Chapter 9

Soul Growth

The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one’s soul to grow.104

Vonnegut espoused this belief many times in many ways, especially as he grew older. “Writing was a spiritual exercise for my father,” his son Mark says, “the only thing he really believed in.”105

Wine writer Allan Yarrow shares this Vonnegut anecdote annually on his blog for those aspiring to write—for little monetary recompense—about wine:

I was taking a fiction writing class one spring, and our teacher managed to convince a good friend of hers to substitute teach a bunch of us eager, bright-eyed college students for one class session. The first thing Kurt Vonnegut said to the twelve of us in his mellow raspy voice, as he slouched in the uncomfortable, dim room was “The novel is dead. No one reads fiction anymore. America has divested itself of its imagination. It’s over.”

In my memory, he said this and rambled on some more while chain-smoking cigarettes. While I’ve probably invented the cigarettes, I definitely remember his words though, and his answer to the timid question one of us managed to squeak out at the end of his rant.

“So, uh, are you saying that, um, we should just forget about this fiction writing thing?”

At this, Mr. Vonnegut (stubbing out his cigarette, of course) sat up a little straighter and got a bit of a glint in his eye, and said,

“Oh no. Don’t get the wrong idea here. You’ll never make a living at being a writer. Hell you may even die trying. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write. You should write for the same reasons you should take dancing lessons. For the same reason you should learn what fork to use at a fancy dinner. For the same reason you need to see the world. It’s about grace.”106

Vonnegut was addressing a beginners’ college class. To committed writers, he said the same kind of thing, with added weight:

Bill Gates says, “Wait till you can see what your computer can become.” But it’s you who should be doing the becoming, not the damn fool computer. What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do.107

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.108

Practicing an art as a “way to make the soul grow” may sound like a vague platitude. What does Vonnegut mean, “make the soul grow”? What is the “soul”?

It’s this, according to Webster’s:

*   the spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal

*   a person’s moral or emotional nature or sense of identity

It’s this, according to Vonnegut’s character in Breakfast of Champions, the painter Rabo Karabekian, in explaining his abstract expressionist painting, a huge green painting intersected by a single strip of day-glo orange tape:

It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal—the ‘I am’ to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us—in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us.… Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery [all italics mine].109

How does the soul—our awareness—grow? Here are some ways and means.

Vonnegut says in the preface to his first nonfiction collection:

I find scant evidence in my nonfiction that I have matured at all. I cannot find a single idea I hadn’t swiped from somebody else and enunciated plonkingly by the time I reached the seventh grade.

My adventures in the writing of fiction, however, have been far more surprising and amusing, to me, at least. I may actually have done some sort of growing up in that field. That would be nice, if that were so. It might prove that works of the imagination themselves have the power to create.

If a person with a demonstrably ordinary mind, like mine, will devote himself to giving birth to a work of the imagination, that work will in turn tempt and tease that ordinary mind into cleverness. A painter friend, James Brooks, told me last summer, “I put the first brush stroke on the canvas. After that, it is up to the canvas to do at least half the work.” The same might be said for writing paper and clay and film and vibrating air, and for all the other lifeless substances human beings have managed to turn into teachers and playmates.…

So I now believe that the only way in which Americans can rise above their ordinariness, can mature sufficiently to rescue themselves and to help rescue their planet, is through enthusiastic intimacy with works of their own imaginations. I am not especially satisfied with my own imaginative works, my fiction. I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth [all italics mine].110

Why should this be so? For simply setting down the truth on paper can be quite validating. Writing is a generosity, even to yourself. This happened, and you bear witness by writing it down. You think and observe this particular way, and by that specific presentation you assert your individuality and confirm the value of your experience.

But with fiction, a portal opens onto the mystery of the imagination and the unconscious—in other words, onto all that which may be hidden from awareness.

A professor at Hunter College, Louise DeSalvo, wrote a marvelous book called Writing as a Way of Healing. She asserts that not all writing leads to healing—freewriting doesn’t, or objective description of trauma, or venting—and lists specific methods that do. “Writing that describes traumatic or distressing events in detail and how we felt about these events then and feel about them now is the only kind of writing about trauma that clinically has been associated with improved health.”

DeSalvo’s prescription is precisely what often happens in the process of writing fiction.

Fiction requires the mask of character: that is, taking on an imagined character’s view. That lends to empathizing. “Give a man a mask,” Oscar Wilde said, “and he will tell the truth.”

Fiction begs for change. There’s no story if there’s no change. Without confrontation of someone else, of some issue, or of something within the character, and a shift in that confrontation, the story is static, stillborn.

Fiction is narrative. That is, it occurs over a period of time, even if only a short period of time. It lends itself to a “then” and “now.”

Of course, not all fiction adheres to the principles DeSalvo presents. And nonfiction certainly can, especially memoir: her book, after all, is addressed to people writing nonfiction. In whichever form, however, according to controlled clinical experiments, she says, “We must write in a way that links detailed descriptions of what happened with feelings—then and now—about what happened.”111

That’s what Kurt Vonnegut did in many of his novels.

We’ll look at two of them as examples of means to Vonnegut’s own soul growth, and perhaps inspiration for your own.

“One way to approach a story,” the writer Josephine Humphreys suggests, “is to think of it as the writer’s response to the most important question he can ask. The response is often complex, ambiguous and changeable, but the question is simple and almost always the same. The bigger the question, the riskier the fiction.”112

Listen to the question Vonnegut asks about the firebombing of Dresden during an interview soon after the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five:

The American and British air forces together killed 135,000 people in two hours. This is a world’s record.

We got through it, the Americans there, because we were quartered in the stockyards where it was wide and open and there was a meat locker three stories beneath the surface, the only decent shelter in the city. So we went down into the meat locker, and when we came up again the city was gone and everybody was dead. We walked for miles before we saw anybody else: all organic things were consumed.

How the hell do I feel about burning down that city? I don’t know. The burning of the cities was in response to the savagery of the Nazis, and fair really was fair, except that it gets confusing when you see the victims. That sort of arithmetic is disturbing. When I finally came home from the war, I was upset about it because what we had seen cleaning out the shelters was as fancy as what we would have seen cleaning out the crematoria. How do you balance off Dresden against Auschwitz? Do you balance it off; or is it all so absurd it’s silly to talk about? [italics mine]

As the Fairy Godmother would have it, while composing this section, I happened to meet (at the opening of my husband’s retrospective at the Liechtenstein Museum) another victim of the Dresden firebombing: a German, Mr. Frank Preuss. He was five years old when it happened.

I told Herr Preuss about Kurt Vonnegut’s experience. He told me he had a few vivid memories. He shared them afterward in a phone call:

My first memory is the night the British started bombing. We are in the luftschutz—the cellar—of our apartment building. My brother and I are kneeling before our mother, who is six months pregnant, hiding our faces in our mother’s lap. There was a lot of noise and bustle, neighbors coming in and my father trying to rescue them and their belongings the entire night.

The next morning we spent trying to get to my father’s parents, a suburb ten kilometers distant. I remember debris and smoke everywhere. I saw an old lady in a black dress, her face covered in blood. I asked my mother, “Do you see this old lady with her bloody face?” I saw a soldier in a gray uniform, lying on the street without his head. “Mommy, Mommy,” I said, “look at this soldier without his head.” Thirty years later my father started to write his memories and he wrote that down, my saying “Daddy, Daddy, look at this soldier without a head!”

We had to cross an open meadow and a bridge over the Elbe. Bombers were flying over. The bombs were huge, like Litfasssaeule, the columns that display advertisements all over Europe, about 1.2 meters in diameter, 3.5 meters high.

It was terrifying. My little brother, who was three, quit speaking for days.

About two weeks later, at the end of February, my family headed north with others on a ship towards Hamburg. Bombers shot and killed one of our crew. I opened the cabin door in a moment when my parents weren’t looking, and I saw the face of the pilot. It was that close.

He was told later it was very difficult to navigate the river because of the debris.

I asked what the adults said about the firebombing in retrospect. “We didn’t talk about it later. My father and mother never talked about it.” He paused. “Many people of my generation didn’t talk to their parents about it.

“It was unexpected, I learned later,” he said, “because Dresden was not a military spot, and it was full of refugees. The population was usually five hundred thousand but had swelled to over a million.”

I told him that’s what Vonnegut reported. I quoted Vonnegut about Churchill ordering it:

The trouble with Dresden was restraint surely, or lack of restraint.… The politicians went mad, as they often do. The man responsible for the bombing of Dresden against a lot of advice was Winston Churchill. It’s the brain of one man, the rage of one man, the pride of one man.113

“Yes,” Mr. Preuss said to me. “Churchill, for revenge and to demoralize.”

We concluded our conversation. There was no blame in his voice. There was, it seemed to me, the same large question Vonnegut posed. Understanding the savagery of the Nazis, and therefore the British and Americans’ desire for revenge: but Frank Preuss was five years old. Disturbing arithmetic.

A major insight Vonnegut accrued in wrangling with transforming his Dresden experience into fiction was about the nature of memory and trauma:

The most difficult thing about it was that I had forgotten about it. And I learned about catastrophes from that, and from talking to other people who had been involved in avalanches and floods and great fires, that there is some device in our brain which switches off and prevents our remembering catastrophes above a certain scale. I don’t know whether it is just a limitation of our nervous system, or whether it’s actually a gadget which protects us in some way. But I, in fact, remembered nothing about the bombing of Dresden although I had been there, and did everything short of hiring a hypnotist to recover the information. I wrote to many of the guys who went through it with me saying “Help me remember” and the answer every time was a refusal, a simple flat refusal. They did not want to think about it. There was a writer in Life magazine—I don’t know how much he knows about rabbits and the nervous system—who claimed that rabbits have no memory, which is one of their defensive mechanisms. If they recalled every close shave they had in the course of just an hour, life would become insupportable. As soon as they’d escaped from a Doberman Pinscher, why, they forgot all about it. And they could scarcely afford to remember it.114

This thin book is about what it’s like to write a book about a thing like that. I couldn’t get much closer. I would head myself into my memory of it, the circuit breakers would kick out; I’d head in again, I’d back off. The book is a process of twenty years of this sort of living with Dresden and the aftermath. It’s like Heinrich Böll’s book, Absent Without Leave—stories about German soldiers with the war part missing. You see them leave and return, but there’s this terrible hole in the middle.115

Vonnegut observed this phenomenon in his orphaned nephews, three of whom he and his wife Jane raised after his sister and her husband died within two days of each other.

As adults, his nephews revealed to Vonnegut

a creepy business which used to worry them a lot: They cannot find their mother or their father in their memories anywhere—not anywhere.

The museums in children’s minds, I think, automatically empty themselves in times of utmost horror—to protect the children from eternal grief.116

Vonnegut’s playwright character in Deadeye Dick says:

I have this trick for dealing with all my worst memories. I insist that they are plays. The characters are actors. Their speeches and movements are stylized, arch. I am in the presence of art.117

When Frank Preuss and I first spoke, he said, “I remember these few incidents vividly. They never affected me, no trauma. They are simply vivid memories.” After I e-mailed him these pages, he wrote back: “Strange: I have told my story a few times and it was just like telling some story. When I read your lines, however, I was shivering.”

They were not my lines. They were his. I simply wrote them down.

You already have evidence of Vonnegut’s soul growth in writing Slaughterhouse-Five from what I’ve presented here and from what he himself tells in his first chapter.

Even the title he landed on conveys his discoveries. Not the one it’s been reduced to on the front of the book for years now: Slaughterhouse-Five. I mean the original, with “or” and “The Children’s Crusade” placed front and center. Here’s the way it appears in my treasured, autographed, hardback copy from 1969:

First-edition hardcover of Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Delacorte Press, 1969). Photo by the author.

Vonnegut himself said, about his growth, a few years after Slaughterhouse-Five’s publication:

I felt after I finished [it] that I didn’t have to write at all anymore if I didn’t want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don’t know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they’re through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served. Flowers didn’t ask to be flowers and I didn’t ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five, I had the feeling that I had produced this blossom. So I had a shutting-off feeling, you know, that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK. And that was the end of it. I could figure out my missions for myself after that.118

That “shutting-off feeling” didn’t end his writing. Or his struggles. It opened a Pandora’s box of others.

He suffered a kind of postpartum depression.

Vonnegut began going through the “big ka-BOOM,” as his eldest daughter, Edie, called it: he was thrust into overnight success and fame. His family, sense of self, and his world were coming apart and reconfiguring themselves.

He swore that he was through writing novels. His interest turned to commedia dell’arte and plays for a while.

However, he discovered, as he said much later,

in a piece in Harper’s, or a letter I wrote to Harper’s, about “the death of the novel”: People will continue to write novels, or maybe short stories, because they discover that they are treating their own neuroses.119

This time what showed up on Vonnegut’s plate for him to deal with were his parents.

Treat one trauma and another surfaces.

A writer’s voice is “grounded in a single scene,” Reynolds Price posits, “most often a lingering sight from childhood or early youth. And that scene is almost always one that a seasoned reader may well suspect lies near the start of a given writer’s reason for writing, the physical moment in which a single enormous question rose before a watchful child and fueled the lifelong search for an answer.”120

Perhaps the scene or scenes Vonnegut wanted to know about were the ferocious arguments his parents had in the middle of the night.121 Why, the child Kurt must have asked, are they so unhappy? Is it my fault?

Asked about his aura of sadness, Vonnegut replied in a 1973 interview,

Well, there are sad things from my childhood, which I assume have something to do with my sadness.… There are two [gravestones] out there in Indianapolis, and I looked at those two stones side by side and I just wished—I could hear it in my head, I knew so much what I wished—that they had been happier than they were. It would have been so goddamned easy for them to be happier than they were. So that makes me sad.…

… They wrecked their lives thinking the wrong things. And, damn it, it wouldn’t have taken much effort to get them to think about the right things.122

At the interview’s conclusion, he circles back to this topic.

One thing writing Breakfast did for me was to bring right to the surface my anger with my parents for not being happier than they were.… I’m damned if I’ll pass their useless sadness on to my children if I can possibly help it.123

Reading Breakfast of Champions feels to me like going on a reckless spree, a wild, hilarious ride. People’s delusions drive them, and childlike drawings abound. Vonnegut skewers guises and bullshit and misguided beliefs by exposing those in his characters, in all their damaging, heartbreaking absurdity.

Could his parents have helped themselves or were they programmed by their chemistry and their own upbringings to behave as they did? Is it possible for anyone to transcend his or her own chemistry and programming?

Vonnegut was going to a therapist, trying to understand depression and his own regularly periodic bursts of temper. In this novel, he said,

The motives of all the characters are explained in terms of body chemistry.…

Suicide is at the heart of the book.124

In it, the narrator says to himself,

You’re afraid you’ll kill yourself the way your mother did.125

Vonnegut comments:

As for real death—it has always been a temptation to me, since my mother solved so many problems with it. The child of a suicide will naturally think of death, the big one, as a logical solution to any problem, even one in simple algebra.126

It’s unclear whether his mother committed suicide or overdosed on barbiturates. Whichever it was, the timing of her death was terrible. Kurt was in basic training. He had come home on a surprise leave with a three-day pass over Mother’s Day. His sister Alice had come home as well. The third morning—on Mother’s Day—they found their mother dead.

His son Mark says that earlier in his life, Kurt didn’t refer to his mother’s death as suicide. Kurt’s brother and father weren’t certain. She was a writer and left no note. But she was a very absent, depressed mother, locking herself in her room for long periods. Mark thinks Kurt may have lumped all that absence together as “suicide.”

Whether intentional or not, death is the ultimate leave-taking. It can feel like abandonment. If someone—especially your own mother—isn’t willing to live for your sake, it can make you feel worthless. It can feel like your fault. Talk about survivor’s guilt.

Having been around suicide and its survivors—my sister is the survivor of her first husband’s suicide—I can hardly bear, dear Kurt, thinking of the impact of this.

Breakfast of Champions isn’t a threat to commit suicide, incidentally. It’s my promise that I’m beyond that now. Which is something for me. I used to think of it as a perfectly reasonable way to avoid delivering a lecture, to avoid a deadline, to not pay a bill, to not go to a cocktail party.127

As usual, this “quest” in novel form did not occur in a straight line. Once upon a time, Breakfast of Champions and Slaughterhouse-Five were going to be one book.128 Later, Breakfast of Champions was going to be about a world in which everyone, except the narrator, is a robot. Even Jesus Christ: “He was a robot who died for my sins.”129

When it was finally finished, he said,

I have a feeling that Breakfast will be the last of the therapeutic books, which is probably too bad. Craziness makes for some beautiful accidents in art. At the end of Breakfast, I give characters I’ve used over and over again their freedom. I tell them I won’t be needing them anymore. They can pursue their own destinies. I guess that means I’m free to pursue my destiny, too. I don’t have to take care of them anymore.130

Everyone wants absolutes. Even Kurt Vonnegut, who abhorred absolutes. He wants his characters’ freedom and his freedom from them, and for this to be the last “therapeutic book.” But none of these prove true. His characters return, including suicidal characters and veterans, and their subjects. But never again are the issues of suicide and war the main focus in Vonnegut’s work. This seems psychologically on target. When addressed, the most vital concerns one has—the impact of events and people that have most deeply touched your life—don’t disappear. But they certainly may lighten up.

There’s evidence that diving into trauma can backfire.131

In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Eliot Rosewater suffers a breakdown and is in a mental hospital. A musician who entertains mental patients meets him there. The musician’s son says,

“Father thought Eliot was the sanest American he had ever met.… I remember Father’s introduction: ‘I want you all to meet the only American who has so far noticed the Second World War.’”…

“… He said, ‘This young Captain I’m bringing home—he despises art. Can you imagine? Despises it—and yet he does it in such a way that I can’t help loving him for it. What he’s saying, I think, is that art has failed him, which, I must admit, is a very fair thing for a man who has bayoneted a fourteen-year-old boy in the line of duty to say.’”132