From the page The Way We Were —


He came home on leave for Mother’s Day, 1944, and found that his mother had died the night before.

Edith Vonnegut had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. She had been struggling for years — with mental illness, with alcohol, with prescription drugs, with the particular despair of a woman whose family had lost everything to Prohibition and the Depression and who had never quite found her way back from the edge. Her son Kurt arrived to celebrate her and found her gone instead. Three months later, he was shipped to Europe.

He would survive things in the next year that would take him twenty-five years to write about.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, into a family shaped by German heritage and American ambition. His father Kurt Sr. was a respected architect. His mother came from a wealthy brewing family. The children — Kurt, his sister Alice, and his brother Bernard — grew up in a household of culture and comfort, and then watched it dissolve. Prohibition ended the brewery money. The Depression ended the architecture commissions. The family sold their house and moved to a smaller one, and the children shifted from private schools to public ones, and the lesson that prosperity was not permanent settled into Kurt Vonnegut’s bones early.

He found his footing in journalism. At Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, he wrote for the student paper — one of the first daily high school newspapers in the country — and discovered that clear sentences, plainly delivered, could do things that ornate writing could not. He carried this lesson to Cornell, where he studied chemistry and edited the student newspaper, and where he was failing his classes badly enough that dropping out to enlist in the Army felt like a reasonable exit strategy.

He enlisted in 1943. He was twenty years old. He had met his wife Jane Cox in kindergarten, dated her through high school, and married her in September 1945 — on the other side of a war that neither of them had fully anticipated.

In December 1944, during the German offensive in the Ardennes Forest that became known as the Battle of the Bulge, Private Vonnegut was captured. He was twenty-two years old. He and other American prisoners of war were loaded into boxcars and transported to Dresden — a German city of extraordinary baroque beauty, largely undamaged by the war, famous for its art and its architecture and its porcelain. Vonnegut later called it the first fancy city he had ever seen.

The POWs were housed in a slaughterhouse. The address was Schlachthof Fünf.

Slaughterhouse-Five.

On the night of February 13, 1945, the air raid sirens went off and the prisoners and their guards descended sixty feet underground into a meat locker, surrounded by hanging carcasses, while the Allied air forces — British and American bombers in successive waves — destroyed the city above them. By the time the bombing was done, the city of Dresden was a smoking ruin. Estimates of the dead range from tens of thousands to over 130,000. The prisoners emerged from the locker into a landscape of total destruction.

For weeks afterward, Vonnegut and the other POWs were put to work excavating the ruins and retrieving the dead — pulling bodies from cellars, collecting corpses for cremation. He described it later, with the particular flatness of a man who has processed something too large for conventional language, as “a terribly elaborate Easter egg hunt.”

He was liberated by Russian troops in May 1945, sent home to the United States, and married Jane that autumn. He took a job in the publicity department at General Electric, where his brother Bernard worked as a scientist, and began writing short fiction in the evenings to supplement his income. He sold stories to popular magazines — the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Argosy — earning enough to quit GE and try to write full time.

The writing life was not immediately glamorous. He ran a Saab dealership in Massachusetts that failed. He taught at a school for emotionally disturbed children. He wrote novels that did not sell in the numbers that would sustain a family, and he had a family that kept expanding. He and Jane had three children. Then, in the late 1950s, his sister Alice died of cancer. Two days before she died, her husband James Adams was killed in a train derailment. Alice died without knowing her husband was gone. Vonnegut, already supporting his own family, adopted his sister’s three orphaned sons. He now had six children and a Saab dealership that was losing money.

He wrote more. He taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He carried, through all of it, the specific weight of what he had seen in Dresden — something that he knew mattered, that he knew had to be written about, that he could not for twenty years find the right form to contain.

Slaughterhouse-Five was published in 1969. It was the antiwar novel that was twenty-five years in the making, told through the fractured, time-unstuck consciousness of a character named Billy Pilgrim, because the linear narrative of what happened in Dresden could not hold the truth of it. The novel appeared at the height of the Vietnam War, when Americans were asking urgent questions about what war was for and what it cost, and it sold immediately and widely and was placed on Time magazine’s list of the one hundred best English-language novels written since 1923.

Kurt Vonnegut, at forty-six, was suddenly and completely famous.

The fame was not simple. He struggled with depression for much of the rest of his life. He separated from Jane. He attempted suicide in 1984, an experience he wrote about with characteristic bluntness. He remarried. He kept writing — fourteen novels in total, along with short stories, essays, and plays, all of them carrying the same voice: sardonic and humane, formally restless, deeply suspicious of cruelty and ideology, committed to the radical proposition that ordinary kindness was the most important thing a person could practice.

His most repeated instruction, in lectures and interviews and letters, was not a writerly principle. It was a human one: “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

He died on April 11, 2007, after falling on the steps of his brownstone in New York. He was eighty-four years old.

He had survived the firebombing of Dresden in a meat locker. He had come home to a dead mother and a country at war and a family that kept needing things from him. He had written his masterpiece in the spaces between everything else, over twenty years, because he could not write it faster than that. He had told the truth about what he had seen and trusted his readers to handle it.

And then he said the thing that contained everything else:

“Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

He knew what it cost to create something real.

He did it anyway.

So it goes.