Little Witch Studio

Kurt Vonnegut on my mind.
I might need to re-read all his books + a biography.
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In the summer of 1965, the phone rang at a failing Saab dealership in West Barnstable, Massachusetts. The man who answered was forty-three years old, broke, supporting six children, working as a sci-fi paperback writer that almost nobody in literary circles took seriously. The call was from a writer named Vance Bourjaily, calling on behalf of the director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, asking if Kurt Vonnegut would like to fill a vacant faculty position teaching fiction in Iowa City for an annual salary of eight thousand five hundred dollars.

Kurt Vonnegut said yes.

By the time he left Iowa two years later, he had finished writing the novel that would make him famous, taught John Irving and a generation of other writers who would carry his influence forward for the next half-century, and crossed the line — quietly, without fanfare — from a man the literary establishment ignored into a man it could no longer afford to.

He had needed every bit of it.

The math of Vonnegut's life up to 1965 was punishing. He had been captured by German forces at the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, age twenty-two. He had survived the Allied firebombing of Dresden on February 13–14, 1945, by climbing sixty feet underground into a meat locker beneath the slaughterhouse where his German captors had housed him and the other American prisoners of war. He had come up the next morning to a city that no longer existed and had been put to work for weeks pulling bodies out of the rubble. He had come home from the war eight months after his mother had died — she had taken her own life the night before he came back on leave the previous May — and had spent the next two decades trying to find a way to write about Dresden that the language could hold.

He could not do it. Not for twenty years.

In the meantime, the rest of his life happened. He married his childhood sweetheart, Jane Cox, in 1945. He worked in public relations at General Electric in Schenectady, New York. He started publishing short stories in the slick magazines of the 1950s. He published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952. He kept publishing — The Sirens of Titan in 1959, Mother Night in 1961, Cat's Cradle in 1963, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater in 1965 — but the literary establishment shelved him with the science fiction writers and largely left him there.

Then, in September 1958, his older sister Alice died of cancer in a New Jersey hospital two days after her husband had been killed in a commuter-train crash off the Newark Bay lift bridge. Kurt and Jane adopted three of Alice's four orphaned sons. Their household, which had had three biological children, suddenly had six.

By 1965, he was trying to support all six on royalties that did not exist and a Saab dealership in Cape Cod that did not work. Then Vance Bourjaily called.

Iowa was a serious place. The Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa was the oldest creative writing program in the United States and arguably the most prestigious. The other faculty included Bourjaily himself, Nelson Algren, José Donoso, Richard Yates at various points. The students were the future of American literature — though nobody knew which ones yet. Vonnegut showed up in Iowa City with his manuscripts, his pipe smoke, his Indiana drawl, and his enormous well of unprocessed war.

He taught from 1965 to 1967. Two years.

In those two years, he taught John Irving, who would later say of him, in the line that everyone who knew Vonnegut at Iowa eventually came back to, that he was cruel to institutions and kind to the individuals. He taught Suzanne McConnell, who would remain his friend for the rest of his life and write some of the most careful memoirs of him published anywhere. He taught dozens of others. He gave the kind of writing notes that students remembered word for word forty years later. He took his teaching seriously in a way that was rare for a writer at his stage of frustration.

He also, finally, sat down and finished Slaughterhouse-Five.

He had been trying to write it for twenty years. He had been trying to write it straight. He could not. The story kept slipping out of order, the way memory does when something is too large to hold in a single line. Iowa gave him a salary, a small office, students who took him seriously, and enough breathing room to stop trying to write the book as a war memoir. He gave the book to a fictional optometrist named Billy Pilgrim, who becomes unstuck in time and travels back and forth through the events of his own life without warning. He gave the book the voice it needed. He finished it in Iowa City.

In 1965, while he was teaching, Harper's magazine published a review of his earlier work that took him seriously as a literary writer for the first time in his career. His salary at Iowa was bumped from eight thousand five hundred dollars to eleven thousand. People started returning his calls.

He left Iowa in 1967. He published Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969. He was forty-six years old. The book landed in the middle of the Vietnam War, in front of an American reading public that was already asking, in increasingly desperate terms, what war is for and what it costs the people who survive it. It made him famous practically overnight. It has stayed on every reasonable list of the greatest novels written in English in the twentieth century.

He kept writing. Fourteen novels in all. He kept returning, year after year, to the one piece of advice he believed mattered more than any literary technique. "God damn it," he wrote, in a line that has been taped to refrigerators and read at weddings and funerals for half a century, "you've got to be kind."

He died on April 11, 2007, in Manhattan, at the age of eighty-four, after a fall outside his home. Suzanne McConnell, his former student from Iowa, was one of the people who wrote about him afterward. John Irving wrote about him. A generation of American writers who had passed through Iowa City in the 1960s wrote about him. The two-year salary line he took because he was broke and trying to feed six kids turned out to have been the bridge that carried him out of obscurity and into the canon.

Eight thousand five hundred dollars a year. Two years. One sister's adopted sons in the back of a station wagon driving west to Iowa City. One book he had been trying to write since he was twenty-two. The math, in the end, worked.

If his story moved you, drop one word in the comments — Kurt, Iowa, Billy, anything that comes to mind. Tap the like button so more people find this story. The page is small. Every reaction helps us keep telling stories like this one.

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