Vonnegut at Hampden-Sydney (i)

from critic Alan Farrell, novelist Kurt Vonnegut, and editor Michael Boudreau

Vonnegut is the name of a folk society. At least 7 generations and their affines have spread far and wide from Indianapolis throughout the United States of America by now. I graduated from high school with one of their name in New Hampshire in 1978.

The novelist Kurt of the Vonneguts had learned about folk societies from their theorist Robert Redfield 30 years before, at Chicago. That university awarded the author his master’s degree long after it would do him any good for the novel Cat’s Cradle, where the charlatan and sage Bokonon draws attention to the endless associations of our species and calls them granfalloons.

Hampden-Sydney College is a granfalloon, and an assembly of granfalloons, a forest with limbs branching throughout our great big granfalloon, the USA. You could pick any 3 of the 1500 or so college people and townies who attended Kurt’s address at Hampden-Sydney and give them 20 minutes to establish exactly how they are, and are not related.

Kurt is a cousin of mine in the granfalloon of our common profession, Americanist anthropology. Had I attended we could have worked out exactly how we two descend from Franz Boas. We could have talked as well about Kurt’s nephew in my class at the high school founded for the new nation as Hampden-Sydney just before the revolution for Virginia.

And hey look at that, the student Michael Boudreau who edited this souvenir booklet when he graduated went on to work long years for my youngest aunt when she was publisher of the university press at Chicago, where Kurt had finally stopped trying to go to school. Granfalloons out the yin yang.

Remember that Robert taught Kurt about the folk society such as had raised this Vonnegut among many, as a structure of human life. The novelist’s character Bokonon instead taught the granfalloon as a pleasant fiction to comfort the loneliness of our modern world with no face-to-face relations.

That’s the nasty cold wind off the frozen lake at Chicago where Kurt walked out of his slaughterhouse from the firestorm in Dresden. The disenchantment of the participant observer who is in turn the artist, the enchanter. Both the man who has crawled up his own asshole and died, and the man who put it that way.

The son who says that in Kurt’s slaughterhouse novel to the infantry veteran of the battle of the Bulge, to the returned prisoner of war, the witness to the destruction of Dresden who has become unstuck in time, to his estranged father is, what do you know, a Green Beret from the war for Viet Nam.

So is the man who introduced Kurt with an address of his own the week before. Wore the green beret, as that friend of mine has corrected others. I suspect that editor Michael Boudreau feels about that man the same way I do.

Many do. In his green beanie and Phi Beta Kappa key hanging from his three-piece suit the critic Professor Doctor Sergeant Major Farrell is my great original for these yawps. Farrell was his Army name, written on the chest of his uniform.

The Alan F. Farrell on the cover and in the table of contents of this booklet looks to me like the unfortunate choice of pen name by a young man who had written a doctoral thesis. Thank heavens old R.W. Franklin, known in person to readers of Emily Dickinson as Ralph but stuck with R.W. from his first publication, warned me off the signature Daniel E. Duffy.

Exactly one woman calls me that and she loves me to pieces. The world calls me Dan. I have published the critic and poet elsewhere as Alan Farrell since we met a few years after this talk although I often think of him by his full name Alan Ford Farrell, because he rebuilds the original automobiles and tractors. See you on the first page.

This is the first Viet Nam letter of 1 so far about the works of Alan Farrell. The critic already has appeared in the sixth letter of 7 so far on Dawson’s War by B.K. Marshall, June 18, 2022.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.