Kurt Vonnegut, at age twenty-two, didn’t know what to do with himself. It was autumn, 1945. He was back from Europe, having survived the firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war, and he had convinced the love of his life, Jane Cox, to marry him. Beyond that, he had no positive ideas, only negatives. He wasn’t going to be a scientist—his bad grades at Cornell made that clear. He didn’t much like working in an office. At one point he had considered law school, but not for long. And he knew for sure he wasn’t going to be a writer. He wasn’t good enough.
He was still in the Army; after his wedding on September 1, 1945, he had been assigned to Fort Riley, Kansas, where he was working as a clerk-typist while awaiting his endlessly delayed discharge. It gave him plenty of time to ponder his future. “Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief; Doctor, Lawyer, Merchant, Chief,” he wrote to his new wife that October. He wrote to her often, and the twin themes of these letters are his uncertainty about his future career and his love for her. Copies of the first eleven letters are at Indiana University’s Lilly Library, but there are scores more, still in the Vonnegut family’s private possession. Jane Vonnegut was the family archivist, and while Kurt’s letters have been preserved, hers have not. But even hearing just Kurt’s side of the conversation gives a sense of how it went. Jane knew what her husband should do with his life: he should write. And she seems to have made it her first mission as his spouse to convince him of that.
It would be easy to view these letters as sorry proof of yet another woman shunted to history’s backstage. But their passionate and thoughtful character instructs us rather to re-see what we may have missed—to write Jane back into the story and acknowledge the clear-eyed ways in which she helped shape the Vonnegut narrative, both in life and on the page. Many of the ideas and themes that characterize Vonnegut were born in the conversation between Kurt and Jane, and throughout his career she remained a voice in the text. She was there: that was her.
Jane and Kurt had known each other since kindergarten, long enough that Kurt could tell Jane she was his “best friend,” a less clichéd declaration, perhaps, in 1943. He had confided in her for years—since they each left Indianapolis for college, he at Cornell, she at Swarthmore. His college letters laid out plans for house parties and weekend dates, bragged about his columns for the Cornell Sun, and occasionally made rosy predictions about his future as a biochemist. But his main subject was their mutual future. They would be married in 1945, he declared as a sophomore—he placed a bet on it with a fraternity brother. They would have a home with books and art and a well-stocked bar. They would have friends over for intellectual conversations. They would have seven kids. He traced sevens behind his paragraphs and signed most of his letters with seven X’s.
They both dreamed of writing. Together they fantasized about going to Europe or Mexico to work as news correspondents, going to Hollywood to work as screenwriters, building side-by-side studios in their back yard and pounding out masterpieces. “I wish I could write as well as you,” he told her in an undated, postwar letter. “Right now you’re the composer and I’m the musical instrument. We periodically swap roles.”
Vonnegut’s letters are delightful, full of love and passion and thought, sprinkled with creative typography and illustrations. He drew yin-yang symbols, representing how they were two halves of a single whole. Like Howard Campbell and his wife, Helga, in “Mother Night,” Kurt and Jane were a nation of two. “The world is divided into two groups: us, and the other people,” he told her. “We’ll win against any combination of powers.” Once married, the pair began figuring out how to run that nation, which was to be, they decided, a nation of love, arts, common decency, and peace. Jane drafted a household constitution: “We cannot and will not live in and be hogtied by a society which not only has not faith in the things we have faith in, but which reviles and damns that faith with practically every breath it draws.”
Kurt was more pragmatic, casting about for career ideas—teaching, reporting, opening a library with a bar. Jane had just one idea, and she pressed it with patient determination. Kurt would be a writer—a great one. Her conviction terrified him. “You scare me when you say that I am going to create the literature of 1945 onwards and upwards,” he wrote to her in August of that year. “Angel, will you stick by me if it goes backwards and downwards?” Jane brooked no such doubts. She suggested books for him to read—“The Brothers Karamazov,” “War and Peace”—and they discussed them by letter. She urged him to use his free time at Fort Riley to pound out stories. He worked from five-thirty to seven-thirty each night and mailed his efforts back to Indianapolis for Jane to edit and re-type.
“Any changes you see fit to make, please make,” he wrote of his fourth story, in October. “This is not a work of art but a grasping at money.” He saw his writing as supplemental to whatever he might end up doing. He would need a steady income to support seven kids. Besides, he might not have the talent. When Jane found an “author’s counsel” to send some of his stories to for comment, Kurt worried that he “might not think the stories are so God damned hot.” “Angel, please go over the crap I’ve written for spelling and punctuation,” he wrote. “I can picture you reading along and suddenly looking pained; running to get a pencil to hide from the world the astonishing gaps in the education of your loving husband.”
Her faith sometimes baffled him. “I can only hope, and this on your instigation, that I’ve not reached my full stature,” he wrote. “I’m willing to work like a dog to attain it.” And he did. But even as he slowly embraced her ambitions for himself, he remained determined to find another career. Either a newspaper or an advertising firm, he told her. He could write in his free time. “I get sick with fear that I’m a bluff, that I’m actually no damned good,” he confessed. “I don’t want to let you and your fantastic hopes down with a thump. I don’t want those fantastic hopes to take the place of love. I don’t want successes to become the consummation of that love, because failures will be the death of it.”
But in November, 1945, he wrote Jane in a fever of excitement. He had been reading the foreign affairs section of Newsweek when he realized something: “Everything that was reported by ace newsmen from the heart of Europe I found to be old stuff to me. . . . By Jesus, I was there.” That was me; I was there. That astonishing moment in “Slaughterhouse-Five” was the impetus for the entire book, first felt in 1945. His war experience was crying out to be written. He told her he was trying to remember every little thing that had happened to him. He would write about that. But one thing was clear: “I’LL NOT BE ABLE TO DO IT WITHOUT YOUR HELP.”
The next week, in a calmer mood, he articulated his new conviction. “Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief? Doctor, Lawyer, Merchant, Chief?” he wrote, reprising his old theme. “From your loving me I’ve drawn a measure of courage that never would have come to me otherwise. You’ve given me the courage to decide to be a writer. That much of my life has been decided. Regardless of my epitaph, to be a writer will have been my personal ultimate goal.”
Jane would continue to be the source of his confidence for the next twenty-five years. Many of the ideas and images for which he became known had their source in the couple’s mutual dialogue. “You ask me questions I like to answer,” he told her. In his letters to Jane he mused on the nature of time, on the dangers of science, on the existence or nonexistence of God. “The greatest man to ever live will be the one that invents the real God, and presents the World with a book of His teachings,” he wrote her in 1945. “A bible written in a Lunatic Asylum may be the answer.” It’s hard to imagine a better summary of Bokononism, the fictitious religion Vonnegut would go on to depict in “Cat’s Cradle.”
In “Timequake,” his semi-autobiographical last novel, published in 1997, Vonnegut recalls that Jane submitted a controversial thesis when she was at Swarthmore. It argued “that all that could be learned from history was that history itself was absolutely nonsensical, so study something else, like music.” He is, in essence, glossing the last line of “Slaughterhouse-Five,” where Billy Pilgrim wakes up to discover that the war has ended. He and his buddies wander outside into a springtime day. Birds are singing. “One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, ‘Poo-tee-weet?’ ” As Jane had argued, there’s no meaning to be made from a massacre, from death in industrial quantities. The only thing left to do is listen to the music of the birds. And, as Father Zossima recommends in “The Brothers Karamazov”—Jane’s favorite novel, and one of Kurt’s—to ask forgiveness of them.
As it turned out, Kurt’s failures were not the death of their love—but his successes were. At least, that’s what the chronology suggests. His departure in the middle of the nineteen-sixties for a teaching stint at the University of Iowa, where he completed “Slaughterhouse-Five,” was the beginning of the end of their marriage. It didn’t help that, since 1958, they had faced the organizational and financial challenges of a household packed to bursting. Kurt’s sister Alice and her husband, Jim Adams, had both died within a couple days of each other, and Kurt and Jane adopted their four boys. Added to their own three children, that made the seven Kurt always said they would have.
After “Slaughterhouse-Five” was published, in 1969, Kurt never came home to Jane for good. His next novel, “Breakfast of Champions,” got a mixed reaction from critics. Buffeted by bad reviews and caught up in the protracted and painful dissolution of his marriage, he next wrote “Slapstick,” a novel about a brother and sister who are ignorant and fumbling when separated, but geniuses when they touch. In the autobiographical preface, he declared that his own sister Alice was the person he had always written for: “She was the secret of whatever artistic unity I had ever achieved. She was the secret of my technique.” Lately, however, he could no longer feel her presence.
Alice was surely on his mind, but he was also writing about Jane. “One peculiar feature of our relationship,” he wrote Jane in 1943, “is that you are the one person in this world to whom I like to write. If ever I do write anything of length—good or bad—it will be written with you in mind.”
“Slapstick” follows what happens when siblings Wilbur and Eliza Swain are forcibly separated. Wilbur goes on to become President of the United States, while Eliza is locked away in an asylum. Coming into physical contact one last time, they write a manual on child-rearing.
Critics have largely taken Vonnegut at his word about “Slapstick,” believing the book to be about Alice. But Jane was his compatriot in child-rearing. She was his other half, the yin to his yang, without whom he feared he might never get it right again. In a 1943 letter to Jane explaining why he loved her, he described their union as a kind of outburst much like those of Wilbur and Eliza Swain.
Read as a valedictory rumination on the end of a marriage, on the loss that attends the collapse of any nation of two, “Slapstick” is a much better novel.
In “Timequake,” Kurt recalls that Jane, by then Jane Vonnegut Yarmolinsky, phoned him near the end of her fight with cancer. She asked him to tell her what would determine the moment of her death.
Why ask him? “She may have felt like a character in a book by me,” he muses. It seems like a heartless thing to say, especially when many critics—not to mention Vonnegut himself—have pointed out the paucity of fully realized female characters in his books. But, in another way, he was simply being honest. Marriage merges individuals into a unit. Kurt and Jane Vonnegut worked together to build his career, a fact he readily acknowledged upon their separation. “Jane has a strong feeling that we have both earned whatever we have, and she is right,” he wrote his agent Donald Farber in 1973.
Jane Vonnegut was in some sense a character invented by Kurt. But only in the sense that Kurt Vonnegut was, and equally, a character invented by Jane.
