This may bore you. It’s been so long since we’ve been together that I’ve grown self-conscious about what I say. I must miss you, Woof, because I’m miserably lonely with hundreds of good friends about me. During one of our rowdy “in-love-with-each-other” phases it was your habit to pique me by asking, “why do you love me?” I’ve finally hit on a rational answer and I think it’s the right one. I have a number of wild dreams which come and go with the green in the leaves. Once conceived I tell you about them. If they’re good dreams you take them up with a flood of enthusiasm and we’re very soon shrieking to each other about them in a transport of delight much greater than if the dream were realized. Then we sink back, logically in each other’s arms, happily exhausted by a swift trip to heaven and back.
I asked Nance how many times she had seen me make you cry. I hated to hear her say four. This, I hope is a step toward maturity, Woof––: I pray to God I never make you cry again.
I never enjoyed writing a letter so much as this one. It flowed from me without a murmer.
Love, Kurt
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My Dear Miss Cox:
Your failure to respond has led me to consider dropping you from the course. Please understand that my helping you in your hour of need is impossible without your cooperation.
However, at no extra charge and as a possible incentive I submit a question for the day: If you marry Bates, what will you do with me?
Respectfully,
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
First Violinist, Emeritus
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Dearest Woofy:
I hate to see you, my someday girl of many a dream, slip away into the shadows. Whether tomorrow is that someday or if it is many years from now I don’t know, but it, and those that follow will be better than any I’ve known. At the precise moment that God settles back into his easy chair in Heaven and lights up a good cigar, you and I will fall wonderfully deep in love and tread happily on pink clouds forever after:––that is that one, that some-day.
Visualization of you and me becomes more blurred and fairyland-like as time’s fog closes behind me. We’ve been gloriously happy, haven’t we? And weren’t we in love? Were we meant for each other for just an instant? I imply no answer to any of these questions––they are musings. My mental state in thinking about us must be something like that of a person who has lost his memory:––a glimmer of the past, a flood of warm pleasure; the glimmer fades and with it dies the pleasure, leaving only a faint and melancholy longing.
Sometime-girl, have you gone?––
Kurt
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October 17, 1943
Dearest Woof:
My roomate, Don Cooper, was having dates with a girl twenty-one when he was seventeen. One night he tried to take her blouse off. “You wouldn’t know what to do if I let you,” she said. Coop admits she was right, and, allegorically speaking, I feel as foolish as he must have. I want something. It looks wonderful from the outside. I’ve raised holy hell to get it, yet I’m extremely uncertain as to what it is or what it’s for. (At this point our little allegory gets ludicrous, but mayhap you see the point.)
You made a clearer point in explaining about your letters. I’m sorry, Sweety. “I’m tired of that feeling so I may as well forget it and be myself” poked through whatever barrier there was and let flow the loveliest letter I’ve ever read. You wonder why I still love you so. It’s something like the “Big Inch” oil pipeline running from West to East: there’s a powerful pump every few miles to keep the pressure up and the oil flowing. If ever my love has been at a low ebb, something like this letter in front of me, or our walk into Broad Ripple comes along––to keep the pressure up and the oil flowing.
Now that I have your blouse off––i.e, you’re coming to Pittsburgh, I’m not sure what to do. As has been our custom––word by word, step by step we’ll augment our fund of fragmentary happiness; until one day we’ll die, with an epitaph like this, for those persons whose curiosity leads them into obscure parts of a cemetary to read:
Here lie two people to whom many good and bad things came. They built a lovely and worthwhile life from splinters of pleasure. They were wonderfully happy. They were sorry they had to go.
I’ll meet you at the station.
Love,
Kurt
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Sunday––:
Dear Woofy:
I spent what was left of the night and most of the day in 696. Without my having said so, the William Penn assumed that you were my wife and so had provided––I suppose you noticed––a double bed. If I hadn’t been so damned dead dog tired I wouldn’t have slept in the big empty thing. We had left the window open wide so 696 was doubly cold. What an empty, sickening feeling, Sweety. Most people who love music started in that vein because of a big gloomy hole in their lives. I don’t hear music, and I mean all kinds of music, very often. But occasionally a few sweet strains seep in––from a passing car radio, a victrola in a nearby apartment, a piano in a second story music school. It fills the gap for a glowing time chip. That’s what our––what, eight hours?––together was in my life. A medley of Liebestraum, Basin Street Blues, Auldlandsyne, Sweet Adeline, Finlandia, Tuxedo Junction, Melody in F, Schubert’s Serenade, My Blue Heaven, and The Nutcracker Suite.
Remember when you made me turn my back to you––before you gave me the picture? You asked me what I was thinking. “Darling, darling, darling, darling” ran through my mind until it sounded like bells. Those bells kept ringing until they joined spirits with the big bell on the 3:47 and clanged out of the station, into the night.
J’espere vous pris le Prix de Paris. My one mortal fear is that, once rolling, you’ll be fiendishly successful and that starting out wedded bliss in a little shack will be an unthinkable setback.
The pressure is up and the oil flowing at a great rate in The Big Inch.
I love you, Woofy: There’s many a sonofabitch who’s said as much and meant it in his own Juke Box way, but I’m the only one who loves you for what you ought to be loved, the only one whose bulk of ambition, direction and pleasure would be embodied in you.
Kurt
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
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HAPPY BIRTHDAY
What if a much of a dream of a girl
Brings love to a too lonely guy;
Leaves him believing that she’s
the one to give truth to the human lie:
Brings music to clatter and dream to wake;
Brings substance to shadow, mend to break?
Whose love is a mountain, devotion a sea:
It’s they who cry there is only one.
What if the neat of a sweet girl sighs,
Her heart she will never know;
Holds her passion a dangerous thing;
Stifles past in a dead ago:
Brings can’t to should be and never to must;
Brings was to always and almost to just.
Only space and time and matter––:
The more love dies the less we live.
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Dear Woof:
I’m coming home October 30th. Methinks you’ll be leaving about the same time. From your letters I perceive you’ve changed a great deal. I’d like to see just what you are like. I used to know.
You no doubt know how abstract my “I love you” is––and it doesn’t make too damned much difference, because it’s been beating on deaf ears for a couple of years now. One peculiar feature of our relationship (whatever in hell that is) is that you are the one person in this world to whom I like to write. If ever I do write anything of length––good or bad––it will be written with you in mi
nd. I honestly don’t know why. I doubt if it’s love. As nearly as I can figure you’re the best friend I’ve got.
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Dear Woof:
Your wild and enthusiastic orgies of dead silence drive me a little nuts. Writing you has become as futile and frustrating as sprinkling handbills saying “Jesus is Coming.”
Lamblike as you know and love me to be, the one atom of ill-humored Tiger in me roars this bitch––: Goddammit; you’re the punkest correspondent I’ve got. Whyfore, articulate one? Many’s the time I’ve heard you say you liked and wanted to write. Seldom’s the time I’ve doubted it but often’s the time I’ve wondered when.
We’ve had and will have mighty little time together for a stinking long time. Maybe you can understand my urgency,––rather, call it curiosity. You have the habit of keeping me in the dark about everything connected with yourself, and upon our rare meetings, have a huge number of developements to relate.
For all I know that pile of dead letters from my note book bore obscenities on their backs. I forgot to look. You can see why I never mailed them.
Love, Kurt
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About November 8th––1943 for sure.
Dear Woof:
I guess I see what you mean, our relationship being the most intricate, complex problem you’ve run across. But I’m damned if I know what makes you think it so or how it came to be a rat’s nest. It would be a help to me if you would try to explain. As I get the implication––: In view of a rather lengthy and oftimes spectacular courting on my part you should, by every law of man, God and nature love me. But conscientiously strain as you will in that direction, results are not forthcoming.
To date, my frequent pleas to adore and cherish me and only me, if answered in the affirmative would and could wreak not the slightest change in our ways of life. This is a perfect cue for a crack which I’m surprised you never experimentally made: “Kurt, I love you with all my heart––So what the hell?” Had you said that I would been amazed into a stupid and bamboozled silence. Wooing has an undeniable basic goal (we never denied it)––anywhere from fifteen minutes to a lifetime of nights in bed together. I’ve had you in mind for the lifetime assignment for quite a while––and for the fifteen minutes if you can spare the time. Every time I’ve brought this matter to your attention I’ve had fifteen cents in my pocket, two dollar’s worth of beer in my stomach and the prospects of a beach-comber. I think that if ever I get to a point where marriage looks like a sound thing you would marry me. That’s pretty smug––but what the hell, I could make you happier than anyone else you’ve ever met. You’d be a damn fool to turn me down. In reply: you are to do nothing, to say nothing, to act in no particular way––until the white light of wisdom shines on your heart. I may have to concede that that will be never.
I’ll make the requested effort to love someone more than you. In skeleton form I’ll send you a chapter in what may be an amusing tale after each week-end. If you’re enthusiastic about my falling passionately in love mayhap your adroit coaching can help. Next July I may be assigned to Europe as a commissioned engineer. Providing I haven’t found some wonderful girl, twice as good as you’ll ever hope to be, lovely, volcanically sexy, fond of beer, music and me, I’ll ask you to come with me. However, with forty week-ends and the delectable young plums of Pittsburgh before me I wouldn’t count on it.
Huzzah and tally-ho, lovey. With lewd wit and lecherous glances I’m off to torment voluptuous women and to drive timid virgins wild.
Love, Kurt
I liked your letter. Write again soon. You probably don’t like this one. I do. I think it’s the nuts.
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Nov. 11, 1943
Dear Woof:
I seem to put you in such a state of torment and your pleas to be let alone are so sincere and inoffensive that I shall stop heckling you with love letters and such stuff. Providing one thing: that you explain for my serenity, also to be considered, just why you feel that ours is one of the most intricate and complex relationships you’ve come across in your short span. This is a tough assignment, I know, as your letters indicate turmoil and indecision over the peculiar broth I’ve brewed. But please try to be as concise as you can. Methinks your implication has been that you should love me but can’t––and if you did, what could it possibly mean to either of us at a time like this? That’s an intelligent way to look at it––if you do look at it that way––and I don’t mind particularly. You say that one day a great white light may shine on your heart. I guess that means that when this damn war is over and I have something with which to build a small house and a promise in the future of wings to be added to it––that will be the time to start my sales talk.
In the hope that I may accumulate something fairly amusing and lengthy I plan to log my weekly attempts to fall in love and send them to you. You are to save them for me. That way, you can watch my progress, coach me and be of immense help.
Your letter is dog-eared before me. It’s a good one, Woof. I’d say you were considerably more alive than in haunted Indianapolis.
That modern lit course sounds like a helluva lot of fun. I’m familiar––I think––with a couple of those you mentioned: Chekhov, Cowboy (am I wrong?) Will James, Ibsen (see G.B. Shaw) whom I don’t like so well (at least in the translation I got), and Sam Butler. Chekhov is sort of a surrealistic realist. I’ve a fat volume of his short stories which I read from cover to cover last year. Two I’ve never forgot: “Sleepy” (I believe) and one involving a doctor who is called from his young son’s deathbed by a man who insists his wife is dying. The doctor leaves his dead son and prostrate wife to go with the excited young man. The young man’s wife had feigned sickness to get him out of the house and had run off with her lover while he was gone. “The Way of All Flesh” is all I’ve read by Butler. What else has he written?
Love,
Kurt
Woof–– Goddam but I’d love to see you again. Could you stop by Pittsburgh on your way home, Christmas? I may make it to Philly some week-end soon. I’d like a date with you Christmas night providing you’re not so goddam much in love with Toothbrush Terry that you can’t see straight.
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six minutes later
Dear Woof:
This may be pretty close to what I tried to say in the other letter. This is the impression I get from Cox kisses.
Your friendship much can make me blest,
O why that bliss destroy!
Why urge the only, one request
You know I will deny!
Your thought, if Love must harbour there,
Conceal it in that thought;
Nor cause me from my bosom tear
The very friend I sought.
––Robert Burns
What can I do to be lovable? You’re hell to get along with! Damn, damn, damn.
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Dec 3, 1943
Dear Woofy:
My conscientious effort to fall in love with someone else has left me broke, flunking, and now with a severe head cold. Seated in the shambles of what once was a healthy, happy and solvent young life I survey that which has recently past. Phoebe, Eleanor, Diane, Nancy––: I did those things to and with them I’ve done to you, and there’s no denying it’s been a big time, but grunt and strain as I will I cant love them. They’re all strictly good––i.e you would approve. Nancy is the most promising. I plan to keep trying to love her. One trouble with the campaign is that it’s cold here. My love for you was tempered in the white-heat of July and August and seasoned in the embers of Indian summer.
This paragraph––were I to write it––would be a glib and syrupy stew of alliteration, allegory, simile, parody, counterpoint and hemstitching telling
of a new and novel way I’ve found to love you. Such a distracting piece of blurp will be sent to you very soon if you don’t answer my question of a few weeks ago–– Please, Woof, what’s the score?
Love Kurt––
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September 3 - 1944
Dearest Woofy:
I’ll come out a heavy loser––(that is, I’ll probably never ever hear from your sweet self again)––if I don’t reinitiate our so called corespondence: “co,” meaning joint; “respondence” meaning the act of responding to a given stimulus––in this case a written message of some sort.
A type stimulus of that sort might be: Jane, darling, know full well that I miss you. These are warm days and convivial nights but I am spoiled for having lived in four dimensions; for having seen the invisible rhapsodic colors at either end of the spectrum; for having heard the thunder and the shreik of the octaves below and above the range of the human ear.
Then again that might strike you as being like drowning in fruit salad so I try mystery: Sun and her obedient satalites move in their orderly elliptical orbits. Her boiling valleys, molten rivers and furious volcanoes conjeal beneath a tranquil blanket of soft white ashes, Parasite Earth grows cold. A billion human bodies lie frozen rock-hard under a windless blue-green prairie of ice. Wise little men, basking in the hot verility of a younger star, look and know that there cannot be life on Earth.
Love, Kurt Page 6
