Kurt Vonnegut - Deadeye Dick

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By the Same Author

PLAYER PIANO

THE SIRENS OF TITAN

MOTHER NIGHT

CAT'S CRADLE

GOD BLESS YOU, MR ROSEWATER

SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE

BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS

WAMPETERS, FOMA AND GRANFALLOONS

SLAPSTICK

JAILBIRD

PALM SUNDAY

KURT VONNEGUT

DEADEYE DICK

JONATHAN CAPE

THIRTY BEDFORD SQUARE LONDON

First published in Great Britain 1983

Jonathan Cape Ltd, 30 Bedford Square, London wci

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Vonnegut, Kurt

Deadeye Dick.

I. Title

8i3'.54[F] PS3572.05

ISBN 0-224-02945-2

Printed in Great Britain by R. J. Acford Ltd, Chichester, Sussex

For Jill

PREFACE

'Deadeye Dick,' like 'Barnacle Bill,' is a nickname for a sailor. A deadeye is a rounded wooden block,

usually bound with rope or iron, and pierced with holes. The holes receive a multiplicity of lines, usually

shrouds or stays, on an old-fashioned sailing ship. But in the American Middle West of my youth,

'Deadeye Dick' was an honorific often accorded to a person who was a virtuoso with firearms.

So it is a sort of lungfish of a nickname. It was born in the ocean, but it adapted to life ashore.

* * *

There are several recipes in this book, which are intended as musical interludes for the salivary glands.

They have been inspired by James Beard's American Cookery, Marcella Kazan's The Classic Italian Cook

Book, and Bea Sandler's The African Cookbook. I have tinkered with the originals, however — so no one

should use this novel for a cookbook. Any serious cook should have the reliable originals in his or her

library.

* * *

There is a real hotel in this book, the Grand Hotel Oloffson in Port au Prince, Haiti. I love it, and so

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would almost anybody else. My dear wife Jill Krementz and I have stayed there in the so-called 'James

Jones Cottage', which was built as an operating room when the hotel was headquarters for a brigade of

United States Marines, who occupied Haiti, in order to protect American financial interests there, from

1915 until 1934.

The exterior of that austere wooden box has subsequently been decorated with fanciful, jigsaw

gingerbread, like the rest of the hotel.

The currency of Haiti, by the way, is based on the American dollar. Whatever an American dollar is

worth, that is what a Haitian dollar is worth, and actual American dollars are in general circulation. There

seems to be no scheme in Haiti, however, for retiring worn-out dollar bills, and replacing them with new

ones. So it is ordinary there to treat with utmost seriousness a dollar which is as insubstantial as a

cigarette paper, and which has shrunk to the size of an airmail stamp.

I found one such bill in my wallet when I got home from Haiti a couple of years ago, and I mailed it back

to Al and Sue Seitz, the owners and host and hostess of the Oloffson, asking them to release it into its

natural environment. It could never have survived a day in New York City.

* * *

James Jones (1921-1977), the American novelist, was actually married to his wife Gloria in the James

Jones Cottage, before it was called that. So it is a literary honour to stay there.

There is supposedly a ghost — not of James Jones, but of somebody else. We never saw it. Those who

have seen it describe a young white man in a white jacket, possibly a medical orderly of some kind. There

are only two doors, a back door opening into the main hotel, and a front door opening onto a porch. The

ghost is said to follow the same route every time it appears. It comes in through the back door, searches

for something in a piece of furniture which isn't there anymore, and then goes out of the front door. It

vanishes when it passes through the front door. It has never been seen in the main hotel or on the porch.

It may have an uneasy conscience about something it did or saw done when the cottage was an operating

room.

* * *

There are four real painters in this book, one living and three dead. The living one is my friend in Athens,

Ohio, Cliff McCarthy. The dead ones are John Rettig, Frank Duveneck, and Adolf Hitler.

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Cliff McCarthy is about my age and from my part of America, more or less. When he went to art school,

it was drummed into him that the worst sort of painter was eclectic, borrowing from here and there. But

now he has had a show of thirty years of his work, at Ohio University, and he says, 'I notice that I have

been eclectic.' It's strong and lovely stuff he does. My own favourite is 'The Artist's Mother as a Bride in

1917'. His mother is all dressed up, and it's a warm time of year, and somebody has persuaded her to pose

in the bow of a rowing boat. The rowing boat is in a perfectly still, narrow patch of water, a little river,

probably, with the opposite bank, all leafy, only fifty yards away. She is laughing.

There really was a John Rettig, and his painting in the Cincinnati Art Museum, 'Crucifixion in Rome', is

as I have described it.

There really was a Frank Duveneck, and I in fact own a painting by him, 'Head of a Young Boy'. It is a

treasure left to me by my father. I used to think it was a portrait of my brother Bernard, it looks so much

like him.

And there really was an Adolf Hitler, who studied art in Vienna before the First World War, and whose

finest picture may in fact have been 'The Minorite Church of Vienna'.

* * *

I will explain the main symbols in this book. There is an unappreciated, empty arts centre in the shape of

a sphere. This is my head as my sixtieth birthday beckons to me.

There is a neutron bomb explosion in a populated area. This is the disappearance of so many people I

cared about in Indianapolis when I was starting out to be a writer. Indianapolis is there, but the people are

gone.

Haiti is New York City, where I live now.

The neutered pharmacist who tells the tale is my declining sexuality. The crime he committed in

childhood is all the bad things I have done.

* * *

This is fiction, not history, so it should not be used as a reference book. I say, for example, that the United

States Ambassador to Austria-Hungary at the outbreak of the First World War was Henry Clowes, of

Ohio. The actual ambassador at that time was Frederic Courtland Penfield of Connecticut.

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I also say that a neutron bomb is a sort of magic wand, which kills people instantly, but which leaves their

property unharmed. This is a fantasy borrowed from enthusiasts for a Third World War. A real neutron

bomb, detonated in a populated area, would cause a lot more suffering and destruction than I have

described.

I have also misrepresented Creole, just as the viewpoint character, Rudy Waltz, learning that French

dialect, might do. I say that it has only one tense — the present. Creole only seems to have that one tense

to a beginner, especially if those speaking it to him know that the present is the easiest tense for him.

Peace.

— K.V.

Who is Celia? What is she?

That all her swains commend her?

— OTTO WALTZ

(1892-1960)

— 1 —

To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.

I have caught life. I have come down with life. I was a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness, and then a

little peephole opened quite suddenly. Light and sound poured in. Voices began to describe me and my

surroundings. Nothing they said could be appealed. They said I was a boy named Rudolph Waltz, and

that was that. They said the year was 1932, and that was that. They said I was in Midland City, Ohio, and

that was that.

They never shut up. Year after year they piled detail upon detail. They do it still. You know what they say

now? They say the year is 1982, and that I am fifty years old.

Blah blah blah.

* * *

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My father was Otto Waltz, whose peephole opened in 1892, and he was told, among other things, that he

was the heir to a fortune earned principally by a quack medicine known as 'Saint Elmo's Remedy'. It was

grain alcohol dyed purple, flavoured with cloves and sarsaparilla root, and laced with opium and cocaine.

As the joke goes: It was absolutely harmless unless discontinued.

He, too, was a Midland City native. He was an only child, and his mother, on the basis of almost no

evidence whatsoever, concluded that he could be another Leonardo da Vinci. She had a studio built for

him in a loft of the carriage house behind the family mansion when he was only ten years old, and she

hired a rapscallion German cabinetmaker, who had studied art in Berlin in his youth, to give Father

drawing and painting lessons at weekends and after school.

It was a sweet racket for both teacher and pupil. The teacher's name was August Gunther, and his

peephole must have opened in Germany around 1850. Teaching paid as well as cabinetmaking, and,

unlike cabinetmaking, allowed him to be as drunk as he pleased.

After Father's voice changed, moreover, Gunther could take him on overnight visits by rail to

Indianapolis and Cincinnati and Louisville and Cleveland and so on, ostensibly to visit galleries and

painters' studios. The two of them also managed to get drunk, and to become darlings of the fanciest

whorehouses in the Middle West.

Was either one of them about to acknowledge that Father couldn't paint or draw for sour apples?

* * *

Who else was there to detect the fraud? Nobody. There wasn't anybody else in Midland City who cared

enough about art to notice if Father was gifted or not. He might as well have been a scholar of Sanskrit, as

far as the rest of the town was concerned.

Midland City wasn't a Vienna or a Paris. It wasn't even a St Louis or a Detroit. It was a Bucyrus. It was a

Kokomo.

Gunther's treachery was discovered, but too late. He and Father were arrested in Chicago after doing

considerable property damage in a whorehouse there, and Father was found to have gonorrhoea, and so

on. But Father was by then a fully committed, eighteen-year-old good-time Charley.

Gunther was denounced and fired and blacklisted. Grandfather and Grandmother Waltz were

tremendously influential citizens, thanks to Saint Elmo's Remedy. They spread the word that nobody of

quality in Midland City was ever to hire Gunther for cabinetwork or any other sort of work — ever again.

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Father was sent to relatives in Vienna, to have his gonorrhoea treated and to enrol in the world-famous

Academy of Fine Arts. While he was on the high seas, in a first-class cabin aboard the Lusitania, his

parents' mansion burned down. It was widely suspected that the showplace was torched by August

Gunther, but no proof was found.

Father's parents, rather than rebuild, took up residence in their thousand-acre farm out near

Shepherdstown —leaving behind the carriage house and a cellar hole.

This was in 1910 — four years before the outbreak of the First World War.

* * *

So Father presented himself at the Academy of Fine Arts with a portfolio of pictures he had created in

Midland City. I myself have examined some of the artwork of his youth, which Mother used to moon

over after he died. He was good at cross-hatching and shading a drapery, and August Gunther must have

been capable in those areas, too. But with few exceptions, everything Father depicted wound up looking

as though it were made of cement — a cement woman in a cement dress, walking a cement dog, a herd of

cement cattle, a cement bowl of cement fruit, set before a window with cement curtains, and so on.

He was no good at catching likenesses, either. He showed the Academy several portraits of his mother,

and I have no idea what she looked like. Her peephole closed long before mine opened. But I do know

that no two of Father's portraits of her resemble each other in the least.

Father was told to come back to the Academy in two weeks, at which time they would tell him whether

they would take him in or not.

He was in rags at the time, with a piece of rope for a belt, and with patched trousers and so on —

although he was receiving an enormous allowance from home. Vienna was then the capital of a great

empire, and there were so many elaborate uniforms and exotic costumes, and so much wine and music

that it seemed to Father to be a fancy dress ball. So he decided to come to the party as a starving artist.

What fun!

And he must have been very good-looking then, for he was, in my opinion, the best-looking man in

Midland City when I got to know him a quarter of a century later. He was slender and erect to the end. He

was six feet tall. His eyes were blue. He had curly golden hair, and he had lost almost none of it when his

peephole closed, when he was allowed to stop being Otto Waltz, when he became just another wisp of

undifferentiated nothingness again.

* * *

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So he came back in two weeks, and a professor handed him back his portfolio, saying that his work was

ludicrous. And there was another young man in rags there, and he, too, had his portfolio returned with

scorn.

His name was Adolf Hitler. He was a native Austrian. He had come from Linz.

And Father was so mad at the professor that he got his revenge right there and then. He asked to see some

of Hitler's work, with the professor looking on. He picked a picture at random, and he said it was a

brilliant piece of work, and he bought it from Hitler for more cash on the spot than the professor,

probably, could earn in a month or more.

Only an hour before, Hitler had sold his overcoat so that he could get a little something to eat, even

though winter was coming on. So there is a chance that, if it weren't for my father, Hitler might have died

of pneumonia or malnutrition in 1910.

Father and Hitler paired off for a while, as people will —comforting and amusing each other, jeering at

the art establishment which had rejected them, and so on. I know they took several long walking trips,

just the two of them. I learned of their good times together from Mother. When I was old enough to be

curious about Father's past, World War Two was about to break out, and Father had developed lockjaw as

far as his friendship with Hitler was concerned.

Think of that: My father could have strangled the worst monster of the century, or simply let him starve

or freeze to death. But he became his bosom buddy instead.

That is my principal objection to life, I think: it is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible

mistakes.

* * *

The painting Father bought from Hitler was a watercolour which is now generally acknowledged as

having been the best thing the monster ever did as a painter, and it hung for many years over my parents'

bed in Midland City, Ohio. Its title was: 'The Minorite Church of Vienna'.

— 2 —

Father was so well received in Vienna, known to one and all as an American millionaire disguised as a

ragged genius, that he roistered there for nearly four years. When the First World War broke out in

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August of 1914, he imagined that the fancy dress ball was to become a fancy dress picnic, that the party

was to moved out into the countryside. He was so happy, so naive, so self-enchanted, that he asked

influential friends if they couldn't get him a commission in the Hungarian Life Guard, whose officers'

uniforms included a panther skin.

He adored that panther skin.

He was summoned by the American ambassador to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Henry Clowes, who

was a Cleveland man and an acquaintance of Father's parents. Father was then twenty-two years old.

Clowes told Father that he would lose his American citizenship if he joined a foreign army, and that he

had made inquiries about Father, and had learned that Father was not the painter he pretended to be, and

that Father had been spending money like a drunken sailor, and that he had written to Father's parents,

telling them that their son had lost all touch with reality, and that it was time Father was summoned home

and given some honest work to do.

'What if I refuse?' said Father.

Tour parents have agreed to stop your allowance,' said Clowes.

So Father went home.

* * *

I do not believe he would have stayed in Midland City, if it weren't for what remained of his childhood

home, which was its fanciful carriage house. It was hexagonal. It was stone. It had a conical slate roof. It

had a naked skeleton inside of noble oak beams. It was a little piece of Europe in southwestern Ohio. It

was a present from my greatgrandfather Waltz to his homesick wife from Hamburg. It was a stone-by-

stone replica of a structure in an illustration in her favourite book of German fairy tales.

It still stands.

I once showed it to an art historian from Ohio University, which is in Athens, Ohio. He said that the

original might have been a medieval granary built on the ruins of a Roman watchtower from the time of

Julius Caesar. Caesar was murdered two thousand years ago.

Think of that.

* * *

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I do not think my father was entirely ungifted as an artist. Like his friend Hitler, he had a flair for

romantic architecture. And he set about transforming the carriage house into a painter's studio fit for the

reincarnated Leonardo da Vinci his doting mother still believed him to be.

Father's mother was as crazy as a bedbug, my own mother said.

* * *

I sometimes think that I would have had a very different sort of soul, if I had grown up in an ordinary

little American house — if our home had not been vast.

Father got rid of all the horse-drawn vehicles in the carriage house — a sleigh, a buckboard, a surrey, a

phaeton, a brougham, and who-knows-what-all? Then he had ten horse stalls and a tack room ripped out.

This gave him for his private enjoyment more uninterrupted floor-space beneath a far higher ceiling than

was afforded by any house of worship or public building in the Midland City of that time. Was it big

enough for a basketball game? A basketball court is ninety-four feet long and fifty feet wide. My

childhood home was only eighty feet in diameter. So, no — it lacked fourteen feet of being big enough

for a basketball game.

* * *

There were two pairs of enormous doors in the carriage house, wide enough to admit a carriage and a

team of horses. One pair faced north, one pair faced south. Father had his workmen take down the

northern pair, which his old mentor, August Gunther, made into two tables, a dining table and a table on

which Father's paints and brushes and palette knives and charcoal sticks and so on were to be displayed.

The doorway was then filled with what remains the largest window in the city, admitting copious

quantities of that balm for all great painters, northern light.

It was before this window that Father's easel stood.

* * *

Yes, he had been reunited with the disreputable August Gunther, who must have been in his middle

sixties then. Old Gunther had only one child, a daughter named Grace, so Father was like a son to him. A

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