Kurt Vonnegut

5/16/2019

Be Kind

     Kurt Vonnegut presents himself in a “whimsical writerly sweetness”
and isn’t someone you’d expect to simply be born in Farm-Ville Indianapolis,
November 11, 1922; Armistice day.
“he was quite proud of being born on a day associated with peace.” (Shields 12)
What a humanist. He came from an upper-class family;
 his father an architect and his mother an investor in the Brewery industry.
When he was young he went to the Orchard school,
who believed that students should be “a little community of doers.” (Shields 14)
Hillis Howie, headmaster, taught Vonnegut his value system,
where Vonnegut “operates in relative to animals and plants and earth and persons with cultures different from mine…” (Shields 15)

His father subscribed to the Schadenfreude modicum of humor; that is,
laughing at others’ demise.
As a child his siblings would often laugh at people falling in public,
or when the gas man fell down their stairs.
“Likewise, Kurt Jr., for the rest of his life, had an odd…habit of laughing
when describing something unpleasant.” (Shields 16)
It seems like his ‘signature’ black humor was dried out German thinking stolen from his father.
His mother was a distant figure, obsessed with the high life of being rich.
When the Great Depression hit, their status fell, and they had to live on a modest income. “Furiously, she turned on him” and “tore at his father” (Shields 22).
She hated his father for not being a sufficient husband; she was disconnected and
 largely unstable and gave her children little attention.
Bernard, Kurt’s big brother, was a prodigy in the sciences and was pored over and loved by his parents and the community.
Vonnegut, overshadowed, felt useless and neglected.
His confidant, Ida Young, the housekeeper, was let go when he was a boy when the family fell onto hard times.
His uncle Alex, which became one of his good adult friends, said of him, “he complained about not being able to talk and that he was always being interrupted.”

Vonnegut’s loneliness in his youth would be an influence over his innate desire to have an impact—more on this later.
This desire to be seen and accepted and liked—to have attention paid to him, was a massive driving factor in Vonnegut. In his teenage years he found a way to get attention at the dinner table, where typically Bernard and his artist sister Alice would hog the conversation and his parents’ attention. “Learning how to amuse was a skill, he realized…the perfect tutor was the radio.” (Shields 28)
Learning how to be funny changed the family’s power dynamic. After showing to his sister he could be funny, they teamed up as a comedy duo, reenacting comedy bits. This victory absorbed him all his life; he’d often put his characters in groups of threes in his books: two men and a woman, to simulate him, his sister, and his brother. (Shields 28)
He attended the up and coming Shortridge public high school, as his parents couldn’t afford a private education.
 Around this time his mother took up writing classes and tried to become a published short story fiction author.
She never sold anything, but her efforts spurred Vonnegut’s interest in authorship and literature. The staff for the Echo, the Shortridge daily paper, was staffed by 60 students, and was on rotation—a new staff every weekday. Vonnegut was one of them, joining his Junior year. Delivering the news around the school directly to his peers, he adopted the journalistic style of short, punchy sentences that would define his later work. (Shields 33)
“I was writing for my peers, and not for teachers, it was very important to me that they understand what I was saying.” (Vonnegut)
He was forced into the sciences for higher education, by his brother and father, despite his utter disinterest in them.
He was sent to Cornell, and enrolled as a science major, his father telling him not to waste time on ‘frivolous subjects’. (Shields 38). However, he deigned to compete to join the Cornell Daily Sun, the prestigious newspaper of the college.
He got in, and did well, covering sports and writing jokes for the humor column. “Writing that was easy to scan were hallmarks in his fiction.” (Shields 39)
His grades began to suffer, and he described the rest of his work outside of the paper as ‘booze and hooey’.
Due to failing at Cornell, as he had devoted everything to the Sun, he enlisted into the army at the peak of hype over the outbreak of WW2.
On Mother’s day, he came back in uniform to his home in Indianapolis to surprise his family. His mother had overdosed on sleeping pills. For the rest of his life Vonnegut would question why his mother had killed herself—he imagined it to be the fact that she couldn’t change with the times: “Edith Vonnegut deigned not to go on living if she had to be like everybody else.” (Shields 53)
Maybe it was this incident that produced the motif of pills here that inspired the format ice nine would take in Cat’s Cradle, and the theme of self-destruction and sacrifice and suicide.
Anyways, after marrying his childhood sweetheart Jane Cox and enrolling at the University of Chicago to finish a degree—he hadn’t actually gotten one yet, flopping at Cornell and all—he (attempts to) major in Cultural anthropology.
It’s this line of education that has him think detachedly about the ideas and behaviors of humanity and its relation to itself.
His two theses that he proposed, which were both turned down for being “too ambitious”, discussed the macro connections of communities, folk societies, and other ideas of ‘interconnectedness’; like how the resurgence of Parisian cubist art in the 80’s was directly linked to Native American spirituality and that its linkage was terribly important. (Shields, 50)
These themes, in concept, that would directly appear in his book Cat’s Cradle. ‘Granfalloons’, ‘karass’, ‘duprass’, with allusions to the Cold War, and a peculiar rendition of Cuba and its native religions, all heavily tied to his theses in cultural anthropology.
Granfalloons are false masses of people who think they’re connected to one another. Karasses are actual masses of people united under a common cause. Duprasses are pairs of people united for life.
Cultural anthropology—the interconnectedness of things—busy busy busy! Though he drops out of the University of Chicago, he gets his degree a while later, when an officer in admissions notices his large envelope on file, and says that he met the requirement for a master’s (he can get his degree now!)—for writing a book of considerable merit. That book was Cat’s Cradle.
During and after school in Chicago, he worked at the Chicago City News Bureau. “We were all looking around for everything. Some of the reporters carried guns. One time I found a body.” (MacQuade) He still ached to be someone, to get attention. That drive from his childhood hadn’t left. “He hated the implication he was a nobody.” (Shields 20)

Before the release of Slaughterhouse Five Vonnegut took up writing in the booming magazine market; in an olive branch fork in the road in his life, he started publishing science fiction. He’d always hated the sciences, but now he used the experience of the war, the things he learned, his rivalry with his brother and the horrifical side of science to create science fiction short stories that sold at quite the price. He needed the money, struggling with his family, having taken on his sister’s children, her having died in an accident.
      The firebombing at Dresden, during his time as a private in WW2, was a traumatic experience; he survived as he and his squadron had been forced into working a meat packing plant and survived through the worst of the bombings. His most famous work, Slaughterhouse Five, is an account of the bombing, more or less.. Critics would pan his work as being too simplistic and for being too direct; they thought them to be defects. Vonnegut disagreed. (MacQuade)
Slaughterhouse Five tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, who lives “unstuck” from chronological time, who connects with an alien civilization, and relives the Dresden bombings which he, just like Vonnegut, survived. Vonnegut, like a movie extra, appears here and there as a casual supporting element. “That was I. That was me.” The structure of Billy’s imaginary narrative contains points of contact between the unreal and the submerged stories. (Pericoli)
“Often, people ask me what I’m working on, and I reply, ‘probably a book about Dresden.” “I thought it would be easy to write about the bombing of Dresden. I just had to report on what I’d seen, and it’d be a masterpiece.” But not many words came, and not many words come now, as an old fart with his memories and Pall Malls. (Intellect, ~14:00)
In many of Vonnegut’s books, recurring characters, themes, instances…recur. Name drops of characters are frequent; you may even spot his own self in there. Kilgore Trout is what we in the fandom community call a ‘self-insert OC’. And he very much did so when he inserted Kilgore into many of his stories. In Breakfast of Champions, “He was a science fiction writer, a nobody, but would become one of the most beloved figures in history.” (Intellect, 6:30) Kilgore was a template where Vonnegut repeatedly impressed himself unto words and story, especially there where I just mentioned, where he’s clearly displaying Kilgore as himself—which he is.
Some say Vonnegut said the same stuff, wrote the same book 14 times. “If I spent too much time thinking about new characters and places I wouldn’t be able to tell the story I want to tell.” (Vonnegut) This is…a way of thinking about things. It’s clear he never truly felt happy with himself in the sense that he never was happy with his, well, himself. He was constantly paranoid about his image, he craved attention. “He was constantly on the verge of quiting novels altogether, or that’s what he said, at least.” (Maslin)
“Some authors dislike writing about their own life, but for me it’s all I have to talk about. I take responsibility for all the actions of the characters in my books.” (Intellect, 14:00) “Kilgore in the books represents my psychological state and condition form book to book.” (Intellect, 7:34) If Vonnegut wanted to make it more clear that he was writing his own memoir multiple times he’d only need to threaten me with a vial of ice nine down my throat or something. He even takes responsibility for his books’ worlds’ characters’ actions! What a card! Vonnegut uses his stories as puck shots at the dart board. They are scribbles on a drawing, trying to mimic the photo in his head. That photo being his life’s sum, its total, its gestalt. He keeps drawing, drawing, repeating over and over in a desperate attempt to express himself. Or maybe it was a subtle manic personality trait that told him he had to be well cohesive, a sugar pill all collected, prologue, rising action, climax and denouement all wrapped up in a bitter coating of Schadenfreude humor.
“The secret ingredient in my books is, there has never been a villain.” (Vonnegut) They were thought exercises, his books, “creating the kind of distance that can offer insight into the mass insanity of modern warfare.” (Powers) Evil and badness are entities derived from humans. Since we are all human, and not everyone can be the villain, there is no villain. He thought on a large scope, or at least tried to. Alas, his hyperfocusedness on his experience at Dresden, his studies at Chicago, his sculpted stone mother, his technical father, his dynamics of his family and his personal life, his constant fear he isn’t complete; a whole package—these all bog him down. Imagine his vision to be so wide angle it’s 3600; however he zooms in so finely on tiny details that whilst he thinks of the bigger picture he can only express the picture via small facets of the diamond ring. Which is understandable. “Vonnegut could toss off little bits of news from nowhere, and not much else. Twitter might have suited him perfectly.” (Jansma)
On Trout’s characteristics: “He’s isolated because he’s suspicious of the human family, wants to be free from pressure on thought.” (Intellect 8:40) Vonnegut is speaking on himself. As a child his creative expression and ability was frowned upon; his science-wiz brother said that “art was ornamental” and that the world ran on science and fact. When Kilgore is afraid of the human family he’s really actually afraid of the expected; what is required of him and the confines implaced once you take up a role like ‘husband’ or ‘father.
Maybe this is why Vonnegut was so antsy. He wasn’t happy with himself a lot; after three children and many years of marriage he drops Jane Cox, leaves behind his family. They’re all grown, they don’t need him. He moves to Manhattan “for a fab new lifestyle” (Walter), gets a big apartment, marries a younger social butterfly—a photographer, Jill Krementz, who was quite the brazen ornament.
Vonnegut was busied with the idea of ‘impact’, or more precisely, ‘legacy’. His Anthropology studies had him looking at the effects of one culture to another and the linkages; his father’s architectural creations, all bland, all erased and demolished, and his father’s last advice “Don’t be an architect”; his mother’s frustration she had no effect on society anymore, but a suburban housewife, and her suicide; his sister’s failure as an artist, and death in early middle age; and his own worried self, fretting over being a nobody. When Charles Shields approached him for the biography Vonnegut had been annoyed nobody had offered to biograph him yet.
Vonnegut was also fascinated with film. He had wanted to be a filmmaker. He wanted movies made about his books. And some of them were adapted, like Slaughterhouse Five in 1972, with another adaptation coming out this year. He had a lifelong yearning for Hollywood. (Andersen) He believed the screen to be a worthy landmark, or memorial, when used for a legacy. He even appeared in the movie adaptation of Breakfast of Champions.
Of course, Vonnegut got what he wanted. Slaughterhouse Five was utilized as the think piece for the antiwar movement; especially during the Vietnam War, where the book’s signature phrase ‘So it goes’ became a mantra for the displeased hippies. The counterculture movement embraced him as a ‘moral sage’ and he showed up at college campuses to give speeches. He wrote more books. Every time they were bestsellers.
“I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labelled ‘science fiction’ … and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.” (Vonnegut) He’s a figurehead of the genre. He hates science. He lives off it.
What’s interesting is the burning dichotomy that rises from all of this. Hark back to when he was working for his uncle’s hardware company the summer of his sophomore year. He realized, as he’d been placed as second in command at the warehouse, and been raised the way he did—he was being taught to grow up to be part of the bourgeois. And he did not like that. He rebelled and was compassionate and his most famous rule is simply, ‘To be kind.’ He suffered a complicated relationship with his fellow Americans during the two great wars; he was German-American and things were awkward. Boo hoo for you, Vonnegut. It’s notable to see that there was precious little real suffering on his end. He did get snubbed by his family at a young age, but it wasn’t long before he fixed that (mostly). His family, during the Great Depression, went from luxurious socialites to middle class comfies. (You just had to kill yourself, Edith, now didn’t you.) I do admit his trauma from the war, and the shadow his mother’s suicide cast upon his life. But he is still a privileged member of the upper class. But he knew that.
      His fanbase, and the counter culture movement as a whole, was largely middle class white folks that were feeling a little compassionate, a tad deviant. What Vonnegut said was true; however it’s humorous to see a product of the establishment flaunt ideas of sticking it to the man and such deviant notions such as ‘free love’ and ‘antiwar’.
“Yet it seems to me that it’s no more trouble to be virtuous than to be vicious. I’m critical, but I’m not a pessimist.” (Vonnegut) He deemed himself a mouthpiece of the sensible. I guess that’s sensible.
“Society can be a villain, just the way a mother can be.” (Vonnegut) And indeed! Like his mother, society wants too much, it eats up at you and feeds off you and squeezes you dry; it has terribly high expectations but often gives you little help and freedom to reach those goals; it can forget about you and die on you and forget about you again.
      “Look at all that humans can do! They’re versatile. They can ride a unicycle. They can play the harp. They can apparently do anything.” (Vonnegut) And we can do anything. We can kill, maim, neglect, nurture, mother, cure, play with, structure and force, design, create, deny. When he heard Slaughterhouse Five was being burned and banned from schools for supposedly advertising moral depravity: “You would learn they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they are.” (Vonnegut)


Works Cited
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Been a Villain.” Chicagotribune.com, 11 May 2019, www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-kurt-vonnegut-city-news-bureau-university-chicago-perspec-0425-jm-20160422-story.html.

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