VONNEGUT One time, while I was writing [in high school], I happened to sniff my armpits absentmindedly. Several people saw me do it, and thought it was funny–and ever after that I was given the name “Snarf”. In the annual for my graduating class, the class of 1940, I’m listed as “Kurt Snarfield Vonnegut, Jr.” Technically, I wasn’t really a snarf. A snarf was a person who went around sniffing girls’ bicycle saddles. I didn’t do that. Twerp also had a very specific meaning, which few people know now. Through careless usage, twerp is a pretty formless insult now.
INTERVIEWER What is a twerp in the strictest sense, in the original sense?
VONNEGUT It’s a person who inserts a set of false teeth between the cheeks of his ass.
INTERVIEWER I see.
VONNEGUT I beg your pardon; between the cheeks of his or her ass. I’m always offending feminists that way.
INTERVIEWER I don’t quite understand why someone would do that with false teeth.
VONNEGUT In order to bite the buttons off the backseats of taxicabs. That’s the only reason twerps do it. It’s all that turns them on.
INTERVIEWER You went to Cornell University after Shortridge?
VONNEGUT I imagine.
INTERVIEWER You imagine?
VONNEGUT I had a friend who was a heavy drinker. If somebody asked him if he’d been drunk the night before, he would always answer offhandedly, “Oh, I imagine.” I’ve always liked that answer. It acknowledges life as a dream. Cornell was a boozy dream, partly because of booze itself, and partly because I was enrolled exclusively in courses I had no talent for. My father and brother agreed that I should study chemistry, since my brother had done so well with chemicals at MIT. He’s eight years older than I am. Funnier, too. His most famous discovery is that silver iodide will sometimes make it rain or snow.
INTERVIEWER Let’s talk about the women in your books.
VONNEGUT There aren’t any. No real women, no love.
INTERVIEWER Is this worth expounding upon?
VONNEGUT It’s a mechanical problem. So much of what happens in storytelling is mechanical, has to do with the technical problems of how to make a story work. Cowboy stories and policeman stories end in shoot-outs, for example, because shoot-outs are the most reliable mechanisms for making such stories end. There is nothing like death to say what is always such an artificial thing to say: The End. I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that’s the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers.
INTERVIEWER So you keep love out.
VONNEGUT I have other things I want to talk about.
INTERVIEWER Not many writers talk about the mechanics of stories.
VONNEGUT I am such a barbarous technocrat that I believe they can be tinkered with like Model T Fords.
INTERVIEWER To what end?
VONNEGUT To give the reader pleasure
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found at http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/features/article2445103.ece, along with this quote I’d like to close this post on:
“My relatives say that they are glad I’m rich, but that they simply cannot read me.”
asocial studies 