Please cite the Information taken from “Kurt Vonnegut: The Man in the Hole. A Life of Reinvention,” an in-progress biography of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. by Hank Nuwer
Chapter One: Oodles of Doodles
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. liked to joke that he never asked to be born. Whenever he put his first little scrawls on paper as a tyke, he wanted to entertain his readers. He decorated his earliest letters with silly, primitive drawings and continued that practice throughout his life in books, articles, and autographs for fans. On paper and in person, Kurt Jr. spent his life creating hilarity.
Gifted writers seem intuitively to understand their audiences. They employ a strong point of view. They write with purpose, whether to amuse, persuade, or express outrage. The best scribes put a signature voice on the page. True writers of genius make readers feel that the words were meant especially for them.
An undated note from Kay to his father on business demonstrated the youngster’s early 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 represent 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 up to the old man’s final illness and death in 1956.
The architect’s endless committee assignments and self-appointed tasks kept him away from young Kay, except when he checked on the boy in bed after returning home.
Craving attention, young Kay liked to spin stories at the supper table. He repeated stock vaudeville gags told by comedians on radio shows. His siblings, Alice and Bernie Vonnegut, sometimes chortled like chimpanzees when he retold these corny jokes. Best of all, Kay loved puns. One would eventually find its way into his student newspaper at Cornell University.
Little ear of corn: “Where did I come from?”
Big ear of corn: “The Stalk brought you.”
Young Kay inherited his wit and sense of humor from his parents. His father, for the first fifty years of his life, was admired by fellow architects for speeches that kept audiences chuckling.
His mother, Edith, had a dry sense of humor. When a squirrel took up residence at the North Illinois Street manse, she dubbed it Tchaikovsky.
When friends took the bait and asked, “Why Tchaikovsky?” she waited a beat.
“The Nutcracker Suite.”
Chapter: 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 Armistice Day, honored and celebrated four years after the Allies defeated Germany. Throughout Armistice Week in 1922, Indianapolis schools staged pageants for children like Bernard Vonnegut that stressed citizenship. Churches marked the occasion with tributes. 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 the participating nations agreed the bloody war would cease at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. The signing of the Versailles Treaty on June 28, 1919, marked the official end of World War One.
The previous evening, the weather felt like early winter as Kurt Vonnegut Sr. escorted his waddling wife, Edith, to the hospital 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 during the last decade of his 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, his involvement in community theater, and his advocacy on behalf of the architectural profession. Everyone appreciated him, it seems, although his wife, Edith, increasingly began to take note of his flaws.
His countenance was marred by an underslung lower lip and a stiff upper lip. Such a mouth would challenge any artist attempting a portrait—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 bow tie.
Family accounts described Kurt Sr. as handsome, but newspaper photographs suggest the architect’s countenance was ordinary. Fellow students told him he resembled a country physician. The elder Vonnegut had been known as “Doc” since his student days at M.I.T.
Doc’s tall, statuesque wife, Edith, still looked striking at age 34. Always fashion-conscious, she usually tucked her abundant red hair beneath a chic hat. As a girl and young woman, Edith had often traveled to Düsseldorf, alone and with her father, Albert Lieber, to visit her paternal grandparents and enjoy courtships with two German military officers.
Like many namesake sons, Kurt Jr. acquired a nickname. The letter “K” distinguished him from his father. In time, “K” evolved 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 would never excel in team sports, but he possessed good eye-hand coordination, helping him hold his own at table tennis.
Edith Vonnegut’s choice of pediatrician owed as much to his social standing as to his evident skills. Oscar Noel Torian, M.D., treated the children of the city’s prominent citizens. Torian clinked champagne glasses with Edith and Kurt Sr. at the literary club and other social events.
Midway through a distinguished career spanning 62 years, Torian seemed never to sleep. He rejected naps and often toiled 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 his 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 crusader for children’s health. Colleagues compared him to the German humanitarian Dr. Albert Schweitzer.
The baby’s mother accepted the infant.
Her boy squinted through eyes gray as moonstones. His double chin and 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 sometimes appeared misspelled as “Court” or “Curt” in census records, police blotters, and newspaper articles.
Two eager youngsters waited with Uncle Alex, Kurt Sr.’s younger brother, and his wife, Raye, ready to peel back this mysterious stranger’s blue blanket and 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 on 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 achieved a fame that his son Kurt Sr. never could match. The homes and buildings Bernard designed would be revered in Indianapolis long into the future.
Like his grandfather, young Bernard answered to the nicknames “Bernie” and “Barney.” He was a precocious child who swam like an otter. His parents bragged to one and all about how their eldest son, at home and at private school, already conducted science experiments.
The second child was Alice Sophia Vonnegut, born on November 18, 1917. Alice’s earliest photographs reveal a sweet girl whose mother dressed her like a doll. One posed 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.
Edith’s long separations from her husband during the hot, humid Indianapolis summers became increasingly regular after Alice’s birth.
Before Kay’s birth, she vacationed apart from Kurt Sr. with Bernard and Alice at Chatham, on the elbow of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The two children gawked upward at its 48-foot-tall lighthouse. They frolicked on sandy beaches overlooking Nantucket Sound and inhaled the salt air of the Atlantic Ocean.
Edith also vacationed that year at a sprawling resort in nearby French Lick, Indiana, and at a lakeside cottage in Forest Beach, Michigan, owned by “Uncle” John Rauch Sr., a Vonnegut relative by marriage.
Early in their marriage, the couple had vacationed together with their then-only child, Bernard, at a Wisconsin resort and elsewhere. In later years, however, Edith mainly vacationed alone with the children on Cape Cod, although Kurt occasionally showed up to join the family for a few days.
Doc remained behind in Indianapolis. As usual, he had accepted a part in a community play—this time a skit marking the arrival of the Madison railroad in Indianapolis in 1847.
He played Harvey Bates, owner of the ritzy Bates Hotel. In one comic scene, Bates argued with the actor portraying Governor James Whitcomb about the proposed location of the railroad station. He complained that it was “way out on South Street,” too dadgum far away for travelers to book his establishment on West Washington Street.
Edith and Kurt decided she was too far along in her pregnancy to risk taking a steamship to Germany. Thus, the couple missed the August 18, 1922, wedding in Hamburg of Kurt’s sister Irma Vonnegut to her prosperous German beau, Kurt Lindener.
Alex Vonnegut, Irma’s younger brother, and Raye sailed to the wedding with the 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, considered by many relatives a spinster for life, and about the same age as her fiancé, who was destined a decade later to become a member of the Nazi Party.
The year baby Kurt was born, modern medicine was helping reduce childbirth deaths among mothers and infants. Hospital deliveries offered advantages over the home births of earlier centuries. Medical advances helped the corn-fed babies of Kurt’s generation remain mostly healthy, although measles and polio remained deadly.
In 1922, a diagnosis of diabetes usually meant a death sentence for children. Soon after Kay’s birth, however, Methodist Hospital emerged as a primary insulin testing center.
Thus, contemporaries of Kurt Jr. who survived childhood diseases would, in their thousands, later experience 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 shell shock and recurring nightmares that for decades left their bedsheets damp with night sweats.
The son of Edith and Kurt Vonnegut Sr. would not only struggle through that cosmic second world war as a soldier and German slave-of-war, but also chronicle some of its story.
His true role would be that of an explainer of what happened. Having endured the war himself, he spoke for millions who suffered but lacked his clarity and wit to tell their horrific stories.
Chapter: First Years
The parents welcomed their third and final child, Kay, in their ninth year of marriage.
His birth certificate, signed by attending physician Torian, listed the family home 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 Street flat. Workers eventually demolished the original building. A cinder-block smoke shop replaced it—without any historical marker to note the birthplace of Kurt Vonnegut, appropriately enough 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 nearly a decade into their marriage. Financial considerations may have 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.
At the time of Kurt’s birth, the Vonneguts were “marginally well-to-do,” according to a later assessment by the adult Kurt Jr.
Readers of Indianapolis society notices in local newspapers likely assumed the Vonneguts were 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 had never learned homemaking skills, always had hired help in the kitchen until a couple of 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 increasingly reclusive—or so their son Kurt claimed in his writings.
Chapter: 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 that address appears to have been in the August 11 edition of the Indianapolis Star. Kurt Sr. reported a break-in at the new house.
At the time, Edith and the three children were away, vacationing at Uncle John’s Michigan cottage in the late summer of 1923. Although the North Illinois Street house was spanking new and the envy of many society acquaintances, Edith continued to spend summers away from hot, humid Indianapolis.
The new house would become a residence Kay loved and revisited even as a senior citizen, sometimes shocking its owners with unannounced visits.
Kay Vonnegut’s boyhood home 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. Tall trees, children’s playground equipment, and nearby fine schools made the neighborhood a desirable place 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 believed its designer was the pipe-chomping Willard Osler. Working alone and with Indianapolis architect Lee Burns, Osler 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.
Thus, two competing possibilities remain concerning who actually designed Kay Vonnegut’s boyhood home.
Osler and Burns, president of the Burns Realty Company, declared their mission to design “a better class of residences.” Architects such as Osler grew prosperous at a time when Kurt Vonnegut Sr., occupied with countless meetings and self-appointed obligations, seemed to find little need for his services.
Although Kay Vonnegut and a later resident disagreed about the home’s main designer, the North Illinois Street house definitely showcased distinctive elements attributed to Doc Vonnegut, an architect working in the shadow of his late father, the accomplished Bernard Vonnegut.
While the elder Bernard 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 recurring newspaper advertisement in 1921 describing the firm as “Architects and Engineers Specializing in Commercial Buildings.”
For 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 a basement dance studio, additional restrooms, and interior renovations, including relocation of the stage.
The building, later razed for a parking lot in 1970, welcomed overflow audiences seeking silent films, vaudeville entertainers, and staged plays.
At some point after moving into their 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 survived 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.
As an older adult, Kurt Junior complained that he had experienced an unhappy childhood. Nonetheless, earlier in his career as an author, he had described his upbringing as happy.
“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, while promoting 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.
Hank Nuwer inspecting the handprints of the Vonnegut children: Bernard, Alice, and the toddler Kurt, Jr. Submitted photo.