*

The next year, Vonnegut moved to Schenectady to work as a public relations writer at General Electric, where his older brother Bernard was a research scientist. He was, to put it mildly, adrift. And here, as a hack on behalf of whizbang technology, with a wife and an infant son to support, Vonnegut made the most foolhardy decision of his brief lifetime: he would become a writer. Worse yet, a short story writer.

His early record was not promising:

“We are sorry to report that this manuscript did not find an opening here” (The Atlantic, 1948).

“There is a brisk style to this [sic] stories but I’d feel rather dubious that they would take with editors.” (Russell & Volkening Literary Agency, 1949)

“Centralized, as it is, around an older character, and placed in a rural setting, it hasn’t sufficient plot and pace to go over with the younger readers we are trying to attract to the magazine.” (Redbook, 1949)

The Vonnegut archive contains reams of these rejections. Reading over them sent me into a kind of rapture of indignation. You fuckers! I wanted to shout. Do you realize who you’re fucking with? Kurt Fucking Vonnegut! Do you realize how fucking stupid you’re going to look someday?

I don’t imagine it will come as a surprise that I spent most of the Nineties receiving rejections of this sort, sitting around in one or another shithole shouting these same imprecations. Such is the fate of short story writers everywhere. We are captains of a dying industry, drama queens, very poor planners.

*

I don’t mean to compare myself with Vonnegut. Or actually, that’s bullshit. Of course I mean to compare myself with Vonnegut. (The entire point of my visit to Bloomington was to compare myself with Vonnegut.) What I mean is that my decision to write short stories was a cinch compared to his. I was single. I had supportive parents, a savings socked away, a miserable little MFA program where I could spin my training wheels. Vonnegut, on the other hand, had a wife and children and no dough. He was a child of the Depression. He had watched his parents tumble from wealth into hard times, insanity and self-annihilation. The guy tried to go the straight route, dutifully tromped off to dad’s alma mater and majored in biochemistry, took the office job. Why, then, did he fall off the wagon, into something as disreputable and unreliable as storytelling?

*

It would be easy enough to say that he was a born writer, which plays to all our romantic notions about talent and destiny, that heroic claptrap we’ve been peddling to ourselves since the Iliad. But I suspect Vonnegut was drawn to writing by something more subversive than his abundant self-regard, something closer to mourning, that dark cloud he kept belching in Hartford. He wouldn’t get to the heart of it for another 20 years, but even in his early stories, he seems woefully out of synch with the era.

The Fifties were dawning, after all. America was booming! The scientists at GE – as scripted by Vonnegut himself – were promising a brave new world for all those bouncing babies. But he wasn’t buying. He could see that technology would do nothing to correct (and might even exacerbate) the essential design flaw, which was human, which resided in our failure to love one another properly, our loyalty to greed and hatred, the gradual hammering of our hearts into swords.

His first published story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” stars a scientist who learns to control objects with his mind. He gets recruited by the government as a secret weapon.

*

As an inveterate thief of office supplies, I will now note a fact that amuses me beyond all reason: Vonnegut stored his early stories in GE News Bureau folders. On the folder for “The Euphio Question” someone – his wife Jane I suspect – has written the following in giant red letters, “Sold to Collier’s on February 23, 1951 for $1250!”

And buried in the early drafts of this very story, on the back of a manuscript page, is what ranks as my favorite all-time Vonnegut doodle, a bit of long division:

[5000 into 80000 with a 16 on top]

Under this, he has written “16 shorts,” and a list of titles. Here was Kurt Vonnegut doing what all ambitious young story writers do – taking inventory, figuring the math, pining after a book. And why not? This was (at least in my imagining of things) an exhilarating era for Vonnegut. After years as the family ne’er-do-well, he could sense that he might actually triumph.

*

And can I also say, while we’re not on the subject, what a joy it was to see the handiwork of Vonnegut’s own hands, the impatient whir of his mind scattered across all those oniony pages, his letters, his outlines, his plays (Vonnegut wrote plays, dozens of them, who knew?) and above all his drafts, corrected, amended, slashed at, his rewrites spilling sideways into the margins, all his decisions. Nobody tells you this when you become a writer: that you’ll spend 99 percent of your time making decisions.

Thanks to computers, I’ve been able to flush all my bad decisions into cyber oblivion, where, with any luck, they will remain, while my collected works are gathered on a disk the size of a cereal flake.

*

Vonnegut’s writing schedule for the first two months of 1950 begins like so:

1. Between Timid and Timbuktu (Jan. 6- Jan. 9)

2. The Ants (Jan. 8- Jan. 10)

3. Ice-9 (Jan. 27-Feb. 10)

He lists half a dozen other stories, most written in the space of a few days. The page also includes his schedule for the composition of his first novel, Player Piano. He wrote the second chapter in two days, and the whole manuscript in a few months.

Anyone who has struggled with stories, and especially a first novel, will recognize how revoltingly fast Vonnegut was writing, particularly given that he was still working full-time for GE, and that he had two young children at home. The man was a machine.

*

This is not to suggest that he was a flawless machine, or even a particularly profitable one. Most of the 300 stories gathered in his archive remain unpublished, for good reason. I now find it necessary to quote from “God’s Gift to Women,” the account of a would-be Lothario nicknamed Gine.

“Fresh meat for Gine,” said Leora, and she smiled like a pirate who had just captured a fresh young beauty, and she looked poor Amy up and down …

“He isn’t married.”

“He isn’t?” said Amy pipingly.

Yes, pipingly.

Most astounding is the number of different ways Vonnegut finds to screw up. His drafts are at once tepid and moralizing, crammed with feckless heroes and labored metaphors. Reading over them was like being trapped in an elevator with my own early stories.

*

Vonnegut is on record as saying that the reason he writes is so he can edit himself into something approaching charm.[21] I realize that it may come off as a bit of dirty pool to go mucking through his early efforts, particularly because it gave me an almost obscene pleasure to see Kurt Vonnegut writing so badly.

Or maybe I mean it gave me a twisted sort of faith.

I mentioned above that I don’t believe in talent, and what I meant by this is that a knack for the language, the stuff identified early on by well-meaning high school teachers, is about as useful a predictor of literary success as shoe size. When students march into one of my undergrad workshops with talent, I regard them as doomed. They are likely to suffer the illusion that writing is about applause rather than humiliation.

But we all come to the keyboard as pitiful supplicants. We all pull the same insecure stunts. We all have own our drawer of horrors. Those who succeed, in the end, are the ones with the biggest drawers.

Which brings us to the file for “The Commandant’s Desk.” It begins with a 1951 letter addressed to Knox Burger, the editor at Collier’s who urged Vonnegut to quit his PR job and write full-time.

Dear Knox:

Here, for operation Brandy Alexander, is THE COMMANDANT’S DESK.

I think it’s pretty good, and, since I am representing myself in this particular deal, let me say my boy deserves a fat bonus.

I’m selling my house and moving somewhere on the Atlantic Coast, probably Massachussetts. We’re renting a place in Provincetown for July, August, and September, and hope you’ll pay us a call…[22]

Signed [in pencil]

Kurt Vonnegut

Burger responds with two single-spaced pages of edits. The rest of the file consists of subsequent drafts, six of them by my count. Vonnegut spends two years trying out different narrators, tones, endings. There are notes for further revisions, outlines, more than 200 pages in all. “The Commandant’s Desk” was never published.

*

Vonnegut wrote his pal Burger a second fascinating note, but before I could finish transcribing it, I got a tap on the shoulder. “Your wife is outside,” the attendant said.

This was good. I had left Erin at the main library, working on her novel. Now I could explain about the no-copying situation, that we might need to stay an extra day. The moment I saw Erin I could tell that was not going to happen.

“Is everything okay?”

She shook her head.

We went outside to talk.

“I’m exhausted,” she said. “I can’t work here. I need to lie down. I need rest.”

“Sure,” I said. “Take the day off.”

She shook her head and turned away for a moment. When she turned back she was silently weeping.

“I’m sick of this.”

“Sick of what?” I said.

But I knew what she meant.

I’ve neglected to mention this, because I’ve been so hooked on the Vonnegunutia, but upon our arrival in Bloomington, we’d been on the road for three weeks. Erin had spent one of these patiently absorbing the complex distress of my family. She’d slept in Lovelock, Nevada and Salt Lake City and York, Nebraska. She’d driven 3300 miles in a tiny Honda packed to the roof with her worldly possessions. And she had done all this while six months pregnant with our first child. The sun beat down on her pale face.

“I want to go home,” she said.

I was torn. I knew I needed to accommodate her needs. I needed not to be a self-absorbed writer jerkoff. At the same time … we were in Bloomington. It was all right here. Vonnegut had something to tell me, I was convinced of it.

I hugged her for a long time and told her we could leave immediately if she wanted, head straight back to Boston, but that she could also, if it was okay, if she didn’t mind, I felt it might be good for her, just for right now, for today, to get a hotel room – a nice one, a fancy one – and give herself the day off. Then we’d get dinner and see where things stood.

*

It’s what writers do, this shuck and jive, this nervous dance to balance the emotional needs of those you love against your own need for glory. To quote that other letter to Burger:

Jesus – wouldn’t it be nice to write just one play a year, or just one anything?

I’ve pretty well pooped out as a hack. The old Moxie is gone. As for the book: I like it, I believe in it. But it’s disloyal…

Everything’s going to be just grand, though. Jane says so. She says she knows it in her bones. And I no kidding believe her. I’d better, with two houses and $20,000 in mortgages.

Vonnegut wrote this in 1955. He was 32 years old. His first novel had come and gone. Sirens of Titan wouldn’t come out for another four years. He was still pumping out the stories, still dreaming about a collection. He had three kids now.

I can’t fathom how Vonnegut did it. To think of myself at that age – sitting alone in a rented room, writing my lameass stories, hurling my body at the nearest soft disaster. I was such a punk. And here I was pushing 40, with a tolerant wife and a single baby on the way, a few books under my belt – and I felt besieged?

Vonnegut has said in the past that he was lucky, that he began his career during the gilded age of magazines, when you could make a living as a story writer. But that’s nonsense. The record indicates that the guy was running one continuous hustle. He worked as an English teacher for troubled kids. He ran a Saab dealership. He even tried inventing a board game.[23]

*

When I told my wife about Vonnegut’s scattered endeavors, she said, “He sounds like you.” It was evening. We had picked up a pizza and now we were wandering the aisles of a dazzling midwestern supermarket. They had everything: seven kinds of lettuce, imported cheeses, vanilla chai smoothies, the glittering bounty of the cheap oil era, toward which I felt a sudden strange sympathy. A light rain fell outside, streaking the high windows, beading the bright cars beyond. We were so lucky to be living in this time, in this place. We had no idea, really.

It was the same feeling I got out on the road, as we sped across America,[24] through all those little retail environments, with their brightly lit gas stations and calorific convenience stores. They would be dead soon, petroleum ghost towns, like the abandoned farmhouses slowly collapsing off in the distance. So maybe it was nostalgia I was feeling, a kind of pre-nostalgia. These were the good old days. Why hadn’t I noticed?

*

I should return to the Lilly Reading Room, but before I do I want to mention something that goes unmentioned (so far as I could tell) in the Vonnegut archive. In 1958, his older sister Alice succumbed to cancer, two days after her husband’s death in a train wreck. Vonnegut adopted three of the couple’s four children. His greatest period of artistic growth occurred at a time that he had no fewer than six children in his home.

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