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1945: Dresden Firebombing and Coming Home
For six months, Jane did not know if Kurt was dead or alive. She had become good friends with Kurt’s sister, Allie, by this time, and the two women stayed in close contact after he was reported missing in action.
During this period of silence, Kurt was one of 150 POWs taken by train to Dresden. On February 13 and 14, 1945, Dresden was firebombed by the British and United States Air Forces, killing between 35,000 and 135,000 people in twenty-four hours. The real figure will almost certainly never be known, as there were so many refugees in the city at the time. For the next two months, Kurt was put to work by the Germans, clearing rubble and collecting corpses for huge funeral pyres. By mid-April, the war was showing signs of ending, and on April 13, German troops marched their prisoners out of Dresden to the Czech border over the course of two days and abandoned them there. By May, Kurt was delivered to the POW repatriation center at Camp Lucky Strike in Havre, Le France.
Finally, Kurt was able to write home and tell his family that he was safe and what had happened to him. They then shared the news with Jane. He even came up with his dream meal for his homecoming.
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1945: Back Home
On July 2, 1945, on the way from France back to Camp Atterbury, Indiana, Kurt stopped in Washington, D.C., to see Jane and convince her to break it off with her other suitors. They continued on to Indianapolis together, as Jane wanted to see her mother, who had had another nervous breakdown. Kurt proposed marriage in Indianapolis, and Jane accepted.
Although he had talked about marriage no fewer than twenty-four times in his letters, this was Kurt’s second real proposal. The first time he proposed in person had been one month after the death of his mother. It was an unusual proposal. He’d been to the dentist and was wearing his extracted molar around his neck. He ripped his shirt open, revealing the bloody tooth, proclaimed how much he loved her, and asked for her hand. My mother always told this story in a kind of baffled way. I don’t think she liked that approach.
The second proposal was more traditional, and she accepted, returning to Washington wearing an engagement ring made from half the stones on his mother’s wedding ring. We don’t know exactly what finally tipped the balance in Kurt’s favor. Perhaps he was the loudest, most persistent voice in the room. Perhaps she fell in love with the writing and the dreams they were creating together…
* * *
—
on August 6 and 9, 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 people.
One month later, on September 1, 1945, Kurt and Jane married in a Quaker ceremony on the backyard terrace of Jane’s house in Indianapolis. Allie was the maid of honor. The young couple honeymooned at French Lick Resort on the edge of the Hoosier National Forest. Family legend has it that Jane made Kurt read The Brothers Karamazov on their honeymoon. He admired her excellent education and deferred to her often regarding literature.
At the end of the month, Kurt had to report to Fort Riley, Kansas, to finish his military duty. He was assigned to the secretarial pool. It is here, at Jane’s coaxing, that he began to write short stories. Jane had always thought she’d be a writer too, but she quickly recognized her husband’s tremendous talent (even before he did) and put her own dreams and ambitions aside in order to help him. Jane lived at home in Indianapolis during this period, seeing old friends and spending time with her father. She briefly had a job selling dresses in a department store, but most of her time was spent editing Kurt’s first stories and submitting them to agents.
It was during this time that Kurt, after working on several short stories, realized he needed to write about his experience in the war.
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Love, Woofy
…
In all my searching, I found only one letter from my mother to my father during this time, as well as one letter she wrote on his behalf to a literary agent.
It shows so clearly how essential she was
in encouraging, editing, and guiding Kurt with her unswerving belief in him. She saw his potential before any other and she constantly advocated for him. He just needed a little direction and cleaning up, like a diamond in the rough.
It is very important to me that my mother be given her proper place in my father’s writing trajectory. She never would have claimed it for herself. As her daughter, I am pleased to step in and deliver the evidence so there is no question of her contribution. She had some of the best qualities a person can have. She listened, supported, and nurtured with all her heart and soul. She devoted her life to helping this man. I see often that this is what some women do. They support and give their lives over to helping another. It’s beautiful and maddening at the same time.
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Beyond 1945
In these love letters, Kurt repeatedly states that he wants seven children. Kurt and Jane got the seven children, but not the way they intended.
On September 15, 1958, Kurt’s sister, Allie, and her husband died within thirty-six hours of each other, the result of breast cancer and a freak train accident. They left behind four boys, ages two, nine, eleven, and fourteen. Our little family of five grew to nine overnight. I was eight at the time, my sister four, our brother eleven. Despite the sudden, horrific tragedy, we became a wonderfully quirky, close family. My mother, known as “Aunt Jane” to all our friends, was the warm center of our home, in which the orphaned nephews were able to recover from their devastating loss, and my brother and sister and I were allowed to flourish. She took care of all of us, including Kurt, exquisitely, with the most open, kind heart I have ever known in a human being.
For Jane, there was nothing as tangible as a book or painting to show at the end of the day. In addition to recognizing that Kurt was going to become a great writer and helping him get there, her hours were spent doing all the things that aren’t usually considered evidence of a brilliant life worth examining: the endless laundry, grocery shopping, meals, dentist appointments, after-school activities, and baking of birthday cakes (it was always someone’s birthday). She created the messy, loving environment through which we could all swerve in and out, and our off-the-wall fun house was where all our friends wanted to be. Jane allowed us to congregate and carry on in large numbers, but kept us from the room where Kurt worked. During these tumultuous, broke years, from 1958 to 1969, he wrote The Sirens of Titan; Mother Night; Cat’s Cradle; God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; Welcome to the Monkey House; and Slaughterhouse-Five.
After the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five and the fame that followed, Kurt left Jane in 1971.
My parents talked frequently and easily after their divorce. Kurt moved to New York and remarried. Jane had been hurt but never became bitter. In 1986, I was with my mother as she was dying from ovarian cancer at the age of sixty-four. She asked me to ring up Kurt. She was too weak to dial or hold the phone. When he answered, I said, “Dad, Mom wants to talk with you” and lifted the phone to her ear.
Their voices were soft and intimate. They were profoundly alone with each other. I was merely the phone-holder, but I heard. She said, “Kurt, I need to go. Do you have any idea how I can leave this ruined body?” He replied, “Okay, listen, close your eyes and take a walk down to the end of the lane to Barnstable Harbor. It’s high tide. A beautiful, clear blue, calm summer day. The water is smooth like glass. There is a boy. He picks up a small, flat, smooth stone. Watch him skip that stone across the water. Watch as the stone skips and skips and goes slower and slower and further and further. When the stone stops and finally sinks, that’s when you can go.” Jane thanked him, they said they loved each other, and that was the last time they spoke. She died seven days later.
* * *
—
It’s been an odd and fascinating project to wedge myself into these pages from my father to my mother. It reminds me of something my father once said while teaching writing in Iowa City. He told his students, “All you can do is tell what happened. You will be thrown out of this course if you are arrogant enough to imagine that you can tell me why it happened. You do not know. You cannot know.”
I can never know why my parents’ love story ended the way it did. But now, at the age of seventy, I have an extraordinary bird’s-eye view of the time compressed in these letters between two kids in their twenties, grappling with raging hormones, A-bomb fears, and impossibly grand expectations. They pledged to each other to try to leave the world better than they found it. Turns out, they did.
—Edith Vonnegut
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to thank my editors, Caitlin McKenna and Emma Caruso, at Penguin Random House. Our entire working relationship has been through emails and phone calls. At this writing, we have not yet met in person. However, when I try to imagine them, I see fierce young Katharine Hepburn types. They shepherded me every step of the way to making this collection of letters as good as it could possibly be. Sometimes they felt like empathetic sisters and sometimes they felt like kindly grammar teachers. The final months of work were accomplished during the coronavirus’s assault on New York City, March and April of 2020. They simply kept soldiering on without missing a beat.
I’m eternally grateful to Kristina Moore at the Wylie Agency who initially brought this project to the attention of Random House, and to my agent, Katie Cacouris, who has been alongside me this whole time in the best way.
Huge thanks to Meera Subramanian and Steve Prothero, real writers who gave me real support early on.
To my husband, John, who is the quiet strong center of my life.
And finally to my father for writing these letters and to my mother for keeping them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edith “Edie” Vonnegut is the eldest daughter of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Jane Cox. She was born in Schenectady, New York, in 1949, and raised in Barnstable, Massachusetts. She works as a painter and has exhibited in galleries across the United States. She wrote and illustrated the book Domestic Goddesses. She has also served as a contributing illustrator to The New York Times, Playboy, and the Franklin Mint. She lives in the barn behind the house she grew up in, along with her husband, John Squibb, and has two sons and two grandchildren.
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This is a collection of facsimiles of original letters that have been transcribed into text for this version, and all original spellings have been maintained.
Dear Woofy, darling, sugarfoot, sweet, angelface:
I’m writing this letter on Thursday night, September 18, 1941, listening to the Maxwell House radio program at its mid-point. With dogged dependability that radio program will end, you will open this letter after the passage of another number of seconds, and with the same surity, the time will come when we will be living and loving together for the greater part of our lives. I just watched a minute pass; do the same, darling, and kiss the clock. We’re winning, can’t you see, we’re winning!!!
House party––I’ll lose my shirt for the first time––will be about November first. You sexy little love affair for a lifetime, I’m coming down to see my wife about October 16, 17, 18. I’ll expect to get off the train and into your cool arms to feel your young restless body against mine. Come naked to the waist, I’ll do the same––what am I saying? I hope Pennsylvania is as nice about beer as New York. Will the corn belt ever learn? I’ll be broke, darling––love, love, love…I’ll continue––and I shan’t be able to support you in the manner I’d like you to be accustomed to. Please don’t fall in love with a Princeton hacker with a billfold. Love good old me; sleep on that, will you? Say to yourself ten times a day, “I love wonder
ful, wonderful, oh so peachy Kurt, and if I don’t marry the guy he’ll kill me––and he will too.” You might add that I’ve got a gun and haven’t missed since the age of eight. Tell that to some of the boys.
Love, Kurt Page 2
