March 26, 2025 • 40 mins
Holly is joined by guest host Bryan Young for a live show at Indiana Comic Con, focused on the life and work of the author Kurt Vonnegut, known for his dark humor and dystopian visions of the future.
Research:
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Kurt Vonnegut". Encyclopedia Britannica, 4 Feb. 2025, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kurt-Vonnegut
- “Kurt Vonnegut Lecture.” Case Western Reserve University. 2004. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_RUgnC1lm8&t=551s
- Manikowski, Amy. “The Legacy of Kurt Vonnegut.” Biblio. https://www.biblio.com/blog/2022/11/the-legacy-of-kurt-vonnegut
- “Meet Kurt Vonnegut.” Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library. https://www.vonnegutlibrary.org/biography/
- Shields, Charles J. “And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, a Life.” St. Martin’s Griffin. 2012.
- Strand, Ginger. “How Jane Vonnegut Made Kurt Vonnegut a Writer.” The New Yorker. Dec. 3, 2015. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-jane-vonnegut-made-kurt-vonnegut-a-writer
- Sumner, Gregory D. “Unstuck in Time: Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels.” Seven Stories Press. 2011.
- Weide, Robert B. and Don Argott. “Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time.” IFC Films. 2021.
- Vonnegut, Kurt. “Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage.” Dial Press. 1999.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, we have an
episode that you're not in.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
I know it was you asked me about whether it
would be okay to do this, and I was like absolutely,
even before you told me that the subject was Kurt Vonnegut,
And when you said that, I was like, I already
was on board with the idea of, you know, a
live episode with a guest host, because I will not
be at the event. But now that you've said Kurt
(00:41):
Vonnegut and that Brian Young is going to be the
co host, I am excited about it.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Yeah. Both Brian and I were penniless and guests Indiana
Comic Con, and we talked a lot about Star Wars
things while we were there, but it occurred to us.
I think it was actually Brian's idea that kirv Vonneguet
is from Indianapolis and this kind of makes a lot
of sense, and so I was like, great, let's do that,
(01:07):
and we did. We also went to the Kur Vonneguet
Museum that morning before the show. Which was very moving
and wonderful. We'll talk about all that on behind the scenes.
Listen spoiler alert. I cried three times doing this episode.
Now is one of those times in life when I
really wish we had Kurt, and I'm also really glad
he's gone because I don't think he would enjoy the
(01:27):
world we're living in right now. But I'm really grateful
to Brian Young, who has been on our show before.
He was our first guest at a live show, so
this kind of felt very natural. And thank you to
Indian a Comic Con as well for having us. There's
also a little heads up. There's what I didn't even
think of as a swear because my family didn't growing up,
(01:49):
but Tracy Flagg did as a swear because her family
would have, which was one of those great moments of like, oh,
how different worlds exist in the every day. It's pretty minor.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
If you are a Kurt Vonnegut van, you probably already
know what the swear is.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Yeah, it's from one of his famous quotes. It invokes
a deity, that's all. It's not not anything not anything big.
But if you are a parent or a teacher, you
may want to preview and make sure you know you're
cool with it or that you have a plan in
place to address that language with your kids.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Yeah, and we'll also say that Kurt Vonnegut lived through
some pretty tough stuff. There are some real difficult moments
in this episode.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Yeah, he for all his wit, that was clearly part
of how he coped with a lot of rough times
in his life. And be aware there is discussion not
only of some pretty horrific wartime events, but there are
also multiple discussions of suicide in it as well as
just incredible horrible loss. So just be aware of all
(02:55):
of that going in worthwhile in my opinion, to talk
about Kurt Vonnegut, who I will wax Rapsodic about on Friday. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
And I'm not Tracy V.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Wilson.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
I'm Brian Young.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
Yeah. Brian is a longtime friend of the show. He
was on our first live show ever ever about talking
about his book about Presidential Assassination for children, which is
pretty spectacular and I recommend you check it out if
it's still available.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
It is, you can still get a children's illustrated History
of Presidential Assassination online or signed copies on my website
at swankmotron dot com.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Perfect, yeah, perfect, it is charming as I'll get out
so today because we're here in Indiana and in Indianapolis specifically,
Brian actually mentioned the idea of like, this is really
the time to talk about Kurt Vonnegut, who is someone
both he and I love and have bonded over over
the years, and he is, of course, you know, the
(03:54):
son of the city, as it were, we both grew
up with him. I think often when you hear people
talk about Vonnegutt and where they discovered him, it's usually
in their teenage years when they encounter an author, either
because it's recommended in school or because they just stumble
on it and it's finally an adult in the literature
(04:17):
space who is not feeding them bowl in any way.
It's very straightforward, and it is in some ways very
subversive in a way that's very appealing to teenagers. And
then if you're like me, you never mature and you
stick with it the whole time. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
Vonniguet was definitely someone I encountered as a teenager and
really latched onto. I found him in a banned books
club in high school, which seems so like you wouldn't
be able to get away with that today the way
you could, you know, twenty five more than twenty five
years sort of quaint now. And I've just always been
(04:55):
in love with his work, and for a long time
I was reading his entire life I library like every year,
and now revisiting it always feels like revisiting an old friend.
And I come to a lot of conventions here in Indiana,
Indianapolis specifically, and I always take that visit to the
Vonnegut Museum, which is within walking distance, And in fact,
(05:17):
Holly and I went this morning and took a visit
there and spent way too much to the museum.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Functionable amount of money in the museum shop chests.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
Yeah, I love. My favorite are the Kilgore Trout covers
that they have on the postcards. They're so lurid and ridiculous.
I love them.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Yeah. So, without further ado, we are going to talk
about this amazing writer who we all love and his
life story. So, Brian, you want to kick it off,
I would love to so.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
Vonnagut was born on November eleventh, nineteen twenty two, in Indianapolis, Indiana.
His father Kurt Senior was an architect, and the German
American Vonnegut family had been prosperous. Their fortunes shift though
when Kurt Junior was a teenager, as the Great Depression
played out, architecture projects were few and far between, and
the other family businesses faltered. The Vonneguts had sent Kurt
(06:10):
Junior's older brother and sister to private schools, but for him,
public school was the only option. His mother, Edith, who'd
been a high society debutante from a very wealthy family,
was deeply dismayed by their loss of financial stability, so
she tried to supplement the family's income by writing short stories,
mostly romances. Sadly that effort was for not as no
(06:32):
one was willing to buy them.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Yeah, Kurt, Kurt Junior, that is, wrote for the high
school newspaper, and he actually credited that time as really
teaching him the basics of journalism and how to convey
stories and ideas very quickly and succinctly and incredibly clearly.
Ironically thinks that he would be kind of dinged for
later in life as not being florid enough as a writer.
(06:56):
But that's why I think young audiences really gravitate to him.
After high school, Vonneguet enrolled at Cornell University in Ithaca,
New York. In what may seem like a bit of
a surprising move, he majored in biochemistry. That was a
bad choice for him. He did not excel.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
In nineteen forty three, Vonnegutt left school to enlist in
the Army. He'd been struggling at school. His journalism efforts
at the Cornell Sun were good, though they often caused controversy.
He ran criticism of the ROTC, of which he was
a member, which got him kicked out. He also wrote
articles suggesting that the school paper, in publishing patriotic writing,
(07:36):
was sharing propaganda. Then when he started school in his
junior year, as the editor of the Sun, he ran
a headline welcoming the classes of forty four and two thirds,
forty five and a fourth or whatever. The US had
joined the war in December nineteen forty one, following the
bombing of Pearl Harbor, and Vonnigut was making a nod
to the fact that many of his classmates were likely
(07:58):
to be called into service and die before finishing their
college careers. He got pneumonia in late nineteen forty two,
and that gave him a good excuse to leave school,
and so he did, and then he enlisted.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
And he went to Fort Bragg for training. He brought
his typewriter with him to basic training, but it was stolen.
He was really good with weapons, so he got some
artillery training. But his aptitude tests got him more attention
because he was clearly very smart, and he was selected
to enter a mechanical engineering program that was supposed to
end up with him getting a degree and an officer's commission.
(08:35):
His grades in this program were kind of mixed, but
ultimately that did not matter because the program was shut
down before he could finish.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
Kurt Junior decided to visit his parents in their new
place for Mother's Day nineteen forty four, and it was
a trip that would really change the family forever. Kurt Senior,
thanks to the war, had a steady income again working
in materials at various bases and facilities, and he designed
a new home from So and Edith and this home
in a quaint development in Marion County, Indiana. It was
(09:05):
contemporary and smaller than their previous home, but Edith did
not love it. It felt small and not just in size.
She was keenly aware of how her fortunes in life
had changed, going from an aristocratic it girl in Europe
to an unknown Midwestern housewife, and she was also very
unhappy about her son's choice to join the service.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
On Mother's Day morning, during that visit, Edith was found
dead by Kurt's sister, Alice, who then went and got Kurt.
Edith had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. This was
not recorded officially as an intentional act. The coroner wrote
it up as an accident to avoid the stigma that
naturally goes along with death by suicide, but the family knew,
(09:50):
although there have over the years been some debates over
whether or not they were going to acknowledge this or not,
and Kurt Sr. Actually asked the paper to run his
wife's obituary.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
This death really became a focal point for Vonnegut in
his writing and in his personal interactions. Biographer Charles J.
Shields noted of the writer, for the rest of his life,
he directed people's attention to the manner of his mother's death,
as if it were something they should know about him.
In Vonnegut's books, it's fairly easy to trace a line
(10:23):
from his own family tragedy to the way he writes
about mother's mothers occupy a strange narrative space for him
and tend to always be grappling with mental health issues.
He makes what certainly seems to be a reference to
his own mother's death in his nineteen seventy three book
Breakfast of Champions. This book, which we'll talk more about
in a moment, is told from the point of view
(10:44):
kil Or Trout, who's often described as being Vonnegut's fictional
alter ego, and in chapter seventeen, Kilbort Trout notes of
another character. Listen, Bunny's mother and mother were different sorts
of human beings, but they were both beautiful in exotic ways,
and they both boiled over with chaotic talk about love
and peace and wars and evil and desperation of better
(11:05):
days coming by and by, of worse days coming by
and by. And both our mothers committed suicide. Bunny's mother
ate Durino and my mother ate sleeping pills, which wasn't
nearly as horrible.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Vonnegut actually had very little time to mourn his mother.
The beaches of Normandy were stormed just a few weeks
after her death, and Kurt was called to active duty
shortly thereafter. Before he left, he proposed to his high
school sweetheart, who did not really give him any kind
of reply. That was Jane, and then that autumn he
was on a ship headed to Belgium. After two weeks
(11:39):
in Cheltenham, England, he and his Division one hundred and
sixth traveled across the English Channel by boat to La
Havre and then by truck into Belgium, where they were
brought to replace the second division that had been holding
the line against Germany's push.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
Almost immediately, Vonnegut's division was subjected to the opening of
Hitler's Operation herbs Nabel or Operation Autumn Mist, which targeted
the Allies in Luxembourg and eastern Belgium. There was a
near constant mirage of fire. It was during this time
that Vonnegut realized, to his disillusionment, that the scouting reconnaissance
(12:15):
squad he was a part of was really just being
thrown into areas that might contain mines or hidden Nazi strongholds,
so they were totally expendable. During one of these scouting missions,
on December nineteenth, he was taken as a prisoner of
war He and his fellow prisoners walked for two days
under German guards until they were loaded into a box car,
(12:35):
which then traveled for another two days. It was one
of several box cars carrying POWs.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
As they moved deeper and deeper into German territory. The
box car and the others that it was connected to
were caught up in Allied bombing. The first instance of
this was at Limburg, which was heavily bombed by the
Allies right after the box car that Vonnegut and his
fellow soldiers were in was disco conted from its engine
and left behind. There were scores of fatalities among the
(13:05):
POWs as some fled the cars, only to run right
into the Allies line of fire. Over the next several days,
Vonnegut's group was moved along until finally reaching Muhlberg, where
they were processed.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
The entire experience was horror after horror. Many of the
men were ill by this time, suffering from dysentery, malnourishment,
and frostbite. They don't witnessed more death in just a
few days than they can really even fathom, and many
were near death when they arrived at Muhlberg. But when
Vonnegut was given a postcard to send home, he told
his family his life is not bad at all and
(13:49):
asked them to send cigarettes. Meanwhile, his family had been
told Kurt Junior was Mia, and they presumed the worst.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Vonnegut was selected to be part of a work that
was going to be sent to Dresden to clear the
streets of rubble and do various factory work. Vonnegut was
also given the job of translator and foreman in this group,
as he spoke enough German to do so. These men
were housed in a converted slaughterhouse, and at one point
Vonnegut was actually court martialed by the Germans for insulting
(14:21):
a Nazi officer after he had abused a six pow.
Vonnegut was beaten and his foreman role was immediately taken away.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
If you read his letter home that he wrote, he
talked about he was overheard telling the foreman what he'd
like to do to him in German.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Yes, yeah, it was.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
It was not pleasant.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
No.
Speaker 3 (14:44):
So on the night of February thirteenth, nineteen forty five,
the Allies began their bombing of Dresden. The POWs housed
in the slaughterhouse were moved into a basement as the
bombing destroyed the city in the morning. The one hundred
and fifty men one was a part of We're in
an odd situation. They'd survived, but much of Dresden had not,
(15:07):
and tens of thousands of casualties littered the streets of
the destroyed city. Vonnegut's work crew was tasked with clearing
the dead and cleaning up the city, salvaging what they could.
It was made clear that if anyone took anything for themselves,
they would be shot, so Vonnegut and his fellow POW's
had to dig graves and in some cases stack bodies
(15:27):
and set them ablaze.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
As the war came to a close in the spring,
Vonnegut and his fellow POWs were eventually abandoned by their
German captors and left to sort of fend for themselves.
Kurt and several others were eventually traded for Soviet prisoners
that the Allies had captured, and Vonnegut, at this point,
like all of the men who had been captured, was
in really rough shape, not just mentally, but also he
(15:53):
was physically a mess. He was malnourished, and he was sickly,
but he did make it home. He got through the
forms that established him as no longer missing an action,
which was apparently a little bit of an ordeal, and
he was promoted to corporal. He also received a purple heart,
which sort of funnily enough, was for frostbite. And it's
just funny, given all of the things that he lived through,
(16:14):
that that's what he got his purple heart for.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
You can go see it at the museum. They have
it on display at the museum.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
He had started writing to his high school sweetheart Jane
again as soon as he was back in the US.
Jane had dated other people when the two of them
went to different colleges, and she was still sort of
playing the field. In his letters, Kurt was so cautious
to not assume that Jane was unmarried or single or
available to him, but she was, and they met up
(16:43):
in Washington, where Jane was living, and then they both
just by happenstance of scheduling, traveled to Indianapolis at the
same time, and once they were back home, Kurt proposed again,
and at that point the two were engaged.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Kurt always claimed that his war experience hadn't been that bad.
He was fine that family and friends shouldn't get emotional
over it, but it did eventually come out as writing.
Of course. In the interviews, his daughter said that they
never knew what he'd been through until they read Slaughterhouse Five.
He was only twenty two when he returned home.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Yeah, that's a lot to process if you think about it, right.
Your prefrontal cortex is not finished forming when you're in
your early twenties, and he had gone through an extraordinary
amount of trauma. But then in the post war nineteen forties,
Vonnegut tried to move on. He focused on his future
with Jane. They were married on September fourteenth, nineteen forty five,
(17:36):
and from the moment they became a married couple, Jane
really became the driving force of his writing career. She
was older than he was by a couple of years,
and she had finished college and she had a job
in the Office of Strategic Services before she accepted Kurt's proposal,
because women generally resigned from their work once they were
getting married, and that's what she did. Kurt was not
(17:59):
always the warmest spouse, but Jane supported him, and she
encouraged him to read more, starting with the Brothers Karamazov,
which she presented him during their honeymoon. The two of
them discussed literature and that was a big part of
their relationship, and while Kurt finished out his time in
the service, she also urged him to write, and he
would send all of the work that he did back
(18:21):
home and let her edit it. And he was very,
very deferential to her. He was like, do whatever you
want with it. You know better than I do.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
The two of them also applied to the University of
Chicago and both were accepted. Kurt's school was paid for
by the GI bill and he was already writing short
stories with Jane's encouragement, but he also signed on for
an anthropology program that would take him right through to
a master's degree. The following year, Jane got pregnant dropped
out of her fellowship program. Vonnie get dropped out of
(18:51):
his anthropology program that summer after his thesis proposal was rejected,
and their son Mark arrived on May eleventh, nineteen forty seven.
His thesis proposal was really fascinating and I'm still mad
that they rejected it. His thesis for anthropology was that
he thought that the shapes of stories were as equally
(19:12):
interesting as the shards of pottery of any civilization. And
he created a method where you could chart the shape
of culture's stories. And I teach a lot of writing
classes and I use that a lot to help people
visualize how stories work. But he didn't end up getting
his degree until they accepted Cat's Cradle as his thesis
(19:33):
years years and years later.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Yeah. After he left his program, he wrote for the
Chicago City News Bureau, which is something that he had
actually started while he was still in school, and he
started to think finally about getting his fiction published and
really focus on it. Money was really tight, though, and
soon it became very apparent that he was going to
need something dependable to bring in money to support Jane
(19:57):
and they're soon to be born son. So he turned
to his brother, Bernard, who was extremely famous in science circles.
He was an accomplished atmospheric and environmental scientist and he
worked with General Electric. Bernard was able to get Kurt
a job as a publicist with the company. There's actually
a pretty interesting story here where during the interview, the
(20:19):
person that Kurt was interviewing with read on his application
in his resume that he had been in Dresden during
the bombing, and the man just looked up and said,
I'm sorry, I was one of those bombers, and he
got the job on the spot. I'm a little choked
up that job. Though he did not like it. He
(20:41):
had a moral issue with PR work, which I love,
because he just thought it was inherently deceitful and that
was not something he really liked. He also thought that
the field of science, which he had been excited to
write about the things that people were doing a ge
because a lot of scientists got to just kind of experiment,
(21:01):
was not being handled in a responsible way and it
wasn't necessarily for the betterment of mankind.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
And its that discomfort with PR with GE that really
led him to pursue fiction writing as his full time job.
He started producing short stories and submitting them to publishers,
but there were a lot of rejections. Still, Jane was
his champion the whole time, and even wrote to publishers
herself to promote his work. The late nineteen forties were
(21:28):
very lean times, and then finally, not long after the
birth of their daughter Edith, in nineteen fifty, Collier's Weekly
published his short story report on the Barnhouse effect, but
a college professor who develops a sort of telekinesis and
is used by the government as a weapon. The story
is told by one of Professor Barnhouse's former students. Colliers
(21:48):
and other magazines needed short stories. They were very popular
with readers in the era before television became ubiquitous, so
he soon had a lot more work and started to
make good money. He'd promised himself that after he sold
five stories, he'd quit his GE job, which he did.
He and Jane then moved to Cape Cod in nineteen
fifty one.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Yeah, he had this moment where he marveled that in
the course of just a couple months he had made
more money as a writer than he would make in
an entire year at GE. So he felt really bolstered
by his decision.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
There was this interesting moment too, where he also felt
some shame because some of those were like he was
writing stuff for like Ladies home Journal, like I know
the one story that sort of based in his life,
Long Walk to Forever, Yeah, which was terrific. It's a
great story, and it's about that time he went back
home to sort of talk to Jane before he shipped
(22:40):
off to the war. He felt a lot shame about
that story and it being like that he'd lived a
moment in his life that would be in a lady's
glossy magazine. But it paid him well.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Yeah, and Vonnegutt continued to turn out fiction and make
really good money for the first time in his life.
He published his first novel, Player Piano, in nineteen fifty two,
and this was a book that was informed by his
time at GE. It was something he could not have
written and published while he was there, or he would
have gotten fired. The plot is set in a mechanized
society where most human labor has been replaced by machines,
(23:14):
and society has split into the out of work laboring
class and the overseeing engineers, and it examines, among other things,
what happens to people when they have no immediate use
and no contribution of value to society. He got labeled
because of this as a science fiction writer, but that
was not a pigeonhole he especially liked, just because while
(23:37):
he had nothing against science fiction, he knew that other
people did not take it seriously as literature.
Speaker 3 (23:42):
So there was a seven year gap between Claire Piano
and Vonnagut's second novel, The Sirens of Titan, which came
out in nineteen fifty nine, and during those seven years
there were a lot of changes in Vonnagautt's life. First,
his daughter, Nanette, was born in nineteen fifty four, than
his father, Kurt's died in the autumn of nineteen fifty seven,
(24:02):
And then in nineteen fifty eight, Kurt's sister, Alice, to
whom he was extremely close, was diagnosed with late stage
breast cancer. While she was in the hospital, her husband
Jim died suddenly in a train accident. Then, while the
family tried to shield Alice from this news, she found out.
Though there's a couple of different accounts about how she
(24:23):
found out. One is that a nurse gave her a
newspaper which mentioned the accident, and then the other is
that the family friend accidentally blurted it out. But regardless,
Alice was heartbroken, and she died two days after learning
about her husband's death. Kurt later said of his sister, quote,
she was the person I'd always written for. She was
(24:44):
the secret of whatever artistic unity I'd ever achieved. He'd
promised Alice that he would keep her four sons together,
and he moved all of them into the house with him,
Jane and their three kids. It became a wild and
boisterous home and the kids, as adults would note, the
Kurt was often grouchy with them and a little scary
at times, but he could be fun, but he was moody.
(25:08):
Jane was the one who kept it all together and
served as a primary caretaker for their huge crew.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Seven Kids is a lot of kids. Sirens of Titan,
which examines space and time travel, free will, and what
it means to try to outrun your destiny, was really
pretty well received by critics. It was a Hugo Award
finalist for nineteen sixty His follow up in nineteen sixty
one was his book Mother Night. And this is a
(25:35):
step away from science fiction, which he was becoming known for,
so it's a little risky. This is a fictional memoir
written by a Nazi propagandist while he awaits his trial
for war crimes. There's a spy twist in the work.
I almost don't want to say more because it's a
really fun narrative as it unfolds. And this story would
eventually be adapted into stage and screen, Like a lot
(25:57):
of Vonaget's subsequent work, including the nineteen ninety six films
starring Nick Nolty, which vonni Gett has a really beautiful
cameo in Is.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
Really Good To See It. Nineteen sixty three saw the
release of Cat's Cradle, and this was inspired by the
Lab at ge where scientists had been allowed to experiment
for the sake of pure science. There's a frequently told
(26:27):
story that one of the scientists there suggested the idea
of water that solidified at room temperature to author H. G.
Wells when he visited the lab, but Wells never used
the idea. Vonnie get decided it was okay to use
it himself. He uses it as the concept of ice
nine to examine the ways that science can be weaponized.
(26:49):
He also introduced a fictional religion in the book called Bocanonism,
which involved a number of absurd practices. Some of the
vocabulary of this faux religion would also be used a
decade later to name a collection of short story writings
by Vonnegut called Wampeters, Foma, and Grand Falloons.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
The novel God Bless You, Mister Rosewater was released in
nineteen sixty five, and it's in this book that Vonnegutt
introduces what has become known as his fictional alter ego,
Kilgore Trout. The name was a play on the name
of the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon. Trout appeared in
numerous books after this time. While he changed personality a
(27:27):
little bit and details give from book to book, he
was always a writer. And in Rosewater, Vonnegut wrote one
of his oftend quotes, which has spoken, this also gets
me choked up. I'm very weepy about kir Vonnagut this week,
you guys. This also gets me choked up. And it's
spoken in the book to a pair of infants by
(27:48):
the titular character, mister Rosewater, and he says, hello, babies,
welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold
in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded on
the outside. Babies, you've got one hundred years here. There's
only one rule that I know of babies, God damn it,
you gotta be kind.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
After Rosewater, Vonneguant, who needed more money than his books
were making, he took a job teaching at the Iowa
Writers Workshop. This turned out to be a pivotal move
in his life. For the first time. He wasn't a
solitary writer typing out his books at home. He was
in the middle of a community of fellow writers, many
of whom would become lifelong friends. He published a collection
(28:27):
of short fiction titled Welcome to the Monkey House in
nineteen sixty eight, but the project he'd been working on
since his return from the war, finally after many, many,
many many drafts, was published as a result of the
work he did on it while in Iowa.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Yeah, the outcome of Iowa is also one of those
kind of funny things in his life. Because he didn't
want to take a teaching job. He thought that was
like admitting defeat as a writer. But it turned out
to be really, really good for him, and that's why.
In nineteen sixty nine he published slaughter House Five, or
The Children Crusade, which took his already impressive status in
(29:03):
contemporary fiction to an absolutely new level. It was a
New York Times bestseller, it won a National Book Award
for Fiction, and it also made Kurt Vonneguet very famous,
very quickly.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
Slaughterhouse Five was incredibly popular, but it was also incredibly
personal for Vonnegut. It's very clearly Vonnegult working through his
experiences in World War II. The narrative jumps around through
time and involves an alien race from the planet Charles Falmador,
but in its heart, it's Vonnaguet sharing his experiences in Dresden.
Even his main character, Billy Pilgrim, who he describes as
(29:37):
unstuck in time, is born the same year as Vonnegut
nineteen twenty two. He's also captured by the Germans in
World War two and survives the bombing of Dresden. Vonnegut's
nonlinear storytelling, which has Billy Pilgrim jumping from moment to
moment in his life, gives away all the details that
would normally be in a novel's final chapters. In the
early pages of the book. The narratives message is anti war,
(29:59):
and many of the characters are inspired by people he
knew during his time in service. All of the things
he could never talk about with family and friends, including
the trauma he felt, came out in the book. He
even has an appearance in the book. He's in the
box cars and is watching some of these horrors play out,
and it's interesting reading the book and seeing him watch
(30:22):
all of these horrors play out in third person, almost
like he's disassociating out of it. Well, Vonaguein always insisted
he was fine as these events were playing out in
his actual life. Billy's story shows how deeply they haunted
him decades later.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
Yeah, it's interesting. There's a moment in a documentary about
him where he talks about trying to share some of it,
like he had written some of it in his letter home,
but he tries to tell his family about one of
the things that happened, and he couldn't finish, and he
was like, I never talked about it again. Slaughterhouse five,
of course, made Vonneguet a critical and media darling and
(30:56):
a household name. There's a Great Life magazine feature on
him and his family. It's this full spread with pictures,
and it includes photos of his family and their home
and their beautiful pictures. Some of them are really really fun.
But all of that fame, ultimately, as fame often does,
led to his life blowing up. He moved from Cape
(31:16):
Cod to New York. The family stayed in Cape Cod,
and he and Jane split up. They had some fundamental differences,
including religion, that had come into sharp focus once their
kids were grown. And moved out, but he had also
met someone else. On the heels of his critically acclaimed novel,
Vonnaguet wrote a play titled Happy Birthday One to June,
(31:37):
and it was released in nineteen seventy one, and while
that play was in production, photographer Jill Krementz was assigned
to take pictures of him.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
The end of Jane and Kurt's marriage was somewhat unusual.
They stayed in touch. Jane remained, according to her children,
very proud of Kurt's accomplishments and accolades. While she could
have easily become bitter over how played out, she seemed
to accept it move on, eventually remarrying.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Slaughterhouse five was optioned for film rights very soon after
its release because of its popularity, and the movie version
came out in nineteen seventy two, starring Michael Sachs as
Billy Pilgrim. The follow up to Slaughterhouse Five was greeted
with less enthusiasm. His nineteen seventy three book Breakfast of
Champions or Goodbye Blue Monday also has roots in Vonnaget's
(32:26):
real life, as he examined what it is to be
famous as a writer. In a world where cultural norms
and values are rapidly shifting. Kil Gore Trout is a
main character in this book, and it also echoes some
of his earlier themes of free will and social inequity.
Vonnegut also refers to himself in this book as a
(32:47):
writer narrator, sharing with the reader why he's doing some
of the things he's doing with the story. This was,
despite its critical reception, actually a bestseller because at this
point the public adore Vonna Guet, but some of the
critics were really really harsh in the way they received it.
Speaker 3 (33:05):
Slapstick or Lonesome No More was released in nineteen seventy six.
He dedicated the book to Laurel and Hardy, two men
that he felt had taught him that laughter was okay
even when things were tough those Slaughterhouse five is very
much considered to be as loose biography. He states in
the opening of Slapstick quote, this is the closest I'll
ever come to writing an autobiography. It's an autobiography of
(33:27):
his main character, doctor Wilbert Daffodil eleven Swain. Swain has
a sister, Eliza, and the siblings have been cut off
from the world because they are, according to Swain's account,
hideously ugly, but they're also uniquely powerful as a duo,
and they wish to help people form extended families to
eradicate loneliness. Critics didn't like it, and to be honest,
(33:48):
Vonnegaue did neither. In his book Palm Sunday, he sort
of gives as signs letter grades to all of his books,
and this is the only one he gave an F two.
And the movie adaptation that Jerry Lewis made is probably
one of the worst movies. I've ever seen it.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
My entire life.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
If you can find it, I had to buy a
bootleg from Australia and then and then make my computer
think it was Australian to watch it. It was a
big rigamarole because I couldn't find it in the US
at all.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
That's the universe telling you not to watch that film.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
That's actually you are not the first person who told
me that. But if you can find it, watch it
because it is it is a horror show.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
Watch it because it's so bad. In nineteen seventy nine,
Kurt married Jill and they adopted an infant daughter named
Lily together and That pair stayed together for the rest
of Kirk Vonaget's life, although like any long term marriage,
it was not always smooth. That same year, Kurt published
the book Jail Bird, a memoir of a man recently
released from prison. It did better than Slapstick did with critics,
(34:54):
but it also marked the start of a run of
books that were seen as kind of okay rather than
brilliant in most critics eyes. So this includes that group
of books that are have Dead Eye Dick in nineteen
eighty two, Galapagos in nineteen eighty five, and another fictional
autobiography in nineteen eighty seven titled Bluebeard.
Speaker 3 (35:14):
In his nineteen ninety book hocus Pocus, it offered up
the idea of a book crafted from scraps of paper
that had been found assembled according to the numbers written
on them by their author. Vonnegut said that he wanted
to prove that books could be written by anyone, and
so he alleged, and I've always wondered if this is
actually true, and he was handing like receipts and things
(35:37):
to his editor or not, but that anybody could write something,
and he was writing it on the backs of you know,
grocery bags and things like that, but who knows. It
features a recurrence of the trel Fammadorians. In nineteen ninety one,
Vonaget published a collection of essays titled Fates Worse Than Death,
and in it he confessed that he'd tried to die
(35:57):
by suicide in nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Vonnegut's nineteen ninety seven book Timequake invokes the trouble that
he often had when grappling with a narrative and makes
it essential to the plot of the book. The conceit
of the story is that in two thousand and one,
everybody gets thrust backwards ten years to nineteen ninety one,
and they have to repeat those years all over again,
but exactly as they played out the first time.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
The medicine to fix that book is great is just
Kilgore Trout running around yelling at people. You were sick,
but now you're well again. There's work to do. Vonnegut's
fiction offered political commentary often, but in two thousand and
five he produced a very overtly political book titled A
Man Without a Country, a Memoir of life in George W.
Bush's America. And this book was a surprise hit. I
(36:46):
don't know why. I was a surprise. I bought a copy,
and Vonnegut made the rounds of TV talk shows talking
about his disdain for the war in the Middle East.
He noted that when he saw images of young Iraqi
soldiers being marched with their hands on their heads as
prisoners of war or he recognized the exact thing he'd
lived through in Germany, and he felt a brotherhood with them.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
Even into his eighties, Bonneget retained his wonderful dark humor
In a lecture he gave it Case Western Reserve. In
two thousand and four, he made an announcement, here's the
big news. I am suing Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company
of Louisville, Kentucky for billions. I hope and you lawyers
here those in law school will be interested in this case.
(37:27):
I think I have never smoked anything but Paul Mall
since I was eleven years old. This is a Brown
and Williamson product on their package. For several years now.
They've promised to kill me, but I'm still alive eighty
one years old. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. He
told this story on numerous occasions, including in an interview
(37:49):
with Rolling Stone a couple years later. I think that
came out in two thousand and six, and in that
version he claimed that he started smoking as a teenager
rather than at eleven. I don't know why he changed
that detail. He probably thought it was funnier that he
started working his later. I don't know, Like it's.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
Interesting when you see his genesis of how he tells
stories in person. Yeah, it's always because he thinks he's
getting a funnier punch line out of it.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:13):
Something. It wasn't cigarettes that caused Vonnegut's death. It was
simply a fall. He'd fallen in his home in two
thousand and seven, sustained brain injuries, and he died on
April eleventh, two thousand and seven.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
After his death, a renewed demand for his work led
to several new releases. In two thousand and eight, Armageddon
in Retrospect was released by his son Mark, and this
brings together both fiction and non fiction short form pieces
that examined the human propensity for war.
Speaker 3 (38:42):
Two more books of previously unpublished short fiction came out
in the next several years. The first was Look at
the Birdie in two thousand and nine, and the second
was while Mortal's Sleep released two years later.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
His final writing, which was an unfinished novel and only
a very small portion of one that he was working
on when he died, was published in twenty twelve in
a book that also included another novella that had never
been published. These two works together were titled We Are
What We Pretend to be.
Speaker 3 (39:10):
Pertinent to where we are today. Vonnegut often said he
trusted his writing best when he sounded like a person
from Indianapolis. He also said of his body of work quote,
if you were to bother to read my books to
behave as educated persons would, you'd learn that they're not
sexy and do not argue in favor of wildness of
(39:30):
any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more
responsible than they often are.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
And that is Kurt Vonnegut, who we both clearly love. Yeah,
and I'd still get choked up over. Thank you once
again to Brian Young for doing that episode with me.
It was really really lovely to have him by my
side for it. He loves Kurt Vonneguet in much the
same way I do, and he is a wealth of
knowledge about him, so it was a perfect fit.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
Do you have any listener mail before we wrap up.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
No, all right, I will even say, since that was
kind of a juicy live show, I'm going to forego
listener mail this time around, and we will have some
next time around, I promise. Alrighty. If you would like
to write to the show though in the meantime so
you could potentially be a future listener mail, you can
(40:23):
do that at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You
can also subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app
or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (40:37):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, we have an
episode that you're not in.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
I know it was you asked me about whether it
would be okay to do this, and I was like absolutely,
even before you told me that the subject was Kurt Vonnegut,
And when you said that, I was like, I already
was on board with the idea of, you know, a
live episode with a guest host, because I will not
be at the event. But now that you've said Kurt
(00:41):
Vonnegut and that Brian Young is going to be the
co host, I am excited about it.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Yeah. Both Brian and I were penniless and guests Indiana
Comic Con, and we talked a lot about Star Wars
things while we were there, but it occurred to us.
I think it was actually Brian's idea that kirv Vonneguet
is from Indianapolis and this kind of makes a lot
of sense, and so I was like, great, let's do that,
(01:07):
and we did. We also went to the Kur Vonneguet
Museum that morning before the show. Which was very moving
and wonderful. We'll talk about all that on behind the scenes.
Listen spoiler alert. I cried three times doing this episode.
Now is one of those times in life when I
really wish we had Kurt, and I'm also really glad
he's gone because I don't think he would enjoy the
(01:27):
world we're living in right now. But I'm really grateful
to Brian Young, who has been on our show before.
He was our first guest at a live show, so
this kind of felt very natural. And thank you to
Indian a Comic Con as well for having us. There's
also a little heads up. There's what I didn't even
think of as a swear because my family didn't growing up,
(01:49):
but Tracy Flagg did as a swear because her family
would have, which was one of those great moments of like, oh,
how different worlds exist in the every day. It's pretty minor.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
If you are a Kurt Vonnegut van, you probably already
know what the swear is.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Yeah, it's from one of his famous quotes. It invokes
a deity, that's all. It's not not anything not anything big.
But if you are a parent or a teacher, you
may want to preview and make sure you know you're
cool with it or that you have a plan in
place to address that language with your kids.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Yeah, and we'll also say that Kurt Vonnegut lived through
some pretty tough stuff. There are some real difficult moments
in this episode.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Yeah, he for all his wit, that was clearly part
of how he coped with a lot of rough times
in his life. And be aware there is discussion not
only of some pretty horrific wartime events, but there are
also multiple discussions of suicide in it as well as
just incredible horrible loss. So just be aware of all
(02:55):
of that going in worthwhile in my opinion, to talk
about Kurt Vonnegut, who I will wax Rapsodic about on Friday. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
And I'm not Tracy V.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Wilson.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
I'm Brian Young.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
Yeah. Brian is a longtime friend of the show. He
was on our first live show ever ever about talking
about his book about Presidential Assassination for children, which is
pretty spectacular and I recommend you check it out if
it's still available.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
It is, you can still get a children's illustrated History
of Presidential Assassination online or signed copies on my website
at swankmotron dot com.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Perfect, yeah, perfect, it is charming as I'll get out
so today because we're here in Indiana and in Indianapolis specifically,
Brian actually mentioned the idea of like, this is really
the time to talk about Kurt Vonnegut, who is someone
both he and I love and have bonded over over
the years, and he is, of course, you know, the
(03:54):
son of the city, as it were, we both grew
up with him. I think often when you hear people
talk about Vonnegutt and where they discovered him, it's usually
in their teenage years when they encounter an author, either
because it's recommended in school or because they just stumble
on it and it's finally an adult in the literature
(04:17):
space who is not feeding them bowl in any way.
It's very straightforward, and it is in some ways very
subversive in a way that's very appealing to teenagers. And
then if you're like me, you never mature and you
stick with it the whole time. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
Vonniguet was definitely someone I encountered as a teenager and
really latched onto. I found him in a banned books
club in high school, which seems so like you wouldn't
be able to get away with that today the way
you could, you know, twenty five more than twenty five
years sort of quaint now. And I've just always been
(04:55):
in love with his work, and for a long time
I was reading his entire life I library like every year,
and now revisiting it always feels like revisiting an old friend.
And I come to a lot of conventions here in Indiana,
Indianapolis specifically, and I always take that visit to the
Vonnegut Museum, which is within walking distance, And in fact,
(05:17):
Holly and I went this morning and took a visit
there and spent way too much to the museum.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Functionable amount of money in the museum shop chests.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
Yeah, I love. My favorite are the Kilgore Trout covers
that they have on the postcards. They're so lurid and ridiculous.
I love them.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Yeah. So, without further ado, we are going to talk
about this amazing writer who we all love and his
life story. So, Brian, you want to kick it off,
I would love to so.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
Vonnagut was born on November eleventh, nineteen twenty two, in Indianapolis, Indiana.
His father Kurt Senior was an architect, and the German
American Vonnegut family had been prosperous. Their fortunes shift though
when Kurt Junior was a teenager, as the Great Depression
played out, architecture projects were few and far between, and
the other family businesses faltered. The Vonneguts had sent Kurt
(06:10):
Junior's older brother and sister to private schools, but for him,
public school was the only option. His mother, Edith, who'd
been a high society debutante from a very wealthy family,
was deeply dismayed by their loss of financial stability, so
she tried to supplement the family's income by writing short stories,
mostly romances. Sadly that effort was for not as no
(06:32):
one was willing to buy them.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Yeah, Kurt, Kurt Junior, that is, wrote for the high
school newspaper, and he actually credited that time as really
teaching him the basics of journalism and how to convey
stories and ideas very quickly and succinctly and incredibly clearly.
Ironically thinks that he would be kind of dinged for
later in life as not being florid enough as a writer.
(06:56):
But that's why I think young audiences really gravitate to him.
After high school, Vonneguet enrolled at Cornell University in Ithaca,
New York. In what may seem like a bit of
a surprising move, he majored in biochemistry. That was a
bad choice for him. He did not excel.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
In nineteen forty three, Vonnegutt left school to enlist in
the Army. He'd been struggling at school. His journalism efforts
at the Cornell Sun were good, though they often caused controversy.
He ran criticism of the ROTC, of which he was
a member, which got him kicked out. He also wrote
articles suggesting that the school paper, in publishing patriotic writing,
(07:36):
was sharing propaganda. Then when he started school in his
junior year, as the editor of the Sun, he ran
a headline welcoming the classes of forty four and two thirds,
forty five and a fourth or whatever. The US had
joined the war in December nineteen forty one, following the
bombing of Pearl Harbor, and Vonnigut was making a nod
to the fact that many of his classmates were likely
(07:58):
to be called into service and die before finishing their
college careers. He got pneumonia in late nineteen forty two,
and that gave him a good excuse to leave school,
and so he did, and then he enlisted.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
And he went to Fort Bragg for training. He brought
his typewriter with him to basic training, but it was stolen.
He was really good with weapons, so he got some
artillery training. But his aptitude tests got him more attention
because he was clearly very smart, and he was selected
to enter a mechanical engineering program that was supposed to
end up with him getting a degree and an officer's commission.
(08:35):
His grades in this program were kind of mixed, but
ultimately that did not matter because the program was shut
down before he could finish.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
Kurt Junior decided to visit his parents in their new
place for Mother's Day nineteen forty four, and it was
a trip that would really change the family forever. Kurt Senior,
thanks to the war, had a steady income again working
in materials at various bases and facilities, and he designed
a new home from So and Edith and this home
in a quaint development in Marion County, Indiana. It was
(09:05):
contemporary and smaller than their previous home, but Edith did
not love it. It felt small and not just in size.
She was keenly aware of how her fortunes in life
had changed, going from an aristocratic it girl in Europe
to an unknown Midwestern housewife, and she was also very
unhappy about her son's choice to join the service.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
On Mother's Day morning, during that visit, Edith was found
dead by Kurt's sister, Alice, who then went and got Kurt.
Edith had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. This was
not recorded officially as an intentional act. The coroner wrote
it up as an accident to avoid the stigma that
naturally goes along with death by suicide, but the family knew,
(09:50):
although there have over the years been some debates over
whether or not they were going to acknowledge this or not,
and Kurt Sr. Actually asked the paper to run his
wife's obituary.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
This death really became a focal point for Vonnegut in
his writing and in his personal interactions. Biographer Charles J.
Shields noted of the writer, for the rest of his life,
he directed people's attention to the manner of his mother's death,
as if it were something they should know about him.
In Vonnegut's books, it's fairly easy to trace a line
(10:23):
from his own family tragedy to the way he writes
about mother's mothers occupy a strange narrative space for him
and tend to always be grappling with mental health issues.
He makes what certainly seems to be a reference to
his own mother's death in his nineteen seventy three book
Breakfast of Champions. This book, which we'll talk more about
in a moment, is told from the point of view
(10:44):
kil Or Trout, who's often described as being Vonnegut's fictional
alter ego, and in chapter seventeen, Kilbort Trout notes of
another character. Listen, Bunny's mother and mother were different sorts
of human beings, but they were both beautiful in exotic ways,
and they both boiled over with chaotic talk about love
and peace and wars and evil and desperation of better
(11:05):
days coming by and by, of worse days coming by
and by. And both our mothers committed suicide. Bunny's mother
ate Durino and my mother ate sleeping pills, which wasn't
nearly as horrible.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Vonnegut actually had very little time to mourn his mother.
The beaches of Normandy were stormed just a few weeks
after her death, and Kurt was called to active duty
shortly thereafter. Before he left, he proposed to his high
school sweetheart, who did not really give him any kind
of reply. That was Jane, and then that autumn he
was on a ship headed to Belgium. After two weeks
(11:39):
in Cheltenham, England, he and his Division one hundred and
sixth traveled across the English Channel by boat to La
Havre and then by truck into Belgium, where they were
brought to replace the second division that had been holding
the line against Germany's push.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
Almost immediately, Vonnegut's division was subjected to the opening of
Hitler's Operation herbs Nabel or Operation Autumn Mist, which targeted
the Allies in Luxembourg and eastern Belgium. There was a
near constant mirage of fire. It was during this time
that Vonnegut realized, to his disillusionment, that the scouting reconnaissance
(12:15):
squad he was a part of was really just being
thrown into areas that might contain mines or hidden Nazi strongholds,
so they were totally expendable. During one of these scouting missions,
on December nineteenth, he was taken as a prisoner of
war He and his fellow prisoners walked for two days
under German guards until they were loaded into a box car,
(12:35):
which then traveled for another two days. It was one
of several box cars carrying POWs.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
As they moved deeper and deeper into German territory. The
box car and the others that it was connected to
were caught up in Allied bombing. The first instance of
this was at Limburg, which was heavily bombed by the
Allies right after the box car that Vonnegut and his
fellow soldiers were in was disco conted from its engine
and left behind. There were scores of fatalities among the
(13:05):
POWs as some fled the cars, only to run right
into the Allies line of fire. Over the next several days,
Vonnegut's group was moved along until finally reaching Muhlberg, where
they were processed.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
The entire experience was horror after horror. Many of the
men were ill by this time, suffering from dysentery, malnourishment,
and frostbite. They don't witnessed more death in just a
few days than they can really even fathom, and many
were near death when they arrived at Muhlberg. But when
Vonnegut was given a postcard to send home, he told
his family his life is not bad at all and
(13:49):
asked them to send cigarettes. Meanwhile, his family had been
told Kurt Junior was Mia, and they presumed the worst.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Vonnegut was selected to be part of a work that
was going to be sent to Dresden to clear the
streets of rubble and do various factory work. Vonnegut was
also given the job of translator and foreman in this group,
as he spoke enough German to do so. These men
were housed in a converted slaughterhouse, and at one point
Vonnegut was actually court martialed by the Germans for insulting
(14:21):
a Nazi officer after he had abused a six pow.
Vonnegut was beaten and his foreman role was immediately taken away.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
If you read his letter home that he wrote, he
talked about he was overheard telling the foreman what he'd
like to do to him in German.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Yes, yeah, it was.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
It was not pleasant.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
No.
Speaker 3 (14:44):
So on the night of February thirteenth, nineteen forty five,
the Allies began their bombing of Dresden. The POWs housed
in the slaughterhouse were moved into a basement as the
bombing destroyed the city in the morning. The one hundred
and fifty men one was a part of We're in
an odd situation. They'd survived, but much of Dresden had not,
(15:07):
and tens of thousands of casualties littered the streets of
the destroyed city. Vonnegut's work crew was tasked with clearing
the dead and cleaning up the city, salvaging what they could.
It was made clear that if anyone took anything for themselves,
they would be shot, so Vonnegut and his fellow POW's
had to dig graves and in some cases stack bodies
(15:27):
and set them ablaze.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
As the war came to a close in the spring,
Vonnegut and his fellow POWs were eventually abandoned by their
German captors and left to sort of fend for themselves.
Kurt and several others were eventually traded for Soviet prisoners
that the Allies had captured, and Vonnegut, at this point,
like all of the men who had been captured, was
in really rough shape, not just mentally, but also he
(15:53):
was physically a mess. He was malnourished, and he was sickly,
but he did make it home. He got through the
forms that established him as no longer missing an action,
which was apparently a little bit of an ordeal, and
he was promoted to corporal. He also received a purple heart,
which sort of funnily enough, was for frostbite. And it's
just funny, given all of the things that he lived through,
(16:14):
that that's what he got his purple heart for.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
You can go see it at the museum. They have
it on display at the museum.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
He had started writing to his high school sweetheart Jane
again as soon as he was back in the US.
Jane had dated other people when the two of them
went to different colleges, and she was still sort of
playing the field. In his letters, Kurt was so cautious
to not assume that Jane was unmarried or single or
available to him, but she was, and they met up
(16:43):
in Washington, where Jane was living, and then they both
just by happenstance of scheduling, traveled to Indianapolis at the
same time, and once they were back home, Kurt proposed again,
and at that point the two were engaged.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Kurt always claimed that his war experience hadn't been that bad.
He was fine that family and friends shouldn't get emotional
over it, but it did eventually come out as writing.
Of course. In the interviews, his daughter said that they
never knew what he'd been through until they read Slaughterhouse Five.
He was only twenty two when he returned home.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Yeah, that's a lot to process if you think about it, right.
Your prefrontal cortex is not finished forming when you're in
your early twenties, and he had gone through an extraordinary
amount of trauma. But then in the post war nineteen forties,
Vonnegut tried to move on. He focused on his future
with Jane. They were married on September fourteenth, nineteen forty five,
(17:36):
and from the moment they became a married couple, Jane
really became the driving force of his writing career. She
was older than he was by a couple of years,
and she had finished college and she had a job
in the Office of Strategic Services before she accepted Kurt's proposal,
because women generally resigned from their work once they were
getting married, and that's what she did. Kurt was not
(17:59):
always the warmest spouse, but Jane supported him, and she
encouraged him to read more, starting with the Brothers Karamazov,
which she presented him during their honeymoon. The two of
them discussed literature and that was a big part of
their relationship, and while Kurt finished out his time in
the service, she also urged him to write, and he
would send all of the work that he did back
(18:21):
home and let her edit it. And he was very,
very deferential to her. He was like, do whatever you
want with it. You know better than I do.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
The two of them also applied to the University of
Chicago and both were accepted. Kurt's school was paid for
by the GI bill and he was already writing short
stories with Jane's encouragement, but he also signed on for
an anthropology program that would take him right through to
a master's degree. The following year, Jane got pregnant dropped
out of her fellowship program. Vonnie get dropped out of
(18:51):
his anthropology program that summer after his thesis proposal was rejected,
and their son Mark arrived on May eleventh, nineteen forty seven.
His thesis proposal was really fascinating and I'm still mad
that they rejected it. His thesis for anthropology was that
he thought that the shapes of stories were as equally
(19:12):
interesting as the shards of pottery of any civilization. And
he created a method where you could chart the shape
of culture's stories. And I teach a lot of writing
classes and I use that a lot to help people
visualize how stories work. But he didn't end up getting
his degree until they accepted Cat's Cradle as his thesis
(19:33):
years years and years later.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Yeah. After he left his program, he wrote for the
Chicago City News Bureau, which is something that he had
actually started while he was still in school, and he
started to think finally about getting his fiction published and
really focus on it. Money was really tight, though, and
soon it became very apparent that he was going to
need something dependable to bring in money to support Jane
(19:57):
and they're soon to be born son. So he turned
to his brother, Bernard, who was extremely famous in science circles.
He was an accomplished atmospheric and environmental scientist and he
worked with General Electric. Bernard was able to get Kurt
a job as a publicist with the company. There's actually
a pretty interesting story here where during the interview, the
(20:19):
person that Kurt was interviewing with read on his application
in his resume that he had been in Dresden during
the bombing, and the man just looked up and said,
I'm sorry, I was one of those bombers, and he
got the job on the spot. I'm a little choked
up that job. Though he did not like it. He
(20:41):
had a moral issue with PR work, which I love,
because he just thought it was inherently deceitful and that
was not something he really liked. He also thought that
the field of science, which he had been excited to
write about the things that people were doing a ge
because a lot of scientists got to just kind of experiment,
(21:01):
was not being handled in a responsible way and it
wasn't necessarily for the betterment of mankind.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
And its that discomfort with PR with GE that really
led him to pursue fiction writing as his full time job.
He started producing short stories and submitting them to publishers,
but there were a lot of rejections. Still, Jane was
his champion the whole time, and even wrote to publishers
herself to promote his work. The late nineteen forties were
(21:28):
very lean times, and then finally, not long after the
birth of their daughter Edith, in nineteen fifty, Collier's Weekly
published his short story report on the Barnhouse effect, but
a college professor who develops a sort of telekinesis and
is used by the government as a weapon. The story
is told by one of Professor Barnhouse's former students. Colliers
(21:48):
and other magazines needed short stories. They were very popular
with readers in the era before television became ubiquitous, so
he soon had a lot more work and started to
make good money. He'd promised himself that after he sold
five stories, he'd quit his GE job, which he did.
He and Jane then moved to Cape Cod in nineteen
fifty one.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Yeah, he had this moment where he marveled that in
the course of just a couple months he had made
more money as a writer than he would make in
an entire year at GE. So he felt really bolstered
by his decision.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
There was this interesting moment too, where he also felt
some shame because some of those were like he was
writing stuff for like Ladies home Journal, like I know
the one story that sort of based in his life,
Long Walk to Forever, Yeah, which was terrific. It's a
great story, and it's about that time he went back
home to sort of talk to Jane before he shipped
(22:40):
off to the war. He felt a lot shame about
that story and it being like that he'd lived a
moment in his life that would be in a lady's
glossy magazine. But it paid him well.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Yeah, and Vonnegutt continued to turn out fiction and make
really good money for the first time in his life.
He published his first novel, Player Piano, in nineteen fifty two,
and this was a book that was informed by his
time at GE. It was something he could not have
written and published while he was there, or he would
have gotten fired. The plot is set in a mechanized
society where most human labor has been replaced by machines,
(23:14):
and society has split into the out of work laboring
class and the overseeing engineers, and it examines, among other things,
what happens to people when they have no immediate use
and no contribution of value to society. He got labeled
because of this as a science fiction writer, but that
was not a pigeonhole he especially liked, just because while
(23:37):
he had nothing against science fiction, he knew that other
people did not take it seriously as literature.
Speaker 3 (23:42):
So there was a seven year gap between Claire Piano
and Vonnagut's second novel, The Sirens of Titan, which came
out in nineteen fifty nine, and during those seven years
there were a lot of changes in Vonnagautt's life. First,
his daughter, Nanette, was born in nineteen fifty four, than
his father, Kurt's died in the autumn of nineteen fifty seven,
(24:02):
And then in nineteen fifty eight, Kurt's sister, Alice, to
whom he was extremely close, was diagnosed with late stage
breast cancer. While she was in the hospital, her husband
Jim died suddenly in a train accident. Then, while the
family tried to shield Alice from this news, she found out.
Though there's a couple of different accounts about how she
(24:23):
found out. One is that a nurse gave her a
newspaper which mentioned the accident, and then the other is
that the family friend accidentally blurted it out. But regardless,
Alice was heartbroken, and she died two days after learning
about her husband's death. Kurt later said of his sister, quote,
she was the person I'd always written for. She was
(24:44):
the secret of whatever artistic unity I'd ever achieved. He'd
promised Alice that he would keep her four sons together,
and he moved all of them into the house with him,
Jane and their three kids. It became a wild and
boisterous home and the kids, as adults would note, the
Kurt was often grouchy with them and a little scary
at times, but he could be fun, but he was moody.
(25:08):
Jane was the one who kept it all together and
served as a primary caretaker for their huge crew.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Seven Kids is a lot of kids. Sirens of Titan,
which examines space and time travel, free will, and what
it means to try to outrun your destiny, was really
pretty well received by critics. It was a Hugo Award
finalist for nineteen sixty His follow up in nineteen sixty
one was his book Mother Night. And this is a
(25:35):
step away from science fiction, which he was becoming known for,
so it's a little risky. This is a fictional memoir
written by a Nazi propagandist while he awaits his trial
for war crimes. There's a spy twist in the work.
I almost don't want to say more because it's a
really fun narrative as it unfolds. And this story would
eventually be adapted into stage and screen, Like a lot
(25:57):
of Vonaget's subsequent work, including the nineteen ninety six films
starring Nick Nolty, which vonni Gett has a really beautiful
cameo in Is.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
Really Good To See It. Nineteen sixty three saw the
release of Cat's Cradle, and this was inspired by the
Lab at ge where scientists had been allowed to experiment
for the sake of pure science. There's a frequently told
(26:27):
story that one of the scientists there suggested the idea
of water that solidified at room temperature to author H. G.
Wells when he visited the lab, but Wells never used
the idea. Vonnie get decided it was okay to use
it himself. He uses it as the concept of ice
nine to examine the ways that science can be weaponized.
(26:49):
He also introduced a fictional religion in the book called Bocanonism,
which involved a number of absurd practices. Some of the
vocabulary of this faux religion would also be used a
decade later to name a collection of short story writings
by Vonnegut called Wampeters, Foma, and Grand Falloons.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
The novel God Bless You, Mister Rosewater was released in
nineteen sixty five, and it's in this book that Vonnegutt
introduces what has become known as his fictional alter ego,
Kilgore Trout. The name was a play on the name
of the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon. Trout appeared in
numerous books after this time. While he changed personality a
(27:27):
little bit and details give from book to book, he
was always a writer. And in Rosewater, Vonnegut wrote one
of his oftend quotes, which has spoken, this also gets
me choked up. I'm very weepy about kir Vonnagut this week,
you guys. This also gets me choked up. And it's
spoken in the book to a pair of infants by
(27:48):
the titular character, mister Rosewater, and he says, hello, babies,
welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold
in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded on
the outside. Babies, you've got one hundred years here. There's
only one rule that I know of babies, God damn it,
you gotta be kind.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
After Rosewater, Vonneguant, who needed more money than his books
were making, he took a job teaching at the Iowa
Writers Workshop. This turned out to be a pivotal move
in his life. For the first time. He wasn't a
solitary writer typing out his books at home. He was
in the middle of a community of fellow writers, many
of whom would become lifelong friends. He published a collection
(28:27):
of short fiction titled Welcome to the Monkey House in
nineteen sixty eight, but the project he'd been working on
since his return from the war, finally after many, many,
many many drafts, was published as a result of the
work he did on it while in Iowa.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Yeah, the outcome of Iowa is also one of those
kind of funny things in his life. Because he didn't
want to take a teaching job. He thought that was
like admitting defeat as a writer. But it turned out
to be really, really good for him, and that's why.
In nineteen sixty nine he published slaughter House Five, or
The Children Crusade, which took his already impressive status in
(29:03):
contemporary fiction to an absolutely new level. It was a
New York Times bestseller, it won a National Book Award
for Fiction, and it also made Kurt Vonneguet very famous,
very quickly.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
Slaughterhouse Five was incredibly popular, but it was also incredibly
personal for Vonnegut. It's very clearly Vonnegult working through his
experiences in World War II. The narrative jumps around through
time and involves an alien race from the planet Charles Falmador,
but in its heart, it's Vonnaguet sharing his experiences in Dresden.
Even his main character, Billy Pilgrim, who he describes as
(29:37):
unstuck in time, is born the same year as Vonnegut
nineteen twenty two. He's also captured by the Germans in
World War two and survives the bombing of Dresden. Vonnegut's
nonlinear storytelling, which has Billy Pilgrim jumping from moment to
moment in his life, gives away all the details that
would normally be in a novel's final chapters. In the
early pages of the book. The narratives message is anti war,
(29:59):
and many of the characters are inspired by people he
knew during his time in service. All of the things
he could never talk about with family and friends, including
the trauma he felt, came out in the book. He
even has an appearance in the book. He's in the
box cars and is watching some of these horrors play out,
and it's interesting reading the book and seeing him watch
(30:22):
all of these horrors play out in third person, almost
like he's disassociating out of it. Well, Vonaguein always insisted
he was fine as these events were playing out in
his actual life. Billy's story shows how deeply they haunted
him decades later.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
Yeah, it's interesting. There's a moment in a documentary about
him where he talks about trying to share some of it,
like he had written some of it in his letter home,
but he tries to tell his family about one of
the things that happened, and he couldn't finish, and he
was like, I never talked about it again. Slaughterhouse five,
of course, made Vonneguet a critical and media darling and
(30:56):
a household name. There's a Great Life magazine feature on
him and his family. It's this full spread with pictures,
and it includes photos of his family and their home
and their beautiful pictures. Some of them are really really fun.
But all of that fame, ultimately, as fame often does,
led to his life blowing up. He moved from Cape
(31:16):
Cod to New York. The family stayed in Cape Cod,
and he and Jane split up. They had some fundamental differences,
including religion, that had come into sharp focus once their
kids were grown. And moved out, but he had also
met someone else. On the heels of his critically acclaimed novel,
Vonnaguet wrote a play titled Happy Birthday One to June,
(31:37):
and it was released in nineteen seventy one, and while
that play was in production, photographer Jill Krementz was assigned
to take pictures of him.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
The end of Jane and Kurt's marriage was somewhat unusual.
They stayed in touch. Jane remained, according to her children,
very proud of Kurt's accomplishments and accolades. While she could
have easily become bitter over how played out, she seemed
to accept it move on, eventually remarrying.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Slaughterhouse five was optioned for film rights very soon after
its release because of its popularity, and the movie version
came out in nineteen seventy two, starring Michael Sachs as
Billy Pilgrim. The follow up to Slaughterhouse Five was greeted
with less enthusiasm. His nineteen seventy three book Breakfast of
Champions or Goodbye Blue Monday also has roots in Vonnaget's
(32:26):
real life, as he examined what it is to be
famous as a writer. In a world where cultural norms
and values are rapidly shifting. Kil Gore Trout is a
main character in this book, and it also echoes some
of his earlier themes of free will and social inequity.
Vonnegut also refers to himself in this book as a
(32:47):
writer narrator, sharing with the reader why he's doing some
of the things he's doing with the story. This was,
despite its critical reception, actually a bestseller because at this
point the public adore Vonna Guet, but some of the
critics were really really harsh in the way they received it.
Speaker 3 (33:05):
Slapstick or Lonesome No More was released in nineteen seventy six.
He dedicated the book to Laurel and Hardy, two men
that he felt had taught him that laughter was okay
even when things were tough those Slaughterhouse five is very
much considered to be as loose biography. He states in
the opening of Slapstick quote, this is the closest I'll
ever come to writing an autobiography. It's an autobiography of
(33:27):
his main character, doctor Wilbert Daffodil eleven Swain. Swain has
a sister, Eliza, and the siblings have been cut off
from the world because they are, according to Swain's account,
hideously ugly, but they're also uniquely powerful as a duo,
and they wish to help people form extended families to
eradicate loneliness. Critics didn't like it, and to be honest,
(33:48):
Vonnegaue did neither. In his book Palm Sunday, he sort
of gives as signs letter grades to all of his books,
and this is the only one he gave an F two.
And the movie adaptation that Jerry Lewis made is probably
one of the worst movies. I've ever seen it.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
My entire life.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
If you can find it, I had to buy a
bootleg from Australia and then and then make my computer
think it was Australian to watch it. It was a
big rigamarole because I couldn't find it in the US
at all.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
That's the universe telling you not to watch that film.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
That's actually you are not the first person who told
me that. But if you can find it, watch it
because it is it is a horror show.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
Watch it because it's so bad. In nineteen seventy nine,
Kurt married Jill and they adopted an infant daughter named
Lily together and That pair stayed together for the rest
of Kirk Vonaget's life, although like any long term marriage,
it was not always smooth. That same year, Kurt published
the book Jail Bird, a memoir of a man recently
released from prison. It did better than Slapstick did with critics,
(34:54):
but it also marked the start of a run of
books that were seen as kind of okay rather than
brilliant in most critics eyes. So this includes that group
of books that are have Dead Eye Dick in nineteen
eighty two, Galapagos in nineteen eighty five, and another fictional
autobiography in nineteen eighty seven titled Bluebeard.
Speaker 3 (35:14):
In his nineteen ninety book hocus Pocus, it offered up
the idea of a book crafted from scraps of paper
that had been found assembled according to the numbers written
on them by their author. Vonnegut said that he wanted
to prove that books could be written by anyone, and
so he alleged, and I've always wondered if this is
actually true, and he was handing like receipts and things
(35:37):
to his editor or not, but that anybody could write something,
and he was writing it on the backs of you know,
grocery bags and things like that, but who knows. It
features a recurrence of the trel Fammadorians. In nineteen ninety one,
Vonaget published a collection of essays titled Fates Worse Than Death,
and in it he confessed that he'd tried to die
(35:57):
by suicide in nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Vonnegut's nineteen ninety seven book Timequake invokes the trouble that
he often had when grappling with a narrative and makes
it essential to the plot of the book. The conceit
of the story is that in two thousand and one,
everybody gets thrust backwards ten years to nineteen ninety one,
and they have to repeat those years all over again,
but exactly as they played out the first time.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
The medicine to fix that book is great is just
Kilgore Trout running around yelling at people. You were sick,
but now you're well again. There's work to do. Vonnegut's
fiction offered political commentary often, but in two thousand and
five he produced a very overtly political book titled A
Man Without a Country, a Memoir of life in George W.
Bush's America. And this book was a surprise hit. I
(36:46):
don't know why. I was a surprise. I bought a copy,
and Vonnegut made the rounds of TV talk shows talking
about his disdain for the war in the Middle East.
He noted that when he saw images of young Iraqi
soldiers being marched with their hands on their heads as
prisoners of war or he recognized the exact thing he'd
lived through in Germany, and he felt a brotherhood with them.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
Even into his eighties, Bonneget retained his wonderful dark humor
In a lecture he gave it Case Western Reserve. In
two thousand and four, he made an announcement, here's the
big news. I am suing Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company
of Louisville, Kentucky for billions. I hope and you lawyers
here those in law school will be interested in this case.
(37:27):
I think I have never smoked anything but Paul Mall
since I was eleven years old. This is a Brown
and Williamson product on their package. For several years now.
They've promised to kill me, but I'm still alive eighty
one years old. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. He
told this story on numerous occasions, including in an interview
(37:49):
with Rolling Stone a couple years later. I think that
came out in two thousand and six, and in that
version he claimed that he started smoking as a teenager
rather than at eleven. I don't know why he changed
that detail. He probably thought it was funnier that he
started working his later. I don't know, Like it's.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
Interesting when you see his genesis of how he tells
stories in person. Yeah, it's always because he thinks he's
getting a funnier punch line out of it.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:13):
Something. It wasn't cigarettes that caused Vonnegut's death. It was
simply a fall. He'd fallen in his home in two
thousand and seven, sustained brain injuries, and he died on
April eleventh, two thousand and seven.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
After his death, a renewed demand for his work led
to several new releases. In two thousand and eight, Armageddon
in Retrospect was released by his son Mark, and this
brings together both fiction and non fiction short form pieces
that examined the human propensity for war.
Speaker 3 (38:42):
Two more books of previously unpublished short fiction came out
in the next several years. The first was Look at
the Birdie in two thousand and nine, and the second
was while Mortal's Sleep released two years later.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
His final writing, which was an unfinished novel and only
a very small portion of one that he was working
on when he died, was published in twenty twelve in
a book that also included another novella that had never
been published. These two works together were titled We Are
What We Pretend to be.
Speaker 3 (39:10):
Pertinent to where we are today. Vonnegut often said he
trusted his writing best when he sounded like a person
from Indianapolis. He also said of his body of work quote,
if you were to bother to read my books to
behave as educated persons would, you'd learn that they're not
sexy and do not argue in favor of wildness of
(39:30):
any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more
responsible than they often are.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
And that is Kurt Vonnegut, who we both clearly love. Yeah,
and I'd still get choked up over. Thank you once
again to Brian Young for doing that episode with me.
It was really really lovely to have him by my
side for it. He loves Kurt Vonneguet in much the
same way I do, and he is a wealth of
knowledge about him, so it was a perfect fit.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
Do you have any listener mail before we wrap up.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
No, all right, I will even say, since that was
kind of a juicy live show, I'm going to forego
listener mail this time around, and we will have some
next time around, I promise. Alrighty. If you would like
to write to the show though in the meantime so
you could potentially be a future listener mail, you can
(40:23):
do that at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You
can also subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app
or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (40:37):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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