playfulness

with inappropriate and hence distressing seriousness. I think not only of the mudpies of art, but of

children's games as well -- running, jumping, catching, throwing.

Or dancing.

Or singing songs.

K. V.

"We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is."

-- Dr. Mark Vonnegut, M.D.

(Letter to Author, 1985)

This book is for Circe Berman.

What else can I say?

R.K.

HAVING WRITTEN "The End" to this story of my life, I find it prudent to scamper back here

to before the beginning, to my front door, so to speak, and to make this apology to arriving

guests: "I promised you an autobiography, but something went wrong in the kitchen. It turns out

to be a diary of this past troubled summer, too! We can always send out for pizzas if necessary.

Come in, come in."

* * *

I am the erstwhile American painter Rabo Karabekian, a one-eyed man. I was born of

immigrant parents in San Ignacio, California, in 1916. I begin this autobiography seventy-one

years later. To those unfamiliar with the ancient mysteries of arithmetic, that makes this year

1987.

I was not born a cyclops. I was deprived of my left eye while commanding a platoon of

Army Engineers, curiously enough artists of one sort or another in civilian life, in Luxembourg

near the end of World War Two. We were specialists in camouflage, but at that time were

fighting for our lives as ordinary infantry. The unit was composed of artists, since it was the

theory of someone in the Army that we would be especially good at camouflage.

And so we were! And we were! What hallucinations we gave the Germans as to what was

dangerous to them behind our lines, and what was not. Yes, and we were allowed to live like

artists, too, hilariously careless in matters of dress and military courtesy. We were never attached

to a unit as quotidian as a division or even a corps. We were under orders which came directly

from the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force, which assigned us

temporarily to this or that general, who had heard of our astonishing illusions. He was our patron

for just a little while, permissive and fascinated and finally grateful.

Then off we went again.

Since I had joined the regular Army and become a lieutenant two years before the United

States backed into the war, I might have attained the rank of lieutenant colonel at least by the end

of the war. But I refused all promotions beyond captain in order to remain with my happy family

of thirty-six men. That was my first experience with a family that large. My second came after

the war, when I found myself a friend and seeming peer of those American painters who have

now entered art history as founders of the Abstract Expressionist school.

* * *

My mother and father had families bigger than those two of mine back in the Old World -

- and of course their relatives back there were blood relatives. They lost their blood relatives to a

massacre by the Turkish Empire of about one million of its Armenian citizens, who were thought

to be treacherous for two reasons: first because they were clever and educated, and second

because so many of them had relatives on the other side of Turkey's border with its enemy, the

Russian Empire.

It was an age of Empires. So is this one, not all that well disguised.

* * *

The German Empire, allied with the Turks, sent impassive military observers to evaluate

this century's first genocide, a word which did not exist in any language then. The word is now

understood everywhere to mean a carefully planned effort to kill every member, be it man,

woman, or child, of a perceived subfamily of the human race.

The problems presented by such ambitious projects are purely industrial: how to kill that

many big, resourceful animals cheaply and quickly, make sure that nobody gets away, and

dispose of mountains of meat and bones afterwards. The Turks, in their pioneering effort, had

neither the aptitude for really big business nor the specialized machinery required. The Germans

would exhibit both par excellence only one quarter of a century later. The Turks simply took all

the Armenians they could find in their homes or places of work or refreshment or play or worship

or education or whatever, marched them out into the countryside, and kept them away from food

and water and shelter, and shot and bashed them and so on until they all appeared to be dead. It

was up to dogs and vultures and rodents and so on, and finally worms, to clean up the mess

afterwards.

My mother, who wasn't yet my mother, only pretended to be dead among the corpses.

My father, who wasn't yet her husband, hid in the shit and piss of a privy behind the

schoolhouse where he was a teacher when the soldiers came. The school day was over, and my

father-to-be was all alone in the schoolhouse writing poetry, he told me one time. Then he heard

the soldiers coming and understood what they meant to do. Father never saw or heard the actual

killing. For him, the stillness of the village, of which he was the only inhabitant at nightfall, all

covered with shit and piss, was his most terrible memory of the massacre.

* * *

Although my mother's memories from the Old World were more gruesome than my

father's, since she was right there in the killing fields, she somehow managed to put the massacre

behind her and find much to like in the United States, and to daydream about a family future

here.

My father never did.

* * *

I am a widower. My wife, née Edith Taft, who was my second such, died two years ago.

She left me this nineteen-room house on the waterfront of East Hampton, Long Island, which had

been in her Anglo-Saxon family from Cincinnati, Ohio, for three generations. Her ancestors

surely never expected it to fall into the hands of a man with a name as exotic as Rabo

Karabekian.

If they haunt this place, they do it with such Episcopalian good manners that no one has

so far noticed them. If I were to come upon the spook of one of them on the grand staircase, and

he or she indicated that I had no rights to this house, I would say this to him or her: "Blame the

Statue of Liberty."

* * *

Dear Edith and I were happily married for twenty years. She was a grandniece of William

Howard Taft, the twenty-seventh president of the United States and the tenth chief justice of the

Supreme Court. She was the widow of a Cincinnati sportsman and investment banker named

Richard Fairbanks, Jr., himself descended from Charles Warren Fairbanks, a United States

senator from Indiana and then vice-president under Theodore Roosevelt.

We came to know each other long before her husband died when I persuaded her, and

him, too, although this was her property, not his, to rent their unused potato barn to me for a

studio. They had never been potato farmers, of course. They had simply bought land from a

farmer next door, to the north, away from the beach, in order to keep it from being developed.

With it had come the potato barn.

Edith and I did not come to know each other well until after her husband died and my first

wife, Dorothy, and our two sons, Terry and Henri, moved out on me. I sold our house, which was

in the village of Springs, six miles north of here, and made Edith's barn not only my studio but

my home.

That improbable dwelling, incidentally, is invisible from the main house, where I am

writing now.

* * *

Edith had no children by her first husband, and she was past childbearing when I

transmogrified her from being Mrs. Richard Fairbanks, Jr., into being Mrs. Rabo Karabekian

instead.

So we were a very tiny family indeed in this great big house, with its two tennis courts

and swimming pool, and its carriage house and its potato barn -- and its three hundred yards of

private beach on the open Atlantic Ocean.

One might think that my two sons, Terry and Henri Karabekian, whom I named in honor

of my closest friend, the late Terry Kitchen, and the artist Terry and I most envied, Henri Matisse,

might enjoy coming here with their families. Terry has two sons of his own now. Henri has a

daughter.

But they do not speak to me.

"So be it! So be it!" I cry in this manicured wilderness. "Who gives a damn!" Excuse this

outburst.

* * *

Dear Edith, like all great Earth Mothers, was a multitude. Even when there were only the

two of us and the servants here, she filled this Victorian ark with love and merriment and hands-

on domesticity. As privileged as she had been all her life, she cooked with the cook, gardened

with the gardener, did all our food shopping, fed the pets and birds, and made personal friends of

wild rabbits and squirrels and raccoons.

But we used to have a lot of parties, too, and guests who sometimes stayed for weeks --

her friends and relatives, mostly. I have already said how matters stood and stand with my own

few blood relatives, alienated descendants all. As for my synthetic relatives in the Army: some

were killed in the little battle in which I was taken prisoner, and which cost me one eye. Those

who survived I have never seen or heard from since. It may be that they were not as fond of me

as I was of them.

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BluebeardTheAutobiographyofRaboKarabekian(1916-1988)byKurtVonneguta.b.e-bookv3.0/NotesatEOFBackCover:"Vonnegutisathisedifyingbest!"--ThePhilidelphiaInquirerKurtVonnegutisamasterofcontemporaryAmericanliterature.Hisblackhumor,satiricvoice,andincomparableimaginationfirstcapturedAmerica'sattentioninTheS...

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