[Englecturers] Kurt Vonnegut has Died: A Legend Leaves Us at 84

[Matthew Snyder]

Kurt Vonnegut, Novelist Who Caught the Imagination of His Age, Is Dead at 84
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/books/12vonnegut.html?pagewanted=1&hp

By DINITIA SMITH
Published: April 12, 2007
Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels 
like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. 
Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a 
generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in 
Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.
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Kurt Vonnegut
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Mr. Vonnegut suffered irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall 
several weeks ago, according to his wife, Jill Krementz.
Mr. Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels 
that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary 
idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and ’70s. Dog-eared paperback 
copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in 
dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States.
Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of 
human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to 
make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, 
wishes them well?
He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. “Mark Twain,” Mr. Vonnegut 
wrote in his 1991 book, “Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical 
Collage,” “finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those 
around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died.”
Not all Mr. Vonnegut’s themes were metaphysical. With a blend of vernacular 
writing, science fiction, jokes and philosophy, he also wrote about the 
banalities of consumer culture, for example, or the destruction of the 
environment.
His novels — 14 in all — were alternate universes, filled with topsy-turvy 
images and populated by races of his own creation, like the Tralfamadorians 
and the Mercurian Harmoniums. He invented phenomena like chrono-synclastic 
infundibula (places in the universe where all truths fit neatly together) as 
well as religions, like the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and 
Bokononism (based on the books of a black British Episcopalian from Tobago 
“filled with bittersweet lies,” a narrator says).
The defining moment of Mr. Vonnegut’s life was the firebombing of Dresden, 
Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a 
young prisoner of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many 
of them burned to death or asphyxiated. “The firebombing of Dresden,” Mr. 
Vonnegut wrote, “was a work of art.” It was, he added, “a tower of smoke and 
flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their 
lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of 
Germany.”
His experience in Dresden was the basis of “Slaughterhouse-Five,” which was 
published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and 
cultural and social upheaval. The novel, wrote the critic Jerome Klinkowitz, 
“so perfectly caught America’s transformative mood that its story and 
structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age.”
To Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent 
meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 
1965 novel, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” summed up his philosophy:
“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the 
winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got 
about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — 
‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”
Mr. Vonnegut eschewed traditional structure and punctuation. His books were 
a mixture of fiction and autobiography, prone to one-sentence paragraphs, 
exclamation points and italics. Graham Greene called him “one of the most 
able of living American writers.” Some critics said he had invented a new 
literary type, infusing the science-fiction form with humor and moral 
relevance and elevating it to serious literature.
He was also accused of repeating himself, of recycling themes and 
characters. Some readers found his work incoherent. His harshest critics 
called him no more than a comic book philosopher, a purveyor of empty 
aphorisms.
With his curly hair askew, deep pouches under his eyes and rumpled clothes, 
he often looked like an out-of-work philosophy professor, typically chain 
smoking, his conversation punctuated with coughs and wheezes. But he also 
maintained a certain celebrity, as a regular on panels and at literary 
parties in Manhattan and on the East End of Long Island, where he lived near 
his friend and fellow war veteran Joseph Heller, another darkly comic 
literary hero of the age.
Mr. Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922, the youngest of three 
children. His father, Kurt Sr., was an architect. His mother, Edith, came 
from a wealthy brewery family. Mr. Vonnegut’s brother, Bernard, who died in 
1997, was a physicist and an expert on thunderstorms.
During the Depression, the elder Vonnegut went for long stretches without 
work, and Mrs. Vonnegut suffered from episodes of mental illness. “When my 
mother went off her rocker late at night, the hatred and contempt she 
sprayed on my father, as gentle and innocent a man as ever lived, was 
without limit and pure, untainted by ideas or information,” Mr. Vonnegut 
wrote. She committed suicide, an act that haunted her son for the rest of 
his life.
He had, he said, a lifelong difficulty with women. He remembered an aunt 
once telling him, “All Vonnegut men are scared to death of women.”
“My theory is that all women have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside,” he 
wrote.
Mr. Vonnegut went east to attend Cornell University, but he enlisted in the 
Army before he could get a degree. The Army initially sent him to the 
Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 
Pittsburgh and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering.
In 1944 he was shipped to Europe with the 106th Infantry Division and 
shortly saw combat in the Battle of the Bulge. With his unit nearly 
destroyed, he wandered behind enemy lines for several days until he was 
captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp near Dresden, the architectural 
jewel of Germany.
Assigned by his captors to make vitamin supplements, he was working with 
other prisoners in an underground meat locker when British and American 
warplanes started carpet bombing the city, creating a firestorm above him. 
The work detail saved his life.
Afterward, he and his fellow prisoners were assigned to remove the dead.
“The corpses, most of them in ordinary cellars, were so numerous and 
represented such a health hazard that they were cremated on huge funeral 
pyres, or by flamethrowers whose nozzles were thrust into the cellars, 
without being counted or identified,” he wrote in “Fates Worse Than Death.” 
When the war ended, Mr. Vonnegut returned to the United States and married 
his high school sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox. They settled in Chicago in 1945. 
The couple had three children, Mark, Edith and Nanette. In 1958, Mr. 
Vonnegut’s sister, Alice, and her husband died within a day of each other, 
she of cancer and he in a train crash. The Vonneguts took custody of their 
children, Tiger, Jim and Steven.
In Chicago, Mr. Vonnegut worked as a police reporter for the City News 
Bureau. He also studied for a master’s degree in anthropology at the 
University of Chicago, writing a thesis on “The Fluctuations Between Good 
and Evil in Simple Tales.” It was rejected unanimously by the faculty. (The 
university finally awarded him a degree almost a quarter of a century later, 
allowing him to use his novel “Cat’s Cradle” as his thesis.)
In 1947, he moved to Schenectady, N.Y., and took a job in public relations 
for the General Electric Company. Three years later he sold his first short 
story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” to Collier’s magazine and decided 
to move his family to Cape Cod, Mass., where he wrote fiction for magazines 
like Argosy and The Saturday Evening Post. To bolster his income, he taught 
emotionally disturbed children, worked at an advertising agency and at one 
point started a Saab auto dealership.
His first novel was “Player Piano,” published in 1952. A satire on corporate 
life — the meetings, the pep talks, the cultivation of bosses — it also 
carries echoes of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” It concerns an 
engineer, Paul Proteus, who is employed by the Ilium Works, a company 
similar to General Electric. Proteus becomes the leader of a band of 
revolutionaries who destroy machines that they think are taking over the 
world.
“Player Piano” was followed in 1959 by “The Sirens of Titan,” a 
science-fiction novel featuring the Church of God of the Utterly 
Indifferent. In 1961 he published “Mother Night,” involving an American 
writer awaiting trial in Israel on charges of war crimes in Nazi Germany. 
Like Mr. Vonnegut’s other early novels, they were published as paperback 
originals. And like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” in 1972, and a number of other 
Vonnegut novels, “Mother Night” was adapted for film, in 1996, starring Nick 
Nolte.
In 1963, Mr. Vonnegut published “Cat’s Cradle.” Though it initially sold 
only about 500 copies, it is widely read today in high school English 
classes. The novel, which takes its title from an Eskimo game in which 
children try to snare the sun with string, is an autobiographical work about 
a family named Hoenikker. The narrator, an adherent of the religion 
Bokononism, is writing a book about the bombing of Hiroshima and comes to 
witness the destruction of the world by something called Ice-Nine, which, on 
contact, causes all water to freeze at room temperature.
Mr. Vonnegut shed the label of science-fiction writer with 
“Slaughterhouse-Five.” It tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, an infantry 
scout (as Mr. Vonnegut was), who discovers the horror of war. “You know — 
we’ve had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being 
fought by aging men like ourselves,” an English colonel says in the book. 
“We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly 
shaved faces, it was a shock. My God, my God — I said to myself, ‘It’s the 
Children’s Crusade.’ ”
As Mr. Vonnegut was, Billy is captured and assigned to manufacture vitamin 
supplements in an underground meat locker, where the prisoners take refuge 
from Allied bombing.
In “Slaughterhouse-Five,” Mr. Vonnegut introduced the recurring character of 
Kilgore Trout, his fictional alter ego. The novel also featured a signature 
Vonnegut phrase.
“Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in 
all year round,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote at the end of the book, “was shot two 
nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.
“Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And 
every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military 
science in Vietnam. So it goes.”
One of many Zenlike words and phrases that run through Mr. Vonnegut’s books, 
“so it goes” became a catchphrase for opponents of the Vietnam war.
“Slaughterhouse-Five” reached No.1 on best-seller lists, making Mr. Vonnegut 
a cult hero. Some schools and libraries have banned it because of its sexual 
content, rough language and scenes of violence.
After the book was published, Mr. Vonnegut went into a severe depression and 
vowed never to write another novel. Suicide was always a temptation, he 
wrote. In 1984, he tried to take his life with sleeping pills and alcohol.
“The child of a suicide will naturally think of death, the big one, as a 
logical solution to any problem,” he wrote. His son Mark also suffered a 
breakdown, in the 1970s, from which he recovered, writing about it in a 
book, “The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity.”
Forsaking novels, Mr. Vonnegut decided to become a playwright. His first 
effort, “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” opened Off Broadway in 1970 to mixed 
reviews. Around this time he separated from his wife and moved to New York. 
(She remarried and died in 1986.)
In 1970, Mr. Vonnegut moved in with the author and photographer Jill 
Krementz, whom he married in 1979. They had a daughter, Lily. They survive 
him, as do all his other children.
Mr. Vonnegut returned to novels with “Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye 
Blue Monday” (1973), calling it a “tale of a meeting of two lonesome, 
skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.” This time 
his alter ego is Philboyd Sludge, who is writing a book about Dwayne Hoover, 
a wealthy auto dealer. Hoover has a breakdown after reading a novel written 
by Kilgore Trout, who reappears in this book, and begins to believe that 
everyone around him is a robot.
In 1997, Mr. Vonnegut published “Timequake,” a tale of the millennium in 
which a wrinkle in space-time compels the world to relive the 1990s. The 
book, based on an earlier failed novel of his, was, in his own words, “a 
stew” of plot summaries and autobiographical writings. Once again, Kilgore 
Trout is a character. “If I’d wasted my time creating characters,” Mr. 
Vonnegut said in defense of his “recycling,” “I would never have gotten 
around to calling attention to things that really matter.”
Though it was a best seller, it also met with mixed reviews. “Having a 
novelist’s free hand to write what you will does not mean you are entitled 
to a free ride,” R. Z. Sheppard wrote in Time. But the novelist Valerie 
Sayers, in The New York Times Book Review, wrote: “The real pleasure lies in 
Vonnegut’s transforming his continuing interest in the highly suspicious 
relationship between fact and fiction into the neatest trick yet played on a 
publishing world consumed with the furor over novel versus memoir.”
Mr. Vonnegut said in the prologue to “Timequake” that it would be his last 
novel. And so it was.
His last book, in 2005, was a collection of biographical essays, “A Man 
Without a Country.” It, too, was a best seller.
In concludes with a poem written by Mr. Vonnegut called “Requiem,” which has 
these closing lines:

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.

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