Kurt Vonnegut has been one of my favorite writers since I first stumbled upon his work as a highly impressionable teenager, a writer who almost single-handedly propelled me down the river of books that I still swim around in (with an initial shove-off from J.D. Salinger and a gentle wind from Tom Robbins). I came across Breakfast of Champions randomly at a used bookstore and, loving the cover and laughing out loud at the first few pages I read in the store, immediately bought the book, fell in love with Vonnegut entirely by that night, and returned the store a few days later to buy every single used Vonnegut paperback they had (Slaughterhouse Five, Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, Sirens of Titan, and Jailbird). By the time I finished high school, I’d read every single thing he’d ever written.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve seen some of the flaws in his writing (though to this day I’d attest there’s not a single thing wrong with Slaughterhouse Five or Cat’s Cradle) and become less feverish in my devotion, though still an ardent admirer of what he managed to accomplish and the ways in which he was able to move me as a reader. Still, I’d always considered Vonnegut the person rather untouchable, a saint of sorts, a man full of wisdom, humor, compassion, ideals, and humanity. And he did have all those qualities, surely, but they weren’t all he brought to the table. Finishing the first real biography of him last night (And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, A Life) I realized that Mr. Vonnegut also brought anger, loneliness, alcoholism, emotional distance, immaturity, selfishness, and sadness to most anybody who had a real relationship with him in his life.
A near-constant refrain throughout the book, from those who knew him best (his children, friends, relatives, editors) was that they had a very tough time squaring Kurt Vonnegut the author with Kurt Vonnegut the person. That, quite simply, for all his warmth and humanity on the page or behind the podium, he was a deeply difficult person to know and live with. He quite often wasn’t able to come close to living out the idealism, compassion, and values he so frequently espoused in his novels.
And I guess this makes sense, though it still surprised and saddened me. Kurt Vonnegut was, of course, a human being, and we human beings are a notoriously complex and contradictory bunch. He was also a boy who grew up with an unhappy, “icy” mother (who eventually committed suicide, on Mother’s Day, just a few months before he went off to war), a 23 year old who was a firsthand witness to mass murder at Dresden, and 33 year old with no job and seven children to take care of. So there are reasons for some of his behaviors, as there are for any of our actions. We are human beings and life is hard.
But I really wanted Vonnegut to be different. I wanted him to have been a better husband, and especially a better father. He was rather lousy at both. While he rallied for connection and compassion in his books, he had a very tough time being a decent human being to his own family. He was horribly passive aggressive about handling most any conflict, leaving editors and agents that considered him a close friend without warning or explanation, staying upstairs writing and/or drinking while leaving his wife to handle everything in the household, including seven children (3 of their own, 4 nephews they took in when his sister and her husband died), dragging his divorce from his first wife out over seven years because he couldn’t handle it despite carrying on numerous other relationships during that time. He even tried to commit suicide (which I had no idea about) in 1983 in the midst of a deep depression during which his second wife, Jill Krementz (who comes off terribly in the book) and his “first family” were arguing over his will and inheritance.
He was a man who was rather miserable most of his life, which he somewhat admitted to in his books, but I still thought that somehow he’d had a better time of things. That he didn’t, that he was only human and capable of all that means, good and bad, reminds me all over again that nobody belongs on a pedestal.
But he still wrote some damn fine books.
