Venus on the Half-Shell, or Not quite Vonnegut

I have written here before about how much I have admired Kurt Vonnegut's writing.  I have read probably everything he wrote and, as it turns out, one book that he didn't write.  Anyone familiar with Vonnegut's writing will recognize Kilgore Trout, an character who appears in many of Vonnegut's novel who is, himself, a sci-fi author.  Trout however, writes schlocky, high-concept sci-fi and is mainly interesting as a mouth-piece for Vonnegut's own undeveloped ideas that he suspected would 

not make for good stories.  

In my college days I spent hours upon hours scouring second hand book and record stores, always with a list of deeply coveted pieces in mind.  Back in these days, I knew that someone had pseudonomously written a Kilgore Trout book, so this was one of the items I always sought.

Well, I found it and I read it, most likely 20 or more years ago.  I have moved this thing from state to state with me ever since.  I suppose I liked the novelty of it and I even supposed that it might have been worth something.  Maybe it is.

As I finally picked this up to reread this week, I quickly discovered why I remembered nothing about it except the cover and its provenance.  It is just terrible, and in a way that affected Vonnegutism can be.  The story is bad, the jokes are bad, and the idea is bad.  I considered including some passages to demonstrate this here, but even that seems too generous for this thing.  I don't want anyone to have the illusion that I am endorsing this book in any way.

I read about 75 pages of this thing before throwing in the towel.  

I will say that I like the cover and, as a dedicated postmodernist, I love the conceit of the book.

I really do like the idea of writing as Kilgore Trout.  I am not so besotted with Vonnegut to think that no one could do this.  I think that there are authors who could pull this off.  This guy (I do know who the real author is but don't want to put his name to this) just isn't the one to do it.  He did write a lot of other sci-fi, but not anything that I had ever read.  I won't say that this book would preclude me from reading any of his other work, but this is a pretty big hurdle to surpass.

So, if you see this book and are interested, I would advise buying it only as a curiosity and saving yourself the time to just go read Vonnegut instead.

Academic Fragments, Part 2

What follows are segments of a review that I worked on back in 2012 when Vonnegut's collected letters was first published.  I think some of the parts still have legs, I just never finished writing it or paced it anywhere.  There are some notes I made for myself at the end of this and I have not edited this at all.

Review: Kurt Vonnegut: Letters

By Matthew Raese

Kurt Vonnegut: Letters edited by Dan Wakefield.  New York: Delacorte Press, 2012, xxvi + 436 pages.

There are few collections of letters that I have been as excited to read as Kurt Vonnegut's.  Of all of the favorite writers I have had, Vonnegut's personality has always loomed largest and resurfaced the most often.  He was the one, and I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking this, who I seemed to know the best.  His engaging, energetic, sharply critical style never seemed like a put on.  At a time in my life when I felt that very few people were being honest with me, I never doubted that Vonnegut was.  In the fall of 1998 I had the distinct pleasure of seeing Vonnegut speak at the Ohio State University as a part of his publicity tour for Timequake.  Much of what he had to say that night sounded familiar.  He explained his structuralist theory of plot (a portion of which appears in Foma, Wampeters, and Granfalloon), he talked about what art is, and what it means to be a human being.  It takes a rare intellect such as Kurt Vonnegut's to tackle these enormous topics and make them seem the obvious starting point.  That evening fifteen years ago convinced me that, when it came to Vonnegut, what I read was what I got.

I am happy to say that Vonnegut's letters solidified my intuition that Vonnegut had no false surface, that he truly was the person so many of his readers needed him to be.  There is one line that Vonnegut writes to his daughter that I must repeat before getting into the meat of this review to set the mood.  At a time when Vonnegut was teaching and living in Iowa City and his family was still in Cape Cod, he wrote a letter to his youngest daughter for her birthday.  The postscript: “The last time I saw you, you were certainly one of the nicest people I had ever seen.  Now I hear that you are learning to dance.  That makes you just about perfect” (111).  

Dan Wakefield edited and wrote the introduction to this collection.  His work in historicizing the Vonnegut family in Indianapolis and providing key context throughout the book prove invaluable to understanding Vonnegut's letters.  Wakefield divides Vonnegut's letters by decade, providing a short summation of the major events of the decade in an introduction to each chapter.  What this does is stitch the letters together into a cohesive narrative of Vonnegut's life.  Wakefield is free to comment on Vonnegut's development as a writer, a thing that Vonnegut does not do in his letters.  

Wakefield's arrangement of letters by decade makes perfect sense for the structure of the book that he edited and could not have been done in a better way.  However, rather than addressing the book in a like fashion, I think that for the purposes of reviewing the work it makes more sense to approach the letters as they may have seemed to Vonnegut – that is, as separate but intertwining connections with those closest to him.  Over the course of the work it becomes very apparent the regard Vonnegut felt for his fellow writers and the love that he felt for his family.  Vonnegut seemed perpetually generous to his family and his consideration of what comprises a family matches closely the concept of the karass that he develops in Cat's Cradle.  For Vonnegut, family means both those to whom we have close filial ties and those to whom we find spiritual connection.  In a letter to Gail Godwin in the late 1970s, Vonnegut writes of the “very classy extended family” that he gained while teaching in Iowa.  “Suddenly,” he continues, “I was a member of a really great gang.”  

Among the most frequent recipients of Vonnegut's letters are those to his youngest daughter, Nannette, to whom he writes moving and tender letters full of reassurance of his love.  Since Nannette, or Nanny as he called her, had been very young at the time of Vonnegut's first separation from his first wife Jane, he reminds her often that he continues to love her mother very much and asks her not to blame Jill, his second wife, for the end of that marriage.  It is evident that his concern comes from the desire that these two women come to care for one another.  While Wakefield compiles only the letters that Vonnegut himself wrote – in contrast to those collections that print both letters to and from the author in question – the letters that Vonnegut wrote to his daughter are the ones of which many readers may wish to know the other side of the conversation.

-W prefaces many of the letters w context info.  W includes many details about V's personality in addition to historical context.  For example, in a letter in which V offers to lend money to Knox Burger, W notes V's “lifelong generosity to friends and fellow writers, even at [. . .] time[s] of his own continuing money pressures” (80).  In this way, W helps to further shape perception of V as a person behind the writing.

-the letters relate V's life, particularly in the 60s when he was living in Iowa City, teaching at the Iowa Writers' thing (look up what this is called) while his wife, Jane, stayed in Cape Cod.  More personal details revealed during this time

-p102 charming passage of V explaining the time difference between Iowa City and Cape Cod so that he can speak with his wife for the cheaper evening rates

-119-20 assignment written as letter

208-10 letter to Drake school board chair who burned V's books in school furnace