So it goes. Ice-nine. Unstuck in time. Hi-ho. . . . It’s always good to trot out the famous Vonnegut catchphrases early in any piece about the author of “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Otherwise, readers just wait impatiently for their appearance, eager to reexperience these little Proustian flashbacks to their lost youth, when they first read Vonnegut in college and were crazy about the soft-voiced, slouching iconoclast.
When Vonnegut died in 2007, his reputation as an important writer had preceded him. The later books were generally dismissed by critics as sophomoric or self-indulgent, nothing as good as “Cat’s Cradle” or “The Sirens of Titan” or that now -classic parable about an ultra-conformist society, “Harrison Bergeron.” (It’s the one where people wear masks and carry around weights so that nobody is any more beautiful or more graceful than anyone else.)
More from Michael Dirda
Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir “An Open Book” and of four collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book” and “Classics for Pleasure.”
But who needs critics when you’ve got family? Early on, Vonnegut made the jump from famous author to favorite uncle. We loved him, shaggy mustache and all. He could do no wrong.
Dan Wakefield, the editor of “Kurt Vonnegut: Letters,” wasn’t just a friend of Vonnegut’s; the two were alumni of Shortridge High School in Indianapolis. This imbues Wakefield’s introductory matter and commentary on the letters with a folksy and personal rather than scholarly tone. All those Indiana relatives, though, are hard to keep straight.
Beyond giving pleasure in itself, Vonnegut’s correspondence, supplemented by Wakefield’s annotation, provides a kind of potted biography. Letters describe the Dresden firebombing, which inspired “Slaughterhouse-Five”; Vonnegut’s work for General Electric; his marriage to Jane Cox and their large family; business dealings with the legendary agent Max Wilkinson and the equally famous magazine and book editor Knox Burger (a major force behind the Gold Medal paperback originals). We learn about Vonnegut’s stint at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (students included John Irving, Gail Godwin and John Casey); the importance of publishing whiz Seymour Lawrence in shepherding the later books into print and resurrecting the Vonnegut back list; and the difficulties in his marriage and with his children. Did you know that Vonnegut’s daughter Edie was once married to Geraldo Rivera?
Some early letters are almost short stories. Vonnegut writes to Miller Harris — a friend who has taken over Eagle Shirtmakers — to suggest manufacturing a fad bowtie “made out of the ribbon the Atomic Energy Commission uses as its official marker for dangerously-radioactive areas.” To Harvey Kurtzman of Mad magazine, he suggests a handy kit designed to break through the steel doors of other people’s fallout shelters.
As early as 1953, Vonnegut is already complaining about being written out, dried up and depressed. Yet he makes shrewd comments then and throughout the book about art and the literary life: “Unsettling business for an artist, where everything that happens in New York has universality, and everything that happens outside is ethnography.” The term paper, he tells his writing students, should be “both cynical and religious.” He insists that “the secret of good writing is caring,” and that “no picture can attract serious attention without a human being attached to it in the viewer’s mind. . . . Pictures are famous for their human-ness and not their picture-ness.” He might be speaking of his own books and persona.
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