I GREW UP IN A SMALL TOWN IN New Hampshire. In the summer months, an ice-cream vendor drove a little white truck through the neighbourhoods known to have families with young children. Loudspeaker music, usually of circus origin, heralded the truck’s approach, allowing children time to grab whatever small change lay around the house and come running. The vendor was called the Good Humor man. Good Humor was the brand name for the ice-cream.

The little white trucks are still in existence; so is Good Humor ice-cream. But to hear the loud-speaker music, and actually lay eyes on a Good Humor man, you have to live in a city or the suburbs. Where I live, in Vermont, the Good Humor man doesn’t come around. There’s a mountain road, which turns to dirt and ascends via several switchbacks. I am, more or less, at the end of this road — except for two distant, unseen neighbours and a fire pond. In the winter, in the perpetual snow, the FedEx truck often slides off the road; the courier arrives on foot, shivering at my door, asking to use my phone. In the summer months, an ice-cream truck would work so hard and take so long to climb my road that the various flavors would melt en route — the cones would be shaken and crushed beyond recognition. Not that the dogs along the road would allow a Good Humor man to pass unattacked, and the radical environmentalists would surely complain about the music — they would call it “noise pollution”.

Besides, there are few ice-cream eaters (and no young children) on my road. We Americans are more divided among ourselves today than we were in the Vietnam War — even ice-cream divides us. There are those Americans, generally fat, with an insufficient grasp of both reality and their finances, and they eat everything that’s bad for them — including ice-cream, which they keep in such abundance in their freezers that they have no need of a Good Humor man in his little white truck with the loudspeaker music. Then there are the rich, marginally better-informed Americans, generally thin, and they eat next to nothing at all — certainly nothing that’s bad for them. They hate ice-cream, or they only permit themselves to dream about it, and they hate fat and carbohydrates; if they are Republicans, they also hate poor people and taxes.

On my road, and elsewhere in Vermont — in most other rural communities in the United States, in fact — what both groups of Americans have in common are guns. Boy, do we have a lot of guns! If a Good Humor guy in a little white truck full of melting ice-cream, playing circus music, came up our road, how long do you think it would be before someone shot out his tires with a deer rifle? (I’m kidding, as Kurt Vonnegut would say — but, like Vonnegut, I’m only sort of kidding.)

ASIDE FROM KURT VONNEGUT — and Mark Twain, before him — the literary Good Humor man has been missing from American society, and under-appreciated in American literature, since I was a child, when I would lie on my back in my grandmother’s garden with my pockets stuffed with small change, listening for the music of the ice-cream truck.

Soon I will be 64, which makes me 20 years younger than Vonnegut, who was my teacher at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa 40 years ago. In those years (1965-67), many of the writing students at Iowa dismissed Vonnegut as a science fiction hack; he wasn’t literary enough for them, and he wouldn’t become literary in the mainstream American media until the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) — although anyone with half a brain and a sense of humor knew he was literary from the beginning, with Player Piano. Long before Slaughterhouse-Five, those of us who were reading Vonnegut could quote whole passages from The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night and Cat’s Cradle; we were saying to ourselves “God bless you, Mr Vonnegut”, long before we read God Bless You, Mr Rosewater.

Even in the 1960s, when too many of my generation were congratulating ourselves for being sexually liberated and otherwise enlightened — some of us were actually prescient enough to oppose the war in Vietnam — Vonnegut was pointing out that we were squandering our planet’s resources, as though there were no tomorrow. Indeed, Vonnegut has always been a Doomsday writer. (He has actually been called a Luddite, something he is proud of.)

And what did Kurt Vonnegut teach me about so-called creative writing? Not a whole lot, but I was crazy about him. He said that I was a good writer, except that I used too many semicolons; I still do, and Vonnegut is at present advising everyone against using semicolons at all. In his new autobiography, A Man Without a Country, he writes: “Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite herm-aphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”

In my case, I used to argue with him, semicolons reflect my appreciation of Dickens, and of Dickens’s long, complicated sentences in particular — and of long, plotted novels in general — to which Kurt usually responded by smiling benevolently, or patting me on top of my head. (I’m short, Vonnegut is tall; more germane to our argument, my novels are long, his are relatively brief.)

Anyway, I loved him then and I love him now. He both teased me and encouraged me, and he made me laugh. Sometimes this was “gallows humor”, as Freud called it, because you were laughing at something that was truly not funny. But what else could you do?

I watched the Six-Day War in Kurt Vonnegut’s kitchen. This was in Iowa City, June 1967. My eldest son, Colin, was a two-year-old; I pushed him the ten blocks to Vonnegut’s house in a stroller. Kurt and I watched the war while Colin took all the pots and pans out of the kitchen cabinets and banged them like war drums on the floor. Kurt just laughed and turned up the volume. I didn’t have a TV and had nowhere else to watch the war, but what better person could you watch a war with?

“I saw the destruction of Dresden,” Vonnegut writes in A Man Without a Country. “I saw the city before and then came out of an air raid shelter and saw it afterward, and certainly one response was laughter. God knows, that’s the soul seeking some relief.”

Soon we got to the part in the Six-Day War — it was only the second day — when King Hussein and Gamal Abdel Nasser declared that American and British aircraft must have taken part in the Israeli attacks. “As if the Israelis needed our help!” Vonnegut howled in disbelief.

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