VONNEGUT: I also worked on The Shortridge Daily Echo.
INTERVIEWER: Was that fun?
VONNEGUT: Fun and easy. I’ve always found it easy to write. Also, I learned to write for peers rather than for teachers. Most beginning writers don’t get to write for peers—to catch hell from peers.
INTERVIEWER: So every afternoon you would go to the Echo office—
VONNEGUT: Yeah. And one time, while I was writing, I happened to sniff my armpits absentmindedly. Several people saw me do it, and thought it was funny—and ever after that I was given the name “Snarf.” In the annual for my graduating class, the class of 1940, I’m listed as “Kurt Snarfield Vonnegut, Jr.” Technically, I wasn’t really a snarf. A snarf was a person who went around sniffing girls’ bicycle saddles. I didn’t do that. Twerp also had a very specific meaning, which few people know now. Through careless usage, twerp is a pretty formless insult now.
INTERVIEWER: What is a twerp in the strictest sense, in the original sense?
VONNEGUT: It’s a person who inserts a set of false teeth between the cheeks of his ass.
INTERVIEWER: I see.
VONNEGUT: I beg your pardon; between the cheeks of his or her ass. I’m always offending feminists that way.
-
INTERVIEWER: Will you ever write a love story, do you think?
VONNEGUT: Maybe. I lead a loving life. I really do. Even when I’m leading that loving life, though, and it’s going so well, I sometimes find myself thinking, My goodness, couldn’t we talk about something else for just a little while? You know what’s really funny?
INTERVIEWER: No.
VONNEGUT: My books are being thrown out of school libraries all over the country—because they’re supposedly obscene. I’ve seen letters to small-town newspapers that put Slaughterhouse-Five in the same class with Deep Throat and Hustler magazine. How could anybody masturbate to Slaughterhouse-Five?
