December 1, 2022

They were writers before they soldiers. They were soldiers before they were stars.

Kurt Vonnegut turned 100 on November 11. Appropriately, he was born on Veterans Day, 1922, and then grew up to serve in World War Two which, darkly, gave him the wounds to write Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death.

Vonnegut turned 100 but he kept quiet about it, having died in 2007; a shitty thing to do because we ache for him each day. We saw Vonnegut once in person, on a stage talking about writing, and could have met him in person but that would have cost more money.

Money.

Vonnegut on that day mentioned his brother Bernard whom he said was “regrettably dead.” Your assignment? Write a story titled Dead, Regrettably.

Charles Schulz’ 100th birthday came on November 26. Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, the father of Snoopy, of Charlie Brown, of our childhood heart and our adult soul, has been gone since February, 2000, just barely reaching over from one century into the next.

On his birthday, many comic strips paid tribute, smiling at him, thanking him from the black and white pages that Peanuts re-prints still inhabit, still dominate.

Life without Charlie Brown is not worth reading.

Were they friends? Vonnegut and Schulz? Was there mutual admiration? If Schulz had ever written novels they certainly would have been in the key of Vonnegut: funny, absurd, sad. Minimalist. Simple.

Both grew up in the Midwest then made their fortune and fame all over the world. But they were created in the Midwestern cold. Schulz’ characters huddled in the Christmas frost, a cold that will always hold the American heartland in its hands. Vonnegut, too. What is it about the Midwest that is about the Midwest? It’s cold. It’s polite. It keeps on, just as Snoopy and Kilgore Trout do long after their fathers’ funerals.

Born in the Midwest, but raised in hell. That’s what Vonnegut and Schulz were. They fought in World War II and saw more death and sadness before turning 25 than most people will, hopefully, in a hundred lifetimes.

Especially Vonnegut. The Midwestern freeze likely armed him well for winter’s bitter grip in a German POW camp. He was at Dresden. It was bombed to shit. Nothing could have readied him for that. He emerged from it but never left. We know the scars the war left on Vonnegut’s characters, but what battle wounds were Linus and Charlie Brown covering up? Maybe Schulz expelled all that horror through Schroeder’s piano. It could have been that the music we could see but not hear was the weeping of a generation, of every generation that is sent to fight and does not come home.

The centenary club already had J.D. Salinger as a member before Vonnegut and Schulz posthumously walked through the door. Salinger, if alive, would be 103, and he must be mentioned because he, too, was in the greatest generation. He fought in the war and carried Holden Caulfield with him through the battles of Europe. And then he, too, came home and, largely, kept personally quiet about the terror he lived through, leaving that to his characters to convey.

What would these old, dead men have given to us if they had not had their youth hijacked by war? What would they have written? What if the war had taken them? Considering a world empty of Charlie Brown, Holden Caulfield, and Billy Pilgrim is uncomfortable to the point of painful to the point of misery.

And then we think of how many other great writers, artists, architects, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, human Goddamn beings actually were taken. The millions of lost lives and billions of blank pages.

Bernard Vonnegut was a genius. He was an atmospheric scientist who discovered that silver iodide could be used in cloud seeding. Planting seeds in the clouds to help them produce rain and snow. He could make it rain and make it snow. He could make it snow in time for Christmas. He could make a snow that would make Holden Caulfield melancholy on a New York City street, Billy Pilgrim shiver in a fox hole, and Charlie Brown wonder what it all really is about as the flakes fall past his window as Christmas keeps getting closer.

Through the fog, across the pages, over the years, and the bullets, and ink, and the echoes. A Christmas parade unstuck in time--TK