I have more to say about Vonnegut.

These reviews are posted somewhat out of order. From time to time I delve into a specific writer, and I have done so with Vonnegut a few times throughout my life.

I read Slaughter House Five a few times in coursework; in both highschool and a college course on Wartime literature. When Vonnegut died I was in college. I turned, in a panic, to a roommate who reported that she didn’t know who Kurt Vonnegut was. The conversation haunted me then and now. I am not afraid to say he’s my favorite author though I hate that kind of commitment.

Here are the books I’ve reread by Vonnegut this year:

Cat’s Cradle

Man Without a Country

Books kitty-corner to Vonnegut I’ve read this year:

If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?

Love, Kurt

Pity the Reader

I also wrote a story story called “Book on Tape” where I have a conversation presumably with Vonnegut. The character has Vonnegut’s history and some features but it’s not actually about Vonnegut at all. And the character that uses Vonnegut like a mask isn’t based on Vonnegut at all. Vonnegut isn’t in the story for a single moment but it’s sculpted in a way to make the general population think it’s Vonnegut. I did it because it’s a story, much as Vonnegut suggests you write, written to one person and one person only. Only one person can read that short story and know that the conversation I’m having is with them. I’ve been thinking of it as a love letter and am vaguely ashamed I used Vonnegut in that way.

I’m going to be very presumptuous and familiar and upsetting in that this isn’t really about Kurt Vonnegut at all. I think Vonnegut is my favorite writer because he’s saved my life more than once. I have a very blunted view of him as a man, a perhaps inflated view of him as a writer, but I think he provides a familiarity. He writes a bit how my father talks, he reminds me of a friend I miss, I have another friend I miss who had tattoos of Vonnegut’s doodles and who has since passed. Vonnegut, like Edward Gorey, has an indelible mark throughout my life through various touchstones.

And lately I’ve needed him. I’ve needed that amalgam old friend to lean on.

“Love, Kurt” —a collection of love letters collected by his eldest daughter Edith sent to her mother, (prior to her parent’s divorce, of course,) describing a side of the man that isn’t satirical, competing with himself to prove his intelligence, or the presented pose he contrived. It’s full of doodles, his name in bubble letters checkerboarded, hearts, constant self doubts, frustrations, and attempts again and again to put feelings into words that he actively avoided putting into novels. Vonnegut felt any manner of romance ruined a novel because love is so much more important to humans than any plot. Once there was romance in a story the story became the romance, and the story ends when they kiss.

In a commencement speech documented in “If this Isn’t Nice, What Is?” Vonnegut suggests, if you find yourself in marital trouble, the trouble isn’t likely sex or money or how to raise a kid, but that the problem in every marriage is that each partner too often looks at the other and is hurt/disappointed/angered that they are only one person. You want your partner to be the world and you lose sight of the singular person that they are. I read it suggested in an article that the reason his marriage to Jane ultimately failed was because he looked at her as a character he had come up with, and that he had become her character just the same. She had been the one to continuously push him as he repeatedly gave up and pursued a wide variety of day jobs, always thinking that writing would just be a hobby. His success ultimately created the rift between them because they were confronted with the truth that they weren’t the characters they’d been playing for each other.

Admittedly, this is what made me go looking through folders to find old notes and love letters from my partner. If you have any things like that laying around, go find them.

My favorite thing Vonnegut wrote, two things I should say, were highlighted in “Pity the Reader”. The first was a letter written home, the first letter written home after he had been liberated in Dresden. The first letter he had sent home to let everyone know that he was alive. There is something so glib and his voice is already so clear then as he reports what has happened and why he’s been missing and how he’s doing at the moment. It’s so clear and evocative a letter that I have no problem seeing him sitting on the cot writing it.

The second, also in “Pity the Reader” is a long form contract he has written to his wife Jane as she is pregnant, detailing all of the things he is willing to do for her, clean for her, arrange for her, and the amount of swearing he’s going to attempt to refrain from while he does it.

I think in those two pieces you get most of what you need to know about Vonnegut the person, outside of Vonnegut the author. You get bluntness, unapologetic honesty, humor, adoration, and resilience.