Kurt Vonnegut: A Passionate Writer and Opponent of Injustice by Alan Maass

Kurt Vonnegut’s life and art were shaped by personal tragedies. His mother committed suicide. His sister and her husband died within days of each other, leaving three children. One of his sons suffered from schizophrenia.

Kurt Vonnegut

But Vonnegut’s writing also reflected his connection to some of the most terrible public tragedies of the 20th century. Like the characters in his novel Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut survived the firebombing of the German city of Dresden during the Second World War. Captured during the Battle of the Bulge, he and a group of fellow prisoners were put to work there, shortly before British and US warplanes dropped wave after wave of incendiary bombs on a city with no military targets. More than 130,000 people were burned alive or asphyxiated in the inferno that Dresden became, but the story of this war crime remained mostly untold until Vonnegut wrote about it.



Dresden left Vonnegut with a hatred of war — up to and including the latest US interventions in the Middle East, which he opposed with his typical rage, despite failing health. The world of Vonnegut’s novels can be grim — full of world-ending catastrophes like the frozen doom of Cat’s Cradle. His most sympathetic characters are often traumatised by the world’s cruelties and stricken by a sense of powerlessness — something encapsulated in the famous phrase “So it goes” from Slaughterhouse Five, a gesture of resignation that follows every mention of a death. But as despairing as his vision of the world was, Vonnegut was also bitterly opposed to the class of people who benefited from society’s disasters — who justified and even welcomed them.



His novels Breakfast of Champions and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater expose the absurdity of the idea that those who enjoy wealth and power have any special talents. And woven into the plots of these and other books are retellings of US history that puncture the myths about the US taught in school and reinforced by the media. Near the start of Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut writes: “[T]eachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492.



The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492.



That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them. “Here was another piece of evil nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom to human beings everywhere else … “Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines.”



Like his hero Mark Twain, Vonnegut was hilarious in his writing and speaking — but absolutely merciless in showing up the greedy, narrow-minded and ignorant. His disgust with the rich and powerful extended to the US political system. As much as he despised Republican maniacs from Richard Nixon to George Bush Jr., Vonnegut was no less contemptuous of two-faced Democrats. Imagining himself a “visitor from another planet” in one of several books of essays, Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, Vonnegut wrote, “The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people do not acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead. Both imaginary parties are bossed by Winners. When Republicans battle Democrats, this much is certain: Winners will win.” By contrast, Vonnegut’s sympathies — and what hopes he allowed himself — were with working people and their capacity to do the right thing in a world that constantly does the wrong one. This led Vonnegut to celebrate the socialist tradition in the US.



As Joel Bleifuss, editor of In These Times — the left magazine that Vonnegut kept up a correspondence with in recent years — pointed out, the two people Vonnegut was most likely to quote were Jesus and US socialist pioneer Eugene V. Debs. The world got less interesting, as The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart put it, with Kurt Vonnegut’s death. But his voice remains, calling out for sanity and decency in an insane and obscene world that needs to be changed.

Reprinted from Socialist Worker United States

From: Cultural Dissent, Green Left Weekly issue #707 25 April 2007.

Kurt Vonnegut, Novelist Who Caught the Imagination of His Age, Is Dead at 84 by Dinitia Smith

NEW YORK - Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.Mr. Vonnegut suffered irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago, according to his wife, Jill Krementz.

Mr. Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and ’70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States.

Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?

He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. “Mark Twain,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote in his 1991 book, “Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage,” “finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died.”

Not all Mr. Vonnegut’s themes were metaphysical. With a blend of vernacular writing, science fiction, jokes and philosophy, he also wrote about the banalities of consumer culture, for example, or the destruction of the environment.

His novels - 14 in all - were alternate universes, filled with topsy-turvy images and populated by races of his own creation, like the Tralfamadorians and the Mercurian Harmoniums. He invented phenomena like chrono-synclastic infundibula (places in the universe where all truths fit neatly together) as well as religions, like the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and Bokononism (based on the books of a black British Episcopalian from Tobago “filled with bittersweet lies,” a narrator says).

The defining moment of Mr. Vonnegut’s life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many of them burned to death or asphyxiated. “The firebombing of Dresden,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote, “was a work of art.” It was, he added, “a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany.”

His experience in Dresden was the basis of “Slaughterhouse-Five,” which was published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural and social upheaval. The novel, wrote the critic Jerome Klinkowitz, “so perfectly caught America’s transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age.”

To Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” summed up his philosophy:

“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.’ ”

Mr. Vonnegut eschewed traditional structure and punctuation. His books were a mixture of fiction and autobiography, prone to one-sentence paragraphs, exclamation points and italics. Graham Greene called him “one of the most able of living American writers.” Some critics said he had invented a new literary type, infusing the science-fiction form with humor and moral relevance and elevating it to serious literature.

He was also accused of repeating himself, of recycling themes and characters. Some readers found his work incoherent. His harshest critics called him no more than a comic book philosopher, a purveyor of empty aphorisms.

With his curly hair askew, deep pouches under his eyes and rumpled clothes, he often looked like an out-of-work philosophy professor, typically chain smoking, his conversation punctuated with coughs and wheezes. But he also maintained a certain celebrity, as a regular on panels and at literary parties in Manhattan and on the East End of Long Island, where he lived near his friend and fellow war veteran Joseph Heller, another darkly comic literary hero of the age.

Mr. Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922, the youngest of three children. His father, Kurt Sr., was an architect. His mother, Edith, came from a wealthy brewery family. Mr. Vonnegut’s brother, Bernard, who died in 1997, was a physicist and an expert on thunderstorms.

During the Depression, the elder Vonnegut went for long stretches without work, and Mrs. Vonnegut suffered from episodes of mental illness. “When my mother went off her rocker late at night, the hatred and contempt she sprayed on my father, as gentle and innocent a man as ever lived, was without limit and pure, untainted by ideas or information,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote. She committed suicide, an act that haunted her son for the rest of his life.

He had, he said, a lifelong difficulty with women. He remembered an aunt once telling him, “All Vonnegut men are scared to death of women.”

“My theory is that all women have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside,” he wrote.

Mr. Vonnegut went east to attend Cornell University, but he enlisted in the Army before he could get a degree. The Army initially sent him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering.

In 1944 he was shipped to Europe with the 106th Infantry Division and shortly saw combat in the Battle of the Bulge. With his unit nearly destroyed, he wandered behind enemy lines for several days until he was captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp near Dresden, the architectural jewel of Germany.

Assigned by his captors to make vitamin supplements, he was working with other prisoners in an underground meat locker when British and American warplanes started carpet bombing the city, creating a firestorm above him. The work detail saved his life.

Afterward, he and his fellow prisoners were assigned to remove the dead.

“The corpses, most of them in ordinary cellars, were so numerous and represented such a health hazard that they were cremated on huge funeral pyres, or by flamethrowers whose nozzles were thrust into the cellars, without being counted or identified,” he wrote in “Fates Worse Than Death.” When the war ended, Mr. Vonnegut returned to the United States and married his high school sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox. They settled in Chicago in 1945. The couple had three children, Mark, Edith and Nanette. In 1958, Mr. Vonnegut’s sister, Alice, and her husband died within a day of each other, she of cancer and he in a train crash. The Vonneguts took custody of their children, Tiger, Jim and Steven.

In Chicago, Mr. Vonnegut worked as a police reporter for the City News Bureau. He also studied for a master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago, writing a thesis on “The Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales.” It was rejected unanimously by the faculty. (The university finally awarded him a degree almost a quarter of a century later, allowing him to use his novel “Cat’s Cradle” as his thesis.)

In 1947, he moved to Schenectady, N.Y., and took a job in public relations for the General Electric Company. Three years later he sold his first short story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” to Collier’s magazine and decided to move his family to Cape Cod, Mass., where he wrote fiction for magazines like Argosy and The Saturday Evening Post. To bolster his income, he taught emotionally disturbed children, worked at an advertising agency and at one point started a Saab auto dealership.

His first novel was “Player Piano,” published in 1952. A satire on corporate life - the meetings, the pep talks, the cultivation of bosses - it also carries echoes of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” It concerns an engineer, Paul Proteus, who is employed by the Ilium Works, a company similar to General Electric. Proteus becomes the leader of a band of revolutionaries who destroy machines that they think are taking over the world.

“Player Piano” was followed in 1959 by “The Sirens of Titan,” a science-fiction novel featuring the Church of God of the Utterly Indifferent. In 1961 he published “Mother Night,” involving an American writer awaiting trial in Israel on charges of war crimes in Nazi Germany. Like Mr. Vonnegut’s other early novels, they were published as paperback originals. And like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” in 1972, and a number of other Vonnegut novels, “Mother Night” was adapted for film, in 1996, starring Nick Nolte.

In 1963, Mr. Vonnegut published “Cat’s Cradle.” Though it initially sold only about 500 copies, it is widely read today in high school English classes. The novel, which takes its title from an Eskimo game in which children try to snare the sun with string, is an autobiographical work about a family named Hoenikker. The narrator, an adherent of the religion Bokononism, is writing a book about the bombing of Hiroshima and comes to witness the destruction of the world by something called Ice-Nine, which, on contact, causes all water to freeze at room temperature.

Mr. Vonnegut shed the label of science-fiction writer with “Slaughterhouse-Five.” It tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, an infantry scout (as Mr. Vonnegut was), who discovers the horror of war. “You know - we’ve had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves,” an English colonel says in the book. “We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. My God, my God - I said to myself, ‘It’s the Children’s Crusade.’ ”

As Mr. Vonnegut was, Billy is captured and assigned to manufacture vitamin supplements in an underground meat locker, where the prisoners take refuge from Allied bombing.

In “Slaughterhouse-Five,” Mr. Vonnegut introduced the recurring character of Kilgore Trout, his fictional alter ego. The novel also featured a signature Vonnegut phrase.

“Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote at the end of the book, “was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.

“Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.”

One of many Zenlike words and phrases that run through Mr. Vonnegut’s books, “so it goes” became a catchphrase for opponents of the Vietnam war.

“Slaughterhouse-Five” reached No.1 on best-seller lists, making Mr. Vonnegut a cult hero. Some schools and libraries have banned it because of its sexual content, rough language and scenes of violence.

After the book was published, Mr. Vonnegut went into a severe depression and vowed never to write another novel. Suicide was always a temptation, he wrote. In 1984, he tried to take his life with sleeping pills and alcohol.

“The child of a suicide will naturally think of death, the big one, as a logical solution to any problem,” he wrote. His son Mark also suffered a breakdown, in the 1970s, from which he recovered, writing about it in a book, “The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity.”

Forsaking novels, Mr. Vonnegut decided to become a playwright. His first effort, “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” opened Off Broadway in 1970 to mixed reviews. Around this time he separated from his wife and moved to New York. (She remarried and died in 1986.)

In 1970, Mr. Vonnegut moved in with the author and photographer Jill Krementz, whom he married in 1979. They had a daughter, Lily. They survive him, as do all his other children.

Mr. Vonnegut returned to novels with “Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday” (1973), calling it a “tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.” This time his alter ego is Philboyd Sludge, who is writing a book about Dwayne Hoover, a wealthy auto dealer. Hoover has a breakdown after reading a novel written by Kilgore Trout, who reappears in this book, and begins to believe that everyone around him is a robot.

In 1997, Mr. Vonnegut published “Timequake,” a tale of the millennium in which a wrinkle in space-time compels the world to relive the 1990s. The book, based on an earlier failed novel of his, was, in his own words, “a stew” of plot summaries and autobiographical writings. Once again, Kilgore Trout is a character. “If I’d wasted my time creating characters,” Mr. Vonnegut said in defense of his “recycling,” “I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter.”

Though it was a best seller, it also met with mixed reviews. “Having a novelist’s free hand to write what you will does not mean you are entitled to a free ride,” R. Z. Sheppard wrote in Time. But the novelist Valerie Sayers, in The New York Times Book Review, wrote: “The real pleasure lies in Vonnegut’s transforming his continuing interest in the highly suspicious relationship between fact and fiction into the neatest trick yet played on a publishing world consumed with the furor over novel versus memoir.”

Mr. Vonnegut said in the prologue to “Timequake” that it would be his last novel. And so it was.

His last book, in 2005, was a collection of biographical essays, “A Man Without a Country.” It, too, was a best seller.

In concludes with a poem written by Mr. Vonnegut called “Requiem,” which has these closing lines:

When the last living thing

has died on account of us,

how poetical it would be

if Earth could say,

in a voice floating up

perhaps

from the floor

of the Grand Canyon,

“It is done.”

People did not like it here.

Published on Thursday, April 12, 2007 by New York Times

Quotes from David Ireland, Australian writer 1927-

David Ireland is a three time winner of the Miles Franklin Award for The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, 1971, The Glass Canoe, 1976 and A Woman of the Future, 1979. A Woman of the Future, also won the Age Book of the Year Award 1980



If there is no other life, why is this one so lousy?

The Chantic Bird 1968

Quotes from The Unknown Industrial Prisoner 1971

We know that man is alienated from his true function, but what is he? What is his true function? That is the hardest question. What should he do? What should he try to be?
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The purpose of a job is to keep you off the street. It’s still a penal colony. All the thousands of companies are penal sub-contractors to the Government.
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"Your push is what makes the wheel turn. Without your shove there is no system....
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A pay packet stops you form dying, it doesn’t teach you how to live....
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Now take my case. I’m twenty-nine and have two brothers—one in the Liberal Party and one serving six years for rape and arson. My sister Peg is on the streets and Dad lives off her earnings. Mum is pregnant by the boarder and because of this Dad won’t marry her. Last night I got engaged to an ex-prostitute and I wish to be fair to her: should I tell her about my brother in the Liberal Party.


Be not led into the wretchedness of right conduct.
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Quotes from The Glass Canoe. 1976

Never be ashamed of being Australian’ he’d say. ‘There’s plenty just as bad as you in the world. The Australian just wants to be left alone, he doesn’t want to hear nasty things or be bothered by politics, he’s not ambitious, he doesn’t want to much fun, look at the bar.
______________________________________________________
We started of in chains, we do our best when we are not pushed, we pay back a good turn, say no to authority and upstarts, we’re casual, we like makeshift things, were ingenious practical, self reliant, good in emergencies, think we are as good as ayone else in the world and sympathise with the underdog.
________________________________________________________
And on the bar, as at the edge of an ocean or the banks of a river, I saw empty rows of glasses being filled; those frail glasses men commit themselves to, some days floating calmly out into broad reaches of water between sympathetic shores and willows and friends and waving picnickers on the banks, and other days whipping dangerously around a sudden bend towards nervous shallows and sharp aggressive rocks.

And now and then, as they drank deeply, they saw in the bottom of the glass, not the face of a man they knew, but the monster that was within waiting and all to willing to be released.
________________________________________________________
Democracy is not for people who just want to be left alone, so long as they do what there told and don’t answer back. The key people in the democratic process are the critics, dissenters, reformers. If their sealed off from the political process, the system grows tired and sick, and turns into something else.
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She’s not a bad little thing the Queen. I wish the sluts round here could hold their grog that well.

Quotes from A Woman of the Future, 1979

It is a continent of dreams we inhabit, a waiting continent. All who have set foot in the bush, its lonely places, know the silence. The continent is dreaming. We have felt it and been afraid, and turned to trivial things, and retired to the outer rim as if to depart. Everyday the quiet tides darkness roll over us from the menacing interior…
________________________________________________________
They take refuge in tight settlements on the least inhospitable edge of the continent. The interior remains unsubdued and empty because they don’t know what to fill it with; they neither have the energy or the fierceness to subdue it….
________________________________________________________

I speak to you, because you will be the future citizens of whatever class. Where is your sense of achievement? Where is your sense of responsibility? You act if you must work because penalties await you if you don’t,you speak as if today was unbearable, and tomorrow will hopefully, not exist . You have no dream just a national sleep.

Quotes from Sean O'Casey, Irish Writer ( 1880 –1964)

All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.

Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.

Here we have bishops, priests, and deacons, a Censorship Board, vigilant librarians, confraternities and sodalities, Duce Maria, Legions of Mary, Knights of this Christian order and Knights of that one, all surrounding the sinner's free will in an embattled circle.

Laughter is wine for the soul-laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness. the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living.

No man is so old as to believe he cannot live one more year.

The flame from the angel's sword in the garden of Eden has been catalyzed into the atom bomb; God's thunderbolt became blunted, so man's thunderbolt has become the steel star of destruction.


The hallway of every man's life is paced with pictures; pictures gay and pictures gloomy, all useful, for if we be wise, we can learn from them a richer and braver way to live.

The military mind is indeed a menace. Old-fashioned futurity that sees only men fighting and dying in smoke and fire; hears nothing more civilized than a cannonade; scents nothing but the stink of battle-wounds and blood.

The old - like children - talk to themselves, for they have reached that hopeless wisdom of experience which knows that though one were to cry it in the streets to multitudes, or whisper it in the kiss to one's beloved, the only ears that can ever hear one's secrets are one's own!

There's no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to%

Quotes from Joseph Conrad Polish born British Writer (1857-1924)

The terrorist and the secret policeman both come from the same basket.

A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.

A man's most open actions have a secret side to them.

Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.

All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook.

As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.

Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.

Don't talk to me of your Archimedes' lever. He was an absentminded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.

Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life.

Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it.

For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

Going home must be like going to render an account.

Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.

Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!

History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.

I don't like work... but I like what is in work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - which no other man can ever know.

I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.

It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.

It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.

It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.

Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

The East Wind, an interloper in the dominions of Westerly Weather, is an impassive-faced tyrant with a sharp poniard held behind his back for a treacherous stab.

The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.

The sea - this truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.

There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten - before the end is told - even if there happens to be any end to it.

There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.

They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience.

This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.

To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.

Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one's friends.

Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.

You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.

Another Selection of Denis Kevans's Poems (1939-2005)

The Bastard Who Squashed The Grapes In Me Bag

I’ve known some lousy bastards, and I bet you have too,

But there is no better bastard than a bastard dressed in blue,

With all their bluff and bluster, there is no-one they can lag,

The dirty, rotten bastards squash the grapes inside your bag!

I was over there in Adelaide, my banner in the sky,

Saying, “Ta tag ga-ga Cha-Cha, and bye-bye Lady Di.”

And I said to waxworks escapees: ”My thoughts you’ll never gag,”

When this lousy, rotten bastard squashed the grapes inside my bag.

Most bastards aren’t real bastards, their only trying out,

They are only apprentice bastards for the bastard talent scout,

Baby bastards, bantams only, who will barrack, brawl and brag,

But not rotten bastard squashed the grapes inside me bag.

He wouldn’t be part bastard, he’s a bastard under par,

He’d have a proper pedigree from the bastard registrar,

Almost the perfect bastard, and for him the day would drag,

If he couldn’t lift his boot and squash the grapes inside your bag.

He’d have to be all bastard from his bootstraps to his head,

Bred by balls of bastard fathers, who were bastards born and bred,

And the bastard got his guernsey, when he gave his toes a wag,

And made a bloody puree of the grapes inside me bag,

There was Jenny, a strange bastard, no stranger bastard born,

When you asked about the phone bill, she would at you with scorn,

And she call it “paranoia”, said your “vibes” were really “agg”

But she couldn’t touch the bastard squashed the grapes inside me bag.

Then there was “Strawb”, an A-grade bastard, who was brillant in a test,

When bastardry was blooming, he out bastarded the best,

He would bot your soap, and jock-strap, he would your final fag,

But he couldn’t beat the bastard squashed the grapes inside me bag,

Poor bastards are a species, patronizing little squirts,

Who will winkle out your weakness, and the nag until it hurts,

And they talk to other bastards, and the bastards start to mag,

But an elocution teacher squashed the grapes inside me bag.

They were luscious, they were lovely, with the sun kiss on the skin,

Pouting with a Summer’s beauty, and the juice within,

But beauty baffles bastards, and the bastards kinda sag,

Like that lousy, rotten bastard squashed the grapes inside me bag.

I have no yen for vengeance, vendettas, or a feud,

Grape-crushing brainless bastards are the greatest bastards brewed,

I’d sentence them to treading grapes in some remote Goulag,

With that lousy rotten bastard squashed the grapes inside me bag.

I mean that rotten bastard squashed the grapes inside me bag.

Cockatoo Island

This land is your land,

This land is my land,

From Cape York Peninsula

To the Cockatoo Island

Now Kerry Packer wants Cockatoo Island

To build a billion dollar Resort,

For his billionaire mates,

To have a casino,

To have boats going back and forth,

Like they have in Hong Kong

Using the water

And the coloured lights on the boats;

There won’t be ferries for the people,

And their children,

For cheap excursions like there used to be

On Sydney Harbour,

When my grandfather was a kid,

No, billionaires only thank you very much,

Clean out their shitpots and dust the cue,

And Kerry says to Bob Hawker

I’m runnen’ the media of half this country,

You want to get reelected Bobby Baby?

Sack these workers, destroy their families,

And their hopes, destroy Australia’s

Ship-repair industry,

And repairing Defense vessels;

We’ll erect a plaque to sailors,

Who, in the Second World War,

Attempted to conquer Australia,

We’ll erect a plaque for them,

But for those who repair Defense ships,

For Australia, sack’em,

‘S Kerry me mate, and he’s gunna

Back me up up in the Elections.

This land is your land,

This land is my land,

From Cape York Peninsula

To the Cockatoo Island

Painter and Dockers

We did Time for the Union Movement,

We did Time for the workers, too,

We did Time for the Nation’s leaders,

And now they say we are through.

Guilford Four

The Guilford Four, framed by the law,

Go out, the iron door banged,

Up comes a journo, half full of Pernot

-“How would you feel now, if you’d ‘a hanged.

The Roar of the Crowd

I’ve heard the roar of the wind, boys in mighty green-shirt pines,

As if the trees were blazing like a gas-fire in the mines,

And the wind’s voice kept on mounting against the midnight’s face

I felt the roar well up in me, that roar has left its trace.

I’ve heard the roar at the school gates when the holidays began,

When the boys raced out like brumbies grown men turned and ran,

And they raced down through the playground

and they roared out: ”We are free!”

Ah, the hungry roar of the schoolboys still lives in me.

I’ve heard the roar at the football match as it rose in the crowded stands,

When a winger leapt and took a pass with magic, outstretched hands,

And the double roar as he came inside and flashed across the line

That was a roar that stirred my soul a roar that was a sign.

I’ve heard the roar on the racecourse when the favorite lunged ahead

He took the lead of the ledger and the rest of the field seem dead,

And the roar for horse and jockey with numbers in the frame,

That was a roar that spurred my blood and victory was its name.

I’ve heard the roar of soldiers when they first went to the front,

When war was only a sporting- match they begged to go on a stunt,

And they roared: “Come on Australia”. “Wagga!” and “Henty!” and “Hay”!,

Ah, that was the roar of the slaughterhouse, there’s nothing more to say.

And I’ve heard the roar at the Town Hall when the delegate rose to speak,

A roar to shake the merciless, a roar to raise the weak,

To raise the weak and wondering, to give eyes to the blind,

That was the roar of a tidal wave that was making up its mind.

Parramatta River

The Councillor spoke with conviction,

Like a preacher from a Hollywood missionate,

“The Parramatta River isn’t dirty,

The problem is all these dead fish in it.

Uranium

For rich individuals,

The dividends are creamier,

For thousands of our children,

The dividend is leukemia.

Like the Roman Caesars

Like the Roman Caesars

They tore of his legs

In front of us,

A Vietnam Veteran,

An American GI

Brian Wilson,

The barbarians,

They tore his legs off, why?

He said-

Stop the Ammunition train,

That’s all he said-

Stop the Ammunition train,

For the Contras in Honduras,

For the Contras in Nicaragua,

That was all-

Brian Wilson.

Pigs Arse is Pork

“Pigs Arse is Pork,” Ada would say,

But, no pig’s arse is orchids! Which way?

Well, these feral pigs travel miles each day,

Through the Megalong, Garangatcha’s way.

To snip the native orchids, those exquisite blooms,

The pigs’ bio-vibe latches onto protein,

In the pretty flowers, so, hour by hour,

They’re snaffling the tender, native orchids,

Of Australia. The pigs! The feral pigs!

Pigs Arse is Pork. No,

Jesus Saves

Religion has its benefits,

Arousing wits and sages,

“Jesus saves,” and, underneath,

“He couldn’t on my wages.”

Safety Precaution

The labourer fell from the scaffold,

Way down where the concrete is small,

The boss ran out with a used Kleenex,

To cushion the poor bastards fall.

Bob Hawke the Scab

“I’m naked and someone has stolen my clothes,

And I cannot get on with the job,

And thousands of eyes are staring at me,”

It’s because you’re a scab, Bob.

Shiva the Worker

Shiva, can work with gaiety,

And Shiva is an eight-armed diety,

And if the boss makes a killing,

With his multi-skilling,

We’ll need eight arms to catch up with him, matey.

Break Even

I came into this world with nothen,

And one day I’ll be leaven’,

And, if I finish with nothen’,

Well, mate, I’ve broken even.

What is This Union Jack?

What is This Union Jack?

With stripes of red and white,

Was it the convict’s back,

Cut by day, and night?

Proud flag of the Blitz!

You waved above the law

In outposts of Empire,

Your slaves were red and raw.

But now, Australian say-

“Enough, O Royal Boss!

We want our nation’s flag,

The star-bright Southern Cross.

Captain Lalor

Captain Lalor,

Haven’t you lost your way?

What are you doing here,

Four hundred yards from the peak of Chunuk Bair?

Peter Lalor’s sword by your side,

Your grandfather’s sword by your side,

The 26^th April, 1915, far from your farm in Victoria, so green?

Captain Lalor,

Haven’t you lost your way?

What are you doing here?

Your eyes filming,

Your fingers unlacing from the handle of Peter Lalor’s sword,

So carefully balanced and restored,

Your spent cartridges all around,

Your four mates lying without a sound,

Captain Lalor,

What are you doing here?

Four hundred yards from the peak of Chunuk Bair?

The Ghost of Sydney Opera House

There’s a ghost in Sydney Opera House,

Who sings in all the shows,

The glittering tiaras sometimes

Tumble on their toes,

The ghost he was a rigger,

And he’d sing up in the shell,

And we sank a fleet of schooners

In the First and Last Hotel

Chorus:

And we’ll sing Paddy, sing,

A song to rouse ‘em all,

You’re the Ghost of Sydney Opera House,

Now take a curtain call,

When in Madame Butterfly,

Joan reaches for High C

We’ll whisper-“Rest your tonsils, love

And leave this one to me.”

When we built the Opera House,

The ‘gingerbeers’d moan,

How can we make this jigsaw fit,

Gigantic blocks of stone?

Says Paddy-“Dig, we’ll jury-rig,

I learnt it when a tar”,

He turned and drew the harness

In the circles in the bar.

We hoisted up those pieces,

And the jigsaw fitted well,

But Paddy took a header

High up in the Opera Shell,

We tried to drown our sorrows

In a wagon load of beer,

The more we drank, the more we knew,

That Paddy was still here.

Paddy was a rigger,

Now he’s in the Opera game,

He got the nod in Tosca,

And the lead in La Boheme,

You should of seen his pantaloons

When he pranced straight through the door,

Playen the local hero

In Luccia di Lammamoor.

Now his voice it carries sweetly

Through the grandeur of the dome-

“Since I helped build the place

I’ll take it for my home”,

His voice it carries sweetly

Through the beauty of the shell-

“Mine’ll be a schooner

In the First and Last Hotel.”