“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over.  Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.  Big, undreamed-of things.  The people on the edge see them first.”

--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-2007)

Kurt Vonnegut was an American writer known for blending deadpan satire, black comedy, and science fiction.

He was born to a third-generation German-American family in Indianapolis, Indiana.  He studied biochemistry1 at two different colleges from 1941 to 1943 before enlisting in the U.S. Army during World War II.

While Vonnegut was serving in Europe in 1944, his mother committed suicide, on Mother’s Day.

As an advance scout during the Battle of the Bulge, Vonnegut was cut off from his battalion and wandered alone behind enemy lines for several days until captured.  Imprisoned in Dresden, Vonnegut witnessed the Allied fire-bombing that destroyed the city.  Vonnegut was one of only seven American prisoners of war in Dresden to survive, because they were kept in a cell in an under-ground meat locker at a plant known as Slaughterhouse Five.  “Utter destruction,” he recalled, “carnage unfathomable.”  The Germans put him to work gathering bodies for mass burial.  “But there were too many corpses to bury.  So instead the Nazis sent in guys with flamethrowers.  All these civilians’ remains were burned to ashes.”  This experience had a profound effect on him and formed the core of his most celebrated book, Slaughterhouse-Five--now recognized as one of the finest American novels of the 20th century--and is a theme in at least six other books.

Vonnegut was freed in May of 1945.  Upon returning to America, he was awarded a Purple Heart for what he called a “ludicrously negligible wound.”

After the war, Vonnegut studied anthropology⁴ and also worked as a police reporter in Chicago before going to work in public relations for General Electric.  On the verge of abandoning his writing, Vonnegut was offered a teaching job in Iowa, and that’s when Cat’s Cradle became a bestseller and confirmed his reputation.

He had two wives (once divorced) and eight children: three with his first wife, one with his second, and four adopted.  Of the latter four, three are his nephews, adopted in 1958 when their mother (Vonnegut’s sister) died of cancer and in the same week their father was killed when his train plunged off an open drawbridge.

Vonnegut attempted suicide in 1984 and later wrote about it in several essays.

In 2000, again fire figured prominently in Vonnegut’s life when flames destroyed the top story of his home.  Vonnegut suffered smoke inhalation and was hospitalized in critical condition.  He survived, but his personal archives were destroyed.

He died at the age of 84 on April 11, 2007, in New York City after a fall at his Manhattan home resulted in irreversible brain injuries.

“The purpose of the arts is to use fraud to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are.  Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move.  Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important.  Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make.  The arts put man at the center of the universe, whether he belongs there or not.  Military science, on the other hand, treats man as garbage--and his children, and his cities too.  Military science is probably right about the contemptibility of man in the vastness of the universe.  Still, I deny that con-temptibility, and I beg you to deny it, through the creation and appreciation of art.”

--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Vonnegut’s work was consistently ironic, distanced and sometimes sardonic, pungent and irreverent in tone.  But he was haunted by the sheer insanity of the war in which he had participated, and by the grotesque nature of the cruelty practised by human beings against each other, and that gave him a wistful counterbalance.

The Sirens of Titan⁵ (1959) and Cat’s Cradle (1963) developed his use of science fiction as a vehicle for satire, and it was this, together with his own war experience, that gave Slaughterhouse-Five its extraordinary impact when it appeared in 1969.

In the preface to Breakfast of Champions (1973), Vonnegut wrote that, as a child, he saw men with locomotor ataxia⁶, and it struck him that they walked like broken machines.  It followed that healthy people were working machines, suggesting that humans are helpless prisoners of determinism.⁷ Vonnegut explored this theme in Slaughterhouse-Five, in which protagonist Billy Pilgrim “has come unstuck in time,” with so little control over his own life that he cannot even predict which part of it he will be living through from minute to minute.  The novel’s combination of simplicity, irony⁸, and rue is very much in the Vonnegut vein.

Kurt Vonnegut’s eight rules for writing:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
   
2. Give the reader [or viewer] at least one character to root for.
   
3. Every character should want something, even if it’s only a glass of water.
   
4. Every sentence must do one of two things: reveal character or advance the action.
   
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
   
6. Be a sadist.  No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them, so that the reader [or viewer] may see what they are made of.
   
7. Write to please just one person.  If you open a window and make love to the world, your story will get pneumonia.
   
8. Give your readers [and viewers] as much information as possible as soon as possible.  To heck with suspense.  Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Vonnegut qualifies the list by adding that the greatest American short story writer, Flannery O’Connor, broke all these rules except the first, and that great writers tend to do that.

Another set of rules about writing from Vonnegut:

1. Find a subject you care about.
   
2. Do not ramble, though.
   
3. Keep it simple.
   
4. Have the guts to cut.
   
5. Sound like yourself.
   
6. Say what you mean to say.
   
7. Pity the readers [and viewers].

Four of his novels, one of his short stories, and two of his screenplays were turned into movies.

An excerpt from one of his books, part of the last rites in the Book of Bokonon in Cat’s Cradle:

I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
“Nice going, God!
Nobody but You could have done it, God!
I certainly couldn’t have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important
is to think of all the mud
that didn’t even get to sit up and look around.”

NOTES:

¹ Biochemistry: the scientific study of the chemical substances, processes and reactions that occur in living organisms.  Vonnegut often dwells on the facticity of human life, usually in a sad humor.
² The Battle of the Bulge: mid-December 1944 to late January 1945.  The bloodiest German counteroffensive of WW2.  (D-Day was in June of 1944.)
The Allied response was hampered by cloud cover and heavy snow.  Officially called the Battle of the Ardennes by the U.S. Army, it was a total surprise.  Allied intelligence failed to detect the planning or initiation of the attack.  The Allies eventually turned it back, but at a cost of 20,000 US dead, 200 British dead, and 72,000 wounded, missing or captured.  The Germans lost 16,000 dead, and an additional 69,000 wounded, missing or captured.  Vonnegut was in the 106th Infantry Division, which suffered the heaviest casualties.  Two movies about the battle:  Battle of the Bulge (1965) with Henry Fonda and Robert Shaw and Battleground (1949) directed by William Wellman.
³ The fire-bombing of Dresden was considered infamous because there were no military targets in the area.  Vonnegut describes Dresden, before the bombing, as a beautiful, fairy-tale city.
⁴ Anthropology: the study of humankind in all its aspects, especially its culture and development from its primitive roots.
⁵ The Sirens of Titan is about free will and the overall purpose of human history.  Compare with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
⁶ Ataxia: inability to coordinate muscles.
⁷ Determinism: a doctrine that everything, including all human acts, is caused by something, and there is no free will.  Compare with the character Auda abu Tayi (Anthony Quinn) in Lawrence of Arabia (1962): “It is written.”
⁸ Irony: something doesn’t fit because it’s not appropriate in context; an incongruity between what might be expected to happen and what actually happens, especially when the result is absurd or laughable.

Compiled, written, edited by Frederick Bailey

Frederick Bailey made his debut as a feature director in 1999 with ‘Shogun Cop' (Bushido Pictures). He also wrote "Quick," the highly successful action thriller which premiered worldwide on HBO in 1993. Frederick has a long list of credits to his name as a director, screenwriter and actor.  He is the screenwriter for his current project, the feature film Tears From Afar.