Kurt Vonnegut on the secret to being universal

Don't open a window

One of those writers almost universally respected and often revered, and most famous for the antiwar novel Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut had a strong and humanistic moral sense. His books “do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are,” he explained when his books were being taken out of libraries. This came out in his understanding of what the writing should be doing in his writing. This insight is taken from Kurt Vonnegut: Letters.

I have never regretted helping people to write better, even though they weren’t going to make livings with that particular skill, since they were learning how to be more graceful. . . .

Unfortunately, television offers the illusion of experiences writers used to come by the hard way, in courtrooms, on ships, in hospitals, whatever. Please don’t rely on those, unless you want to be popular.

I say go for truths, very personal ones, not likely to be learned from TV sets. We need to know what those are. Or I do.

The secret of universality is provincialism. Don’t open a window and make love to the world. Literary masterpieces since the birth of the novel and short story have all been obsessed with narrow societies, Emma Bovary’s, Leopold Bloom’s, about which most readers cannot be expected to know much. They’ll learn, those readers will.

Previous: Keith Waterhouse on how children see the world.

Next: A former psychic on how psychics know your secrets.