Free Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) by Kurt Vonnegut

always seemed to me, to
Archie and Mehitabel
by Don Marquis, whose wife was the former Mrs. Walter Vonnegut.)
    The premiere of Lloyd Webber’s requiem took place in St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, an outspokenly Anglican institution, although the specifically Roman Catholic words (lyrics) of the mass drew much of their anger from the fact of England’s having denied the spiritual supremacy of the Papacy. If I am any judge, the black-tie audience was about half Protestant and half Jewish. (Some of the musicians and TV cameramen and policemen outside were probably Catholics.)
    Nobody seemed to know or care what the Latin words meant or where they came from. We were all there for the music. (Or maybe because that was the chic place to be that night.) After all, Placido Domingo (one of the Catholic musicians) was going to do a lot of the singing, along with the combined boys’ choirs of St. Thomas Church and Winchester Cathedral (all the way from England), backed up by members of the New York Philharmonic. Off they went,
“Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine”
et cetera. I was beguiled by the cat face and silvery voice of the soloist of the Winchester Boys’ Choir, and looked into my program to learn his name. God love him, he was Paul Miles-Kingston.
    But then something else in the program caught my eye, which was a translation into English of the words of the mass, the last things anybody there gave a darn about. They were terrible! (And lest somebody think I am mocking Holy Scripture, I point out again that the mass was as frankly manmade and as nearly contemporary, taking the long view of history, as Hemingway’s
Green Hills of Africa.)
    Domingo and Paul Miles-Kingston and Lloyd Webber’s soprano wife Sarah Brightman and all the rest of them onstage, in front of the organ pipes, were behaving as though God were a wonderful person who had prepared all sorts of goodies which we could enjoy after we were dead. They were in fact, if only they had known what they were saying, promising a Paradise indistinguishable from the Spanish Inquisition.
    “Quantus tremor est futurus, quando judex est venturus, cuncta stricte discussurus!”
Whoopee! What fun! How nice. Except that what that means is, “What trembling there will be when the Judge shall come to examine everything in strict justice!”
    “Quid sum miser tunc dicturus? Quem patronum rogaturus, cum vix justus sit securus?”
From the performers’ expressions and body language you would have concluded that the weak wouldn’t have to be afraid in Heaven, that they would find kindness and forgiveness on all sides. You would have been badly mistaken. The performers were singing, “What shall I, a wretch, say at that time? What advocate shall I entreat to plead for me when scarcely the righteous shall be safe from damnation?”
    Ain’t that nice? (“Get a lawyer,” says the mass.)
    Nearly the entire mass was that sadistic and masochistic. (You can find how it goes, from start to finish, in the Appendix. Decide for yourself.) So after Jill and I got home, I stayed up half the night writing a better one. (That is not a vain statement. Anybody could write a better one and nobody could write a worse one.) I got rid of the judges and the tortures and the lions’ mouths, and having to sleep with the lights on. (I have tossed that into the Appendix, too, so again, decide for yourself.)
    I did not think it was very good poetry, and so I was eager (as were the lyricists at the Council of Trent, no doubt) to get it put into Latin as quickly as possible. As I told my wife, I wanted to find somebody who could put it through the hocus-pocus laundromat. I was willing to pay good money.
    I tried Fordham first, but was turned down there on the grounds of heresy. But then I found a specialist in Church Latin at New York University, John F. Collins, who agreed to be my hired gun, come hell or high water. Like Placido Domingo, he is a Catholic. “Rest eternal grant them,