And So It Goes

It's always dangerous to read biographies of your heroes; invariably they don't live up to expectations. I've always loved the books of Kurt Vonnegut, ever since I read Slaughterhouse-Five in grade school. I haven't read all of his books, but those I have have made him one of my favorite authors. But, of course, he was a human being, not an icon.

Charles J. Shields, who would also seem to be an admirer of Vonnegut's work, gives us Vonnegut's life, warts and all, in And So It Goes (this is a phrase repeatedly written in Slaughterhouse-Five). Vonnegut certainly wasn't a bad guy--he was irascible, and had some family problems, like most of us, but he isn't exactly the figure the counterculture claimed him as.

Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922, to conservative German stock. He was never a socialist of any kind: "He believed in free enterprise. It had made his forebears rich. And he recognized that many ideas of Western freedom are intrinsically tied to capitalism."

His mother committed suicide: "The simple truth was, Edith Vonnegut deigned not to go on living if she had to be like everybody else."

Vonnegut was pushed into studying science by his older brother, a great scientist, but at Cornell he drifted into journalism. He never graduated, and served in World War II. He was taken prisoner and was held in Dresden, which endured a terrible firebombing: "They passed the corpse of a boy with his burned dog at the end of the leash; bodies of children dressed in party clothes; blackened drivers slumped at the wheels of their cars; couples who had leaped into fountains for safety and plunged into boiling water instead. The Dresden zoo, blown open by direct hits, had released its ark of animals into the wild. The men spotted a llama mounting slopes of debris. Exotic birds, with no trees to sit in, preened themselves on twisted iron railings. A chimpanzee, once popular with children, sat alone without hands."

Dresden would haunt his dreams, and he would struggle to write about it, but that would take twenty years. In the meantime, he went to work for GE in the marketing department, a job he hated. He would quit to be a freelance writer, and struggle to make ends meet by selling short stories. He and his wife, Jane, had three children, and took in the four children of his sister, Alice. They were orphaned when their father died in a train accident and Alice died of breast cancer just a few days apart.

Vonnegut would struggle financially for years. It wouldn't be until the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969 that he would become rich and famous. For years it had vexed him, but Shields writes of his solution: "For twenty years, he had been strangely confounded about the book, and intellectualizing its problems hadn't helped. At base, the antagonist was death, and life forces would have to sing a stronger, more convincing counterpoint in the novel. But now, because he was experiencing sex--the psyche's match for death--in ways that inspired him, he saw how to give the novel balance. He would introduce a fantasy lover with the titillating name Montana Wildhack...to rescue Slaughterhouse-Five's protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, from the terror of existing in an empty, meaningless universe.

Vonnegut became the darling of college students, and that book, plus Cat's Cradle, Mother Night, and The Sirens of Titan, still remain popular today. His wit made him a popular public speaker, and his curls and mustache made him a recognizable celebrity. Still, he felt snubbed by some literary types because he was considered a science-fiction writer.

He was also a philanderer. He and Jane would divorce after several years of marriage, and he fell under the spell of Jill Kremetz, a photographer who Shields portrays in almost entirely unpleasant terms. He describes her as basically snaring him, as if were a trophy, and then tormenting him. He would file for divorce three times, but always went back to him, much to his children's distress.

In later years, Vonnegut became something of an eminence grise, still admired, though his later works were not well-received. He died in 2007, in a way that befits him, given the absurdity of his stories: he fell, entangled in a dog's leash, and struck his head.

The book is straightforward, and Shields writes nimble prose. Each book is briefly explicated--the literary discussion isn't particularly broad, but then Vonnegut isn't easy to summarize. Basically, we learn that his basic theme is: What is man's purpose? Also, he was a forerunner of meta-fiction, inserting himself into the action. He also had many recurring characters, none so famous as Kilgore Trout, who was modeled on author Theodore Sturgeon, but came to be an avatar for Vonnegut himself: "Kilgore Trout, the wise fool of science fiction, ignored, sold only in pornographic bookstores, and half-mad with frustration...'Kilgore Trout is the lonesome and unappreciated writer I thought I might become.'"

I would have liked more. Shields ends his book with Vonnegut's death, writing nothing about the world's reaction, or what became of his children. It kind of left me in the lurch. But otherwise, I recommend this book for Vonnegut fans. The truth is harsh, but Vonnegut believed in the truth.