And So It Goes Kurt Vonnegut a Life Review New York Times
How It Went
Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007, simply one gets the sense from Charles J. Shields's sad, often heartbreaking biography, "And So Information technology Goes," that he would have been happy to depart this vale of tears sooner. Indeed, he did endeavor to flag downwardly Charon the Ferryman and hitch a ride across the River Styx in 1984 (pills and alcohol), only to be yanked back to life and his marriage to the photographer Jill Krementz, which, in these dreary pages, reads like a version of hell on earth. But so Vonnegut'southward relations with women were vexed from the start. When he was 21, his mother successfully committed suicide — on Mother's Twenty-four hour period.
It's a truism that comic artists tend to hatch from tragic eggs. But as Vonnegut, the author of zesty, felicitous sci-fi(esque) novels like "True cat's Cradle" and "Sirens of Titan" and "Breakfast of Champions" might put information technology, "And then it goes."
Vonnegut's masterpiece was "Slaughterhouse-Five," the novelistic account of beingness nowadays at the destruction of Dresden by firebombing in 1945. Between that horror (his job as a P.O.W. was to stack and burn the corpses); the mother's suicide; the early decease of a love sister, the only adult female he seems truly to have loved; series unhappy marriages; and his resentment that the literary establishment really considered him (just) a writer of juvenile and jokey lurid fiction, Vonnegut certainly earned his status every bit Man of Sorrows, much every bit Mark Twain, to whom he is frequently compared, earned his.
Was Kurt Vonnegut, in fact, just that — a writer 1 falls for in high school and college and then puts aside, similar one of St. Paul'due south "childish things," for sterner stuff?
This vein of feet runs through Shields's diligent, readable but uneven biography. Merely the question seems self-answering: when did yous final reread "Slaughterhouse" or "God Bless Yous, Mr. Rosewater"? That long ago? Then, when did yous terminal read "Huckleberry Finn" or "To Impale a Mockingbird"? Or nosotros could just crunch the numbers: in the first half dozen months of 2005, "Cat's Cradle," published the year John Kennedy was assassinated, sold 34,000 copies; "Slaughter-house" sold 66,000. Well-nigh of those are probably being read in the classroom. Just so what? Yous want to shout beyond the River Styx: "Information technology'due south O.K.! Cheer up!"
Vonnegut and the other slap-up "comic" (or if you prefer, ironic or tragico-comical-ironic) novelist of Earth War II, Joseph Heller, are getting their biographical due, nigh simultaneously. Tracy Daugherty's fine biography of Heller was recently published, in time for the 50th anniversary of "Catch-22."
Paradigm 
There are some odd synergies. The ii met years after their wars, onstage at a literary festival in 1968, and became great friends and eventually neighbors. Heller'due south state of war was up in the air, every bit a bombardier in the nose cone of a B-25. Vonnegut'south was at basis level, as an infantryman in the Battle of the Burl, and ultimately beneath footing level, in the basement of Schlachthof-Fünf during the firebombing.
Both men were profoundly, and with respect to their war novels, specifically influenced by the French author Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Both their novels were numerically titled — Heller had to retitle his original "Take hold of-18" when Leon Uris brought out his "Mila eighteen."
In a particular that struck me as, well, weird, Vonnegut'south quantum moment while he was trying to become a handle on how to write his novel came during a visit to a war buddy — in Hellertown, Pa. More ironic is that both Earth State of war 2 novels ended upwards beingness Vietnam novels.
Heller'south appeared in 1961, just equally American pacificists were starting to ask, What are we doing here? Didn't the French effort this? "Catch-22" became an existential field manual for the antiwar movement, and a must-read for the grunts and soldiers doing the fighting. Vonnegut'south novel came out in March 1969, by which time the question had pretty much been answered. Information technology fabricated him famous — the proverbial "voice of a generation" (always a problematic title) — and a Pied Piper to disaffected American kids. It also made him rich.
Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 into squarely bourgeois circumstances. His father, an architect, lost his coin in the Depression; his mother, unable to cope without the luxuries to which she had become accustomed, killed herself. (Thanks, Mom.) Kurt'due south older brother, Bernard, was the star; he became a physicist and climatologist, experimenting with ways to supercool water, a detail that perhaps seeped into his brother's quaternary novel, "Cat's Cradle," in the grade of "ice-nine," the substance that turns all moisture on Globe into a supersolid.
Kurt dropped out of several colleges, merely worked while he was there on schoolhouse or local newspapers, where he learned to write clear, concise, punchy and often very funny sentences. "Writing that was like shooting fish in a barrel to browse," Shields tells usa, "would go 1 of the hallmarks of his fiction." He worked as a reporter at a news agency in Chicago, covering a city trounce, and later as a publicist at General Electric.
"A lot of critics," Vonnegut would say after with some incommensurateness, "think I'm stupid because my sentences are then unproblematic and my method is and so direct: they think these are defects. No. The point is to write equally much as yous know as rapidly as possible."
Paradigm
He did, cranking out brusque stories, some of which he sold to "slicks" like The Saturday Evening Postal service; in those years, a single story could earn him the equivalent of half dozen weeks salary at G.E. An editor and former college friend named Knox Burger (to whom Shields dedicates this biography) took him on, publishing him beginning at Collier'south magazine and then at Dell paperbacks earlier trying to become his agent in 1970. One of Vonnegut'due south less admirable traits was his trend to throw his mentors — decisively — under the motorbus. He did this non only to Burger, backing out of their representation agreement, only also to the legendary editor Seymour Lawrence.
This, every bit much else here, does not make for pleasant reading. Vonnegut was Whitmanesque, contradictory, containing multitudes. Equally a parent, he could be sugariness and generous merely also aloof, and even, according to one nephew, "cruel" and "scary." When his sis died of cancer within a 24-hour interval of her husband's ghastly decease in a train wreck, Vonnegut and his married woman raised iii of their four orphaned children. Just the domestic scenes don't read similar "Cheaper by the Dozen." As a dad, Vonnegut was a mixed blessing.
Shields has a deep affection for his subject and does what he tin to rebut charges of hypocrisy, but in this he is not entirely disarming. Vonnegut the staunch anti-Vietnam War spokesman couldn't exist bothered to help his wife campaign for Eugene McCarthy; more disconcerting is the revelation that as an avid purchaser of stocks he had no qualms most investing in Dow Chemical, maker of napalm. At the least, it seems an odd buy for a survivor of the Dresden firebombing. The champion of saving the planet and the Common Homo also, we learn, endemic shares in strip mining companies, malls and corporations with antiunion views. So it goes.
As a writer of science fiction — a characterization he tried strenuously to shed, not wanting his books to be shelved in the genre ghetto — he was curiously blasé, fifty-fifty antagonistic, about the moon landing on July 20, 1969. On a broadcast with Walter Cronkite, Gloria Steinem and others, he dissed the entire enterprise and reiterated his view that the $33 billion should have been spent "cleaning up our filthy colonies hither on Earth." The avuncular Cronkite allow information technology get, simply CBS was swamped with furious messages. (For the record, many of the writers felt that Steinem too had been "un-American.")
Just this was echt Vonnegut: not with a bang or a whimper simply with a shrug. If he, like Twain, was angry at the universe — and had every reason to be — he wasn't going to yell himself hoarse or make himself a spectacle in the process. He possessed more than ambivalence than passion; odd, perchance, in someone of German ancestry. (Seems more than . . . French.) But then the line with which he volition always be remembered, from "Slaughter-house-Five," is "So it goes," as shut an English-language phrase as there is to denote hunching shoulders.
As to whether he wrote for the kids, or for — pardon — kids of all ages, and for the ages, maybe that's more than definitively answered by the Library of America'southward contempo publication of "Kurt Vonnegut: Novels and Stories 1963-1973," ably edited by Sidney Offit. Turning to the first sentences of "Butchery-Five":
"All this happened, more than or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. Ane guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to take his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I've changed all the names."
There's an repeat there of some other vox — Holden Caulfield's, and didn't the guy who came upward with him as well accept a reputation for writing for kids?
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/books/review/and-so-it-goes-kurt-vonnegut-a-life-by-charles-j-shields-book-review.html