Charles J. Shields’s ‘And So It Goes’: Excellent biography of Kurt Vonnegut

In the introduction to “And So It Goes,” his excellent biography of Kurt Vonnegut, Charles J. Shields recalls an early conversation in which Vonnegut lashed out, with genuine venom, against such family members as his brother, Bernard, a man he had written about with great affection in his 1976 novel, “Slapstick.” A few pages later, Shields recounts an earlier incident in which Vonnegut, incensed by the remarks of a “smart aleck” theatergoer, invited the man into the parking lot and knocked him to the ground. These vignettes serve as early warning signals that the portrait we’re about to encounter — the portrait of a world-renowned humanist — will contain some dark and unexpected revelations.

Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922, the youngest of three children. His father was a moderately successful architect. His mother, Edith, was a distant, emotionally unstable woman whose eventual suicide would haunt Vonnegut throughout his life. Shields sketches Vonnegut’s adolescent years with admirable efficiency, isolating those elements that would prove most significant: the life-
altering effects of the Depression, Kurt’s first glimpse of the importance of extended families as antidotes to loneliness, his discovery of humor as a means of asserting himself in a highly competitive family. A predilection for irreverent wit followed him from Indianapolis to Cornell University, where he was an indifferent student and inveterate joker whose primary interest was writing for the college newspaper. His abortive academic career ended with the advent of World War II and his enlistment in the infantry.

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(Henry Holt) - ”And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life” by Charles J. Shields

Vonnegut arrived in the European theater in December 1944. Captured almost immediately, he spent several harrowing months as a prisoner of war and was eventually transferred to a labor battalion in Dresden, Germany. On Feb. 13, 1945, when the Dresden firebombing began, he and his fellow prisoners were safely sequestered in an underground bunker. When he emerged, he encountered a scene of such stupefying devastation that it colored his worldview forever, providing the impetus for his signature work of fiction, “Slaughterhouse-Five.”

Moving on from the war years, Shields gives us a judicious, tightly compressed account of more than 60 years in the life and career of a complex, often contradictory man. Vonnegut’s personal life was never easy and rarely free of turmoil. After marrying Jane Cox and brief stints as a student at the University of Chicago and a PR copywriter at the Schenectady, N.Y., branch of General Electric, he moved his growing family to Cape Cod, Mass., where he attempted to earn his living writing fiction.

Life grew considerably more complex when his sister and her husband died within days of each other, leaving behind four young children. All four were absorbed into the Vonnegut household, though the youngest was eventually adopted by a childless cousin. The resulting pressures — financial and otherwise — nearly overwhelmed Vonnegut, who frequently treated his suddenly expanded family with a harshness bordering on contempt.