My Father the Novelist
Kurt Vonnegut
Widely considered one of America’s greatest novelists, Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1922. During World War II, Vonnegut served in the army and was captured soon after deployment in the Battle of the Bulge. His wartime experiences inspired or influenced many of his best-known works, including Player Piano, Mother Night, Cat’s Cradle, and Slaughterhouse-Five. From 1945 to 1971, he was married to Jane Marie Cox, and they had three biological children and four adopted children. In 1979, he married Jill Krementz, with whom he had one adopted daughter. He died in 2007 at age eighty-four.
had my father not been a writer, he would have been another broken vet. After World War II, he suffered from severe post-traumatic stress disorder. He used to tell me stories of being captured by Germans in the Battle of the Bulge and being beaten almost to death. He was only in his twenties when he witnessed the fire bombings of Dresden from the slaughterhouse where he and the other prisoners were kept. Being forced to clean the burnt bodies from a civilian bomb shelter was the defining experience of his life. He dealt with that pain by becoming a writer. But whereas so many of my father’s readers identified with the horrors of Dresden through the eyes of Billy Pilgrim, the time-traveling protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five, I knew that it was his own inner demons he was expelling onto the page.
I’m deeply grateful that he found his way, but, of course, a writer’s life is not without its challenges. My father had grown up fairly wealthy in Indianapolis. Before the Great Depression, his family had a cook and a servant. But the Depression wiped that all out, and when he came back from the war, he really struggled to make a living.
I grew up relatively poor, surrounded by a lot of arguments about money. My father worked hard writing and rewriting short stories, trying to get them published. He shuffled around the house mumbling. In fact, we all knew that the more he mumbled, the less he was writing and the better it was to steer clear of him. In the 1950s, the market for the type of short fiction my dad wrote was dying, so he was forced to do a lot of other things to make ends meet. He tried to sell cars for a while, but he was terrible at it. He taught English at Cape Cod Community College and at the Hopefield School, a school for troubled kids in Massachusetts. He took a job in advertising, and even had a one-day stint working as a staff writer for Sports Illustrated. (They wanted him to write a story about a racehorse who broke away and jumped over a fence. He sat at his desk all morning, trying to figure out how to write the story. Finally, he typed out, “The horse jumped over the fucking fence,” and quit.)
We were a big family. My two younger sisters were born in 1949 and 1954, and in 1958, my parents adopted my aunt’s four orphaned children after she died of cancer and her husband died a day later when his train plunged off a bridge into the water below. We lived in a sprawling house in Cape Cod. Parts of it were two hundred years old. There was a big barn and a beautiful pond, but the property was definitely run-down. I knew that my father was stressed out about money. You could sense it in the atmosphere. I think he felt resentful that having so many family obligations ate into his creative time. I know he struggled with the fact that he wasn’t as widely hailed as Hemingway or Fitzgerald. That wasn’t just ego but also about his ability to keep us all fed and housed. As his oldest son, I carried some of that worry, too. Once, he borrowed a hundred dollars from me from my paper route. I was happy to give it to him.
Around this time, in an effort to make some money, he developed a board game called General Headquarters. It was a game of strategy played on a chessboard. You had eight divisions of infantry, three artillery, one paratrooper, two armored artillery, and a heavy artillery. You had to focus two of your pieces on one of the opposition’s to kill it. My father—who was a tremendous draftsman (having inherited the skill from his father, an architect)—went through several rounds of designs before he was satisfied. Then he headed out to the barn to cut the game pieces out of wood on an old band saw and painstakingly painted them. At last, we were ready to play.
I often played board games with my father. But he never took it easy on me, nor I on him. My father had a temper, and he didn’t handle losing very well. Eventually my siblings got so tired of searching for pieces lost after he flung the board across the room, they asked me to not win so often. But I wasn’t inclined to throw a game and didn’t. Nevertheless, I became his guinea pig for General Headquarters. It was a really, really good game. And I loved playing it with him, working out the kinks. I felt like I was contributing to the family work. (I had the same delightful feeling when, as a teenager proofreading The Sirens of Titan, I found a quotation mark missing.)
Kurt with Mark (four months old) in Schenectady, New York, 1947
My dad’s idea was that the game would help World War II veterans like himself who wanted to show off their skills at strategy in a nonviolent way. It was a pacifist war game. Unfortunately, like so many of my father’s endeavors, this one failed, too. He tried to sell it to game companies like Milton Bradley and Saalfield Game Company. Milton Bradley never expressed interest in it. He was turned down by Saalfield, too; they thought it was too complicated. So he and I are the only two who have ever played the game. I still have the pieces, wrapped in a cloth in a drawer in my home—little totems of my father’s genius, born of necessity and trauma.