Ferndale Reads Spotlight: An Interview with Dr. Gregory Sumner - Vonnegut Biographer

"What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time." -Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (Chapter 5)

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut is this year’s Ferndale Reads book - which the Ferndale Public Library is encouraging everyone in Ferndale to read this March... Click here for a schedule of special Ferndale-Reads Events.

This year’s keynote speech will feature local Ferndale resident and author, Gregory Sumner. His recent publication, Unstuck in Time, is a journey through Kurt Vonnegut’s life and work. Sumner will speak about Slaughterhouse-Five’s popularity and sign copies of his book.

An interview with
Dr. Gregory Sumner - Part 2 (of 3)

"The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries..."

When Dr. Gregory Sumner, a local author and U-D Mercy history professor, joins me for coffee in the Ferndale Public Library's break-room, these words quoted above are the first thing he notices, scribbled lovingly on our dry-erase board. It's fitting, since the well-traveled lecturer and cultural columnist is here to discuss his favorite subject - the man who wrote those very same words: Kurt Vonnegut. 

"(Kurt Vonnegut) was always a lover of libraries," said Sumner, who researched the man's life and works extensively for his recently published book Unstuck In Time, a hybrid biography/literary overview. "He thought they were a miracle, that they represent America at its best."

America at its best comes up often during my discussion with Sumner.

"Vonnegut was an ardent defender of the first amendment," Sumner points out, citing the rustbelt-raised author's tendency to raise a bit of hell when it came to irreverent social/political/religious satire, throughout his career. "So sometimes he uses a shocking, vulgar style, as he does have a tough message, but he coats it with a sugar pill." 

He's referring almost exclusively to the man's most famous work: Slaughterhouse-Five. This experimental half-sci-fi, half-slapstick, half-protest folk ballad is an odyssey that defies conventional narrative and epitomizes kaleidoscopic evocation by having you laugh out loud on one page, scoff on the next, perturbed at one paragraph but won over by whimsy and wit in the very next sentence. 

Slaughterhouse-Five did, indeed, administer some jagged pills - It deflates "war stories" of all heroism, in fact- goes as far as to indict the romantic delusion of heroic-ism and patriotism by imprisoning (and thereby almost infantalizing) his framed soldier(s). But our "hero" is someone who stands still upon a hill after being fired upon (narrowly missed) so as to give his enemies another fair shot at him; marching along epitomizing aloofness with his uneven boots and thin coat and, oh yeah, he - Billy Pilgrim that is - happens to be unstuck-in-time and sporadically skipping (like a quantum-stone) across time into different scenes of his life. 

But I'll let you read the book! It's part of our Ferndale Reads--community reading event - all month long. (Schedule) 

Sumner's eyes beam through a squint caused by a smile as he speaks of Vonnegut, an artist whom he's studied and written about extensively. Now, he says, he feels as though he's come to "understand his Midwestern vibe," and, not just because the two share a birthplace, (i.e. Indianapolis, IN). 

As surreal as he could be, at times, Vonnegut struck the tone of an old friend rambling at the barber shop. "(We Midwesterners) are much more informal. Vonnegut was our modern social critic, like our own modern Mark Twain, with that sort of sense of humor, that satire stung with a certain pessimism about the country and the world, but still, truly, at heart, a patriot."

Mark Twain bled America, says Sumner. And so does Vonnegut.

Yet...

Slaughterhouse-Five's controversial nature slotted it onto many "banned" lists throughout the United States during the late '60s and early '70s. It wasn't as though Vonnegut himself, (a charmingly fuddy-looking "World-War-II" guy who'd cultivated a resemblance to Twain's stately scruff) was identifying himself with the hippie/counterculture movement when the book was published in 1969; that was just a happy accident of timing. He wasn't a firebrand, said Sumner, nay, he was more "a trustworthy elder." 

He's got such an undeniably American voice and why he did what he did (i.e. Slaughterhouse's perceived irreverence) and how he did it (a defiantly experimental narrative structure) came from his love of America. 

"If you're questioning," Sumner said, "either questioning a war or a political leadership or reporting people," as Vonnegut did, quite creatively, through his works, then you're intoning "...that's not the America I grew up in." That was part of Vonnegut's response to Vietnam. 

"Vonnegut said that he thought Vietnam liberated 'all us writers' to tell the truth, in all its good, bad, and ugly gray-ness. I think Vietnam was the thing that really opened up and allowed this wave, in the late '60s of revisionism to happen. Vonnegut always hated being placed into categories so he would rebel against any, like: 'irreverent,' or 'black humorist.' The humor he used was picked up in the midwest and from listening to his family and from the radio comedians and from seminal slapstick."

Humor, for Vonnegut, being of the Greatest Generation, raised during the Depression, was a "survival tactic." It's probably partly why our SH5 'hero,' Pilgrim, is such a curious cartoon. 

So in modern America, 2013 going into 2014 - where our television sets seeth with vitriol from pundits accusing each other of "not being American-enough," Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse-Five simultaneously offer us, Ferndalians, to open a new dialogue and explore that idea; the modern idea of patriotism and what it means in, inevitably, a post-9/11 world. 

In part 3 - Sumner ruminates further upon Slaughterhouse-Five as Vonnegut's "Survivor's Mission." 

Thanks for reading - and stop in to the Library this week to get your very own copy of Slaughterhouse Five.

Dr. Sumner will speak in our Community Room on March 27th. More info here.

Follow Sumner here.  

Mark your calendars

Thursday, March 7 – Go Comedy Performs a Show inspired by Slaughterhouse-Five – 261 E 9 Mile Rd - 8 p.m.