There are two types of people in this world—those who can count, and those who can’t.
And I’d argue there are also two types of fiction writers—those who take a backseat
and let their work take the spotlight, and those who are as iconic as their work, sometimes
even more so.
Whether deliberately crafted or not, these writers have a legacy that is so monumental,
it’s an uphill battle to read their work on its own terms.
But maybe there’s a third type.
The type of writer whose complex persona is so intertwined with his fiction (or hers)
that to ignore
him is to ignore his work entirely.
Folks, I’m talking about Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Writer of such genre-bending satirical novels like The Sirens of Titan, Cat’s Cradle,
and Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel which regularly pops up on “Best Novels of All Time” lists,
Kurt Vonnegut practically moonlighted as his own Public Relations rep.
In fact, he was so successful at crafting his persona, he spent his later years waffling
back and forth between fighting against his reputation and actively leaning into it.
In other words, Kurt Vonnegut was a man of contradictions.
A man who wanted it all and got it, only to be unsure it’s what he actually wanted in
the first place.
What resulted from his ongoing struggles with his identity and reputation is a mish-mash
of outlandish science-fiction, wacky characters, biting satire, sobering reflections on our
place in the universe, and somber tragedy.
And at the center of this glorious mess is Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. himself, a man who would
change the face of modern science-fiction and give new meaning to the term “metafiction.”
To quote a phrase that pops up time and again in Kurt’s writing: “so it goes…”
I’m going to begin my Kurt Vonnegut spiel by doing something no one has ever done before
open with a dictionary quote.
A truly revolutionary idea.
According to University of Minnesota English Professor Peter J. Reed in the Dictionary
of Literary Biography:
“The contribution of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. to American literature is twofold: through his
artistry (and persistence) he has helped to elevate the pulp genre of science fiction
to the level of critical recognition; and through his philosophy he offers a mixture
of wistful humanism and cynical existentialism that implies a way of dealing with modern
realities completely different from that of most American writers.”
This entry about Vonnegut is a helpful jumping-off point for two reasons:
1.
It encapsulates the fundamental contradictions of Vonnegut’s outlook on life
and 2.
It emphasizes that his impact on science-fiction literature is just as notable as the road
that got him there—most notably his persistence.
When Vonnegut was born on November 11, 1922, he was entering a world that was practically
designed to shape a conflicted young man.
You see, November 11th was Armistice Day, which we now know as Veterans Day.
It was a day to commemorate the end of World War I, which at that time was called
“The Great War” because we had not yet seen the more horrific sequel:
World War II: Hitler Boogaloo
Later in life, as Vonnegut’s identity became inextricably linked with war, he was proud
that he was born on a day associated with peace.
But even though the fighting was technically over, there was still plenty of hostility
against Germans to go around, and the Vonneguts were very German.
Vonnegut even dubbed himself a “purebred kraut.”
The youngest of three children, Vonnegut enjoyed
an upper-middle class upbringing in Indianapolis, Indiana.
But even the Vonneguts’ cushy lifestyle couldn’t shield them from the Great Depression.
But throughout familial ups-and-downs like his family’s bankruptcy and Vonnegut’s
inability to live up to his older brother’s relentless superiority.
Bernard was a whiz
at science and well…
Vonnegut was more of an artsy kid, there is one event that overshadows everything.
And it’s something that would not only radically affect Vonnegut’s life but would kickstart
Vonnegut’s inclination of facing traumatic life experiences head-on in his writing.
That event was his mother’s suicide.
And content warning for that, because we’re about to go into some detail.
At the age of twenty-one, Vonnegut had returned home one weekend from military training when
his sister Alice woke him up early Sunday morning.
And not just any Sunday morning.
Mother’s Day.
At the age of fifty-five, Vonnegut’s mother Edith overdosed on sleeping pills.
She left no note, so it’s unclear why Edith took her own life, but what is certainly clear
is t he profound effect it had on Vonnegut and his family.
Such is the secretive, put-a-happy-face-on-it nature of Midwestern life that her suicide
wasn’t even openly acknowledged as such.
The coroner ruled it an accident, and even though Vonnegut’s father would sometimes
admit the truth to relatives, he never did so with his children.
Left with the tragic loss of his mother, coupled with everyone’s refusal to admit the truth
about her death, Vonnegut didn’t run from it—he openly grappled with it.
In social circles, he would steer conversations toward suicide, and the topic would crop up
over and over in his work.
And in true Kurt Vonnegut style, he didn’t alter the truth that much, even in his fiction.
In Breakfast of Champions, a zany whirlwind of a novel, Vonnegut describes the suicide
of Celia Hoover, the wife of one of the two main characters, Dwayne Hoover, in gruesome
yet detached detail.
Having just drunk a bunch of Drāno, "Celia became a small volcano, since she was composed
of the same sorts of substances which commonly clogged drains."
Vonnegut himself—ahem,
I mean, “the narrator”—notes, “. . . both our mothers committed suicide.
Bunny’s mother ate Drano.
My mother ate sleeping pills, which wasn’t nearly as horrible.”
And in an earlier novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Vonnegut writes:
“Sons of suicides seldom do well.
Characteristically, they find life lacking a certain zing.
They tend to feel more rootless than most, even in a notoriously rootless nation.
They are squeamishly incurious about the past and numbly certain about the future to this
grisly extent: they suspect that they, too, will kill themselves.”
I should just say right now that Vonnegut doesn’t end up killing
himself.
He dies in 2007 at the ripe old age of eighty-four.
And not from the countless Pall Malls he chain-smoked
through the decades
which he thought for sure would kill him.
No, he died of brain injuries from a fall.
Which is sad.
But not the bleak fate he thought about for himself.
But this quote also sheds some light on perhaps why so much of Vonnegut’s work is focused
on the meaninglessness of existence and humanity’s likely doomed future.
His mother’s suicide also permeates his work in other ways.
Says Kurt Vonnegut biographer Charles J. Shields: “...his mother’s suicide permanently erased
some of life’s luster for him.”
In many of Vonnegut’s novels and short stories “his obsession
with self-destruction edges his fiction like a black border.”
Vonnegut’s predilection to grapple with his own past in his fiction
by portraying his mother characters as “either morbid, crazy, or suicidal.”
Just seven months after the death of his mother, the second of Vonnegut’s two major life-altering
events was set in motion—War.
In December 1944, the Germans launched their final offensive with the Battle of the Bulge,
and after his division was swept into the chaos, Vonnegut was one of seven thousand
troops who was taken prisoner and marched hundreds of miles into Germany, leaving his
family uncertain of his fate.
For six months, Vonnegut was listed “missing in action,” and during this time, he, along
with 150 other POWs, were taken to Dresden.
And it was the ultimate “wrong place at the wrong time” situation.
On February 13 and 14, 1945, the British and United States Air Forces firebombed the
ever-living-hell
out of Dresden, resulting in so much carnage that to this day the death tolls are unknown,
potentially figuring somewhere between 35,000 and 135,000 people.
For the next several months, Vonnegut and the other POWs were forced into traumatizing,
back-breaking work, gathering corpses for massive funeral pyres and clearing rubble,
all the while becoming increasingly sick and malnourished.
Then late that spring, Vonnegut and the remaining POWs were marched to the Czech border and
abandoned.
But at last, they were free.
So how in the heck does a man who endured such tragedies in his life become a writer
known for his wit, humor, and bizarre, off-kilter views on life and man’s place in it?
This is a writer, after all, who’s written stories with titles like, “Guns Before Butter,”
“FUBAR,” “Bagombo Snuff Box,” “Welcome to the Monkey House,” and
“The Big Space ****”
—wait, this is PBS.
I’m not allowed to say “Big Space ****,” am I?—
But here’s the thing.
As out-there as Vonnegut’s stories can be - and boy oh boy, can they be out-there - they
are always firmly rooted in a strong moral point-of-view.
Fellow writer Dave Eggers says of Vonnegut’s stories: “The satisfaction we draw from
seeing some moral clarity, some linear order brought to a knotted world, is impossible
to overstate.”
The moral compass in much of Vonnegut’s work points in a progressive direction, leaning
very heavily in favor of fairness to downtrodden workers; equality for everyone, no matter
their race, gender, or creed; and an overall empathetic view of the poor, lowly, sick,
and disadvantaged.
In fact, in lectures and speeches, he would oftentimes quote the socialist/activist Eugene
V. Debs: “...while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal
element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
And then there is one of Vonnegut’s most oft-quoted aphorisms: “God damn it, you’ve
got to be kind.”
Between Vonnegut’s repetition of such lofty words to live by and his growing reputation
as a writer in the turbulent 60s and 70s, it’s no wonder then that he attracted the
attention and allegiance of America’s youth.
Disaffected by the never-ending war in Vietnam, the seemingly relentless assassinations of
iconic leaders, and a barrage of violence across the country, many students turned to
Vonnegut’s fiction as a way to both escape from their harsh reality and stay tethered
to it through the strong moral views in his work.
So perhaps it’s no coincidence that Vonnegut’s most iconic novel, Slaughterhouse-Five,
was released at the turn of the decade in 1969
a year many historians consider the end of
the free-spirited “peace and love” sixties and the beginning of a darker period in America.
Slaughterhouse-Five marked the culmination of Vonnegut’s struggles to grapple with
his own war experience in his work.
Rather than spice up his war novel with big, exciting battles and macho war heroes, he
once again leaned into the truth—the confusion of war and the aimless powerlessness that
so many soldiers like him felt.
Slaughterhouse-Five also continued Vonnegut’s trend of directly inserting himself in his
fictional work
beginning the novel with this sentence: “All this happened, more or less.”
More or less.
Wink, wink.
Vonnegut was continuing to fulfill his dream of wanting to be a character in all of his works.
But now that he was becoming a household name, he wanted to have it both ways.
He noted that to his fans he was “valuable to them as a personality” while simultaneously
finding this “disturbing in a way.”
As Vonnegut enjoyed the fruits of being a famous, well-known author
fancy dinners, hobnobbing with celebrities,
speaking at universities and lecture halls for tidy fees
he was slowly realizing that the image of himself
that he had relentlessly presented in his work
was now interacting with his fans in the flesh…
and to them, his persona and the real person were not lining up.
They mistook persona for person
and in so doing became part of an endless, frustrating cycle between the writer and his fans.
In short, as Shields put it: “He had made choices, consciously or unconsciously
that had created multiple and even contradictory identities.”
On a more personal note, Vonnegut’s nephew, Jim Adams, puts it thusly:
“There was a definite disconnect between the kind of guy you would imagine Vonnegut must be
from the tone of his books, the kind
of guy who would say, ‘God damn it, you got to be kind,’
and the reality of his behavior on a daily basis.
He was a complicated, difficult man. . . . I think he admired the idea of love,
community, and family from a distance
but couldn’t deal with the complicated emotional elements they included.”
Vonnegut once did something few writers would never have the stomach to do
he graded his own novels.
He gave Slapstick the lowest grade, a D
while Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five both got A-pluses.
Way to go, Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five! Good for you!
The rest were somewhere in the middle.
But before he graded them, he emphasized that
in a world with William Shakespeare, shout out to him
“the grades I hand out to myself do not place me
in literary history.
I am comparing myself with myself.”
Throughout his life and career, Vonnegut’s sense of self was ever-evolving
and always at odds with the blurred line between man and myth.
It was a myth he both embraced and resisted.
A myth that even he himself got lost in like a funhouse of mirrors.
In his later years, he told fellow writer Martin Amis:
“I have to keep reminding myself that I wrote those early books.
I wrote that . . . . I wrote that.
The only way I can regain credit for my early work is
to die.”
Vonnegut did die, but the truth lives on in his fiction.
More or less.