Kurt Vonnegut Remembered

By Jim O'Loughlin

A collection of reminiscences that illuminate the career and private life of the iconic author of 'Slaughterhouse-Five'
 
Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007), who began his writing career working for popular magazines, held both literary aspirations and an attraction to genre fiction. His conspicuous refusal to respect literary boundaries was part of what made him a countercultural icon in the 1960s and 1970s. Vonnegut’s personal life was marked in large part by public success and private turmoil. Two turbulent marriages, his sudden adoption of his late sister’s four children (and the equally sudden removal of one of those children), and a mid-eighties suicide attempt all signaled the extent of Vonnegut’s inner troubles. Yet, he was a generous friend to many, maintaining close correspondences throughout his life.

Kurt Vonnegut Remembered gathers reminiscences—by those who knew him intimately, and from those met him only once—that span Vonnegut’s entire life. Among the anecdotes in this collection are remembrances from his immediate family, reflections from his comrades in World War II, and tributes from writers he worked with in Iowa City and from those who knew him when he was young. Editor Jim O’Loughlin offers biographical notes on Vonnegut’s relationship with each of these figures.
 
Since Vonnegut’s death, much has been written on his life and work, but this new volume offers a more generous view of his life, particularly his last years. In O’Loughlin’s introduction to the volume, he argues that we can locate and understand Vonnegut’s best self through his public persona, and that in his performance as the kind and humane figure that many of the speakers here knew him as, Vonnegut became a better person than he ever felt himself to be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Mar 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9780817392246

Book preview

Introduction

There was something improbable about Kurt Vonnegut’s professional success. After years of struggling to make ends meet and to be taken seriously as an author, he became, in the years after the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five, one of the most popular writers of his generation. But things did not have to work out that way. Vonnegut could have suffered the fate of the cult writer, with a small following and matching royalty statements. Or he could have abandoned writing professionally, perhaps to become a frustrated manager of an auto dealership. Or he could have been killed in World War II, as so many men and women of his generation were. Or perhaps he could have simply chosen a different career path as a boy growing up in Indianapolis. As one of Vonnegut’s characters says in The Sirens of Titan, I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all (233). While Vonnegut’s success may have been accidental, it is safe to say that some accidents are more earned than others. He paid his dues as a struggling writer for many years, and his personal life had even more ups and downs than his professional career.

Kurt Vonnegut was born on November 11, 1922 (then celebrated as Armistice Day, and now observed as Veterans Day), in Indianapolis, where he grew up as part of a tight-knit, well-established, German American clan. Kurt Vonnegut Sr. was a noted local architect, and his mother, Edith, came from one of the wealthiest families in the city, courtesy of her father’s brewery business. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was the third of three children. His oldest sibling, Bernard, would go on to become a respected scientist and researcher (and, at least in part, the model for the scientist in Cat’s Cradle, Felix Hoenikker). Vonnegut was close to his older sister, Alice.

The 1929 stock market crash and the ensuing Great Depression were devastating for the Vonneguts, as they were for many families. Kurt Sr.’s business was much diminished, eventually leading him to abandon his architecture firm. The brewery that had been the source of Edith Vonnegut’s family fortune went bankrupt. Vonnegut was forced to leave private school in the third grade. This reduction in circumstances was difficult for both his mother and his father to accept, and, to differing degrees, they became increasingly withdrawn.

Vonnegut was a successful and popular student, if not as academically focused as his older brother. After high school he attended Cornell, where he majored in chemistry, though he took more interest in writing for the campus paper. Prior to Pearl Harbor, he had written against US involvement in World War II, but in 1943 he enlisted in the army. In 1944, during a visit home on leave, Vonnegut was in the house when his mother was found dead of an apparent suicide. During that year, he fought in and was captured during the Battle of the Bulge, only to be imprisoned in Dresden, Germany, when Allied forces firebombed the city in 1945. This episode would become the centerpiece of his most celebrated novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, though it would be many years before Vonnegut would be able to turn that experience into a completed manuscript.

After the war, Vonnegut married his childhood and high school classmate Jane Cox, whom he had begun dating while he was at Cornell and she was at Swarthmore. He continued his education at the University of Chicago (now in anthropology) but left without receiving a degree, though one would be granted to him in 1971. He worked in Chicago as a reporter and eventually found a position in public relations at General Electric, where his brother, Bernard, worked as a researcher. But what Vonnegut wanted to do was to be a writer. He broke in when, in 1950, his first published short story, Report on the Barnhouse Effect, appeared in Collier’s Weekly. He earned $750 for that story, as much as he made in six weeks at GE (Hayman et al.). In the brief moment of postwar expansion before the widespread adoption of television, there was a thriving and well-paying magazine market for short fiction. In fact, Vonnegut was successful enough selling short fiction that, even though he was married and had two children, he felt able to give up his day job to write full-time. However, he found mixed success as a magazine writer, and he was often forced to supplement his family income. One venture was an ill-fated attempt to open a Saab dealership (one of the first in the country) on Cape Cod, where he had relocated his family, which now included three children: Mark, Edith, and Nanette.

Vonnegut had also begun writing novels, publishing his first, Player Piano, in 1952. Throughout the next decade he continued writing and publishing works like Mother Night (1961) and Cat’s Cradle (1963) to modest success. The financial (and emotional) strains he faced had been compounded in 1958 when his sister, Alice, and her husband both died within three days of each other, and Vonnegut made good on a deathbed promise to look after Alice’s children, James, Steve, Kurt, and Peter. The challenges of this situation are detailed in this collection by Jane Vonnegut Yarmolinsky.

In 1965, when Robert Lowell was forced to cancel plans to teach at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, Vonnegut was offered a replacement position. This job provided Vonnegut with a level of financial stability he had not had in more than a decade, and he began working alongside a series of successful writers with whom he would remain friends, including Vance Bourjaily and Andre Dubus. He also became mentor to a group of writers, many of whom (including John Irving and Gail Godwin) would go on to have their own successful literary careers. Though this shift in circumstances put strains on his already troubled marriage, while in Iowa City Vonnegut was able to finish work on his Dresden novel, which became Slaughterhouse-Five when it was published in 1969.

The initial reviews of Slaughterhouse-Five were largely positive, though some reviewers were unsure what to make of the book’s experimental structure as well as its combination of World War II narrative and science-fiction saga. But the novel was a popular sensation, and Vonnegut quickly found himself a sought-after speaker and interview subject. Donald E. Morse states, Rarely, if ever, in the history of American literature has an author gone so quickly from obscurity to celebrity as happened in the case of Kurt Vonnegut (42).

With the success of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut was able to become a full-time novelist, and over the next decade his published works included Breakfast of Champions (1973), Slapstick (1976), and Jailbird (1979). Throughout the decade, Vonnegut became an unofficial countercultural representative, though he was a generation older than the baby boomers that made up the bulk of his now extensive readership.

Vonnegut attracted a uniquely devoted readership that often felt it had a personal connection with him. At one point, his wife, Jane, developed a form letter to respond to all the correspondence he received. The letter noted that Vonnegut was sent between 100 to 200 letters a week, about 3 books and/or manuscripts a day, and a variety of little magazines, student publications, term papers, short stories, etc., on all of which someone wants help, advice or commentary.¹

During the 1970s, Vonnegut and Jane endured a long and uncertain separation, and eventual divorce. Vonnegut became involved with the photographer Jill Krementz, whom he would marry in 1979. By then he had relocated to New York City and the Hamptons, where he became a regular participant in literary culture and a friend of writers including Norman Mailer and George Plimpton. During this period he continued publishing best sellers, such as Galápagos (1985), and cementing his reputation as an innovative and wryly humorous author.

But professional success did not necessarily secure personal happiness. In 1984, suffering from depression, Vonnegut attempted suicide via an overdose of sleeping pills and antidepressants. His relationship with Krementz was a stormy one. Though they adopted a daughter, Lily, together, they also went through difficult periods, including separations and divorce filings, though they stayed married throughout the rest of Vonnegut’s life.

Though Vonnegut claimed in the pages of 1997’s Timequake that it was my last book, he continued publishing essays and book-length collections, and he remained an active public figure, speaking out forcefully on political topics, lending his literary celebrity to issues of the day, and promoting the careers of younger writers (xiv). In the latter part of this volume, many writers and fans such as Andrew Leonard and Joseph Timmons remark on his generosity and concern. On March 14, 2007, he suffered a severe fall from his front stoop. A few weeks later, on April 11, at the age of eighty-four, Kurt Vonnegut died.

But the story of Kurt Vonnegut does not end there, nor will it end while his work remains popular and new readers find themselves drawn to his unique vision. Our sense of Kurt Vonnegut changes as we learn more about his work and life. The Vonnegut estate continues to publish works that had been unpublished during his lifetime, in collections such as While Mortals Sleep (2011) and We Are What We Pretend to Be (2012). In the half-decade before this volume was published, three different television productions adapting Vonnegut novels (Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, and The Sirens of Titan) were announced.

Additionally, three important critical works have altered our sense of Vonnegut as both writer and individual. Those works are And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life by Charles J. Shields, Kurt Vonnegut: Letters edited by Dan Wakefield, and The Brothers Vonnegut: Science and Fiction in the House of Magic by Ginger Strand.

Shields’s 2011 biography, And So It Goes, is perhaps the one study that has most upset the accepted vision of Vonnegut’s work and life. While it is thoroughly researched and documented, this biography takes umbrage at perceived contradictions between Vonnegut’s professional image and private life. Against the common view of Vonnegut as a quirky and profound individual willing to challenge convention, Shields’s biography presents a man driven by grudges, small and large, who could be cruel toward those to whom he was closest. The challenge this biography offered to the accepted public image of Kurt Vonnegut was rebutted by many of Vonnegut’s friends and colleagues, including in reminiscences commissioned for this volume by Jerome Klinkowitz and Peter Reed.

This volume does document negative encounters in which Vonnegut appeared to avoid certain individuals or to hold grudges, as in the cases of David R. Slavitt and Dan Rattiner, but those moments are outnumbered by many reminiscences of Vonnegut’s generosity and kindness, including those by Robert B. Weide and John Krull. In the aggregate, there is much to commend in Shields’s biography. His insights into Vonnegut’s childhood and marriages correct idealized accounts in both Vonnegut’s own writing and in more heliographic studies. For example, it is now clear that the views of Vonnegut’s parents prior to World War II would be more accurately described as isolationist than as pacifistic (Shields, And So 41). That said, it is my hope that the reminiscences in the latter part of this volume will serve as a corrective to Shields’s unremittingly dismal account of Vonnegut’s later years.

The 2012 collection Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, edited by Dan Wakefield, is a selected edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s correspondence that provides invaluable insights into Vonnegut at both his most profound and when immersed in minor daily struggles. As with all collections of letters, the perspective it offers is that of the correspondent, but it does bear witness to the many small kindnesses Vonnegut offered to friends and admirers.

Additionally, Ginger Strand’s 2015 The Brothers Vonnegut: Science and Fiction in the House of Magic offers a different biographical approach, tracing the often parallel (though intriguingly intersecting) lives of Kurt Vonnegut and his brother, Bernard. This book centers on the early careers of both men, with an emphasis on the time they both worked at General Electric (Kurt in public relations and Bernard as a research scientist), and it does an excellent job capturing the specific post-World War II period that influenced some of Vonnegut’s most important writing.

As a collection of reminiscences, many of which were written by Vonnegut’s family members and closest friends, this volume offers a more generous view of Kurt Vonnegut than is to be found in And So It Goes. Many who wrote about Vonnegut were peers and colleagues who wanted to celebrate him and his work. Others were avid fans who wanted more than anything to have a positive and memorable encounter with a favorite author. However, I have also come to have a different view from Shields’s as to why, in the case of Kurt Vonnegut, the public figure and the private individual were not identical. Being a celebrity author did not require Vonnegut to put on a false face as much as it involved putting his best face forward. One could argue that the best Vonnegut was the public Vonnegut, and that becoming a generation’s representative required him to be a better person than he actually felt himself to be. Being Kurt Vonnegut may have been a performance, but it was a role he played well.

Vonnegut’s 1961 novel, Mother Night, is about an American who posed as a Nazi in order to pass on secret information via radio broadcasts, only to find himself unable to prove after the war that he was not a Nazi. It is the only one of Vonnegut’s novels that the author himself stated had a clear moral, and that moral has become one of his most frequently repeated quotations: Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be (v). However, the experience of Kurt Vonnegut the literary celebrity offers an important corollary to that quotation. Many of us respond to identities others foist upon us. It can be a challenge when we are first asked to take on new roles, perhaps as students or as parents or as professors. But in many, if not most, of these situations, we do what is necessary to meet those expectations. And often we discover that we have, in fact, become the people others expected us to be. If Kurt Vonnegut’s readers desired for him to be kind, humane, and someone you would like to have as a friend, perhaps one of the best decisions he made was to pretend to be that person, because, in the end, that is who he was.

Because so many accounts of personal encounters with Kurt Vonnegut have been published, it was necessary to use certain criteria to determine which reminiscences to include. In general, every effort has been made to include the viewpoints of those who knew Vonnegut best, if such reminiscences involved attempts to understand Vonnegut’s personality and character. This volume also includes a representative sampling of the many memorable singular encounters by fans and critics alike. Though Kurt Vonnegut was in Iowa City for only a short period of his life, he was there with an astonishing array of talented writers, and many wrote about their experiences with him. The sheer quantity of reminiscences from this period may have the effect of over-representing this brief moment in Vonnegut’s life. Though Vonnegut’s time in Iowa City was significant, the number of reminiscences from colleagues and students should be understood, at least in part, as an expected consequence of hanging out with a bunch of writers.

Lastly, there is a unique set of quasi-reminiscences that I have chosen not to include in this collection but which deserve mention. These are fictional accounts in which a character named Kurt Vonnegut is included. There are several such texts that are separately noted in the Additional Reminiscences section. Because these fictional accounts do not involve actual reminiscences, they fall outside the scope of this project, but they do speak to the iconic status of Kurt Vonnegut and his importance to many readers. I suspect that because Vonnegut turned himself into a character in his own novels, many writers felt they had implicit permission to do the same.

As part of this project, I have a Google Alert to let me know every day whatever gets posted online with the name Kurt Vonnegut. In some cases, this has helped me discover writings that became part of the collection. However, many times, I have found texts that seem at first blush as if they might be a personal reminiscence but which soon reveal themselves to be simply highly personalized accounts of reading Vonnegut’s novels. Often, Vonnegut’s readers write about him with such familiarity that it is hard to tell initially whether someone had actually met him or simply feels like she or he knows him through his works. These false positives, as I have come to think of them, have been a lasting sign of Vonnegut’s continued relevance and importance to readers.

And then there are those people who turn Vonnegut quotes into tattoos, but that’s another story.

1

Growing Up: 1922–1943

As an adult, Kurt Vonnegut often looked back fondly on his childhood in Indianapolis. His early years were spent as the youngest of three children in an affluent family and as part of a tight-knit German American clan, many of whose members had cottages north of the city along Lake Maxincuckee. K, as he was nicknamed as a child, enjoyed many summer days in the safety and seclusion of that lake. Vonnegut would later note, The closed loop of the lakeshore was certain to bring me home not only to my own family’s unheated frame cottage on a bluff overlooking the lake, but to four adjacent cottages teeming with close relatives (Fates 150). It was his good fortune as a young child to be able to take such circumstances for granted and to be watched over by relatives such as his aunt Irma Vonnegut