Vonnegut Kurt - And so it goes: Kurt Vonnegut, a life

To Knox Burger

Hang a Gold Medal on him

Kurt will have the last word, if not the last laughand we will miss that laugh! That ineffable, smoke-laden, sardonically elated laughter that suffused and punctuated his conversation. Laughter that at times seemed inappropriate following the retelling of some of the most ghastly events of the twentieth century. This laughter was a mental bulwark against the madness of war he witnessed.

S COTT V ONNEGUT , nephew,
Kurt Vonneguts memorial service,
The Algonquin Hotel
New York, April 21, 2007

I keep losing and regaining my equilibrium, which is the basic plot of all popular fiction.

And I myself am a work of fiction.

K URT V ONNEGUT , Wampeters,
Foma & Granfalloons (1974)

Contents

Prologue: Out of Print and Scared to Death

K URT V ONNEGUT PLANNED to give this new teaching job at the University of Iowa his best shot. As he zoomed across the Midwest in early September 1965 in his sons new Volkswagen Beetlehis six-foot-three frame pressing his head against the roof linerit was as if failure were clattering behind him like tin cans tied to the bumper. The ashtray was stuffed with the crushed butts of Pall Mall cigarettes and the windshield was tawny with nicotine from his chain-smoking. He had a lot to think about, and the twelve-hundred-mile cross-country drive between his home on Cape Cod and Iowa City, Iowa, gave him all the time he needed.

He was bored by his twenty-year marriage to his first love, the former Jane Cox, whom hed married barely five months after his release from a prisoner-of-war camp at the end of World War II. This past summer, he had been trying to start an affair with a woman in New York twenty years his junior who, in turn, was waiting for the writer William Price Fox to divorce his wife so they could marry. If this writer-in-residence job in the respected Iowa Writers Workshop didnt suit him, he was going to leave it and compensate himself for his trouble by coming on strong with Sarah.

He did have a daughter almost her age, and five other children besidesthree of his own with Jane and three from his sister and brother-in-law, who were dead. There was only enough money for him to come to Iowa City alone. He had not wanted to go, but everyone else seemed to think it was a good idea.

It was certain he needed the change of scene. Things like that got around fast on Cape Cod.

Maybe it was only the remark that got to him, but he also hated the implication that he was a nobody. Obviously, the guy had no idea who he wasincluding that he was Edies father. His neighbors hadnt read his novels, didnt care much about books, so he felt like he had no status at all.

Not that the English Department in Iowa knew much about him, either. Actually, he knew more about their creative writing program than they knew about his work. An article about it had appeared in Look magazine just a few weeks before Dr. Gerbers invitation had arrived. When the poet Robert Lowell backed out at the last minute, Engle had rescued him with a steady job.

The truth was, despite his four published novels and scads of short stories in magazines found in doctors waiting rooms, Kurt Vonneguts writing career had been a nonstarter for years. In college, hed written satirical columns, news, and opinion pieces for the Cornell newspaper, but he dropped out after two years in 1943 because of bad grades and enlisted as a private in the army. After the war, he attended the University of Chicago on the GI Bill to earn a degree in anthropology but never completed his thesis. Now, in his forties, the only academic credential he had was a diploma from Shortridge High School in Indianapolis. Packed away in the Volkswagen, he had the notes for another thesis for Chicagoa casserole of ideas that conflated fiction and anthropologywhich he dreamed he might be able to finish in Iowa City in maybe a month or so. He also wanted to work on a partially written screenplay for his most recent novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater . Then there were the drafts of a wartime novel about his surviving the bombing of Dresden, a project he had been taking unsuccessful runs at ever since he got out of the service. Whether he could find time to work on all three would depend on his teaching schedule not being murderously heavy.

Ten miles outside of Iowa City, the Volkswagen began to thump and sway. He pulled off to the gravelly shoulder and got out, surrounded by millions and millions of acres of topsoil like the farmland outside Indianapolis, as flat as pool tables and as rich as chocolate cake. A tire had blown. It was quiet, except for the grasshoppers and cicadas hissing drily in the heat, and he looked around, weighing his choices.

1: You Were an Accident

19221940

T HE WEDDING OF Kurt Vonneguts parents, Edith Sophia Lieber and Kurt Vonnegut Sr. on November 22, 1913, in Indianapolis, Indiana, was spectacular.

Ediths father, Albert, owner of a giant brewery who reveled in his reputation as one of the richest men in the city, threw a gargantuan reception at the Claypool Hotel at the northwest corner of Washington and Illinois streets, reputed to be the finest hotel in the Midwest. There were six hundred guests, and those not chauffeured in automobiles arrived in horse-drawn carriages with jingling brass harnessesan entire generation of rich Edwardians, silk-hatted or covered demurely by parasols, many of whom had been raised in Indianapoliss mansions on Meridian Street. Albert Lieber knew what his guests expected and he did not disappoint. There was a sixty-foot bar, choice meats, champagne, and dancing to an orchestra in the ballroom lasting until six in the morning.

And to the satisfaction of some guests, there was plenty of gossip to go around, too. The bride had graduated from Miss Shipleys finishing school in Bryn Mawr outside Philadelphia in time to come out for the 1908 season in London. Her first serious suitor, Kenneth Doulton, whose family owned the world famous Royal Doulton Porcelain Works, had proposed. He said his father would buy them a house in Mayfair, hinting that they could live very well if her father would settle a good-sized dowry on her. But she suspected he was an upper-class idler who wanted a sinecure and not the responsibility of inheriting a giant brewery in Indianapolis. She broke off the engagement.

Then she had crossed the English Channel to live in her grandfather Peter Liebers castle in Dsseldorf. There she caught the eyes of two German cavalry officers who competed for her affections. She had become engaged to the higher-ranking one, a captaina Prussian, Otto Voigt, whose saber, boots, and brass buttons looked dashing. Unfortunately, like the English gentleman who had preceded him, he had no interest in the Lieber family brewery either. She ended that engagement too.

So she had retreated home to her fathers estate, Vellamada, outside Indianapolis, where he built for her a cottage on a bluff overlooking the White River and furnished it according to her tastes, with a fireplace and a grand piano in the living room. Many days she spent hours strolling around the grounds alone.

No one recalled exactly how the groom, Kurt Vonnegut Sr., came on the scene romantically, but he and Edith, four years his junior, had known each other since childhood. Both families belonged to Indianapoliss coterie of wealthy German Americans who gravitated to Das Deutsche Haus, the citys German cultural center. Money and the suitability of the young couple were on the minds of both families, naturally.