Wilson Knut's Witticisms

Charles Shields’ authorized biography of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., And So It Goes, has caused some controversy lately.  Vonnegut died a little less than a year after beginning to work with Shields on the biography.  Jill Krementz, Vonnegut’s widow, refused to participate even when Kurt was alive, and Mark Vonnegut, his son and co-executor, refused to let Shields quote directly from Vonnegut’s letters after his death.  Mark has even publicly denounced the biography recently.  Nonetheless Shields conducted extensive interviews and combed through more than 1,500 letters for five years.  And So It Goes presents Kurt Vonnegut as a human, a complicated mix of good and bad.  He was a writer by trade trying to make sense of the world he lived in.

I thought the biography was fairly extensive (roughly 400 pages) and paced well.  Vonnegut was shaped by a series of complicated events and Shields does a good job documenting those critical events: his childhood marked by his family’s fall from fortune during the Great Depression and as a result his mother’s suicide; the struggle between his brother’s excellence at science and his desire to write; his experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden, which most people know later became the critical impetus for his most beloved novel, Slaughter-House Five; excelling as a PR man for General Electric; and his sister and brother-in-law’s tragic deaths that led Vonnegut to adopt their three children, which placed six children total under his wife at the time, Jane, and his care.

Shields does an especially good job capturing Vonnegut’s struggles as a new writer with a family of six children.  Vonnegut was diligent in his writing regime, waking every morning and hunching over his typewriter for hours.  It was the era of magazines, and Vonnegut paid his dues selling stories.  Vonnegut’s novels didn’t come easily, but he followed his morning writing ritual for much of his life.  Shields gives critical analyses of Vonnegut’s early novels, but his later novels don’t receive as much attention.  Vonnegut was troubled by critics for much of his career, but especially with his later work.

I also found Vonnegut’s experiences at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop especially interesting.  It was that experience that ultimately gave him the inspiration and motivation to complete Slaughterhouse-Five.  I was also unaware that Vonnegut taught and befriended many great writers, like John Irving and one of my favorites, Andre Dubus.  It was the first time that he felt like part of the literary community.  His time at the workshop also led to an extra-marital affair that sped the end of his already stressed first marriage.

Writer Naeem Murr once told me, when he was the writer-in-residence at my my college, he didn’t think it was a good idea for artists to have children, because the art often takes everything the artist has.  If you look at the lives of famous writers, you’ll find that this is often true.  Vonnegut was no exception.  Though he had enduring relationships with his wives and children, those relationships were often strained due to his work and his life-long battle with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.

Shields begins the book with an appropriate quote from Vonnegut’s Wampeters, Foma & Granfallons (1974), “I keep losing and regaining my equilibrium, which is the basic plot of all popular fiction.  And I myself am a work of fiction.”  That quote sums up what I found most revealing about the biography.  Much of Vonnegut’s image among his loyal readers, myself included, is part of the fiction.  Vonnegut was on the cutting of edge of the new metafiction technique in literature, and he became popular during the 1960s.  Shields writes about the film adaptation of Mother Night:

…in the film, Vonnegut is not there to intervene the way he could in metafiction—there is no safe, ironic distance in the storytelling—so that the film Mother Night unfolds pretty much as straight drama.  The problem, Vonnegut later came to realize, was that filmed versions of his novels are one character short: himself.

Placing a fictional character of himself in his books is what makes them great, but the demand for that fictional character on speaking tours, as a creative writing teacher, and during interviews was something Vonnegut often wrestled with throughout life.  Shields touches on that struggle throughout the biography:

His readers assumed the voice they trusted in the novels was rooted in a combination of wisdom and sophistication, but the truth was different.  Vonnegut was more like his readers than they could have guessed.  His themes of community and extended family for persons who are naïve or lonely had much to do with how he saw himself, and he idealized some of his boyhood.  His summers at Lake Maxinkuckee had been his communal paradise lost…

I didn’t find the fact that Vonnegut was sometimes sad, cruel, or distant surprising.  He’s human.  If you’ve ever read his nonfiction essays, you will see all of those things, as well as humor, love, and kindness.  What I found most surprising were the seeming contradictions between how his readers viewed him and his conservative nature.  For example, Vonnegut was a shrewd investor in companies like Dow Chemical and Texas International Drilling Funds.  Shields explains that Vonnegut didn’t object to capitalism, but the use of capitalism to “justify the power of the rich over the poor.”  Vonnegut’s views of sexuality and society were also relatively conservative.  Shields writes:

Unfortunately, many of his younger readers and fans misjudged him…Sometimes their wrong impression created awkward, man-behind-the-curtain moments when at last they saw him in person.  In the spring of 1972, for instance, he spent one morning at West Point visiting classes and in the afternoon delivered a lecture.  At the end of the lecture, a cadet who had been looking forward to the event approached him. “And he said, ‘I can’t imagine you wrote those books,’ and I had, I swear to God I had, but I was not the man he thought should have written those books.”

Vonnegut was a brilliant PR man.  He created his own image, much like Mark Twain, which is discussed in the book as well.  Whether that image conflicts with him in reality doesn’t matter.  His work stands on its own.  In fact, that image is part of the artistry.  I believe much of the controversy over this biography is unwarranted.  Krementz and Mark Vonnegut may use the premise that they are defending Kurt’s image, but the truth is they are likely more worried about how they are portrayed.  Shields’ work is heavily annotated and documented.  Anyone who is a fan of Vonnegut should read this biography.