2001: A YEAR DOWN YONDER by Richard Peck
It was a September morning, hazy with late summer, and now with all the years between.
Well, it’s time to talk about Kurt Vonnegut again. I know I keep bringing him up, I know he had the epigraph in the introductory Newburied essay, I know I wrote a lot about him in The Other Newsletter, but turns out he’s maybe the best to ever do it, so in a newsletter about books he’s going to come up a few times. Vonnegut never wrote a children’s book, although he did write the afterword for an edition of Free To Be You And Me where he talked about how he used to noodle on writing a children’s book before Free To Be… basically covered everything he would have wanted to tell children anyways. But that’s not what I want to talk about.
For someone who was very proudly and publicly an atheist, Kurt Vonnegut wrote about religion all the time. As I’ve written about before, he was completely enamored with the Sermon on the Mount as recorded in Matthew’s Gospel, and the Christian principles of that passage are explicitly included across novels, lectures, and essays from every period of his writing career. In a particularly memorable passage from an early novel, the title character of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is asked to baptize a cohort of infants in his town, telling them, as their introduction to the world, as part of this ostensibly religious ritual, “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.”
But I also know that Vonnegut loved talking about religion because he made up religions all of the time for his novels. He created new religions, with rituals and teachings and holy books, from scratch, multiple times as he wrote his stories. All of these were created in the service of Vonnegut exploring his favorite themes and playing around with his humanist principles, and he never seemed to get tired of inventing new religions.
The most famous fake Vonnegut religion was Bokonism, from one of his most famous novels, Cat’s Cradle. Bokonism, a religion indigenous to the fictional Carribean island of San Lorenzo and started by a political dissident rebelling against the island’s authoritarian government, gives us some of Vonnegut’s most famous neologisms (karass, wampeter, granfalloon, kan-kan, foma), and some of his most famous turns of phrase (“peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God”, “Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly, man got to sit and wonder why why why”) and gets to the heart of what religion, in Vonnegut’s mind, is for. As Bokonon himself put it in the ever-expanding Books of Bokonon:
“I wanted all things/
To seem to make some sense/
So we could all be happy, yes,/
Instead of tense./
And I made up lies/
So that they all fit nice,/
And I made this sad world par-a-dise.”
Foma is the Bokonist term - in the weird San Lorenzo pidgin language that provides us with most of the Bokonist terms - for “harmless untruths”, for the lies we tell ourselves and others that help us be slightly kinder and more selfless and happier people. For Vonnegut, every religion was constructed out of foma, every religion was a pack of lies, but the lies helped us live as people in the world, so who really cared if they were lies or not, if we can get this sad world a little closer to a par-a-dise? To use a term from actual theology, this is a sort-of variant on Pascal’s Wager (about which I’ve also written a lot of words); you can live your life as though it’s meaningless and sad, or you can choose to live your life as though there is a greater meaning, and that choice is a gamble, at best, but it’s probably better than the alternative. Vonnegut was all about this idea: he didn’t think there was a God or an afterlife or any divine order, but we still had to live with a greater purpose, we still had to choose to be kind to each other, we still had to care for the poor in spirit, the meek, the peacemakers, and the sorrowful. Ultimately, it wasn’t really a choice to Vonnegut, and it wasn’t a choice for the oppressed people of San Lorenzo.
Bokonism was the most famous fake religion from Vonnegut, and it was the fake religion he developed the most and that served its story the most directly - Cat’s Cradle explored, among other things, how to live under the constant fear of nuclear annihilation - but it wasn’t the only fake religion from Vonnegut at all. The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent is a different variation on this same theme, from the early-period hallucinogenic novel The Sirens Of Titan. The convoluted plot of Sirens would take thousands of words to recount, but what you need to know about the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent is that, like Bokonism, it was created by a human being as a political project. The Church’s founder was Winston Niles Rumfoord, the gregarious New England millionaire - Vonnegut wrote him as a kind-of stand-in for FDR - who happened to also have the ability to time travel, and used his knowledge of the future to explain to Americans that there was not a grand divine plan for them, that we had to live in a universe governed by random chance, that we had to accept that and move forward anyways, that “there is nothing more cruel, more blasphemous that a man can do than to believe that - that luck, good or bad, is the hand of God!” Rumfoord can see the entire timeline of infinity - some of this presages the “unstuck in time” structure around which Vonnegut would eventually build Slaughterhouse-Five - and needs people to understand what’s really out there. Suffice it to say, by the end of the novel, it becomes very clear that Rumfoord is missing one key piece of information about what's actually governing the universe.
There’s also the Church of Jesus Christ the Kidnapped, from 1976’s Slapstick, “a tiny cult in Chicago, but destined to become the most popular American religion of all time”. As the founder put it, “Jesus is here among us. He has been kidnapped by the Forces of Evil. We must drop whatever we are doing, and spend every waking hour in trying to find Him. If we do not, God will exercise His Option…He can destroy mankind so easily, any time he chooses to.” This one is weird and not really explained very thoroughly, but most of Slapstick is weird and not really explained very thoroughly (it’s a good novel, but Vonnegut wasn’t happy with the final product and took the negative reviews pretty hard).
Then there’s the Ghost Shirt Society from Vonnegut’s first novel Player Piano, set in a dystopian future where most industry has been automated and millions have been thrown out of work. The Society is a less a formal religion and more a Luddite-esque hybrid labor uprising that borrows a worldview and practices from 19th-century indigenous Sioux devotions; while that is an extremely strange series of words to put together, the Society is still very clearly a vehicle for Vonnegut to espouse his humanism and his choice to live in an uncaring universe with purpose and compassion. As the novel’s protagonist, and the Ghost Shirt Society’s eventual leader, states during his treason trial:
“...there must be virtue in imperfection, for Man is imperfect, and Man is a creation of God. That there must be virtue in frailty, for Man is frail, Man is a creation of God. That there must be virtue in inefficiency, for Man is inefficient, and Man is a creation of God. That there must be virtue in brilliance followed by stupidity, for Man is alternately brilliant and stupid, and Man is a creation of God. You perhaps disagree with the antique and vain notion on Man’s being a creation of God. But I find it a far more defensible belief than the one implicit in intemperate faith in lawless technological progress - namely, that man is on earth to create more durable and efficient images of himself, and, hence, to eliminate any justification at all for his own continued existence.”
Here, the Ghost Shirt Society is a response to relentless capital and technological advancement, a desperate attempt to reclaim humanity and put our stake down in the idea that humanity is good by itself, was created good, and should not need to justify itself against profit or progress. Just like the other, more real religions teach us.
There's still more. Both Galapagos and God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian feature a specific depiction of the afterlife as a blue tunnel populated by very unexpected characters. Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five, is an Army chaplain forced to reconcile his faith and his position with the unimaginable carnage at Dresden, and then the additional complication of being kidnapped by interdimensional alien beings. Faith is in all of these stories. God is not, God doesn't really figure into these stories by an author who didn't think God existed, but faith, and what faith does to people and what faith does for people, is in all of these stories.
But God does speak directly to humanity in one Vonnegut novel. Just like God spoke directly to humanity in the Sermon on the Mount. This is from the prologue of the best Vonnegut novel, 1973's Breakfast Of Champions; in this passage, Vonnegut is speaking as himself:
“November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy…all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.”
God spoke to mankind for the one minute when we stopped butchering each other. Some old men still remembered that moment in 1973, and the clear implication is that God hasn’t spoken to mankind since the armistice whistle blew. And Armistice Day doesn’t exist anymore; as Vonnegut says in his very next sentences, “Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.” Vonnegut wrote extensively about how we should treat each other, and he said, over and over again, in his novels and his essays and his lectures, how important peace is. And peace is not something we value anymore, not something we prioritize anymore in the world; the absence of peace is usually the only thing our governments can agree to spend money on, and the only thing that movie studios can get funding for anymore. We used to have a holiday for peace, we used to remember that for the one minute when we got there, God actually spoke directly to us, and we don’t care anymore.
A Year Down Yonder is very good, and funny, and endearing. It’s the story of fifteen-year-old Mary Alice Dowdel, whose parents lose everything in the Depression and have to move into a smaller place in Chicago, sending Mary Alice to live with her eccentric grandmother for a year in downstate Illinois. Her grandmother, as it turns out, is a battleax who enjoys fighting against Mary Alice’s bullies, and taking over the town’s bake sale, and hiding a giant snake in her attic to keep the birds away. There are so many funny lines about the culture shock that city girl Mary Alice finds when she shows up in a tiny town, like when the principal asks her about her enrollment in the school: “‘What grade did they have you in up there?’ ‘Would have been tenth,’ I mumbled. ‘Sophomore.’ ‘Let’s call that junior year down here.’” Or grandma talking up the town as “the healthiest spot in Illinois. We had to hang a man to start the graveyard.” Or Mary Alice’s backhanded compliment that “the DAR was a club of only the best ladies in town. They all traced their families back to the Revolutionary War (our side).” And her crack, after an altercation with her classmates, that “anybody who thinks small towns are friendlier than big cities lives in a big city.”
And there are donkeys and outhouses and other period references, but none more dated than the Armistice Day celebration:
“People took Armistice Day seriously back then, nineteen years after the end of the Great War. In Chicago everything stopped at eleven o’clock, even the streetcars. People stood for a minute of silence, remembering…It was the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the moment when the armistice of the Great War had been signed in 1918. We all turned to face east as people did, toward France.”
Christian churches used to be uniformly oriented towards the East, and Christians used to be uniformly buried facing East, in anticipation of Christ returning to Earth for the apocalypse. They thought that when God returned to talk to humans again, it would be from the East. Americans faced East when they celebrated Armistice Day because the last time God spoke to them directly, the voice came from that direction that time, too. We used to have a holiday for peace, we used to remember that for the one minute when we got there, God actually spoke directly to us. A Year Down Yonder is a very sweet story about family, and a simpler time, and the small things that we don’t remember quite so well anymore. And in one chapter, there’s a reference to the one big thing we don’t remember anymore.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1929 medalist, The Trumpeter Of Krakow by Eric P. Kelly.