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“And So
It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life” by Charles J. Shields;
Henry Holt (544 pages, $30)
———
It’s
dangerous to begin a biography with what amounts to an
advertisement for oneself. “Someone else could cobble
together a so-so version of your life just by mining
what’s stored in library boxes and electronic files.
And it will happen soon, I think,” Charles J. Shields
writes in the introduction to “And So It Goes: Kurt
Vonnegut: A Life,” quoting a note he sent his
then-potential-subject in summer 2006. “But I’m the
guy for the job — for doing it right, that is. ... And
I’m a damn good researcher and writer.”
What we
have here is the literary equivalent of a come-on,
Shields buttering up Vonnegut, appealing to his vanity.
But it also raises elusive questions, such as: What is
the connection between biographer and biographee? And:
Who is all this really about? To his credit, Shields
removes himself from the book once he finishes the
introduction, but an afterimage lingers, like residue.
Vonnegut
died at 84 in April 2007; Shields met with him on only
two occasions, and then, in an irony worthy of the
author’s fiction, was left to “cobble together” a
version of the life. “After (Vonnegut’s) death,”
he writes, “I tried, repeatedly, by phone and mail, to
talk to (Jill) Krementz about her late husband, but I
never heard from her. In addition, Mark Vonnegut, acting
as co-executor of the Vonnegut estate, refused to allow
me to quote directly from two hundred and fifty-eight of
his father’s letters that I received from his
correspondents, most of them never before seen.”
For this
reason, perhaps, “And So It Goes” is a problematic
portrait, sketchy and pedantic by turns. Even without
Vonnegut, Shields has done a lot of research, but
although he loads the book with information, he never
develops an integrated overview. We see Vonnegut as a
child and as a high school student, see him go off to
World War II. We see him taken prisoner and surviving
the firebombing of Dresden, an experience that led to
his 1969 breakthrough novel, “Slaughterhouse-Five.”
We see the aftermath of his rise to fame in the late
1960s, the burden of his cult hero status, his
conviction in his later years that he had run out of
things to say.
Still, if
“And So It Goes” admirably avoids hagiography, it
also steers clear of any real sense of who Vonnegut was.
Shields makes noise early about his subject’s sense of
being overlooked, a feeling that went back to his
relationship with his parents and his older brother
Bernard, a noted physicist who died in 1997. During
their final meeting, Vonnegut asked Shields to look up
his name in Webster’s Dictionary; when Shields
couldn’t find it, he directed him to look up Jack
Kerouac.
The
implication is that Kerouac (or Norman Mailer or Nelson
Algren or Truman Capote, all of whom make cameos in
these pages) was taken more seriously than Vonnegut,
whose early work was ghettoized as science fiction,
published in slick magazines and cheap paperbacks. Yet
while it’s true that, as late as 1965, when he took a
job teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, “all of
his novels, except his most recent, ‘God Bless You,
Mr. Rosewater,’ were out of print,” by the early
1970s, Vonnegut had become a literary superstar.
That’s one of the many interesting narratives here,
and Shields’ inability to get at its nuances reveals a
blind spot at the biography’s core.
That
blind spot asserts itself most aggressively when it
comes to Vonnegut’s writing. Part of the intention, I
suppose, is to make this a critical biography;
certainly, Shields comments on each book, from the
author’s 1952 debut novel, “Player Piano,” to his
final effort, the essay collection “A Man Without a
Country,” published in 2005. Such accounts, though,
are largely vestigial, a bit of plot synopsis, a sense
of the reaction and a summary of themes. Nowhere does
Shields evoke the process of creation, except to say
that Vonnegut could be a terror when working — “With
the pressure on him to produce,” he writes of his
situation in the late 1950s, “Kurt labored in his
study, emerging occasionally for a sandwich in the
kitchen and to yell up the stairs, ‘What the hell are
you kids doing up there? Shut the hell up!’” — and
nowhere does he really dig into the implications of the
work.
His
account of “Slaughterhouse-Five” is instructive,
since this is a book Vonnegut carried with him for
years. He admits as much in the opening chapter of the
novel, citing a conversation with a friend’s wife, who
was angry that the book might glorify war. Shields also
refers to that conversation but leaves out one key line:
“Mary,” Vonnegut tells the woman, “I don’t think
this book of mine is ever going to be finished. I must
have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them
all away.” Here, we see the struggle to get the book
right, to become the writer he wanted to be.
This is
the key to the Vonnegut story — not just to the novel
but also to the life. Dresden transformed him,
highlighting the absurdity of a world where reason,
logic, faith were meaningless. How, in such a landscape,
to maintain hope, love, humor, meaning? How to get
along? When Shields writes that, for Vonnegut, “the
truth was useless ... What he needed to communicate was
the delirium created by his sense of chaos,” he gets
it exactly wrong. Truth is not useless; it’s
essential, especially in an amoral universe. That’s
the message Vonnegut was affirming: The only response to
chaos is to face it, to try to find a way to persevere.
At best,
this is a futile process, which is why as he got older,
Vonnegut became, in his own words, an “intolerably
unfunny” pessimist. His later novels (beginning with
1976’s “Slapstick”) fall flat under such a burden,
although his essays, first collected around this time in
“Wampeters, Foma&Granfalloons” (1974), grow
increasingly sharp. Shields misses that also, dismissing
the nonfiction as an afterthought.
He does
offer compelling images of Vonnegut’s home life —
his relationships with his kids and with the three
nephews he took in during the 1950s, after his sister
and her husband died — and his portrait of
Vonnegut’s first wife, Jane, is delightful, framing
her as the most sympathetic figure in the book. Yet even
here, he moves too quickly, tracing the complexities
without letting us see them for ourselves. The result is
a biography in which, Shields’ opening salvo to the
contrary, we never do get close enough to its
subject’s beating heart.
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