A Human’s Human: Remembering Kurt Vonnegut
Cigarette ash, absurdity, and the man who made it all make sense
Wide open beaver.
Those were the first words I ever read by Kurt Vonnegut. I was 16, holding a dilapidated copy of Breakfast of Champions I’d found at a garage sale. Amused, I kept reading. Then I read it again.
Vonnegut became a lifelong North Star - someone who made sense of a world that often didn’t.
So when I recently had the chance to watch the documentary Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time, I was enthralled. I cried. No one has ever made me feel better in times of darkness. My home is scattered with framed Vonnegut quotes and a haphazardly painted plate that says, Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. Nothing seems to get under men’s skin more than my love of Vonnegut and Newman. 60’s icons that are unapologetically themselves, intelligent, masculine, impossible to duplicate.
Things I Didn’t Know About Kurt That You Should
Jane was his first great love: the one who believed in him before the world did.
They were high school sweethearts who married young, weathering war, children, and years of financial struggle together. She supported his writing long before he was successful. But as fame arrived, so did distance. He left her, and though they remained connected through their children, their love story became one of quiet heartbreak - of a man who could make sense of the world but struggled with his own.He lost most of his childhood friends in WWII, before they even saw battle.
Many of the boys he grew up with died in basic training. They never saw combat, never experienced what he did. He seemed to find it sad and amusing. He hated war.He survived the Battle of the Bulge and the Dresden bombing.
The Americans were dressed “like dog sh*t” in brown uniforms that made them easy targets against the snowy backdrop. He was captured and sent to Dresden, where he was held in a slaughterhouse with 100 other POWs. One day, he emerged, and the city - centuries of opulence and history - was gone, reduced to ash. He was ordered to bury hundreds of dead Germans, including babies. “I didn’t mind,” he later wrote, “but it’s hard not to.”His mother committed suicide while he was at war.
Pills and alcohol - what he called the “Marilyn Monroe” way. It was 1944. His father never recovered. The house his father, Kurt Vonnegut Sr. an accomplished architect, built still stands with his and his wife’s initials all over the property K&E.He was a babe - A young Kurt was no one to scoff at, not with those eyelashes.
He adopted his sister Alice’s four young sons after tragedy struck
Diagnosed with terminal cancer, she had only weeks left in 1958 when her husband was killed in a freak train accident. Kurt, already a father of three, took in her four children, two dogs, and a rabbit, keeping the family together.He sold Saabs.
Supporting a family of nine wasn’t easy. Before Slaughterhouse-Five made him famous, he ran a Saab dealership. He hated it. But he kept writing, submitting stories to hundreds of publications, refusing to give up.He hated Republicans.
No further explanation needed. He really hated them.He was born on 11/11/22.
A powerful Scorpio stellium. Born on Remembrance Day, under a numerological sequence that practically wrote his fate in the stars.
A Man for Humanity
One of the most compelling parts of the documentary was hearing his voicemails to the director Robert B. Weide (yes the guy from Curb your Enthusiasm). They were sincere. Thoughtful. He had a profound understanding that family extended beyond blood. As he wrote in Cat’s Cradle:
“If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons, that person may be a member of your karass.”
A karass - a group of people unknowingly linked together to carry out a shared destiny. You’ll know them when you see them.
Kurt Vonnegut lived through unimaginable grief, uncertainty, and loss, yet he remained funny, hopeful, and deeply, painfully human. If I had to sum him up, he was a human’s human. A man for humanity.
I like to imagine him now, somewhere above us, cigarette ash tipping off the edge of a cloud, watching us all, hoping we all love each other a little more and of course, laughing.
“Be patient. Your future will soon come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and loves you no matter what you are.”
Kurt Vonnegut helped shape me into the human I am today (and still strive to be). My uncle had a hardcopy of Breakfast of Champions but never read it. I borrowed it and when I saw that a famous author had illustrated his novel with a childish rendition of an asshole done in magic marker, I was hooked.
A friend of mine recommended Slaughterhouse Five, The Sirens of Titan, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, the excellent short story collection Welcome to the Monkey House, and what I consider his tour-de-force, Cat's Cradle. On the surface, science fiction, but underneath, passionate and snarky treatises on what it means to be human. Just like his alter-ego, Kilgore Trout. When I write stories, I try to emulate his simple, elegant language, his brevity, his jarring insights, his gentle righteousness.
Okay, two quick Vonnegut stories. I was attending a writer's conference at the University of Iowa in 2015 and was downing a couple of Rob Roys at a divey bar called the Dublin Underground when the bartender told us that Vonnegut liked to take his students there for a drink, and one night got overserved and barfed on the pool table, which is still there. I felt in the presence of greatness.
In 1990, I attended a live Kurt presentation at Harper Community College, which is only a couple miles from where I live. He presented his "create art, even if it's silly or awkward, for there is no higher calling" admonition and also left us with some sound fiction writing advice. My kindly literary uncle.
He was so popular when I was in college. People used to run around quoting him like he was the pope or something. I admit, this is hole in my reading life. Other than a few short pieces and watching the film of Slaughterhouse 5, I haven't read much of him. He's the kind of writer you can really admire even if you've never read him, though. Like he really put his money where his mouth is, you know? I was really into Harlan Ellison, who I feel also fits your description of intelligent, masculine, impossible. I suspect that once history has it's say, besides such obvious candidates as Stephen King and Salman Rushdie, guys like Vonnegut and Ellison and Phil Dick will be the definers of 20th Century writing. What do you think?