Mother Night

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." This is the moral of Kurt Vonnegut's second novel, Mother Night, published in 1961. After his death two weeks ago I was spurred to read one of his books that I have laying around the homestead that I hadn't read yet, and this one turned out to be appropriate, as another moral of the book is: "When you're dead, you're dead." Vonnegut himself spells these morals out in an introduction.

This is the autobiography of Howard Campbell, Jr., an American boy who grew up in Germany between the wars. He becomes a popular playwright and marries an actress, Helga, whom he loves deeply. In the days before and during World War II, he became a mouthpiece for the Nazis, broadcasting incendiary monologues about the inferiority of Jews and others in an attempt to sway the American mind. What no one but three other people knew, he was also an American agent, using those broadcasts to transmit information to the Americans. Because he was such a secret, his life has become a lie. His wife is missing , presumed dead.

Captured at the end of the war and sentenced to hang, the American government arranges to have his life spared and relocated to New York City, where he lives a drab existence. He has become a hero to the fascists, and an evil entity to those who remember his broadcasts, including the soldier who captured him, who has sworn he will finish what the government couldn't. When Campbell is discovered by a small group of fascist pamphleteers, who wish to rescue him, the mechanisms of the plot spring forward.

Mother Night is a melancholy book, full of regret and sadness, but with the distinctive Vonnegut touch. Only he could write about despair with such a light tone. There is also a distinctly anti-jingoist nature to the work. At one point Campbell draws an American flag, a Swastika, and a hammer and sickle on the dust of his window, and points out that each represents the meaning of patriotism to, respectively, an American, a Nazi and a communist.

Campbell is writing his story in an Israeli jail, awaiting trial for war crimes. How he gets there is the meat of the story. He briefly meets Adolph Eichmann, and is amused when Eichmann believes that the "I was just following orders" excuse is original. He also comes to an epiphany about the nature of hate: "There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on his side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive."

Amen.