Kurt Vonnegut: Poo-tee tweet.

There’s a post I never published, written after Kurt Vonnegut’s remarks in praise of suicide bombers. I never published it because I never quite finished it, and I never quite finished it because I couldn’t stand that the man I’d admired for most of my life, the writer who is on my top ten list of all-time favorites, could so sell out his own moral code and say something good about those who murder. He made his career by writing anti-war novels (Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five), and yet, here he was, glorifying killers. So I never finished the post, and in fact finally deleted it from my drafts a month or two ago, realizing I’d never put it out there.

Vonnegut died last night, and the words that come to me most vividly are the words that either Harpo Marx or his ghostwriter wrote about John Barrymore, watching him drunk, crying, and trying to find a scrap of paper in a pile sawdust with a blowsy waitress’ phone number on it:

The passing of a great man is tragic, and doubly so when the greatness passes before the man.

Vonnegut’s greatness passed before he did. But it doesn’t take away from the legacy of his writing. It doesn’t take away from my discovery of him in high school, and my memories of being thrown out of the high school library for laughing too hard at a certain illustration in Breakfast of Champions. (It was the picture of an asshole, to my 17-year-old mind, it was hilarious. And, well, I never got thrown out of anywhere in high school and, in fact, was such a book geek that I had the librarians sign my yearbook.)

It doesn’t take away from the fact that I have all of his novels, and will take them out and reread them from time to time, or that his influence can sometimes be seen in my humor pieces.

And yes, I know that he quoted David Irving liberally in Slaughterhouse-Five, and I know that Irving’s facts have since been utterly debunked—but that doesn’t take away from Vonnegut’s writing career, either. Irving fooled a lot of people in those days.

The science fiction community tried to claim Vonnegut, and to this day is a bit resentful because he never considered himself an SF writer. That’s because he wasn’t. He was an American humorist, and yes, in the same vein as Mark Twain. So I will remember his writing, and forget his foolishness, and thank God that he can no longer say anything stupid in interviews that will make me cringe and wonder what happened to the man I respected all those years.

So it goes.