by Steve Almond
He lists half a dozen other stories, most written in the space of a few days. The page also includes his schedule for the composition of his first novel, Player Piano. He wrote the second chapter in two days, and the whole manuscript in a few months.
Anyone who has struggled with stories, and especially a first novel, will recognize how revoltingly fast Vonnegut was writing, particularly given that he was still working full-time for GE, and that he had two young children at home. The man was a machine.
THIS IS NOT to suggest that he was a flawless machine, or even a particularly profitable one. Most of the three hundred stories gathered in his archive remain unpublished, for good reason. I now find it necessary to quote from “God’s Gift to Women,” the account of a would-be Lothario nicknamed Gine:
“Fresh meat for Gine,” said Leora, and she smiled like a pirate who had just captured a fresh young beauty, and she looked poor Amy up and down…
“He isn’t married.”
“He isn’t?” said Amy pipingly.
Yes, pipingly.
Most astounding is the number of different ways Vonnegut finds to screw up. His drafts are at once tepid and moralizing, crammed with feckless heroes and labored metaphors. Reading over them was like being trapped in an elevator with my own early stories.
VONNEGUT IS ON record as saying that the reason he writes is so he can edit himself into something approaching charm.5 I realize that it may come off as a bit of dirty pool to go mucking through his initial efforts, particularly because it gave me an almost obscene pleasure to see Kurt Vonnegut writing so badly.
Or maybe I mean it gave me a twisted sort of faith.
I mentioned above that I don’t believe in talent, and what I meant by this is that a knack for the language, the stuff identified early on by well-meaning high school teachers, is about as useful a predictor of literary success as shoe size. When students march into one of my undergrad workshops with talent, I regard them as doomed. They are likely to suffer the illusion that writing is about applause rather than humiliation.
But we all come to the keyboard as pitiful supplicants. We all pull the same insecure stunts. We all have our own drawer of horrors. Those who succeed, in the end, are the ones with the biggest drawers.
Which brings us to the file for “The Commandant’s Desk.” It begins with a 1951 letter addressed to Knox Burger, the editor at Collier’s who urged Vonnegut to quit his PR job and write full-time.
Dear Knox:
Here, for operation Brandy Alexander, is THE COMMANDANT’S DESK.
I think it’s pretty good, and, since I am representing myself in this particular deal, let me say my boy deserves a fat bonus.
I’m selling my house and moving somewhere on the Atlantic Coast, probably Massachusetts. We’re renting a place in Province-town for July, August, and September, and hope you’ll pay us a call….6
Signed [in pencil]
Kurt Vonnegut
Burger responds with two single-spaced pages of edits. The rest of the file consists of subsequent drafts, six of them by my count. Vonnegut spends two years trying out different narrators, tones, endings. There are notes for further revisions, outlines, more than two hundred pages in all. “The Commandant’s Desk” was never published.
VONNEGUT WROTE HIS pal Burger a second fascinating note, but before I could finish transcribing it, I got a tap on the shoulder. “Your wife is outside,” the attendant said.
This was good. I had left Erin at the main library, working on her novel. Now I could explain about the no-copying situation, that we might need to stay an extra day. The moment I saw Erin I could tell that was not going to happen.
“Is everything okay?”
She shook her head.
We went outside to talk.
“I’m exhausted,” she said. “I can’t work here. I need to lie down. I need rest.”
“Sure,” I said. “Take the day off.”
She shook her head and turned away for a moment. When she turned back she was silently weeping.
“I’m sick of this.”
“Sick of what?” I said.
But I knew what she meant.
I’ve neglected to mention this, because I’ve been so hooked on the Vonnegunutia, but upon our arrival in Bloomington, we’d been on the road for three weeks. Erin had spent one of these patiently absorbing the complex distress of my family. She’d slept in Love-lock, Nevada, and Salt Lake City, and York, Nebraska. She’d driven thirty-three hundred miles in a tiny Honda packed to the roof with her worldly possessions. And she had done all this while six months pregnant with our first child. The sun beat down on her pale face.
“I want to go home,” she said.
I was torn. I knew I needed to accommodate her needs. I needed not to be a self-absorbed writer jerkoff. At the same time…we were in Bloomington. It was all right here. Vonnegut had something to tell me, I was convinced of it.
I hugged her for a long time and told her we could leave immediately if she wanted, head straight back to Boston, but that she could also, if it was okay, if she didn’t mind, I felt it might be good for her, just for right now, for today, to get a hotel room—a nice one, a fancy one—and give herself the day off. Then we’d get dinner and see where things stood.
IT’S WHAT WRITERS DO, this shuck and jive, this nervous dance to balance the emotional needs of those you love against your own need for glory. To quote that other letter to Burger:
Jesus—wouldn’t it be nice to write just one play a year, or just one anything?
I’ve pretty well pooped out as a hack. The old Moxie is gone. As for the book: I like it, I believe in it. But it’s disloyal….
Everything’s going to be just grand, though. Jane says so. She says she knows it in her bones. And I no kidding believe her. I’d better, with two houses and $20,000 in mortgages.
Vonnegut wrote this in 1955. He was thirty-two years old. His first novel had come and gone. Sirens of Titan wouldn’t come out for another four years. He was still pumping out the stories, still dreaming about a collection. He had three kids now.
I can’t fathom how Vonnegut did it. To think of myself at that age—sitting alone in a rented room, writing my lameass stories, hurling my body at the nearest soft disaster. I was such a punk. And here I was pushing forty, with a tolerant wife and a single baby on the way, a few books under my belt—and I felt besieged?
Vonnegut has said in the past that he was lucky, that he began his career during the golden age of magazines, when you could make a living as a story writer. But that’s nonsense. The record indicates that the guy was running one continuous hustle. He worked as an English teacher for troubled kids. He ran a Saab dealership. He even tried inventing a board game.7
WHEN I TOLD my wife about Vonnegut’s scattered endeavors, she said, “He sounds like you.” It was evening. We had picked up a pizza and now we were wandering the aisles of a dazzling midwestern supermarket. They had everything: seven kinds of lettuce, imported cheeses, vanilla chai smoothies, the glittering bounty of the cheap oil era, toward which I felt a sudden strange sympathy. A light rain fell outside, streaking the high windows, beading the bright cars beyond. We were so lucky to be living in this time, in this place. We had no idea, really.
It was the same feeling I got out on the road, as we sped across America,8 through all those little retail environments, with their brightly lit gas stations and calorific convenience stores. They would be dead soon, petroleum ghost towns, like the abandoned farmhouses slowly collapsing off in the distance. So maybe it was nostalgia I was feeling, a kind of pre-nostalgia. These were the good old days. Why hadn’t I noticed?
I SHOULD RETURN to the Lilly Reading Room, but before I do I want to mention something that goes unmentioned (so far as I could tell) in the Vonnegut archive. In 1958, his older sister Alice succumbed to cancer, two days after her husband’s death in a train wreck. Vonnegut adopted three of the couple’s four children. His greatest period of artistic growth occurred at a t
ime that he had no fewer than six children in his home.
WHEN WE LAST LEFT our hero, though, he was a young writer bursting with ideas, who spent his days writing short stories, fretting over dough, doodling, and inventing board games. How in the hell did this schlub become Kurt Vonnegut?
I fully intend to answer this question, but to do so, I’ll need to share with you a letter the novelist John Irving wrote to Vonnegut, his former teacher, in 1982:
I think you are (and have been for as long as I’ve known your work) the best writer in this country. Period. I’m afraid I have an almond macaroon for a heart, when it comes to your writing.
I know we are all insecure about what we truly mean. But your books always create the perfect illusion that you know exactly all those parts of the story as you are telling us just one of the parts, and that simply makes everything sound true—makes you the absolute authority. You have to be a writer to feel that.
Günter Grass can give me this impression, too. No one else living gives it. Dickens gave it. Hardy gave it. Well, it’s a short list.
This strikes me as an apt description of Vonnegut. His trademark as a writer, the key to his magnetism, resides in the awesome assurance of his voice. His narrators all sound like the same plain-spoken God. I am now ready to reveal the source of Kurt Vonnegut’s divine voice: a shitload of failure.
I’m not being cute here. To a greater extent than anyone likes to admit, writers evolve simply because they tire of their own mistakes. The best example I can offer happens to be the best book Vonnegut ever wrote, Slaughterhouse-Five.
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE is impossible to describe to anyone who has not read it. It is a mix of science fiction, farce, autobiography, war reportage, and meta-fiction. It is somehow all of these things at once, in the service of a single theme: the chaos of war, which is to say, young men sent to foreign countries to kill strangers. The event at the heart of the novel is the firebombing of Dresden, which burned to death more than 25,000 Germans, nearly all of them civilians, and which Vonnegut survived as a twenty-two-year-old POW. He spent the next two decades trying to write about the experience. And he failed at it, over and over. “Guns Before Butter” begins like so:
The three American soldiers remained seated within the roofless shell of a building amid the smashed masonry and timbers of Dresden, Germany. The time was early March, 1944. Kniptash, Donnini, and Coleman were prisoners of war.
All his initial war stories are like this: hard-bitten and stagy. The characters are thin as dimes. What matters in them are the episodes that keep cropping up—a man is shot for stealing a teapot, another almost dies on a boxcar—memories that would haunt Vonnegut until he exorcised them in Slaughterhouse-Five.
BY THE TIME Vonnegut took up Dresden again, in the late sixties, he was riding an unbelievable hot streak. He had published four novels in the space of six years, including the masterpiece Cat’s Cradle, for which the University of Chicago would award him a belated master’s degree. He was a bestselling author. You might assume that he tore through Slaughterhouse-Five.
He did not.
His initial draft—at least the initial draft that made its way to Bloomington—is a standard-issue war story, starring a scarred veteran named Weary. “Three in our labor unit in Dresden died,” it begins, wearily.
By his second draft, Vonnegut has come to recognize the necessity of personal confession. But he has lost the struggle against his own nihilism:
I used to pretend, even to myself, that I was deeply sorry about Dresden, tinkered with the idea of writing a book about the massacre with neatly underplayed indignation. But these things happen and there is no stopping them, so the hell with them…. The American conscience is dead. The human conscience is dead. It has almost certainly always been dead.
Elsewhere, no doubt as a compensatory measure, he comes off as glib.
That is why the name of this book is “Slaughterhouse-Five.”
Zowie.
Whizbang.
Mother, pin a rose on me.
Wow.
Some title for a war book. And how.
Vonnegut actually crossed out this passage. He knew he was playing to the balconies. And that’s what I’m getting at here. Vonnegut needed to make all these mistakes. He needed to work through his anger, his evasions, his boredom with conventional approaches. By the third draft, he has found an outlet for his exuberance, in a campy science fiction subplot. He has also found the humility that precedes absolution. There is an air of surrender to the narrative, which begins, “I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time.” He is done lying to the reader, done posing, done pretending his own depression and failure are not part of the story.
I fucking love that about Vonnegut.
ANOTHER WAY TO put it would be this:
He himself was the most enchanting American at the heart of each of his tales. We can forgive this easily, for he managed to imply that the reader was enough like him to be his brother.
Vonnegut said this about his hero Twain, though he was speaking about himself too, as we always do. That is the great game writers play: pretending what we do is a matter of superior imagination, or empathy, when, in fact, our defining impulse is a desire to be noticed.
OF VONNEGUT’S MANY speeches, most notable is his 1981 tribute to the labor leader Eugene Debs, a fellow Hoosier. He quotes the words Debs uttered before being sentenced to twenty years in prison for speaking out against World War I: “While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Vonnegut then asks,
How many of us can echo those words and mean them? If this were a decent nation, we would all find those sentiments as natural and easy to say as, “Good morning. It looks like another nice day.”
But the star system has made us all ravenous for the slightest proofs that we matter to the American story, somehow, at least a little bit more than someone else.
Reading these words, I thought about the Reality TV show Erin and I had watched the night before, something called My Super Sweet Sixteen, in which a teenage girl from Scottsdale celebrates her birthday with a $150,000 party, and two new cars. In one scene, she stands in front of her school in a tiara and presents invitations to the other cool kids, while the ugly and poor watch. Two undesirables begin to beg for invites and she allows them to dance for her on the sidewalk, while she and her friends insult them.
It would be natural enough to express disgust for this lunatic display. But all I felt watching that girl was the terrible misery inside her, her monstrous need to be popular, which has become our national aspiration.
INCLUDED IN THE speech file is a sheet of paper that includes random notes, mostly political rants of the sort Vonnegut produces at the drop of a hat, along with these two humdingers:
Something you should know about me: Geraldo Rivera Question of the hour. Does penis size really matter?
I’m not sure what prompted the penis size question, though Vonnegut’s obsession with this topic is well documented. I’m fairly certain he’s the only writer (other than myself) ever to write a novel in which the male characters are identified by the length and girth of their johnsons.
The Geraldo thing is a little less cryptic; for a brief time Geraldo was married to one of Vonnegut’s daughters.
That is so, like, ick.
BY THE SEVENTIES, Vonnegut was himself famous. (Not as famous as Geraldo. But who is?) He had written himself into his work. He had become a renowned speaker, an icon to malcontents and pacifists everywhere. Now came the deluge. Letters. Mountains of them. From Günter Grass and Herman Wouk and John Updike. From Marlo Thomas and Julie Nixon Eisenhower and Laurie Anderson. From Larry Flynt. (“My attorney is seeking a well-known and respected author who would be willing to offer expert testimony as to the literary merit of Hustler.”) Mostly, from guys like me who fell in love with him and developed the absurd but inevitable notion that he
might fall in love right back. Such tender notes of worship! They fill three boxes.
HONESTLY, I DON’T like this part of the movie. The stuff that excited me—Vonnegut’s era of struggle, his lean and hungry ascent—is over now. We’ve reached the part where the privileges of fame overtake suspense.
Vonnegut continues to write novels, many of them quite good, but none feel groundbreaking, the way the early books did. He continues to say the right things, with tremendous eloquence, but his actions don’t jibe. He divorces his first wife and takes up with a more glamorous model. He gets a place in the Hamptons. He writes a letter entreating Jack Nicholson to read a script for Breakfast of Champions.
Does Kurt Vonnegut sell out?
Sure. He sells out like hell. He’s flattered by the money and the praise, by the innocent belief that commercial attention means his ideas are being heeded.
He gets himself a fancy New York lawyer, too, to sort through all the contracts and letters and such, the infamous Donald Farber. “I was dumb enough to join a health club,” reads one of his notes to Farber. “It now bores me shitless. I no longer use it. I enclose my lifetime membership…. Would you take steps to break off the connection?”
How’s that for mid-career decadence?
IT WAS NEARLY closing time at the Reading Room of the Lilly Library. I had not read four thousand documents in the allotted 840 minutes. More like four hundred. My eyes were burning. Soon, my wife would be waiting for me outside, gorgeously swollen, perhaps weeping at my inconsideration.
And so, at this point in my odyssey through Vonnegut’s archive, I made a thoroughly stupid (by which I mean rather typical) decision. I watched Vonnegut on TV. The archive contained several programs, the most excruciating of which was a 1989 interview with Charlie Rose, during which Vonnegut admits that he watches TV “all the time,” in particular The People’s Court. Then comes this exchange:
VONNEGUT:
People have two houses, one in the country and the city.
ROSE:
Do you have that?
VONNEGUT:
I do.
