I guess it’s no big secret that my favorite author is the late Kurt Vonnegut. I discovered his work when I was a Sophomore in High School, when Slaughterhouse-Five was required reading. I devoured that book. I read it over and over again.
Then I discovered that my brother had several of Vonnegut’s novels in his collection. I was not permitted to read his books without permission; this did not dissuade me. I “swiped” Player Piano and Mother Night and read them with the same joy I had experienced reading Slaughterhouse. I did not get caught, because my brother was in the Air Force at the time.
Probably an epiphany for me came in my only year at college, when I purchased a copy of Breakfast Of Champions at the campus book store. It took me the better part of a day to read it. Breakfast developed one of Vonnegut’s more endearing characters, Kilgore Trout, in it’s plot. Trout was a hack science fiction writer and recluse who lived in the upstate New York town of Cohoes. He made his living publishing filler for pornographic books. Trout had only one fan: Elliot Rosewater, a mentally ill millionaire. Rosewater had an extensive collection of art, and another Vonnegut character named Fred Barry wanted to borrow one particular piece to display at an Arts Festival in Midland City, OH. Rosewater had only one condition for the loan: that Barry invite “the greatest American author,” Kilgore Trout.
Trout was based on a real-life science fiction writer named Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon was a friend of Vonnegut’s, the two having met at a Saab dealship where Vonnegut worked as a salesman. Sturgeon’s work included an episode of Star Trek.
Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922, to Kurt Sr. and Edith (Lieber) Vonnegut. The elder Vonnegut was an architect in the firm of Vonnegut and Bohn, founded by Kurt Sr.’s father, Bernard Vonnegut.
Vonnegut was studying chemestry at Cornell University when he joined the Army at the start of WWII. Vonnegut was the assistant managing editor and associate editor of the Cornell Daily Sun. The Army sent Vonnegut to the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, and later The University of Tennessee in Knoxville to study mechanical engerineering. When manpower ran short, he was transferred to active duty in the infantry.
He was captured at The Battle of The Bulge, and taken to Dresden to work as a prison laborer. While in Dresden, Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners lived in the underground storage area of a slaughterhouse. Since Vonnegut spoke some German, he was chosen to be a leader of the prisoners, but this honor was taken from him when he told a German guard what he was going to do to him “when the Russians get here.” The Germans instructed the prisoners to say the following if they got lost: Ichh bin American prisoner. Schlacthof-funf. Translated, “I am an American prisoner. Slaughterhouse-five.” From this, Vonnegut got the name for his greatest work, and one of the greatest American novels of the 20th Century.
During his inprisonment in Dresden, the city was firebombed by the Allies. This experience was without a doubt the seminal moment in his life.
After the war, Vonnegut went to Chicago, where he attended Chicago University, studying anthropology. He worked at the Chicago City News Bureau, where he covered the police beat for five major Chicago newspapers. In his spare time, he wrote short stories, many of them science fiction.
Vonnegut later moved to Schenectady, where he got a job in Public Relations at General Electric, a job he got through his brother Bernard. Dr. Bernard Vonnegut was a respected atmospheric scientist working in GE’s Research Department, and it was he who discovered that introducing silver iodide to clouds could create rain, a process known as “cloud seeding.” The job offered him not only a better living, it gave him time to work on his writing. It was in Schenectady where Vonnegut wrote his first novel, Player Piano. It told the tale of a dystopian America where machines did all the work. Often compared to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Piano is today considered exactly the opposite of Shrugged. While Rand wrote about unmotivated workers on the Government dole and portrayed business owners as victims, Vonnegut told of a world where people wanted to work, and eventually revolted in order to re-acquire their work and dignity. Vonnegut set the story in Ilium, NY, the first time he used this fictional version of Schenectady.
He published his work under the name “Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.” He dropped the “Jr.” in 1976 with the publication of Slapstick.
Vonnegut’s next novel, The Sirens Of Titan, was pure science fiction. The Hero, a rich idler named Malachi Constant, is invited to visit Winston Niles Rumford, who had somehow become extant in a phenomenon called a Chrono-synclastic Infandibulum. It was in this book that Vonnegut introduced the planet Tralfamadore, which would also play a significant role in Slaughterhouse-Five. Rumford also appeared in a Vonnegut short story.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater introduced Kilgore Trout. Trout was a reclusive writer of filler for pornographic books, and he wrote science fiction. Elliot Rosewater was Trout’s only fan, who read the pornographic books for their science-fiction content. Rosewater wrote Trout his only fan letter, which read “you ought to be president of the world.”
His next novel, Mother Night, introduced Howard Campbell, Jr., an American expatriate who while seeming to be a propagandist for the Nazis was actually aiding the Allies during WWII. Campbell was also a character in Slaughterhouse-Five.
His next work, Cat’s Cradle, told of an atomic scientist who invented a substance called “Ice Nine” which eventually froze all the water in the world.
Growing weary of science fiction, Vonnegut decided to write a novel based on his experiences in Dresden. He got a Guggenheim grant to return to Dresden to do research on his book, but soon found out that he didn’t have enough for a decent story. So, turning to his science-fiction roots, Vonnegut made the hero a shy WWII veteran named Billy Pilgrim, who had come unstuck in time. Pilgrim lived in the fictional town of Ilium, NY, which Vonnegut had used for the location of the story in Piano. The book covered Pilgrim’s life, through his time-travel. Pilgrim was captured at The Battle of The Bulge and taken to Dresden, and was quartered in “Slaughterhouse-five. He lived through the firebombing. Vonnegut took this story from his own experiences, and based many of the characters on people he had known.
Pilgrim had no control over where he went, he simply moved about from event to event in his life. Slaughterhouse-Five became probably Vonnegut’s best-known work. Rosewater, Trout, and Campbell were all characters in the novel, and the planet Tralfamadore was where Billy was taken when he was kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians, along with soft-core porn actress Montana Wildhack.
Vonnegut had other jobs in writing. He got a job at Sports Illustrated, where his first assignment was to write a piece about a racehorse which had jumped the fence of his enclosure and ran away. Vonnegut was stricken with a severe case of writer’s block, and spent hours staring a blank piece of paper in his typewriter. Vonnegut finally wrote, “The horse jumped over the fucking fence.” Thus ended his sportswriting career.
Vonnegut finally settled in Barnstable, MA. He was hardly the recluse that Kilgore Trout was. Vonnegut served as a volunteer fire fighter, and was active in community events.
Barnstable seemed to be a source of creativity for Vonnegut, and he began to write novels that were largely traditional prose rather than science fiction. These works included Slapstick and Jailbird, which was losely based on Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers.
Another character from Breakfast appeared as the protagonist of a later novel, Bluebeard. Rabo Karabekian was an Abstract Expressionist artist who had studied art under the greatest illustrator ever, Dan Gregory. Karabekian could paint a picture indistinguishable from a photograph, but found that his paintings had no soul. So, he decided to paint only souls, which he did by painting an entire canvas one color, and applying vertical strips of tape to show the soul of the subject. Karabekian used a house paint called Sateen Dura-Luxe which was advertisied as having the quality to “outlive the smile on the Mona Lisa.” But the paint would flake off, and all of Karabekian’s works self-destructed. This was not just Vonnegut’s black humor at work; he detested Modern Art. His father and grandfather were architechts in Indianapolis, and excellent artists. He considered Abstract Expressionists to be frauds. The character of Karabekian had many friends in the Modern Art community, and he also had a real job, so he was often loaning money to the likes of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and William deKooning, and was repaid with paintings, in the process acquiring one of the largest private collections of Modern Art.
Breakfast also spawned another novel, Deadeye Dick. It took place in Midland City, but no mention of the events of Breakfast were included save for the Mildred Barry Arts Center and the character of Fred Barry, and Celia Hoover, wife of Dwayne. Celia’s suicide, a sidebar event in Breakfast, is mentioned in more detail. The population of Midland City had been wiped out due to the “accidental” detonation of a neutron bomb. The hero, a pharmacist named Rudy Wertz, was in Haiti at the time, and was allowed to return to Midland City to recover any personal items he could find. Wertz was called “Deadeye Dick” because he had accidently shot and killed a pregnant woman on Mother’s Day. Wertz’s father was disliked. He was a rich idler who as a young man went to Austria to hang out with artists. It was in Austria where the elder Wertz befriended a starving Adolf Hitler. Upon returning to America, Wertz was not shy about his admiration of Hitler. After the shooting, the Wertz family lost all of their fortune.
The ghost of Trout’s son, Leon, was the narrator of one of Vonnegut’s later novels, Galapagos.
His penultimate novel was Hocus Pocus, which told of a Vietnam Veteran named Eugene Debs Hartke, a college professor who was fired from his post because he taught his students that a new Ice Age was coming. The wealthy and very conservative father of one of his sutdents was not amused. His final novel, Timequake, was a semi-autobiography. After this book, Vonnegut announced his retirement from writing.
In addition to his novels, Vonnegut published many collections of his short stories.
Vonnegut considered Mark Twain to be an American Saint, and named his son after Twain. He had a love-hate relationship with Ernest Hemingway, loving his prose but despising the man who, as Vonnegut put it, “…murdered animals in the guise of sport.” He wrote one play, Happy Birthday Wanda June, basing the protagonist, Harold Ryan, on the part of Hemingway he disliked.
Vonnegut also had a career as an actor. He appeared in two movies made from his novels, Breakfast Of Champions starring Albert Finney as Trout and Bruce Willis as Dwayne Hoover, the other hero of the story. Hoover was the owner of a Pontiac dealership, who went insane at the Midland City Arts Festival. Vonnegut played the director of a television commercial being made for Hoover’s dealership. Vonnegut also had a non-speaking role in Mother Night, Which starred Nick Nolte as Howard W. Campbell, Jr, an American expatriate living in Nazi Germany, who actually was aiding the Allies by making seemingly pro-German radio propaganda broadcasts. The film also starred John Goodman as the American agent who was Campbell’s contact. Nolte, incidently, played a transvestite auto salesman in Breakfast. But Vonnegut’s best-known film appearance was when he played himself in Back To School, starring Rodney Dangerfield, who was a personal friend. In addition, Vonnegut provided his voice to Ken Burns’ The Civil War, reciting lines from soldiers of that conflict.
Slaughterhouse-Five and Happy Birthday Wanda June were also made into movies. Several of Vonnegut’s short stories were produced as made-for-television programs in a series called Kurt Vonnegut’s Monkey House. Vonnegut served as host.
Vonnegut often wrote about his uncle Alex Vonnegut, who was a recovered alcoholic. Vonnegut, who was never a heavy drinker, admired his uncle’s triumph over alcohol. The prelude of Slapstick told of he and his brother Bernard flying to Indianapolis for his uncle’s funeral.
Vonnegut was a chain-smoker, for which he never apologized. He often quipped that he was “committing suicide by cigarette.” He also never apologized for his Atheism. He came from a long line of German free-thinkers who “did not fear God.” He had been a member of the Unitarian Church, but later embraced Secular Humanism. He suffered from bouts of depression, and attempted suicide once by taking sleeping pills and washing them down with vodka. It was not successful.
Vonnegut was not shy with his opinions. He once referred to his former son-in-law Geraldo Rivera as a “scumbag” in an interview on the news program Nightline. Rivera repeatedly abused Vonnegut’s daughter Edith until she divorced him. Likewase, a science-fiction tome called Venus On The Half-Shell was written by Philip Jose Farmer under the pen-name of Kilgore Trout. The hero was named “Simon Wagstaff” who was called “Space Wanderer,” a psuedonym Vonnegut used for Malachi Constant in Sirens Of Titan. It was intended to be an homage to Vonnegut, but he was not amused. Farmer claims to have received an obscenity-laden late-night phone call from Vonnegut.
Vonnegut lived a life beset with tragedy. His mother committed suicide while he was in the Army. His beloved only sister Alice died of cancer In a twist of fate that would seem like one of Vonnegut’s novels, her husband was killed only days before her death when the train he was riding on hurled itself off of an open drawbridge. Vonnegut adopted his sister’s three children, and raised them along with his own three. He divorced his wife in 1971, and married photographer Jill Krementz later that year. He and Krementz remained together until his death in 2007. Vonnegut died as a result of severe head trauma after he fell down a flight of stairs.
So it goes.
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