And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life Review

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And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life ReviewDresden, Germany. The night of February 13, 1945. Remnants of the Army's 423rd Regiment, 106th Division, captured almost as soon as they began fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, are roused from their bunks in a POW camp by an airraid siren. They are hustled into a meat locker, 60 feet below ground. German prison guards enter the bunker with them, and shut the steel door behind them. Above ground, the night time firebombing of Dresden begins. In the one thousand degree heat, "super heated tornadoes had sucked out the oxygen and turned hiding places into tombs." The bombing continued into the night. At dawn the next day, the POW's emerged from the meat locker to see what had happened, Private Kurt Vonnegut among them. What he saw that day colored his entire career and formed the basis for his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse 5.
The new Charles J. Shields biography of Kurt Vonnegut, And So It Goes, doesn't adhere to the love-hate mentality that was in vogue between biographers and their subjects a generation ago. In the current book, biographer and author seemed genuinely to like each other in the brief period they worked together. One could go so far as to say that before Vonnegut's death, they were well on their way to becoming, well, pals. Ah, I thought to myself. This biographer will suck up in person, then skewer the old man after he dies. It never happens.
This is not to say Vonnegut gets a free pass. Infidelities and indiscretions are on full view, and never more so than in the Fall of 1965 when the author begins an affair at the famous University of Iowa creative writing workshop. As his fame grows, so do the number of extra marital liaisons, most spectacularly with Jill Krementz, a photographer who comes off in the book as having the charm and graciousness of Lady Macbeth. During their tryst, wife Jane Vonnegut is rewarded by being left home in the role of family matriarch to supervise the upbringing of their children. In the saddest episode of the book, Vonnegut's brother-in-law Jim Adams is killed in a train wreck and Kurt's sister Alice, terminally ill and grief stricken over the tragedy befallen her husband, also dies and the Vonnegut household is newly infused with four additional children to care for.
Even as Jill finds Kurt an apartment in Manhattan where he feasts in regal fashion, Jane is as determined as ever to hold the family together. On page 290, out of the pain of knowing her husband is living with another woman, Jane issues her own prophecy: "Jill will find ways to cut you off from your home", an eerie forecast that comes true not once but twice - most flamboyantly on Page 404 when Vonnegut, smoking during Super Bowl pre-game ceremonies, goes down stairs for a snack, and watches portions of his Manhattan townhouse go up in flames. In a fit of anger, Jill changes the locks on the door for the second time, refusing him entry. If there is any justice in the game of musical beds, surely it came when Vonnegut learns that just as he and Jill deceived Jane, so Jill and investment banker Stephen DuBrul ultimately deceive Kurt. Even that isn't the end of things as DuBrul abruptly terminates the relationship with Jill and she hightails it back to Vonnegut, who has finally had enough of his sugar daddy role and files the first of three petitions to divorce Jill.
Even with contretemps like these, it is never the intention of Shields to intentionally debunk or puncture Vonnegut's reputation. If anybody gets skewered, it is literary critics as a group, who ignored him when he was starting out then jumped on his bandwagon as he became a moneymaker. Shields places his subject's actions in the context of success American style. Impoverished most of his life, when the trappings of reward were offered, Vonnegut took full advantage. The writing in this biography is straight forward and devoid of moralizing so that readers don't mind "looking under the hood" to discover that, as his father had done, Vonnegut not only became a stock market investor, but a shareholder in Dow Chemical which, Shields points out, was the sole manufacturer of napalm in the Vietnam War.
It is part of Shields' research effort to illuminate his subject's private persona, then compare and contrast that to his public image - if only to show that most of the time, public expectations are at odds with a subject's private behavior. In that, Kurt Vonnegut was no exception.
There are two major wonders in this book: 1. How did Vonnegut, not only a heavy smoker, but a smoker of Pall Mall, an unfiltered cigarette, live to the ripe old age of 85? 2. How is it that at page 350 in a 400 page book, we are only up to 1982 with the publication of Vonnegut's novel Dead Eye Dick? That is to say, how can the remaining 25 years of Vonnegut's life warrant a tad more than 50 pages? This second question is answered by Vonnegut himself. "We all see our lives as stories...if a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended, and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is."
Unless you are Kurt Vonnegut. Many would be satisfied to have their entire life distilled down to the career he had after age 60. He produced the best seller Hocus Pocus in 1990 at the age of 68. Showtime adapted three of his short stories for network TV in 1991. Nick Nolte starred in a 1996 film adaptation of Mother Night. A collection of his speeches and essays appeared in 2005 as A Man Without A Country, which spent several weeks on the New York Times nonfiction best seller list.
Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007.
And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life Overview

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