Insert predictable title here
A ten year old review rescued from defunct blogger account
This review was written ten years ago, more or less. I found it while undertaking a long-overdue close-down of an old blogger account and apart from a light edit here and there it is unaltered. There are some fairly trivial ten years wiser (ha!) comments in italics here and there.
Is a ten year old review of a book published in 2011 still relevant?
I really doubt it, but the key subject of so much of Kurt Vonnegut’s work was mankind’s viciousness towards other humans.
I find myself at the moment, most days, scrolling through war porn on Telegram. It troubles me yet is addictive. I push away the mental dissonance with an internal shrug, just like the one Kurt used in Slaughterhouse-5…and mostly get to sleep at night.
Many Telegram channels, btw, seem way more authentic and “balanced” than the utter tripe (more to the point: dangerous lies) being published by newspapers and broadcasters. Take a bow Baa Baa Cee.
Review of And So It Goes - Kurt Vonnegut: A Life by Charles J. Shields
I'll preface what might seem a harsh review by saying straight-off that this is a well-written and engrossing book and I recommend it to anyone with an interest in Kurt Vonnegut's life. I would add "...and work" but I think that would be going too far: a real weakness of this biography is a severe lack of appreciation for Vonnegut's actual writing.
More recently a corrective has been published, Unstuck In Time by Gregory D. Summer. I’m part-way through it and will add a review when I eventually finish it. The text is very much based around the novels, and addresses these in chronological order. Recurring themes, and links with Kurt’s life, are highlighted quite well.
I first encountered Vonnegut aged, I think, 16. I was off school for a few days with flu, confined to bed. On the landing of the boarding house I lived in during term times there was a small library of (mainly paperback) books. Something about the blurb on the back made me decide to give Slaughterhouse-5 a try. About a day later I read the whole thing again and as soon as I could afford to I bought my own edition, and I have it right here. It has been read a dozen or more times though now a couple of pages have gone missing - which I guess for a 32-year old paperback is kind of to be expected. (I have the kindle version too, nowadays, and reading the first chapter a few days ago reduced me to tears.)
The paperback fell apart in the interim, and would be 40+ years old by now, had it survived.
It's a great, great book, as much for the things it doesn't need to say as for the things that it does. Having since read, and owned, practically all of his others (several times in a few cases, Mother Night and Jailbird particularly**) I would have to concede that Vonnegut never quite matches Slaughterhouse-5. But in my opinion very few people ever have.
** It isn’t very clear what I meant here. Several of the books had been loaned out but never returned, or caught in a small flood, mislaid or whatever. Eventually they were replaced or came home again via some or other route.
His biographer implies that once he had achieved success Vonnegut coasted along for several more decades with little real effort and that his subsequent books, to a greater or lesser extent, betray this. He implies that Vonnegut was too fond of the easy buck and the financial security that a couple of dozen speaking engagements per year offered, for example.
My retort to that is: so what?
Shields is correct to say that Vonnegut intruded into so many of his texts, from Slaughterhouse-5 onwards, blurring the line between his private self and his public persona. The latter, he states, was essentially a fictional character which Kurt used his skills and experience in public relations to craft. Again I say: so what? Has the man never heard of authorial voice? Why should a man not promote the avuncular, humane, concerned part of his character while de-emphasising the bad-tempered, depressed, angry part? It seems to me that it was his way to maintain some kind of mental good health, having suffered what may have been a cold and detached upbringing, the trauma of his mother's suicide (on Mother's Day), the death of his beloved sister when they were both still very young, the horrors of war (which Shields does portray excellently well), years of struggle and poverty.
I'm afraid that Shields sacrifices warmth for and empathy with his subject in his efforts to be "balanced". He seems too keen to reproduce Vonneguts' more hostile critics, to dwell on the man's shortcomings and mistakes, his faithlessness, poor parenting skills, his impulsivity, his embittered old age (or so he says, based on two meetings and a few phone calls).
He implies hypocrisy by, for example, correctly identifying how Vonnegut became a sort of left-wing totem, despite having few genuine leanings in that direction, and doing too little to repudiate that misperception.
But for a third time I say: so what.
As for the title, "And so it goes"... In case you are not aware (which means you have not read Slaughterhouse-5. Read it!) The three words "So it goes." recur throughout the text. According to bewildered time-traveller Billy Pilgrim this is what the inhabitants of the planet Tralfamadore say when they "(see) a corpse... the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but... just fine in plenty of other moments." Billy himself, and Kurt, use these words every time deaths are reported in Slaughterhouse-5. Given that the pivotal point of the text is the fire-bombing of Dresden, with tens of thousands of civilian casualties, the metaphorical shrug of the shoulders which accompanies these words may seem callous or uncaring. But given mass murder on that sort of scale what other kind of response can a person make while still staying sane?
So choosing those same words as his title smacks of the same inappropriate levity or flippancy which Shields says Vonnegut was too often guilty of. (Not to mention a singular lack of originality.)
It is true that Vonnegut's expressions of despair at the human condition, while professing to love humanity, are self-contradictory. This is why so many readers appreciate Vonnegut's works, the slimmer and more slapdash along with the more substantial ones that he laboured long and hard over. It's a shame that Shields can't quite seem to grasp this.
I sense too that the way in which he hurtles through the last quarter of the text (in terms of the time-span covered, and the page count, roughly speaking) betrays either that he had grown weary of his subject, or that his researches were less thorough and/or he had less material to work from. Perhaps those left alive were not terribly willing to act as his sources? I speculate, though a close examination of the notes and sources might be an interesting exercise.
The fact is that Shields hardly knew the man and he attaches far too much significance to the rueful or even bitter words of a man who had grown weary of the world, and said so, in the only lengthy conversation they ever had face-to-face. Now that was a sad twist of fate rather than any fault of the biographer, but it seems very unfair to construct an entire thesis based largely on this partial impression.
Perhaps I am reacting to a less than glowing appraisal of one of my great heroes? It's certainly possible. But I think there's plenty in Vonnegut's extensive autobiographical writings to grasp that he was a flawed man, in some ways a weak man, one who made many mistakes, treated people less well than they deserve, and while he may have regretted that deeply he did not always take the trouble to make amends.
A human being, in other words.
This is a good book, but it's not an excellent one. I will re-read it I am sure, and perhaps I will appreciate it more then. But there's something mealy-mouthed and begrudging in it. I haven’t done so yet. So many books as yet unread, or with a bookmark 10% of the way in….
I give the last word to Vonnegut's oldest son, Mark. When I finished reading this biography I was troubled. I was curious to know what other reviewers had had to say and in the course of checking a few of these appraisals I found out that Mark has highlighted a number of factual inaccuracies in Shields's text. Furthermore what he said a month or so ago backs up my own conclusion:
"(Kurt was) not a perfect man or father, and I'll grant you two failed marriages (but readers should) employ a modicum of critical thinking before buying into the truth of a book whose existence is completely and utterly dependent on a picture that Shields would have made up out of whole cloth if he had to". (http://www.dumptheguardian.com/books/2011/dec/07/kurt-vonnegut-son-biography-charles-shields)
An abridged version of this review appeared on the Goodreads site in January 2012.
25/11/2022: Guardian archive link was borked, has now been fixed.