Draft only from my in-progress biography of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Kurt Vonnegut: Behind the Laughter (working title)
Chapter One: Oodles of Doodles
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. liked to joke that he never asked to be born. Whenever he put his welcomed little scrawl on paper as a tyke, he wanted to entertain his readers. He decorated his first scrawled letters with silly, primitive drawings and continued that practice all his life in books, articles, and autographs for fans. On paper and in person, Kurt Jr. all his life created hilarity.
Gifted writers seem intuitively to understand writing for an audience. They employ a strong point-of-view. They write with purpose, be that to amuse, persuade, or to express outrage. The best scribes put a signature voice on the page. True writers of genius make readers think these words were meant for them.
An undated note from Kay to his father on business demonstrated the youngster’s awareness of point-of-view. The boy—perhaps six—pretended he was a daddy longlegs who missed Kurt Sr. Alongside the daddy longlegs, he drew an asterisk, similar to his later trademark “asshole” signature, to emulate a tiny descending spider. In a cartoon balloon, the lonely spider implored his absent father to remember him. Kurt Junior would continue corresponding with a father who often disappointed him right onto the old man’s final illness and death in 1956.
All the architect’s endless committee assignments and self-appointed tasks kept him away from young Kay, save to check on the boy in bed after he returned home.
Craving attention, young Kay also liked to spin stories at the supper table. He liked to tell stock Vaudeville gag told by comedians on radio shows. Siblings Alice and Bernie Vonnegut sometimes chortled like chimpanzees when he retold these corny jokes. Best of all, Kay loved puns. This one he’d slip one day into his student newspaper at Cornell University.
Little ear of corn: “Where did I come from?”
Big ear of corn: “The Stalk brought you.”
Kay’s Cradle
Kurt Junior, plump as a dressed turkey, made his grand entrance at 12:25 a.m., on November 11, 1922, in a birthing room at Indianapolis’s Methodist Episcopal Hospital. The date, coincided with a declared federal holiday known as Armistice Day, fondly celebrated four years after the allies defeated Germany. Indianapolis schools all that 1922 Armistice Week put on pageants for children like Bernard Vonnegut that stressed citizenship. Churches marked the day with tributes. The employees at Vonnegut Hardware and elsewhere stopped work and gathered on street corners to observe two minutes of respectful silence for the dead and gassed. Americans of German ancestry and non-Germans alike celebrated the end of the Great War. Folk legend claimed that participating nations agreed the bloody war ceased on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day and the eleventh month of 1918.
The previous evening, the weather felt like an early winter as Kurt Vonnegut Sr. escorted his waddling wife Edith to the reception desk.
The receptionist greeted the father-to-be, a slender man with blue eyes and light brown hair. Kurt Vonnegut Sr. was days shy of his 38th birthday. He displayed the confident manner of a man of standing in the community–a confidence he would lose the last decade in life, when he lived alone as a reclusive widower. Kurt Senior possessed a sterling reputation, respected for his pro bono work at the Indianapolis Children’s Museum, community theater involvement, and advocacy on behalf of his profession as architect. Everyone appreciated him, it seems, although his wife Edith increasingly begin to take note of his flaws.
His countenance was marred by an underslung lower lip and a stiff upper lip. Such a mouth would be a challenge for any artist to paint—even Kurt himself when painting a self-portrait. Nonetheless, the dapper Vonnegut always cleaned up nicely in a suit or dinner jacket, starched collar, white vest, cufflinks, and bowtie.
Family accounts described Kurt Sr. as handsome, but newspaper photographs suggest that the architect’s countenance was ordinary. Fellow students told him that he resembled a country physician. The elder Vonnegut had been known as “Doc” since his student days at M.I.T.
Doc’s tall and statuesque wife Edith yet looked striking at age 34. Always fashion-conscious, she usually tucked her abundant red hair beneath a chic hat. Edith, as a girl and young woman, often had traveled to Dusseldorf on her own and with her father, Albert Lieber, to visit her paternal grandparents and to enjoy courtships with two German military officers.
Like many namesake sons, Kurt Jr. also acquired a nickname. The letter “K” distinguished him from his father. In time, “K” would evolve into “Kay” after he pronounced it at school roll call. Some jocks teased him for having a girl’s name. Girl classmates tended to swoon over his curly blond locks. His lack of coordination meant he never would excel in team sports, but he did have good eye and hand coordination, helping him hold his own in table tennis.
Edith Vonnegut’s choice of pediatrician was as much for his social standing as his evident skills. Oscar Noel Torian, M.D. treated the children of the city’s prominent citizens. Torian clicked champagne glasses with Edith and Kurt Sr. at the literary club and at social events. Midway through a distinguished career spanning 62 years, Torian seemed never to sleep. He rejected naps and toiled often after midnight, as he did to deliver Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Torian was a physician of medium height and build. He had dark, close-cropped hair, though it grew gray over the ears. He trimmed his moustache close to the skin and wore large, round spectacles. A professor of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine, Torian earned a reputation as a champion crusader for children’s health issues. Colleagues compared him to the German humanitarian Dr. Albert Schweitzer.
Dr. Torian inspected the newborn’s bobbing head, lower parts, fingers, and toes. The baby’s mother accepted the infant. Edith’s abundant red hair glistened with perspiration from labor. Kay squinted through eyes gray as moonstones. His double chin with rounded cheeks invited pinches. He had a powerful set of lungs, and he would put them to use all his life.
Kurt and Edith Vonnegut named this son “Kurt,” employing the traditional German spelling. Relatives pronounced the name as “Kourt” or “Koort,” and the four-letter name appeared sometimes misspelled as “Court” or “Curt” in census records, police blotters and newspaper articles.
Two eager youngsters waited with Uncle Alex, the younger brother of Kurt Sr., and his wife Raye, ready to peel back this mysterious stranger’s blue blanket to behold his chubby face. Babysitters Alex and Aunt Raye never could conceive children of their own. Alex claimed he once contracted a social disease that detonated his body’s plumbing.
Edith and Kurt’s firstborn child was Bernard Vonnegut. Named for his paternal grandfather, he had been born August 29, 1914, nine months after Edith conceived him during a honeymoon with Kurt at the Asheville Biltmore in North Carolina. Bernard’s deceased grandfather, Bernard Vonnegut, a revered Indiana architect, had displayed creative talent and fame that his son Kurt, Sr. never could match. The homes and buildings Bernard designed will be revered in Indianapolis long into the future. Like his grandfather, young Bernard answered to the nicknames of “Bernie” and “Barney.” He was a precocious child who swam like an otter. His parents bragged to one and all how this eldest son, at home and private school, already conducted science experiments.
The second child was Alice Sophia Vonnegut, born on November 18, 1917, seven days after the Allies signed the Armistice ending World War One. Alice’s earliest photos reveal a sweet girl whose mother dressed her like a doll. One posed photo portrait, taken by Bachrach Studios, depicts Alice in a Roman tunic. She wore full lipstick and sported long bangs. Alice’s first name honored Edith’s deceased mother, Alice Barus Lieber. Her middle name honored Sophia Lieber, the wife of Edith’s late paternal grandfather, Peter Lieber. The grandmother lived in Germany and was in ill health.
While pregnant with Kurt that Summer of ‘22, Edith elected to get away from hot, sticky Indianapolis. She vacationed with Bernard and Alice at Chatham in the elbow of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The two children gawked upward at its 48-foot-tall lighthouse. They frolicked on the sandy beaches in view of the Nantucket Sound and inhaled the salt air of the Atlantic Ocean.
Doc remained behind in Indianapolis. As usual, he had accepted a part in a community play—this time a skit marking the coming of the Madison railroad to Indianapolis in 1847. He played Harvey Bates, owner of the ritzy Bates Hotel. In one comic scene, Bates argued with the actor playing Governor James Whitcomb about the proposed location of the railroad station. He complained that it was “way out on South Street,” and too dadgum far away for travelers to book his establishment on West Washington Street.
Edith and Kurt decided she was too far along in pregnancy to chance taking a steamship to Germany. Thus, the couple missed the wedding of Edith’s sister-in-law Irma Vonnegut in Hamburg to her prosperous German beau, Kurt Lindener, on August 18, 1922. Alex Vonnegut, Irma’s younger brother, and Raye sailed to the wedding accompanying mother-of-the-bride Mrs. Nannie Vonnegut, widow of architect Bernard Vonnegut.
Irma’s engagement announcement likely took her two brothers by surprise. She was already 32, to many relatives a spinster for life, and about the same age as her fiancé, destined a decade later to become a member of the Nazi Party.
Edith’s long separations from her husband during hot, humid, and sticky Indianapolis summers started becoming regular and ordinary after Alice’s birth. Prior to Kay’s birth, she took vacations apart from Kurt, Sr. with Bernard and Alice to Chatham, but also to a sprawling resort at nearby French Lick, Indiana, and a lakeside cottage in Forest Beach, Michigan, owned by “Uncle” John Rauch, Sr., a Vonnegut relative by marriage. Perhaps long separations after Alice’s birth may have contributed to the yawning distance emotionally between Doc and Edith that led to furious arguments that so upset teenage Kay. Early in their marriage, they vacationed together with then-only child Bernard at a Wisconsin resort and elsewhere. In recent and future years, however, Edith mainly vacationed alone with the children in Cape Cod, although Kurt now and then showed up and joined the family there for a few days.
The year baby Kurt was born, modern medicine helped reduce childbirth deaths of mothers and infants. Deliveries in hospitals decreased mortality rates compared with centuries of at-home births. Medical advances helped the corn-fed babies of the infant Kurt’s generation keep mostly healthy, although measles and polio remained deadly. In 1922, a diagnosis of diabetes usually meant a death sentence for children. However, soon after Kay’s birth, Methodist Hospital emerged as a primary insulin testing center.
Thus, contemporaries of Kurt Jr. by-and-large lived disease-free lives only to experience—thousands of them–early death, amputation, disfigurement, and lifelong depression during World War Two service.
Bayonets tore through healthy hearts and lungs. Artillery shells decapitated some. Incendiary devices torched flesh. Enemies and Allies alike murdered surrendered prisoners-of-war in cold blood. Many soldiers, not much older than boys, endured shellshock and recurring nightmares that for decades left their bedsheets damp with night sweats.
The son of Edith and Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. would not only would struggle through that cosmic second world war as a soldier and German slave-of-war, but he chronicle some of its story. His true role would be that of explainer of what happened. After he endured, he spoke for the millions who suffered but lacked his clarity and wit to tell their horrific stories.
Kay’s birthday fell on a declared federal holiday known as Armistice Day, celebrated four years after the allies defeated Germany. At Bernard Vonnegut’s Indianapolis school, a pageant for children stressed citizenship. Churches marked the day with tributes. The employees at Vonnegut Hardware stopped work and gathered on street corners to observe two minutes of respectful silence for the dead and gassed. Americans of German ancestry and non-Germans alike celebrated the end of the Great War. Folk legend claimed that participating nations agreed the bloody war ceased on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day and the eleventh month of 1918.
The signing of the Versailles Treaty on June 28, 1919, marked the official end of World War One.
Chapter: First Years
The parents welcomed this third, final child Kay in their ninth year of marriage. His birth certificate, signed by the attending physician Torian, listed the parental home address as a rental building at 955 North Pennsylvania Street, a half-duplex with seven rooms, hardwood floors, a bathroom, laundry, a servant’s bedroom, and ample grounds that included a carriage house.
The family never planned a long-term stay at the North Pennsylvania rented flat. Workers eventually demolished the original building. A cinder-block smoke shop replaced it—absent any historical marker to note the birthplace of Kurt’s Vonnegut—appropriately a lifelong smoker since his teens.
Kurt and Edith Vonnegut planned to move into their dream home on a large lot at 4365 North Illinois Street, but considerable work remained before the house was completed. Kurt Sr. obtained a $20,000 building permit around September 21, 1922.
Thus, the Vonneguts did not move into their first owned home until about a decade of marriage. It may be that financial considerations played a role. The couple’s extravagant lifestyle—including frequent vacations and trips to Europe—could have delayed completion of their North Illinois Street home. The Vonneguts at the time of Kurt’s birth were “marginally well-to-do,” according to a later assessment delivered by the adult Kurt Jr.
Readers of Indianapolis society news notices in local papers likely assumed the Vonneguts made a contented, prosperous couple. The husband presided at frequent meetings of architects and the state chapter of Delta Upsilon, his college fraternity. Edith, a housewife who as a rich girl never learned homemaker skills, always had hired help in the kitchen until a couple years into the Great Depression. Edith and Kurt Sr. put on an orchestrated good front for family and friends, but the two were mismatched horses pulling an off-course carriage. The wife’s domination of her husband increased as he withdrew from civic activities and became withdrawn, or so their son Kurt claimed in his writings.
The Dream Home
Edith and Kurt Sr. moved into their dream home at 4365 North Illinois Street in 1923. The first newspaper mention of the family living at 4365 North Illinois Street likely was in the Indianapolis Star of August 11th that year. Kurt Sr. reported a break-in at the new house. At the time, Edith and the three children were not at home—vacationing at Uncle John’s Michigan cottage in late summer and early fall of 1923. Although the Vonnegut house on North Illinois was spanking new and the envy of many society acquaintances, Edith continued to summer away from hot and humid Indianapolis.
The new home would be a residence that Kay loved and revisited even as a senior citizen, shocking the owners with his unannounced visits. Kay Vonnegut’s boyhood home on North Illinois Street was a. chalet situated in a classy neighborhood of middle-class and upper middle-class residents, a short distance from the exquisite mansions with stone carvings on North Meridian Street. The neighborhood’s tall trees, children’s playground equipment, and nearby fine schools marked it as a desirable neighborhood to rear children.
The dream home boasted Arts and Crafts architecture. While Kurt Jr. always credited his father with designing the house, a later resident of the home believed the designer was the pipe-chomping Willard Osler, who, working alone and together with Indianapolis architect Lee Burns, designed many grand Indianapolis homes in the 1920s, including the house owned by the father of Kay’s soon-to-be lifelong friend Benjamin Hitz, Jr. Osler and Burns, president of the Burns Realty Company, declared their mission to design “a better class of residences.” Thus, architects such as Osler grew prosperous at a time Kurt Vonnegut Sr., in between countless meetings and self-appointed obligations, found little need for his services.
The house on North Illinois Street showcased distinctive elements created by Doc Vonnegut, an architect working in the shadow of his late father, the accomplished architect Bernard Vonnegut. While the father achieved fame for designing both elegant family homes and imposing commercial structures, Doc and his firm’s colleagues focused on practical buildings for businesses and institutions. Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur Bohn & Otto Mueller ran a reoccurring newspaper advertisement in 1921 that described the firm as “Architects and Engineers Specializing in Commercial Buildings.”
As an example, Vonnegut, Bohn and Mueller landed a lucrative contract in 1919 to remodel and expand the iconic Lyric Theater at 135 North Illinois Street. Improvements included the addition of a basement dance studio, additional restrooms, and improvements to the interior such as relocating the stage. The building, later razed for a parking lot in 1970, welcomed overflow audiences seeking with silent films, vaudeville entertainers, and staged plays.
At some point after moving into the intended permanent residence, Edith and Doc placed the hands of their three children into a slab of wet cement in a back room.
Kay’s tiny hand looked like a newborn bear cub’s pawprint next to the handprints of his brother and sister. The preserved handprints would survive until several years after Kurt’s death. When yet another owner of the house permitted decorators to remove the charming memorabilia, this piece of Vonnegut family history was put into storage, away from his followers.
Photo of Hank Nuwer with handprints of Alice, Bernard and Kurt Vonnegut. Submitted Photo 
As an older adult, Kurt Junior complained that he had an unhappy childhood. On the contrary, early in his career as an author, he told one and all his upbringing was happy. Certainly, he was aware that most parents in their social circle mouthed the venerable adage about children being seen, not heard.
“I miss my Mommy and Daddy, and I always will—because they were so nice to me,” he wrote in “Why They Read Hesse,” his 1970 essay. “Now and then I would like to be a child again.”
Many decades later, shilling for his book A Man Without a Country, Vonnegut spoke to Washington Post book editor Bob Thompson. Vonnegut, like Joan Didion, had been one of Thompson’s literary heroes when he dropped out of graduate school to paint houses before entering journalism as a career.
“Where he most wanted to be now, he said, was home, by which he meant `Indianapolis when I was 9 years old, and you can’t go back there. But I had a mother and a father, a big sister, a big brother, a dog, a cat—and yeah, that’s where I’d like to go,’” he told Thompson in another of his final interviews.
Dear Readers: Here is a draft of my forthcoming biography of Kurt Vonnegut. I have never asked that it be an authorized biography. My goal is to make it an authorized biography. The biography corrects the errors in Charles J. Shields’ biography of Kurt Vonnegut, “And So It Goes.” It notably takes a far more objective look at Vonnegut’s second wife Jill Krementz, and my biography stresses her accomplishments as an author and photographer.
Errors in Shields’ “And So It Goes” corrected in my in-progress draft include 1) the address of Kurt Vonnegut’s birthplace; the address of Vonnegut’s first real home; the name of the architect who may have designed that home; the year that real home was completed and occupied; the visits of Kurt and Edith Vonnegut to Europe, etc.
My scholarly book also departs from “And So It Goes” in approach. I have taken years to find public documents and publications and lectures where I found Kurt Vonnegut’s words. His letters in books edited by Dan Wakefield and daughter Edie Vonnegut were important. Charles J. Shields conducted many memorable interviews. I respect his diligence even as I disagree with his tone and conclusions in the biography. (He has declined to be interviewed for my book, and I respect his wish).
I conducted fewer interviews and concentrated on getting the facts right. I spoke in person only twice with Mr. Vonnegut. Based on those two conversations and years of research, I believe my scholarly biography will present a balanced portrait of Kurt Vonnegut. I still have work to do. My work on hazing and teaching are also important uses of my time. Fans of Kurt Vonnegut or my own readers can help out by sending any letters, new material, corrections (including from “And So It Goes” or other Vonnegut books), or personal recollections to me at Hank Nuwer, PO Box 73446, Fairbanks, AK 99707, or to me at the Journalism Department, University of Alaska, Fairbanks. I still have interviews to do, and if readers have benefitted from my hazing work, etc., they are free to send donations with my thanks.