God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

Why was I unconsciously imagining Donald Trump's idiotic self-contented smile every time senator Rosewater was mentioned in the book? Must be the zeitgeist.
I am amazed, how fresh and on time this whole Vonnegut's rant on riches feels today. But I'm not surprised. It's Vonnegut after all. Always leaves you laughing and sad. Because... humans?
Half star off - the ending felt a bit forced and whatever-ed. Other than that - excellent.

Romanzo pazzo e geniale. Il mondo raccontato da Vonnegut è surreale e divertente, ma è anche il nostro mondo.
Gli "effetti speciali" narrativi non nascondono un universo fatto di ingiustizie e disuguaglianze in cui un uomo Eliot (come Elios, il dio del sole dei romani?) cerca di fare qualcosa per ripianare le differenze.
È buffo pensare che ci sia un giovane avvocato desideroso di fare carriera cerchi di togliergli tutto in favore del ramo "cadetto" della famiglia (una disuguaglianza da ripianare anche questa) ed è ancora più buffo come Eliot risolva la situazione a modo suo in un finale forse in tono minore rispetto al resto della storia, ma a mio parere molto interessante.

Daily Vonnegut – Day 5.

A Kilgore Trout monologue and Eliot Rosewater’s compassion are the two standouts of this book.

Outside of that, there are echoes of the social novel which Vonnegut goes on to perfect after the whole Slapstick debacle. Being in the mental health sector of life, I had a lot of compassion for Eliot Rosewater and his attempts to save individuals of Rosewater County one by one. Of course, I also saw the dark side of it, the creeping Messiah complex (intended without a pejorative connotation) that would come to dominate his day to day. The danger is there for people to think that they can save everyone, and it’s difficult to knock off after a few “successful” cases.

What else to say here but to tell of my lack of enthusiasm for the storyline itself. A lot of important novels work because they are able to coax the message in between the lines, but I have come to see that Vonnegut’s books are message first, story second. Funnily enough, I don’t have that “I am done with this” feeling, and I think I will come back to a lot of these in the future. I guess that’s a compliment. And of course, there is mention of Dresden, right before he gets down to writing the single brightest star in his career.

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth.
It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter.
It's round and wet and crowded.
At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here.
There's only one rule that I know of, babies—
God damn it, you've got to be kind."
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater



I've only got two big rules with my two babies (one boy, one girl): # 1 be happy, # 2 be kind. Everything else is negotable. It appears that Kurt Vonnegut independently arrived at the same conclusion. 'God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater' happens to be a fairly straight-forward novel about money and charity. Vonnegut's novel (also known as Pearls before Swine) is about the Rosewater family and how they invest their efforts into a foundation as a means of keeping the government from taxing their money. The problem is Eliot Rosewater (the protagonist) ends up not caring much about money and being infinitely charitable and kind. This obviously is a form of insanity that either needs to be exploited or protected. In some ways it reminds me of a simplified, satirized version of Dostoevsky's 'the Idiot'. When people are good, selfless, and caring in a world like the one we all live in, they must be stupid or a little nuts. They certainly aren't likely to survive.

The company I work for has a department called « corporate giving », and I can’t help but find that hilarious. These people’s job basically consists of working with a set budget for donation purposes, but they are also constantly looking for the way to get the best return on their charity. “If we sponsor event X, our name will be on their website, printed on a big banner and in the program, we get to invite clients to wine and dine them, and then we can network with the other guests, exchange business cards, organize lunches and get new clients!”. And of course, there are tax breaks for that donation money… Now don’t get me wrong: I understand how capitalism works and why that whole process is necessary in a large business, but it also makes me vaguely uncomfortable because this whole thing is marketing thinly disguised as generosity. The concept of charity and wealth redistribution is only part of this process as a side-effect.

It was hard to not think of that department, and of the rather upsetting current political climate, as I was reading “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater”.

In this book, Vonnegut tells the story of Eliot Rosewater, a millionaire and trustee of a large fortune, who develops a *gasp* social conscience and wants to give away his money to poor people; this leads a lawyer working for his corporation to think he is mentally insane. Incidentally, if the trustee is proven to be mentally unfit, the money passes down to the nearest relative, and the lawyer is hoping to grab a slice of the pie for himself in the transition process.

While that may sound like a very simple story line, there is much more to this book than meets the eye. Of course, you can expect Vonnegut’s trademark weird humor. But he also wants to talk about the dehumanizing potential of wealth and greed and the way such sentiments destroyed the so-called utopic American Dream. After all, can we really call a place a land of unlimited opportunity when the wealth and privilege are hoarded by a handful of people, who work really hard to make it impossible for others to get on the same level as them?

Compassion, in this context, is almost an act of rebellion, and it is sadly ironic that Eliot’s urge to help those less fortunate than him is considered a symptom of mental illness by his family and lawyers. It’s interesting to remember that this book was written in a day and age where communism was the enemy of the state – and in a country that’s quite fanatically (and bizarrely) Christian, but where the idea of taking care of one’s fellow man always seems to sound heretical. It’s something we hear Republicans say over and over again: poor people are lazy and if they just worked hard enough, they’d be fine and wouldn’t need all these socialist bail outs…

Eliot gives money, time, compassion and energy to the people of Rosewater county, and it doesn’t seem to solve the problem. People need to feel loved, but they also need to feel valued, and that’s not always easy in the stratified society they live in. I was touched by Eliot’s efforts to right what he believes is wrong and to atone for that horrible mistake he can’t seem to get passed.

The book is fun and thought-provoking, but very scattered – this is actually the big flaw with Vonnegut’s books in general and it diminishes my enjoyment a little bit. But that doesn’t make it any less interesting and moving - and the amazing end twist has a surprisingly optimistic note to it.

Interestingly, as I read this book, I became aware of a New York Times article (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/bu...) that opens up a new and fascinating conversation about the social responsibility of public companies. I am thrilled to see a major investor challenging the notion that giving shareholders a good return on investment is the one true purpose of a corporation and that the rest of the world is none of their business. Hope?

Okay, I have a new favourite Vonnegut. I already loved Mother Night, and Breakfast of Champions was also a five-star read (Slaughterhouse 5 is probably my least favourite, honestly). But this takes my heart. This is beautiful, full stop. Plenty of the chaotic Vonnegut absurdism, and plenty of the enduring and ever-present Vonnegut heart.

Sylvia— I’m going to be an artist. I’m going to love these discarded Americans, even though they’re useless and unattractive. That is going to be my work of art.

Enter Eliot Rosewater, the chaotic, mentally ill, alcoholic heir of the wealthy and political Rosewater family, and (merely by virtue of being the heir) president of the Rosewater Foundation, who sees himself as Hamlet and idolizes Kilgore Trout (recurring Vonnegut character), who wrote a science fiction book called 2BR02B (“to be or not to be”-- it took me more minutes of staring before I figured out how, but in fairness to me, the text makes the 0 look like an O so I didn’t realize it was supposed to be “naught”).

After traipsing randomly around the country, he drags his long-suffering wife, Sylvia (who has one foot out the door already) to Rosewater County, Indiana, to live. After a nervous breakdown and some arson (she stays in an asylum on which a message is carved: Pretend to be good, always, and even God will be fooled), Sylvia flees and moves back to her native Paris.

Eliot stays in Rosewater and starts a kind of suicide phone hotline, where troubled souls call him for reassurance, bracing reality checks, and checks of an entirely different sort— financial checks, if they will put off killing themselves and give life another go. He becomes so central to the little community that he even baptizes newborns:

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies— God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

Eliot’s father, Senator Rosewater, a staunch elitist and capitalist, considers his son quite the disappointment and even suspects him of — gasp! — communism.

For heaven’s sake, Father, nobody can work with the poor and not fall over Karl Marx from time to time— or just fall over the Bible, as far as that goes. I think it’s terrible the way people don’t share things in this country. I think it’s a heartless government that will let one baby be born owning a big piece of the country, the way I was born, and let another baby be born without owning anything. The least a government could do, it seems to me, is to divide things up fairly among the babies. Life is hard enough, without people having to worry themselves sick about money, too. There’s plenty for everybody in this country, if we’ll only share more.

Meanwhile, there’s this subplot where Norman Mushari— a lawyer for the firm that represents the Rosewater Foundation— is scheming to figure out how best to get his hands on as big a chunk of the foundation money as he possibly can, ideally by getting Eliot declared insane so that the Foundation passes to a distant cousin, Fred Rosewater (and Mushari can take a big commission simply for passing it from Eliot to Fred).

In the end, in an effort to make Eliot seem sane, Senator Rosewater brings Eliot to Indianapolis, where they learn that Mushari has been spreading rumors that Eliot has fathered dozens and dozens of illegitimate children in Rosewater County (all of them lies) in order to cast him in a bad light. To cast Eliot in a good light, they bring in Kilgore Trout to talk to and about him. Trout tells Eliot he admires what he did in Rosewater County:

It dealt on a very small scale with a problem whose queasy horrors will eventually be made world-wide by the sophistication of machines. The problem is this: How to love people who have no use? In time, almost all men and women will become worthless [because of machines] . . . So— if we can’t find reasons and methods for treasuring human beings because they are human beings, then we might as well rub them out. Americans have long been taught to hate all people who will not or cannot work, to hate even themselves for that. We can thank the vanished frontier for that piece of common-sense cruelty. The time is coming, if it isn’t here now, when it will no longer be common sense. It will simply be cruel.

Eliot decides to legally acknowledge every one of the 57 children in Rosewater claimed to be his, even though none of them are (thus rendering the question of whether he was insane moot— even if he were insane, the inheritance would go to his children):

Let them all have full rights of inheritance as my sons and daughters. Let their names be Rosewater from this moment on. And tell them that their father loves them, no matter what they may turn out to be.

“Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil’s foot…” John Donne – Song
Sanity and madness… Is there a borderline in between?
In his old letter Eliot Rosewater wrote to his wife:

n  Maybe I flatter myself when I think that I have things in common with Hamlet, that I have an important mission, that I’m temporarily mixed up about how it should be done. Hamlet had one big edge on me. His father’s ghost told him exactly what he had to do, while I am operating without instructions. But from somewhere something is trying to tell me where to go, what to do there, and why to do it. Don’t worry, I don’t hear voices.n

The world is a crazy place… And the ones who are considered to be normal aren’t normal… They’re just a bit less mad…
The ambitious young poet dreamed to tell the world the truth… And sponsored by the Rosewater Foundation he has written a pornographic novel Get with Child a Mandrake Root… So much for the ultimate truth…
All those pretensions of the rich… All that petty charity… All that aplomb… All that hypocrisy…Ignorance and vulgarity… God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater…

“You’re the man who stands on a street corner with a roll of toilet paper, and written on each square are the words, ‘I love you.’ And each passer-by, no matter who, gets a square all his or her own.”

Lukewarm-hearted sanctimony is the kindness of the wealthy.

Out of all Vonnegut's novels, this is by far the best. One reason is that there are no sci-fi trappings, no silliness about time travel or aliens, nothing but a real study of American history and the impact of wealth and greed on the ideal of democracy. While short and exceedingly easy to read, the book feels like an epic narrative, since it sweeps from the very rich to the very poor, from the battlefields of the Civil War to the modern sailing playgrounds of the very rich. It feels much longer and richer than it is in terms of page count alone.

For the first and last time, Vonnegut takes the time to outline a realistic setting, Rosewater County Indiana, and observes the effects of poverty there with all the power (but none of the sentimentality) of John Steinbeck at his best. At the same time he cuts back to New York, writing about the rich Rosewater clan and the wealthy families of Pisquontuit with all the power (but none of the sentimentality) of Edith Wharton. Last of all, he uses a brilliant series of flashbacks to describe America's tragic fall from the courage and carnage of the Civil War to the squalor and self-indulgence of America today. The Civil War sections alone are unique in Vonnegut's work; he captures the horror of the casualty rates without in any way denying or shying away from the ideals of the Union Army. He writes about the Civil War with all of the power (but none of the sentimentality) of Southern apologists like William Styron and Charles Frazier.

Eliot Rosewater is an ideal American hero,and a fascinating foil to Billy Pilgrim in SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE. Both are All-American guys. But where Billy is an average Joe, Eliot is a scion of wealth and privilege. Where Billy is a ninety eight pound weakling, Eliot is a sailing and tennis champ. Billy is a one-dimensional anti-war propaganda device, (too "pure" to acquire even the most basic military discipline) while Eliot is a much-decorated officer who fights well and suffers as only a brave man can.

The greater power of Eliot Rosewater means that the stakes are much higher. Unlike Billy Pilgrim, Eliot is not a passive weakling but a crusader who sacrifices wealth and privilege to help the poor. His warmth, gentleness and paternal concern for the less fortunate are rendered with tenderness and humor. Vonnegut creates a convincing modern day saint and gives him a real experience among fully realized victims of modern America.

As always in Vonnegut, the few flaws in the book all involve women. Eliot's wife Sylvia is flayed raw again and again as a spoiled socialite who simply can't muster up the gumption to stand by Eliot's side. Vonnegut apologizes for her -- but with a sneer. He never seems to have realized that not all women are as fragile and treacherous as his own mother, who, as he never gets tired of telling us, abandoned him by committing suicide at an early age. By the same token, Fred Rosewater of Rhode Island, Eliot's distant cousin, is rendered as gentle and long-suffering, while his wife Caroline is a one-dimensional shrew. Vonnegut can't get away from an instinctive hostility to women as women, as if the mere biological condition of womanhood were some sort of moral weakness.

His social criticism, as bracing as it is, often suffers as a result. For example, in the Rhode Island section, he feels like lashing out at the rich, so he writes (quite memorably) "four fat, stupid, silly widows in furs were laughing over a bathroom joke printed on a cocktail napkin." Hell of a sentence! Sounds like Joseph Cotten in SHADOW OF A DOUBT. But what does it really mean?

What's odd here is that Vonnegut is attacking the rich, only it seems he only means women. And what he hates about women is that they know about sex? That they enjoy sex? That sex exists? That somehow wanting sex killed off the men folk? As Thackeray's Becky Sharp puts it, he leaves women under the weight of an accusation that is, after all, unspoken.

Still, this is the one Vonnegut book that really has the feel of a fully accomplished novel, a genuine American classic. It has moral depth and epic scope that he never achieved again.