And So it Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life by Charles J. Shields

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


""Humanists [...] try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife."
(From Kurt Vonnegut's address to the American Humanist Association on the occasion of being awarded Humanist of the Year, Portland, Oregon, 1992.)

Over a half a year ago I reviewed here John Tomedi's book Kurt Vonnegut , which did not exactly read like a biography but rather like a collection of serious, almost research-depth essays about the Vonnegut opus. Charles Shields' And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life (2011) is a biography proper, and an extremely detailed one. Reading the biography one feels that virtually every month of Kurt Vonnegut's adult life has been documented. Well-written and balanced this is a captivating read and my main complaint is the large volume: 424 pages plus 68 pages of notes and references.

Thanks to Mr. Shields' monumental work I now understand Kurt Vonnegut as a writer a little better and like him as a person perhaps a little less. Since Mr. Shields' research, so richly referenced, seems extremely meticulous and detailed, I have high degree of confidence in his observations. He had the opportunity to work with Mr. Vonnegut on the biography over correspondence for several months and had several in-person conversations with him shortly before the writer's death in 2007.

One does not usually summarize a biography in a review. I am skipping over all the well-known events from Vonnegut's life, such as his service in the US Army in Germany in the waning years of the World War II and the POW period spent in Dresden, housed in a slaughterhouse, during the February 1945 massive bombing by the Allied forces. Of the period 1947 - 1967, when Vonnegut worked as a journalist and a writer for general Electric while publishing several early novels, I found his participation in a creative writing program at the University of Iowa the most interesting.

Vonnegut's breakthrough began in 1967 and fully materialized in 1969 with the publication of his masterpiece - to me one of the best books ever written - Slaughterhouse-Five . The novel arrived in bookstores at the time of the growing anti-Vietnam-war sentiment and perfectly matched the zeitgeist. Mr. Vonnegut became a hippie icon, "and his novels became part of the printed currency of the youth movement." Yet the biographer also points out a growing dissonance between the young readers' image of Vonnegut and the actual persona of a clean-shaven and business-attired writer. The reader may also be interested in Mr. Shields' descriptions of the difficult business of selling a book, even if the book is a masterpiece.

I am unable to refrain from mentioning the famous incident of book burning in the U.S., this Great Land of Freedom of ours.

"[...] in 1973 in Drake, North Dakota [...] a sophomore complained that her English class was reading Slaughterhouse-Five and that it was profane. The school board went into special session and ordered the superintendent to burn all copies of the novel. On a freezing November day, three dozen were shoveled into the school furnace [...]"

The biographer goes into much detail about Kurt Vonnegut's personal life, in my view way too much. The long-lasting yet gradually more and more difficult marriage to Jane Cox is juxtaposed with Vonnegut's turbulent later-life union with Jill Krementz. The biographer does not hide his moral judgments.

I feel a little hurt by Mr. Shields' ridiculing Bluebeard as "an overlong, bumptious treatise on the value of Vonnegut's oeuvre as a writer," as I love the novel and consider it the second best in the oeuvre. But then, what do I know about literature.

Three and three quarter stars.



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