I'd wanted to see this documentary when it first hit the theater. I'd heard nothing before I saw the title on the marquee at the Village 8, but by the time I had found a free moment...three or four days later...it was gone. I searched the usual suspect platforms for it, gave up, and
then kind of forgot about it. Until last night, when I was glancing at hulu , and there it was. I started watching right away. Didn't get far, as it's rare for me to have much tv time to myself, but even the first 30 minutes were enough to re-ignite my great love for Kurt, which goes back to my junior year in high school (1973 - 1974).
I remember being in a bookstore in a mall in Baltimore, looking at the shelves, and then something on the floor level caught my eye. There stacked at the bottom of the shelves were various books, and the orange cover of one of them had flashed into my peripheral vision. I picked it up.
It was Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. I'd never heard of either of them before. But it amused me that someone had written a novel with the Wheaties' slogan as a title, so I picked it up. I flipped through a few pages...saw the primitive, Magic Marker pictures, maybe read a bit here and there, and decided to buy it.
I began to read it, and was quickly struck by the way that Vonnegut would write "Listen:" sporadically throughout, because my then-girlfriend, June, did that on a regular basis. The next day at school I showed her a paragraph that began that way. Unfortunately, it was a paragraph about "buggery," and she, Christian soul that she was, was horrified and tried to take the book from me, because in her mind the only thing to be done was to destroy it. The ensuing quarrel didn't end our relationship, but it put a pretty good crack in the superstructure.
As for me, I fell in love with Vonnegut and began to buy and read all of his novels. By the time Slapstick came out in 1976, I was buying hardcovers off of the New Books shelves, and that continued until his final book...the posthumous While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction, which came out in 2011. *
I read all of those books except the posthumous Mortals (I stalled out halfway through and never went back) when I first got hold of them, and reread all of them while I was living in South Bend, Indiana, in the late 1980s. I'd started another full-on re-read a few years back, but got distracted shortly after starting Cat's Cradle and never did get back to it. Though I've thought about it quite a bit, and am determined to do it at some point in the near future, preferably before my death.
So I came to this documentary with the skin of my blivit attenuated to the point of translucency.
Which is probably never a good way to start. Satisfaction seems to have an inverse relationship with expectations most of the time. Which probably explains the whole high divorce rate in the US of A. (Full disclosure: I personally have a 100% divorce rate.)
But as I said, I was really delighted with the first 30 minutes or so of Unstuck in Time.
Then we got to the aftermath of Kurt's amazingly generous and beautiful act of adopting his sister's four children after her death. The "kids" were interviewed, and they all talked about how Kurt could be fun and playful, but that he was more often mean and intimidating. One of them even said that he hated Kurt when he was growing up. Then it got worse. Kurt finally achieved great success in his writing with Slaughterhouse-Five. A great deal of his success could be directly attributed to his wife, Jane Marie Cox, who had unrelentingly encouraged him through all of the hard years. Although it's not directly stated in the documentary, it seems that she, who had aspired to be a writer herself, completely sublimated her artistic desires in order to support Kurt. But shortly after his big success came, he divorced her and married photographer Jill Krementz, who was 18 years younger than he was. **
That really hurt me. To think that the man I had followed and pretty much worshipped for almost 50 years was a guy who was regularly nasty to his children and was not loyal to his long-suffering wife really galled me. It made me feel like I never wanted to read his books again.
Fortunately I didn't stop watching at this point.
And fortunately the director, Robert B. Weide, had inserted himself into the documentary. Because Mr. Weide's heartfelt monologues brought me back to loving Kurt. Weide was so sincere about his life and his relationship with Kurt...was so obviously a good person...that it made me understand that if this guy loved Kurt, then Kurt was still worth loving.
So yes, this is a movie well worth seeing.
And now I think I'm going to get back to Cat's Cradle. Might have to start over, though.
* Well...kind of his last book. You know how that goes. Various publishers have combed through Kurt's life to create some other books: Kurt Vonnegut: The Cornell Sun Years 1941–1943, a collection of his writings as editor of his college newspaper; We Are What We Pretend to Be: The First and Last Works, which included two unpublished works, "Basic Training" and "If God Were Alive Today"; Sucker's Portfolio: A Collection of Previously Unpublished Writing, which includes 7 previously unpublished pieces (six stories and one non-fiction piece); and If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice to the Young, which is a collection of his commencement speeches. Pretty slim fuckin' pickins, I'd say, and even an OCD like me hasn't yet felt compelled to throw the money down for any of those.
** As a man who was briefly married to a woman 25 years younger than myself, I don't cast this aspersion lightly. The fact is, though, that (1) I wasn't married when I began messing around with a much younger woman and (2) she started it; I just didn't resist.
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