- I'm in the business I'm in because of junior civics class in school 43 in Indianapolis.

I'm trying to be a good citizen, (Borden laughs) so I do want to talk about social issues.

(pensive music) (upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Tom Wolfe, and we are here today at the University of South Carolina "Writers Workshop," and our guest is the novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

And I think you're going to detect a real note of concern as Kurt Vonnegut tries to tell the students how to get started in this business of writing fiction.

The problem is that when Kurt Vonnegut himself started out, there was a tremendous market for fiction, and there was a tremendous audience that was hungry for fiction.

For example, there were about 10 national magazines that were eagerly devouring short stories, magazines that no longer exist, such as "The Saturday Evening Post" and Collier's.

And you'll find that Kurt Vonnegut, really searching for some way to help writers in the situation today get started.

Finally, you'll see both Kurt Vonnegut and the students begin to search their own souls and to try to figure out how to save themselves as people who have that calling of writing fiction and who also find themselves citizens who are writing fiction.

- Well, earlier you said that we all may have to go in the direction of writing for actors and actresses.

- [Kurt] Mm-hm.

- Do you think that that's like the direction of screenplays or plays?

- Well, we're being racked up by technology, magazines got knocked out, not by any spiritual change, but by the invention of practical television.

And then the advertising agencies declined to advertise anymore in the magazines, figuring television was a better buy.

So the magazines died.

And so ordinary citizens like us had our lives radically changed by technology, and it could happen again.

One of the terrible things about teaching in a writers workshop, is that you know the industry is dying.

You know, it's like, like teaching somebody to play the sackbut, or the virginal or something like that.

You know, there's gonna not a whole lot of lute work out there right now.

(students chuckle) And it becomes tragic when a, when a student reaches this level, they have to say, well, you know, show it to your relatives, or mail it out and see who'll print it.

But there, there's probably no outlet now.

- Well, I don't know.

I think we're being a little over gloomy about the future of fiction.

You've got to have confidence in yourself.

I live in Sarasota, Florida, and Corky Cristiani gave me a great line one day.

She's one, she's one of the great horsemen of the world, comes from the Cristiani family.

She said, "Well, you know, there's one beautiful thing about the circus world.

You live in this world, and if you can do a triple back somersault, that is something they can never take away from you.

And they, and you know, you can do the triple back.

Everybody in the world knows, and you are respected for this.

So you have to know you can do the triple back somersault sometimes even before you can do it."

- Well, where, where should good writers, what should you think they should do then?

Besides... - Well, I, I- I think we're realizing in this country that, that people are gonna have to rescue themselves through autonomous local collectives, I think.

Because the government can't do everything and then national or the National Endowment hasn't got enough money to publish all this.

I suspect that God rationed different sorts of people and assumed that we were going to be nomads or, or small communities of maybe 50, a hundred people at the largest.

And that God made sure that genetically we had a leader.

We had somebody who could run very fast.

We had a seer as possibly an epileptic who would, who would have, have, get us in touch with the gods, and a storyteller.

The storytellers are very common as if you're in any university in the country.

If you call together a creative writing class, there can be a remarkable number of people who are born with this talent.

'Cause God wanted us to have enough storytellers.

And now in a country of 200 million people, the conglomerates are saying, "Well, let Mario Puzo..." - [Panelist] Yeah.

- Tell the stories for us all and we'll give him $2 million.

And let Frank Sinatra sing all your songs and we'll give him $5 million a year.

And the rest of you, you know, you don't need to sing, you don't need to dance, you don't need to write poems, you don't need to tell stories anymore.

That's all taken care of in either Burbank, California or New York City.

And it's a tragedy because there are all these, all these people with, with a God-given talent.

And I'm serious about the people of Indianapolis, 'cause that's where I ought to be, is that city, has had a million people in it.

Now, my family was there for three generations.

I know a lot about 'em.

That town is 10 times the size of Athens in the Golden Age.

It has no literature.

Those lives are going totally unrecorded.

The people have no mirrors held up to themselves, you know, this is what your lives look like, and this is tragic.

We've gotta become more local again, somehow.

And, and well, I, people are in the frame of mind that think the city state's a very good idea anyway.

Literary problems to this day are, are largely political and technological and not spiritual.

- How about people like Sam Lawrence and Silverman that are, have pulled off from the conglomerates and have their own writers, you know, as in your case?

- Well, they're gonna die and there aren't gonna be any more like them.

They the other, yeah.

- [William] Robin just came out with, with with John's book, you know.

- Yeah.

- [William] I mean this, there's gotta be some hope out there someplace.

- Yeah, well, Sam Lawrence, my, my publisher's, a good pal of mine, he brings out about 20 books a year and he is one of the last of the personal publishers, but he is plugged into an enormous conglomerate.

I mean there's Sam Lawrence Incorporated, and that's my publisher, but he is tied in with Dell, and Dell is in turn owned by Doubleday, but there, that's all publishing anyways, you know, as he could, the whole thing could be owned by a cat food company, Collier's.

(audience laughs) - How do you see that things are going to get more localized then?

How is there going to be more storytelling done?

- That's for you to figure out as a citizen.

If we get people in the frame of mind where they don't have to be paid for what they do, 'cause if you're content to do this sort of thing and pass it around to friends, that's fine.

As that's what a primitive person would do with it anyway.

If you were in a, in a small family.

But you have people particularly in university situation who, who have spent a lot of money to get here and to stay here, and expect to start getting money back sometime.

I think poets, I, I think we all ought to be writing poems perfectly routinely as, just as human beings.

We all should have written a poem for somebody today because it's Valentine's Day, you know, and whoever receives it should read it and, and give you a kiss and throw it in a waste basket.

It is like, I, I like the idea of disposable literature or literature for a narrow number of people.

- Back when the feedback was better, or particularly when there were, you know, were more magazines and they were printing more stories, did you find that the type of feedback that you got, you know, in being able to sell it to this particular magazine or, or that magazine, the one that you wanted to, affected your work?

Was it better then, do you feel, or you know, has it become better as you've become a established writer?

- The advice that the editors of these slick magazines gave, took me a long time to realize it was almost all in Aristotle's poetics, and that it seemed to be schlock information you were getting, but in fact, treating a story as a gadget, as a Model-A Ford.

How to get the damn thing started again.

And the advice was all terribly interesting.

And we all came up through this world.

I was writing short stories for slick magazines.

And so we know how to tell a story, I can tell you in about five minutes.

But younger people often, it's considered corrupt to accept advice of that sort.

But the basic rule that the magazine would tell you is don't put anything in the story that does not either reveal character or advance the action.

And this Model-A is gonna run forever.

(panelists laugh) I mean, it goes.

If you will, if you will simply do that.

And that's hack advice.

And a lot of people would say, "Well, you know, this is a low grade person, and basically the enemy of art, who would, who would give formula advice like that."

But if you obey that, it, that story will just go forever.

- [Borden] It works.

- And it makes for terribly efficient storytelling.

And you get into the frame of mind to, to do that.

(lighter flicks) And, and the quality of the stories in the Saturday Evening Post and Collier's were quite high.

And the New Yorker was regarded, and Harper and the Atlantic were regarded as superior.

And you were really an artist if you got up to that level, which I never reached incidentally.

I'd never published in a so-called quality magazine, but also there was snobbery in those magazines, educated people digging each other with their elbow.

- And less money too, right?

- [Kurt] Yeah.

- Harper's paid 500, the Post paid 2000, you know, so you start with the Post.

- But the the premise is what if, what if, what if?

- [William] Yeah.

- And so many young writers are too polite.

I mean, we try to be polite, we try to be nice to each other.

You don't insult each other, and you have to learn to be really mean to fictional characters because they're not real people.

And it's, it's your politeness, it... and you make the worst possible thing happen, which is just the opposite of the way you conduct your life.

But there's this, there's this wife of a poor government clerk in France who would love to get into the middle class and, and had some associations with it, and they get an invitation to a dance, and she wants to go.

And so he is able to get her a dress, but she doesn't have any jewelry to wear to go to this dance.

So she borrows a necklace from a friend, beautiful necklace, and they go.

Well, how nice, is here these people are having some fun, right?

Let 'em have fun, go home, and and give the necklace back.

Why not?

And it's a nice story about a nice evening.

These people always have to remember.

But what, what does then a writer do?

She loses the necklace at the party, a $60,000 necklace, and her husband makes $6,000 a year.

They lose it.

Well this is a famous Maupassant story, it's "The Necklace."

The worst possible thing that happened to this innocent child?

I mean, there was nothing ugly about this wife at all.

She was darling.

And so they spend the rest of their lives earning enough money to replace this necklace.

But you have to be mean, and make the worst, make the worst thing happen to them.

Well, a guy on a, if a guy's on a chain gang, you gotta do road work near his house, all right?

Is, he'd be able to conceal himself from the, from members of his community, from his family and all that, except his God damn dog recognizes him.

(audience laughs) That's his story.

What's the worst possible thing?

Why isn't it enough that this man was on a chain gang, having to work near his own home?

It was all right, let him spend the day and reflect on it, and then go back to prison.

No, something worse than that's gotta happen to him or it's not a story.

- Knowing now after writing for a long time, even if you were making, you know, a living at writing, but not really getting that much recognition during those first years, how does it feel now?

I mean, is it a good feeling or is it a scary kind of feeling knowing that whatever you put out, it's got your name on it, it's got Vonnegut on it, is gonna sell, it's gonna be a success?

I mean, is that... - It's it's, it's troubling, yeah.

And well there one reason people want, wanna become well known, is people will forgive you an awful lot if you're simply well known is, is is people, people protect well known people.

And so I think my last book really was quite bad and, but people want to comfort me about that and everything.

So it's nice is they, they have a family feeling about it.

And, and the celebrity society we have is tragic in a way.

'Cause we have a, a family composed now of Jacqueline Onassis, Marlon Brando, and you know, there aren't even 52 of them that People magazine and US can't go 52 weeks without repeating because we don't have 52 celebrities.

I think we've got, you know, 46 or so.

- [William] It's tough at the top, isn't it?

- Yeah, but this is our family now.

- Well, as Andy Warhol said, eventually everybody's going to be a celebrity for 15 minutes.

(chuckles) - Yeah.

- I don't believe that.

- But we've gotta become more local again.

Our poets have to be, we have to have local poets.

But I, I grew, when I grew up in Indianapolis, radio was wasn't much.

And, and the highways weren't much either.

So Indianapolis was like some provincial capital like Sophia or like Bucharest.

And I knew the conductor of the Indianapolis Symphony orchestras, Ferdinand Schaefer, he'd come over to our house and eat supper.

I took clarinet lessons from Earnest Michaelas, who was the first clarinet in the orchestra there.

I knew the sculptor who made the friezes on my high school there, big friezes on the front.

As when buildings were built there.

My father was an architect, my grandfather was an architect.

I knew the architects who designed these office buildings around town and all that.

All that was just wiped out by the, by the Second World War, by television and all that.

And so now they want an architect, they hire Edward Dole Stone or E. M. Pire.

And they had to hire, Serge Koussevitzky's nephew to direct a symphony orchestra and all this.

And I want to see America become local like that again.

And by God it's going to, you know, as soon as we run outta gasoline next August, or whenever the last drop goes.

- Do you write quickly?

Do you do a lot of revision?

Do you have writer's block?

- Two kinds, yeah, sure, lots of blocks, but mainly I think, 'cause I don't have anything on my mind, you know, I, I just wanna write a book.

But there's basically two kinds of writers, they're swoopers and they're, and they're bashers.

(panelist chuckles) And the the swoopers, I, I assume you're a swooper, right?

- [William] Probably.

- I mean, but you're soaring along there, and then pretty soon you got 600 pages and, and this isn't quite right and that isn't quite right, and everything, you gotta come back and refine this scene and throw that out.

- I was interested in, when you're talking about working at GE and PR, how you made that transition to writing, how you got into literature.

Was it a planned thing?

Did you know you were gonna get out of working where you were or how did that turn out?

- Well, we, we were, we were an ambitious generation having come out of the, coming out, come out of the Depression and we were gonna go as far and fast as we could.

And we're naturally job hoppers all the time, and made us rather unreliable employees.

You know, we, we were good, we were good at our jobs.

That was important.

And so you couldn't be fired.

But the boss knew that you weren't, you were looking for some better opportunity all the time.

And so it was that sort of hustle was on the weekend.

I'd try and write short stories 'cause that opportunity existed.

Then I sold one, you know, for several hundred bucks.

It was more than they were paying me at General Electric.

So I left.

Opportunistic generation, and sure I do all kinds of writing.

But it was easy for me to go back to an ad agency, you know, in mid-career.

I had several books behind me and all that.

And I went and wrote ads for a while.

I didn't mind that.

They were good ads, or good enough.

- You don't think that ours is as an opportunistic generation as yours?

I mean, you don't think that we have to have that same, or that we do have that same drive?

- Well, I, I won't, I don't know you.

I, I have six children, and it seems to me that they're not willing to take any kind of job.

I always was.

And I found, I found any job interesting, and kind of marvelous to have a job.

And they have higher standards as they consider certain jobs demeaning.

It's another thing I recommend to people is that they be humiliated.

That everybody deserves to be humiliated.

And you know, I thought it was great, that I was a private first class for three damn years with a war going on.

(panelist chuckles) You know, everybody, everybody else got promoted.

There were casualties and there, and no promotion for me.

And people spoke to me abominably, and, and that was all very good to me.

Good for me.

- [Borden] What was your first story, Kurt?

- It was a Barnhouse Effect and that was Knox Burger and I just could not get the ending right.

You know, I could, I could never end my stories.

And so finally I heard Collier's had bought it.

- Knox bought it?

- Yeah, Knox bought it, and it was 750 bucks, and my agent had finally ended it for me.

(cross talk) (panelists laugh) It was a matter of, it was a matter of about two or three lines and, and Ken Littower, who had been functioning at Colliers for years just finally got exhausted sending this damn thing back to me and then back to the editor and everything.

So he put the proper ending on it.

And that's a dishonorable story.

I've got another one too, as, as a hack, as a person who can take advice from other people, and they, you know, is write me a western, write me a detective story.

And a true creative writer cannot deliver that sort of thing.

And or, you know, if you asked Faulkner to write, write you a story of a certain sort, he would say, "Yeah," he would do it.

And he would get something very different because he can't control himself to that extent.

So I've been proud that I've never been able to do hack work too.

And Playboy magazine called me up and said they had an idea for a short story and would I write it for 'em?

And I'm open to propositions and all that.

What's this crappy idea?

It was so God damn funny.

(laughs) I was rolling on the floor and thank you very much.

And I sat down and I wrote my version of it.

That was once, that was... - You have an ability to bring social issues to the public, to the way they could read them.

A lot of social issues have been brought up lately in books and they're so depressing, nobody gets past the second page.

Do you set out to do that?

Or does, does it just, is that what's on your mind at the time?

- [Kurt] Social issues?

- Well, or prisoners.

The thing last night with the prisoner getting out, that's a, a big deal right now.

And a lot of people that I've talked to don't wanna read about that, but they don't know they're reading about it, it seems, when you talk about Kurt Vonnegut, it's like Kleenex and Vaseline, it's, everybody knows that.

- That's simply storytelling, is if you are willing, if you are willing to tell a story, is to have a character wants something strongly and to put only things in the story, which either reveal character or advance the action, (snaps fingers) so that the thing moves right along there.

You can say all sorts of things that the, you know, you talk about a prison system or about shopping bag ladies.

Just my book is full of shopping bag ladies, and it's a very upsetting subject, but if you make the thing move fast enough, people will accept that.

There's a problem with storytelling and not, not that picking an unpleasant subject, but I think some of the greatest social commentary that's in British detective novels is what they say about our society.

Just wonderful, delightful.

And meanwhile, they, they're keeping you going with who committed this crime and why and all that.

But meanwhile they, they're really pouring things in your ear.

I like that.

I mean, it's a, I'm in the business I'm in because of junior civics class in school 43 in Indianapolis.

I'm trying to be a good citizen.

(panelist laughs) And so, so I do want to talk about social issues.

As people who have no interest in our society annoy me.

- [Borden] Question from the girl in black.

- This is a non-literary question, but you know, you're saying that we're moving into a non-literary time.

- [Kurt] Mm-hm.

- I just read somewhere that you were the first SAAB dealer in the United States.

- [Kurt] Second SAAB dealer.

- The second.

- The first one was Gasnel Andre.

It was an automobile racer, yeah, yeah.

- When was that?

I mean, was that at some point when things weren't... - Yeah, I'd gone broke.

What my wife said to me, "You know how long it's been since you've been paid for anything?"

I said, "no."

(audience laughs) And turned out it was about 14 months and she said, "Well, don't you think you better do something?"

(audience laughs) And so I first went to work for an ad agency in Boston and, but then I worked there for about a year and at lunch I saw this, a trailer truck come by with all these little Easter eggs on the things, yellow, blue and pink and all that.

And they looked kind of like VWs, but they, I didn't know what the hell they were.

So I followed the thing in the garage.

- [William] You did?

(laughs) - And asked what they were.

And they were SAABs.

And so then I found out where their headquarters was and I said, "Hey, how about giving me a dealership?"

And they said, "Okay."

And, and so I, oh, I went to a filling station operator on the cape where I lived and he had a lift and he, and he had wheel alignment stuff and he had a lot of swell tools and all that.

And so I split with him on the profit, on each car.

And it, I think it was a business story of the year because I only lost $6,000, and I should have lost about 112 if I'd been as properly active.

- [William] What'd you call yourself anyway?

- SAAB Cape Cod.

And it, it turns out that you cannot get listed in the telephone directory with a, with a name like that.

They said you can call yourself Cape Cod SAAB, but you cannot put the name of your product.

- You can't, huh?

- Or we won't put you in the, in the, in the telephone directory.

And I got mad about it.

- [William] To what do you owe your failure as a SAAB dealer?

- of success, I mean.

Unwillingness to trade.

- [Borden] Would you, would you buy a sob story from this man?

(chuckles) - I, I'll think it over.

I'll look at the warranty clause very close.

- No, but the trouble was that the SAAB had a published price, which was 1850.

- [Borden] Mm-hm.

- And they cost me 15, 1500.

And Americans, when they hear the car price is 1850.

Well, all right, yeah, let's really start talking, you know?

- [Borden] Oh, yes, that's right.

- Is they're gonna knock at least a hundred dollars off and if they knock a hundred dollars off you're outta business, because they must pay that 1850.

- How'd you hold the line?

- We screwed them on the radio.

(audience laughs) - [Borden] Sold some seat covers.

- No, we screwed them two ways.

If we would give, give 'em a Simonized job for $25 and it was actually Turtle Wax, and we would give them a radio, which looked pretty good for a hundred bucks.

And if they'd looked around, they could have bought it for 35.

But you have to, you have to, to gouge the customers that way.

- You should have made out this thing though.

You had the thing going for you there.

- The markup wasn't enough.

- Oh.

- And also, well, the cars came through as, as the Swedes are wonderful people in a lot of ways.

But some people say they have very thick skulls too.

And in the glove compartment of each car that says, you know, is what is SAAB stand for?

It stands for Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget, which are very reputable European airplane manufacturers now gone into the automobile business.

And among our products in the past have been the Stuka, the Messerschmitt - [William] My God.

- The Folker.

And they were building planes for the Germans all through the war, you know, and they thought their customers would like to know this, just to know that.

(audience laughs) - From Columbia, South Carolina, this is Tom Wolfe thanking you for joining us for the University of South Carolina Writers Workshop.

(upbeat music)