In the early 1980s, Kurt Vonnegut was in the habit of lurking around the mailbox near his house in Manhattan, waiting for the collection and the opportunity to reclaim letters written in haste the night before. "I thank you for your cracked and mean complaints of July 20," he addressed his old friend Knox Burger in 1982. "When I turn 60, I'll decide what I really think about you." Dan Wakefield, the editor of Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, does not say whether the writer took this one back, but it would have been better if he had.
As fiction editor of Collier's magazine in the 1940s, Burger had paid Vonnegut large sums at the start of his career – $750 for a story in 1949. He then published the early novel The Sirens of Titan while working at Dell. When Burger switched trades, becoming an agent, Vonnegut reneged on a promise to become his client, saying he could not forsake the loyal Max Wilkinson. One wonders if he tried to retract a letter of August 1977, before it reached Wilkinson: "You say that you have not retired, but I tell you as your client that you have felt retired to me." It certainly would have been wiser not to reveal his wounds to the New York Times critic Anatole Broyard, on the publication in 1981 of Palm Sunday, a collection of sketches and speeches. "I thank you for your comments on how slowly my literary career is dying," Vonnegut told the notoriously severe Broyard. "I can imagine what it must be like for a critic to remain seemingly respectful in the presence of a writer he knows to be all through." He felt obliged to add that Palm Sunday had been "elsewhere praised with no embarrassment".
Domestic regrets also dogged Vonnegut. In 1970, his relationship with his wife Jane having deteriorated, he left the family home in what Wakefield calls "the small bucolic town of West Barnstable on Cape Cod", to settle in New York. In letters to friends, Vonnegut owns up to a lot of anger and a lot of drinking. There were also lots of children – six, including three of his sister's, adopted after her death. A year after his move, he met Jill Krementz, who was building a career as a literary portrait photographer, and soon they were living together. "I will not marry Jill," he promised his youngest daughter Nanny in 1977 – she had been withdrawn since her parents' separation – but the wedding duly took place not long afterwards, and the couple adopted a daughter, Lily. Marrying Krementz would turn out to be one of Vonnegut's biggest regrets. "I will be back here on the evening of June 20," he told a friend in 1991, "by which time Jill Krementz and [name deleted] will have been served subpoenas to defend themselves in my divorce action which charges them with adultery. He has been living in Jill's studio next door … for several months, without my even suspecting it. And, with me at home, putting Lily to bed or whatever, she would go over there 'to finish her book'. Such class!"
Things scarcely improved through Vonnegut's eighth decade, for him or Lily: "Jill and I are not speaking, thank goodness, and I am on the mend." He was involved in a car crash in late 1999, by which time Lily, still in her teens, had become "the fourth member of our family to swear off liquor for the rest of her life".
Vonnegut's son Mark wrote in a recent memoir that his father went "from being poor to being famous and rich in the blink of an eye". The trigger of change was the publication in 1969 of Slaughterhouse-Five (his eighth book), and the sale of film rights to George Roy Hill, whose successful movie soon followed. For many readers, particularly younger ones, Vonnegut's story of Billy Pilgrim and the firebombing of Dresden – "possibly the world's most beautiful city" – was the first encounter with an alternative to the accepted narrative of necessary destruction to bring about an end to the second world war. Having been a prisoner-of-war, trapped in an underground meat-locker throughout the bombing, Vonnegut gave his own experiences to Billy, throwing in a bit of time travel and faux-naivety, and punctuating the recitation of unspeakable horror with one of modern literature's most famous phrases: "So it goes." Kurt Vonnegut: Letters contains an account of his experiences written to his family just after the war, and another from a relative who was comforting "the boy".
The bittersweet whimsy of his fiction occasionally spills into the correspondence. "And tell me," he wrote to Burger, "when one is being frogmarched by life, does one giggle or does one try to maintain as much dignity as possible?" If Vonnegut's German experience shaped his folksy, confidential style, which made readers feel he was looking them in the eye, it also created the gaps in his spirit that were filled by addictions – alcohol and nicotine – and by bouts of depression.
To draw up a full catalogue of the disasters which beset the clan one would have to add his mother's suicide, timed to coincide with one of Kurt's periods of military leave, Mark's breakdown and diagnosis of schizophrenia ("most schizophrenics respond beautifully to large doses of vitamins", Vonnegut wrote), and the extraordinary circumstances of the adoption of his sister's children in 1958: she died of cancer the day after her husband was killed in a train crash. What else to do but giggle, or quote the closing words of Slaughterhouse-Five: "Poo-tee-weet?". Eventually, Vonnegut succumbed to that bafflingly common condition among the wealthy: being broke. The causes were the usual ones – taxes and alimony.
Charles Shields's biography of Vonnegut, And So It Goes, appeared last year, but there is no substitute for a well-rounded collection of letters. Wakefield, a lifelong friend, has divided the book into sections according to decade, prefacing each with a brief essay. He also adds comments before some of the letters – a method chosen by certain editors in preference to footnotes – which occasionally has the effect of informing us of events before we have the chance to read about them at source.
Broyard was scarcely wrong to say that Vonnegut's reputation suffered a blow with each new book; he is a classic example of a writer whose renown endures through the success of a single novel. Yet the tone was ever recognisable, and even lesser-known books – Slapstick, Deadeye Dick, Hocus Pocus – sold well. In response to a question from a reader in 1991 about the relationship of his style to "jazz and comedians", he replied: "I don't think about it much, but now that you've asked, it seems right to say that my writing is of a piece with nightclub exhibitionism … lower class, intuitive, moody, and anxious to hold the attention of a potentially hostile audience."
