By CONNIE ZEIGLER, Contributing editor
On March 26, 1945, not for the first time, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. – the youngest son of a well-known architect from a well-known Indianapolis family – was in the newspaper. But this was not the usual social tidbit about travel with his mother in Europe or an item about his Shortridge High School activities or his enrollment in Cornell.
This time, according to The Indianapolis News, 22-year-old Vonnegut Jr. was reported to be a prisoner of war.
Held since December 1944, when his division was cut to pieces and forced to surrender early in the first onslaught of World War II’s Battle of the Bulge, Vonnegut was one of a group of 50 soldiers taken from that battlefield. They were force-marched, loaded like matchsticks onto a train car, starved by the Germans and bombed by the Americans until they reached their destination – “Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five)” – as Vonnegut explained in a letter addressed to his “Dear People” after he was safely out of Germany in May 1945. Those dear people did not include his mother, who had died in March 1944 when he was in training at Camp Atterbury before leaving for the European war theater.
Vonnegut’s letter, now published online at the Letters of Note website, reveals that he thought he was breaking the news of his captivity to his family. He had been told that they had probably only heard that he was missing in action, but The News article was published two months before he wrote. They knew.
Thin rations and hard labor had caused the soldier-fit Vonnegut to lose more than 20 pounds during his five months with the Nazis. After their German guards vamoosed following the Allied forces invasion, Vonnegut and his mates were eventually found by Russian troops, who got them to U.S. authorities. It was from POW repatriation camp in Le Havre, France, that he typed the letter to his “Dear People.”
By July, he was back in Indianapolis. Having learned a valuable lesson about how tenuous life is, he wasted no time in moving his life forward and got himself engaged to Jane Cox, a lifetime friend, a Swarthmore College graduate. Jane’s engagement photograph in The News on July 20, 1945, shows an intelligent-looking beauty with wavy dark hair, heavy brows, almond-shaped eyes and the dark lipstick she favored. Kurt was no slouch in the physical charms department either; he was 6’2” with light hair and what could subjectively be described as dreamy eyes.
In a 2015 article by George Strand in the New Yorker titled “How Jane Vonnegut made Kurt Vonnegut a Writer,” Strand credits Jane with pushing Kurt to turn his dreamy eyes toward his dream career – writing. Still, it would be five years before he saw his first work published. The Indianapolis News was on top of the story in February 1950. News reporter Filomena Gould was clearly unsure how to categorize Vonnegut’s A Report on the Barnhouse Effect, in that month’s Collier’s magazine. Gould wrote, “While I would call Kurt’s story fascinating, I am not sure whether to employ such terms as fantastic or pseudofactual or to assign the ‘Report’ to the shelves labeled ‘Science Fiction’ … But I still believe I know a good, well-written yarn when I see one. And Kurt’s is that.”
Gould reported that Vonnegut was working for General Electric’s press bureau and Jane Vonnegut had just had a baby. She also recalled a time when she had heard Vonnegut tell the story of his months in the German POW camp “one which he managed to tell piecemeal with an amazing (and to the listener, heart-breaking) humor … dramatic, dreadful and considering the outcome, miraculous.” But that story was one that he was not yet ready to write.
A month after the Collier’s publication, The News included a short article about how local residents Mr. And Mrs. Edwin McNally were “surprised and delighted” when they attended church in historic Williamsburg, Va., and the sermon was based on Vonnegut’s The Barnhouse Report.
In 1952, The News brought the news that Vonnegut had published his first novel. The dystopian tale of intelligent machine versus man in Player Piano caused reviewer Fred Odiet to write, “You might call it science fiction, but the possibility of it all is a little weird.” Odiet thought it was a good first novel that should gain popular interest. Published by Charles Scribner and Sons in a print run of only 7,600, it did not.
By 1960, Filomena Gould was back on the Vonnegut story reporting about a Vonnegut-authored play – his second – in production on Cape Cod. The play got a great review in the Cape Cod newspaper, but most of The News article was a description of Vonnegut’s life with his “vivacious wife” and their six children in their restored Barnstable, Mass., house. Gould did not mention that three of the six children belonged to Vonnegut’s sister, Alice. He and Jane adopted them after Alice’s death. She did mention that Vonnegut had, by then, published numerous short stories and several books, most recently The Sirens of Titan. She concluded by noting that Jane’s mother had sent along the Cape Cod article and this “news of the young people.”
Kurt Vonnegut returned to Indianapolis to speak to the Theta Sigma Phi professional women’s organization in 1965. His latest book, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, was newly published and the 43-year-old writer talked about it, about growing up in Indianapolis, his life with his wife, Jane, and their six children, and about a play and another book he was working on, according to The News on Feb. 19. This book would be based on the destruction of Dresden, Germany, and his time as a POW.
It was tentatively titled Slaughterhouse Five. Two months later in an April 1965 article in The News, Vonnegut said about that book, “I don’t know what the hell it will be really.”
It would be four years and a divorce later before Kurt Vonnegut Jr. could say what Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children’s Crusade (the full title) would be. It was a science-fictionalized account of the hell he lived through in Germany, and it was also about time traveling, and more than that. If you know, you know.
Slaughterhouse-Five placed Kurt Vonnegut Jr. into the pantheon of great writers. Not surprisingly, The Indianapolis News published a review in April 1969. It ends with these lines, “This is a tough book, tough and sad and delightful and at times screamingly funny. It is vintage Vonnegut.” It was an introduction to “vintage Vonnegut” for most readers and still is one for many. It was a New York Times best-seller. Slaughterhouse-Five sold about 800,000 copies in its first run. In 1969, 24-years after Vonnegut was captured in World War II, it was a timely story published during the height of the protests against a new war, the one in Vietnam.
Connie Zeigler holds a master’s degree in history. She enjoys digging up a surprising, forgotten story and sharing her pirate’s booty with Urban Times readers.
