The writer who has had the greatest influence on my intellectual and creative development isn’t a playwright, but a novelist: Kurt Vonnegut. I can’t remember why I first read Slaughterhouse-Five — it may have been a school assignment — but I immediately began reading every single thing he’d written, and I continued to read everything he wrote for as long as he continued to publish. (I even read his son’s most excellent memoir.) I connected with his work stylistically, and the ideas on which his work is founded were new and invigorating to me.
In the last few years, I’ve noted that there have been a few stage adaptations of his novels. Longacre Lea, here in DC, did a version of Cat’s Cradle, and I seem to recall discussing a version of Sirens of Titan with someone, though I can’t find it now. In any event, the few productions I’ve noted have put in mind of an idea: what if, given the fact that so many of his novels are interconnected in one way or another, somebody adapted, say, five or six of them into a complete cycle of work?
You’d probably want to include, in addition to the novels I’ve already mentioned, Breakfast of Champions, Mother Night, and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, though I wouldn’t blame you if you went old school with Player Piano or new school with Timequake. You might want to focus on the novels in which Kilgore Trout makes an appearance, if only to find an easy way to unite them all; you could do them chronologically, too, to show how Vonnegut’s work evolved… but given how much he thought about being “unstuck in time,” that would probably do a disservice to his memory.
So, here’s the question: do I have the stamina to do something like this? Would I be willing to devote the three or four years it would take just to get to a solid first draft of the entire cycle? (I work methodically, not slap-dash.) Would the Vonnegut estate consider granting me the rights to doing something that ambitious? I really don’t know the answers to any of those questions.
I suppose what I’ll do is just file the idea away for now… fully expecting it to return, nagging at me, until I address it one way or another. (The truth is, I’ve had conversations already, brief ones, with a potential collaborator who shall for now remain nameless… though only time will tell if they bear fruit.) Because I really do think I’d like to do this. If I can figure out how.
Kilgore Trout was able to create “shared experiences” with ‘real’ people. Now when someone, say, Kurt Vonegutt experiences Kilgore Trout, he can tell us stories and write books about these experiences, and try to convey to his readers just what an influence this alter ego has had on him. Vonegutt’s writing is surly one foot in the transcendent and when I read one of his books it’s as though an old friend is telling me another one of his stories.
Now I can’t speak for everyone but some readers of Vonegutt have ‘alter egos’ , we will call them, that are of similar experience so as to know a little bit of what might be going on.
So hold on… I have actually observed instances where someone with an imaginary friend, and this imaginary friend has friend in “imaginary land” who is , just happens to be, the imaginary friend of someone who can’t for the life himself figure out exactly how that can be, but decides just to go withmit and enjoy the ride. Some of these stories of how Kilgore has allowed people to know way to much to have rational explanations . These transcendental experiences that sometimes break through into psychosis have also been seen in two scitzophenia paitents talking to one oneonother .
Like this:
The only thing I know for sure is that all of this is possible . If and when Kilgore pops into your head go with it. An idea for a story that I think I may never write is “Proffessor Quintini’s Almanac”
It’s more of an oral tradition when told so it’s always changing a bit. Kurt needed to change dates and whereabouts for Trout. He’s not dead, from draino, it turns out. Kilgore first came to me with a shiny paperback novel just as Bluebeard came out hardcover. Now with PQA so it goes before the Trout event this Prof Qintini shows up and tells me to hold on to this Almanac and he and this Almanac I’m told came buy way of CSInfundibula and Quintini is prof of psudo-theoretical physics at The University of Tralfamador which at that point I quite trying to translate the almanac as that proves to be a mute point. This was before I found out that Hanna (a relation to me) married a Amos Figard in the mid 1800’s. And of the nine children, one, Mary Jane Figard married Brink Trout. They are from Ohio, so it goes, they had nine children, only one of those had a child, Jane, the last born, married Fred Sietz. And the one son, Hobart Seitz (1910) roughly the same age as kilgore . Then all these Figards and Trouts seem to just go away. I used to think this was all just a bunch of silly made up stuff. I did write one short story in a frenzy that was a shared experience that preceded a time quake which was Jan 17 late 1994 so all this talk about earthquakes and time travel Kilgore seemed to think was going to be it for Kurt and the books.