Alice, one gathers, was a little crazy. So was Vonnegut’s mother, who eventually killed herself when the family was degentrified by the Crash of 1929. Like craziness, ‘suicide is a legacy’, says Vonnegut. ‘As a problem-solving device, it’s in the forefront of my mind all the time. It’s like walking along the edge of a cliff. I’m in the country and the pump stops. What’ll I do ? I know: I’ll kill myself. The roof is leaking. What’ll I do? I know: I’ll blow my brains out.’
Finally, along came Slaughterhouse-Five, and everything changed. Vonnegut had been trying to write about Dresden ever since his return from the war. He had filled 5,000 pages and thrown them away. But the book, when it came, was a cunning novella, synthesising all the elements of Vonnegut’s earlier work: fact, fantasy, ironic realism and comic SF. In my view, Slaughterhouse-Five will retain its status as a dazzling minor classic, as will two or three of its predecessors. But quality alone can hardly explain its spectacular popularity.
Perhaps the answer is, in some sense, demographic. Although the Vietnam war changed the mood of America, it produced no fiction to articulate that change. As a result the protest movements seized on and adopted two Second World War novels as their own, novels that expressed the absurdist tenor of the modern revulsion. Those novels were Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse-Five: they became articles of faith as well as milestones of fiction. Slaughterhouse-converts looked back into the early work and found that the same chord was struck again and again. Vonnegut had secured his following.
He had also lost his first wife, Jane: ‘It was a good marriage for a long time — and then it wasn’t.’ Jane Vonnegut ‘got’ religion; Kurt Vonnegut still had scepticism — as well as the strange new freedom of hemispheric adulation. He left Cape Cod and came to New York, setting up house with the well-known photographer Jill Krementz. By all accounts — and my own brief impressions tend to bear this out — Jill is the opposite of Jane, and.the opposite of Kurt too. She is glamorous, voluble and abrupt; and the Vonneguts are now talked of as a celebrity couple fairly active in society and fringe politics. When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life. The transformation is more or less inexorable.
After lunch we walked back to the Vonneguts’ house on the East Side of mid-town. We passed the mailbox where, on three separate occasions, Vonnegut had palely loitered in the early morning to retrieve letters written the night before — letters of denunciation, sent to hostile reviewers. ‘I don’t know what the law is in England,’ he said, ‘but over here the letters are still your property, and the mailman has to give them back.’
He laughed his wheezy, spluttering laugh. Vonnegut has chainsmoked powerful Pall Malls for forty-five years. He has given up twice. The first time, he blew up to eighteen stone. His second attempt, though, worked like a charm. He felt fine; he was ‘enormously happy and proud’. The only trouble was that no one could bear being near him. ‘I had stopped writing. I had also gone insane. So I started smoking again.’ He is shaggy, candid, reassuring. The big suede shoes on his big American feet are ponderous and pigeon-toed. His blazer is epically stained.
Like its proprietor, the Vonnegut town house stands tall and thin. The furnishings are anonymously handsome. In the basement, Jill runs her business; on the top floor, Kurt runs his. Up there he proceeds with his post-Slaughterhouse fiction — vague, wandering parables of American futility, full of nursery games (Breakfast of Champions contained dozens of childish drawings; Deadeye Dick is dotted with cookbook recipes), full of shrugs, twitches and repetitions, full of catchphrases, adages, baby-talk. So it goes. Poo-tee-weet? Peace. Skeedee wah. Bodey oh doh. And so on. And on and on —
Until 1969, Vonnegut was in his own words ‘a trafficker in climaxes and thrills and characterisation and wonderful dialogue and suspense and confrontations’. Now he is — what, exactly? The later Vonnegut novels are deserts, punctuated by the odd paradisal oasis. These good moments are, simply, reversions to his earlier manner, which is why it is more fun to re-read an old Vonnegut novel than it is to tackle a new one. I switched on the tape-recorder and backed myself into the Big Question. Of all the writers I have met, Vonnegut gives off the mildest prickle of amour propre. But no writer likes to be asked if he has lost his way.