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Was Kurt Vonnegut a nice man? A good writer doesn't have to be a saint

"Kurt doesn’t mind being hurtful, really" (Matthias Rietschel / Associated Press)

"Kurt doesn’t mind being hurtful, really" (Matthias Rietschel / Associated Press)


November 10, 2022   7 mins

In 1999, the director Baz Luhrmann had a novelty hit with “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)”, a spoken-word litany of whimsical advice for young people: enjoy your youth, keep your old love letters, floss, and so on. The text derived from a column by a journalist called Mary Schmich but it was widely rumoured to be from a commencement address by a celebrated author who was born 100 years ago this week: Kurt Vonnegut. Despite having quit writing two years earlier, he was still delighting students with his witty speeches, of which this appeared to be one. Vonnegut set the record straight but graciously told Schmich: “I would have been proud had the words been mine.”

Nothing illustrates an author’s reputation as clearly as misattributed work. The Sunscreen confusion proved that one of his era’s most scathing satirists had been recast as the cuddly hipster grandpa of American letters. This certainly chimed with one strand of Vonnegut’s work, which is summed up by a famous line from his 1965 novel God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine (“God damn it babies, you’ve got to be kind”) but that was by no means the whole picture.

Like Dolly Parton, Alan Bennett, George Michael and Anthony Bourdain, Vonnegut has become simplified into an avatar of kindness, his wrinkles ironed flat by the heat of sainthood. This happened long before his death in 2007 and he was a willing conspirator. George Saunders recently spoke about his own reputation as literature’s Mr Nice Guy and gave himself some advice: “one: don’t believe it; two, interrupt it.” The first is easier than the second. One of Vonnegut’s most famous lines is from 1961’s Mother Night: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Vonnegut often pretended to be nicer than he was, which was good for both his ego and his income.

If you Google Vonnegut, one of the most-asked questions that comes up is: “Was Vonnegut a nice person?” Tough one. He could certainly be warm, wise and generous, but he could also be a greedy and disloyal business partner, a selfish, unfaithful husband and a crotchety, intimidating father. He suffered from depression and suicidal ideation; his work often flirts with nihilism. Robert B. Weide’s recent documentary Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time (the title quotes Vonnegut’s masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five) is candid about the writer’s failings as a family man but Weide, who considered Vonnegut a close friend and mentor, still sands off a lot of rough edges.

In his more objective biography And So It Goes, Charles J. Shields quotes the private notes that Vonnegut’s ex-wife Jane made after reading his 1981 quasi-memoir, Palm Sunday: “Kurt doesn’t mind being hurtful, really, although he talks a good game to make you think the opposite. He’s fooled most of his public now, for a long time. You see, he doesn’t really know what he’s doing. He’s really very innocent.”

When Vonnegut died, one newscaster tagged him as “an oracle for the baby boomer generation”, but that was not his generation. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born in Indianapolis on 11 November 1922, a few months before Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller. His childhood was happy and prosperous for seven years before falling off a cliff with the Great Depression. Kurt Vonnegut Sr, formerly a successful architect, couldn’t get a single commission during the Thirties. Edith Vonnegut, a society belle from a brewing dynasty, lost her inheritance in a Ponzi scheme and the shock of her reduced circumstances exacerbated serious mental health issues. Her family insisted that her death from an overdose of sleeping pills in 1944 was accidental but Kurt knew better. His father was shattered. “After I’m gone,” Vonnegut told Playboy three decades later, “I don’t want my children to have to say about me what I have to say about my father: ‘He made wonderful jokes, but he was such an unhappy man.’”

By 1944, Vonnegut was in the US Army. He had agreed to study science at Cornell to please his father and his older brother Bernard, a brilliant atmospheric scientist, but put more effort into student journalism than his grades and figured it was better to enlist than wait to be drafted. Sent to Europe, he was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge and incarcerated in an abattoir in Dresden, a beautiful, militarily insignificant city that did not expect to be bombed. On the night of 13 February 1945, however, Allied bombers almost razed it to the ground, killing around 25,000 civilians. When Vonnegut and his fellow POWs emerged from their underground meat locker the next day, they were tasked with removing the corpses of people who had been suffocated in their homes by the firestorm. “The end of the world is not an idea to Vonnegut,” John Updike wrote. “It is a reality he experienced.”

Vonnegut published his first short stories while working in public relations at General Electric, an experience that informed his relatively conventional debut novel, 1952’s Player Piano, a futuristic satire on automation. Vonnegut said that his first six novels were “all about the abuses of technology”. They are also about morality, mortality, free will, war, death, God, the nature of time and the meaning of life. As one character asks in Player Piano: “What are people for?” Vonnegut’s experience in journalism made his prose irresistibly swift, punchy and funny. As his former student John Irving says in Unstuck in Time: “It’s not easy to be easy to read.”

All Vonnegut lacked was readers, and therefore money to support his unexpectedly large family. In 1958, his beloved sister Alice died of cancer, just two days after her husband Jim was killed in a train crash. Kurt and Jane agreed to adopt the couple’s four boys but Jane did the parenting (they had two children of their own) while Kurt typed, chainsmoked and grouched about the noise. “Please let me off the father hook,” he would complain, reserving his physical warmth for his dog. When Vonnegut began teaching fiction at the University of Iowa in the autumn of 1965, all but one of his books was out of print. His latest, God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, introduced his alter ego Kilgore Trout, a desperately unsuccessful science-fiction writer and crank who was, Vonnegut later admitted, “the lonesome and unappreciated writer I thought I might become”.

Vonnegut finally got what he wanted with the 1969 publication of Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, the novel about Dresden that he had been trying to write since 1945. It remains a radically entertaining read. Like the Charlie Kaufman/Spike Jonze movie Adaptation, it has the startling originality that comes from acknowledging that a story is untellable by conventional means — a sui generis medley of memoir, history, philosophy, science fiction and outrageous black comedy.

“I got three dollars for each person killed,” Vonnegut said sardonically of his advance, but he made a lot more than that. Coinciding with the peak of the movement against the war in Vietnam, Slaughterhouse-Five made the 47-year-old a hero to readers less than half his age, who saw in his work their own anxieties reflected and made funny. Previously apolitical, if not conservative, he became “A Campus Orwell”, according to Newsweek, growing a moustache and bushy hair to suit his new persona as a public satirist. The press said that he was to the late Sixties what J.D. Salinger had been to the Fifties: an icon of dissent.

Yet Vonnegut was ambivalent about his new celebrity. “I was just writing books to entertain,” he protested in 1972. “I never dreamed of becoming a Pied Piper of the young.” Asked by Playboy if he was a radical, he replied: “No, because everything I believe I was taught in junior civics during the Great Depression.” It’s striking that, with the exception of 1985’s Galapagos, all of Vonnegut’s essential novels — Player Piano, Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You, My Rosewater, and Slaughterhouse-Five — were written while he was unsuccessful. He had been poor and obscure for so long that he was discombobulated by the tardy onslaught of wealth and fame. Slaughterhouse-Five, he said, “was the end of some sort of career”.

It was also the end of his marriage to Jane, who had been his most ardent cheerleader during the lean years and never got to enjoy the fat ones. Vonnegut eventually produced 1973’s Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday, a metafictional patchwork festooned with whimsical illustrations and more interested in aphorisms than plot. He summed up its strengths and flaws in an interview: “My books are essentially mosaics, thousands and thousands of tiny little chips all glued together, and each chip is… this thing I learned to make as a child, which is a little joke.”

Breakfast of Champions lodged in the bestseller list for a year but, like most of his later novels, was poorly reviewed, with accusations of glib wisecracks, sophomoric philosophy and recycled ideas. Hostile critics assumed that because his books appealed to students, he must be pandering to them. Reviewing 1976’s Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!, Newsweek called him “an ideal writer for the semi-literate young”. Vonnegut also became a popular target for censors — some of his books were literally burned — which dismayed him. When a Michigan judge condemned Slaughterhouse-Five as “depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar and anti-Christian”, Vonnegut drily responded: “But Billy Pilgrim was a Christian. The judge apparently read the wrong book.”

During the Eighties, Vonnegut’s talent and confidence were on the slide (“The only way I can regain credit for my early work is to die,” he told Martin Amis) but he was still in demand as a celebrity. He advertised coffee, played himself in the comedy Back to School and accepted a mindboggling $150,000 from Time for six one-page articles. His speeches became more celebrated than his novels, and his interviews were sensationally entertaining.

They could also be very bleak. “God will kill us by the millions quite soon, I think — by starvation, with flu, through war, in any number of ways,” he said in 1976. And what about this, from 1980? “I think that at least half the people alive, and maybe nine-tenths of them, really do not like this ordeal at all… You know, you talk about the dark side of life: that’s really it. Most people don’t want to be alive.” There is nothing cuddly about that. Salman Rushdie observes that “So it goes”, the famous phrase from Slaughterhouse-Five, is often misinterpreted as a stoic shrug — life goes on — when it’s really about the inevitability of death: “Beneath the apparent resignation is a sadness for which there are no words.” In 1984, Vonnegut attempted suicide with an overdose of pills, just like his mother. So it almost went.

Clearly, Kurt Vonnegut was not the man he pretended to be. His adopted son Jim Adams told Charles J Shields, “There was a definite disconnect between the kind of guy you would imagine Kurt must be from the tone of his books, the kind of guy who would say ‘God damn it, you got to be kind’, and the reality of his behaviour on a daily basis. He was a complicated, difficult man.” There are two ways of interpreting this. One is as cold hypocrisy. Another is to see him as a troubled, serially traumatised man who wanted to be a force for good and often fell short, in which case his talk of living decently in an indecent world was not a scam but a genuine aspiration. “All my books are my effort… to make myself like life better than I do,” he once said.

The truth is that paradox and disappointment are what make Vonnegut’s work such a compelling dance between cynicism and idealism. Who needs perfection? “The crude term that every writer would like to do is mind-fucking,” he said in 1987. “It’s to get into somebody else’s head.” Kurt Vonnegut didn’t need to be a saint or a guru because he succeeded, as well as any writer of his generation, in getting into people’s heads.


Dorian Lynskey is an author, journalist and UnHerd columnist.

Dorianlynskey

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J Bryant
J Bryant
2 years ago

Another erudite, entertaining article from Dorian Lynskey. I feel I’m being nudged ever closer to actually reading Vonnegut.

Jeff Cunningham
Jeff Cunningham
2 years ago
Reply to  J Bryant

I liked Cat’s Cradle. Did not like Rosewater at all.

Richard Parker
Richard Parker
2 years ago

I can second that. “Player Piano” still has some great moments for me and I still reread “Slaughterhouse Five” every now and then. “Galápagos”, too.

Simon James
Simon James
2 years ago
Reply to  J Bryant

I started from scratch with Harrison Bergeron, possibly recommended by someone here on Unherd. Good call.

polidori redux
polidori redux
2 years ago
Reply to  J Bryant

I have only read Slaughterhouse Five. I was young and easily impressed, but might take another look.

Ian Stewart
Ian Stewart
2 years ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Ditto. The link to Rushdie’s article is worth reading too. Though like this writer, Rushdie says:“So it goes” is not a way of accepting life but, rather, of facing death.”
And I find it rather ironic that such erudite writers don’t realise that accepting life is a means of facing death, certainly for me.

I’ve also been reflecting on the positive nature of the war experience for the Ukrainians and the discussion here and in Rushdie’s piece of Slaughterhouse 5 as an anti-war book. The reporting about the Ukrainians war experience seems to echo the experience of the British in WW2 when subject to the blitz and potential invasion – and, despite the sheer barbarity, there is a collective joy in surviving a mass existential threat (also similar to the soldiers in WW1 trenches), which in due course they may, like our own people, become very nostalgic about – “when they were at their best”. It makes me wonder if war is actually useful in providing an extreme experience, maybe bonding beyond the individual, that people really value. Maybe its even an essential experience that most of us in the West are no longer exposed to.

Last edited 2 years ago by Ian Stewart
Steven Somsen
Steven Somsen
2 years ago
Reply to  Ian Stewart

And I find it rather ironic that such erudite writers don’t realise that accepting life is a means of facing death, certainly for me. Bingo!

Hilary Easton
Hilary Easton
1 year ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Try Cat’s Cradle, Player Piano and Slaughterhouse Five. If you don’t like him after that you never will. His books are short and incredibly easy to read so well worth the investment.

Jim R
Jim R
2 years ago

My favourite author. I just started reading Hocus Pocus again. Vonnegut’s characters are all flawed and complicated – of course he was too. One of my favourite lines, in defence of smoking, was that it was the only socially acceptable way of committing suicide.

Zirrus VanDevere
Zirrus VanDevere
2 years ago
Reply to  Jim R

And we don’t even get that as socially acceptable any longer…

Serge Vandenplas
Serge Vandenplas
2 years ago

fortunately we still (sic) have alcohol…

Pete F
Pete F
2 years ago

What’s wrong with suicide ideation and nihilism? With the state of the world today, its the only way to be.

Jim R
Jim R
2 years ago
Reply to  Pete F

The problem with people, one of Vonnegut’s characters said, was that they are about a thousand times dumber and meaner than they think they are.

Alan Osband
Alan Osband
2 years ago
Reply to  Jim R

Sententious projection , and probably meant to be understood as such

Claude Faribault
Claude Faribault
2 years ago

Hi Dorian,
There is a well-hidden connection between Vonnegut and Salinger.
To write “Cat’s Cradle“, Vonnegut borrowed his Hoenikker characters from the Glass family. On closer examination, Angela, Franklin and Newt share the same attributes as Franny, Seymour and Zooey.
This discovery was made possible because John Irving, who was taught by Vonnegut, used the exact same cast in “The Hotel New Hampshire“, now calling them Franny, Frank and Lilly.
The funniest thing is that Salinger borrowed his characters from Greek mythology, the ultimate public domain source for all storytellers.
I posted a short 3-page story about this incredible investigation.
The Dog Who Didn’t Speak Much
Hope you enjoy reading it.
C.

Last edited 2 years ago by Claude Faribault
Karl Juhnke
Karl Juhnke
2 years ago

I loved Slaughterhouse 5 and poor old Kilgore Trout who was a forerunner to Kenny from South Park in that he died several times only to return in later books. Breakfast of Champions was another favourite, but I was 16-18 at the time.

James Kirk
James Kirk
2 years ago

Sirens of Titan with Winston Niles Rumfoord as a perceived demigod inspiring a foolish pointless war with the result everyone is equalized is practically where we are today. One of my favourite return to novels. With the CGI we have now it would be a blockbuster.

Richard Parker
Richard Parker
2 years ago
Reply to  James Kirk

I forgot that! Must dig it out again. And “Mother Night”.

Last edited 2 years ago by Richard Parker
Roy Griffis
Roy Griffis
2 years ago

They don’t have to be a “good person,” but that is a decision the writer him/herself will have to make. That is, am I going to be a destructive selfish asshole who abuses and exploits the people around me and try to excuse it with some self-serving blather about “my art,” or am I going to be a decent human being who is also an artist?

We do have to sleep with our choices every night, regardless.

Jeff Butcher
Jeff Butcher
2 years ago
Reply to  Roy Griffis

This is true but I try to avoid reading biographies of my favourite writers because they are nearly always insufferable pr**ks to everyone around them. Henry Miller comes to mind. As for Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle is excellent

0 0
0 0
2 years ago

I never knew anything about his private life or his personal vices and virtues. I just loved his books. In the early 1970s I binge-read everything he’d written. Every now and then an author comes along who immediately clicks with you. It doesn’t happen very often but, when it does, it’s a great feeling…

Devonshire Dozer
Devonshire Dozer
2 years ago

Like a lot of people, I read Vonnegut when I was much younger, but it was interesting to read this piece. I’ll be revisiting the BBC ‘Great Lives’ podcast tonight for a comparison (because I no longer trust a word they have to say). It’s here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000d71c

Jay Hoenemeyer
Jay Hoenemeyer
2 years ago

” Captured at the Battle of the Bulge” does not begin to describe the events . Vonnegut’s division , the 106th, had been in the line for about ten days, with only bare minimum training and zero prior combat experience, when the world exploded around them. The Germans used searchlights to illuminate the fog and mist in an eerie half light and the Panzers rolled through the false dawn as Vonnegut’s division absolutely collapsed. Where Vonnegut himself was , I don’t know , but for the 106th there was no’battle’ , only panic , nay terror , and then surrender . My uncle was shot and captured that December 16 and the PTSD stayed with the rest of his life. Again , Vonnegut , I don’t know , but there was no ‘battle”

chris sullivan
chris sullivan
2 years ago
Reply to  Jay Hoenemeyer

Of course Vonnegut had PTSD and of course that affects the whole personality ……amazing that he survived psychically at all!

Huw Parker
Huw Parker
2 years ago

“All my books are my effort… to make myself like life better than I do,” he once said.

I wonder if he didn’t get that the wrong way round. Perhaps his books were his effort to make life like him better than it did.

John Riordan
John Riordan
2 years ago

How important is it either way? Henry Ford was a famously unpleasant man, yet we’re all better off than if he hadn’t existed.

In fact he came up with one of my favourite ever quotes so here’s an excuse to repeat it: “If I’d bothered to ask what my customers wanted, they’d have said faster horses.”

Last edited 2 years ago by John Riordan
Richard Craven
Richard Craven
2 years ago

I’m reading Andre Gide’s L’Immoraliste at the moment. I see Gide as the Gallic Nabokov.

Andrew Boughton
Andrew Boughton
2 years ago

Finally Kurt gets a brilliant critic.

Richard Craven
Richard Craven
2 years ago

Not that this has any relevance to the article, but has anyone else noticed the resemblance between Kurt Vonnegut and Donald Sutherland?

R Wright
R Wright
2 years ago

“Dresden, a beautiful, militarily insignificant city that did not expect to be bombed”

Whatever you say…

Huw Parker
Huw Parker
2 years ago
Reply to  R Wright

Which bit do you take issue with?

Andrew F
Andrew F
2 years ago
Reply to  Huw Parker

It was still significant transport hub for Germans.
Whether it was in Western Allies interest to help Russians at that stage of war is another question.
Still, Germany ended up with economic 4th Reich (sorry EU) instead of Morgentau plan.