Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (118 page)

Vonnegut did not, in the conventional sense, write
Slaughterhouse-Five
– it rose out of his subconscious like a slow bruise. Immediately after the war he found he could not remember the event: ‘There was a complete blank where the bombing of Dresden took place … And I looked up several of my war buddies and they didn’t remember either.’ In his first, fuzzy, conception of his ‘Dresden book’, he imagined something like the popular war movies of the period: ‘I saw it as starring John
Wayne and Frank Sinatra.’ Ironically, these two ‘dirty old men’, as Mary O’Hare calls them, in
Chapter One
of
Slaughterhouse-Five
, declined to serve their country in the Second World War, but made millions out of playing war heroes onscreen where the bombs don’t hurt.

One problem for Vonnegut, both as a POW and an author, was his ethnicity. He was an American with a name more German than most of the enemy he was sworn to kill. Kurt Vonnegut Jr was born in Indianapolis, into a wealthy German-American family, settled in the New World for two generations. His father, with whom he had a fraught relationship, was a successful architect and painter. His mother, Edith Lieber Vonnegut, was heiress to a brewing family, highly cultivated, a published author, and a lifelong depressive. She would eventually kill herself on Mother’s Day, 1944, while her son was serving abroad. Others in the Vonnegut family, including Kurt, would make suicide attempts during the course of their lives.

The Vonneguts, although they kept the family name, followed the ‘Americanisation’ routine in their ethnic community after the First World War. They studiously immunised their son from any German cultural influences. He might as well, Vonnegut ruefully said, have been brought up Tibetan. If Goethe was Greek to him, he was strongly influenced, growing up, by the stars of radio comedy (Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Jimmy Durante). The more depressing the Great Depression of the 1930s, he observed, the funnier and zanier the jokes. At his father’s insistence, he enrolled in 1940 to do biochemistry (a ‘useful’ subject) at Cornell. In 1943 he enlisted in the US Army. As a serviceman Vonnegut never put himself forward for promotion on the persuasive grounds that all officers were ‘shits’. It was as a scout (i.e. in a dangerous forward position) with the 106th Infantry Division that Vonnegut was taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge, one of the more ignominious episodes in American military history. On his release and demobilisation, he married. At the same period he enrolled on the GI Bill in the University of Chicago’s MA programme in anthropology. He flunked. The examiners failed his thesis on ‘simple tales’. Some would flunk his fiction for the same reason.

Work was fairly easy to come by during the post-war boom and Vonnegut got a job in the PR department of the vast multinational, General Electric. On the side he was writing his own stuff. His first short story was published in 1950. Other pieces for the ‘slicks’ (upmarket magazines) followed. Confident of his powers he left GE to write a satire on the company,
Player Piano
(1952). He was in business. Science fiction was in vogue and he did well with his first Tralfamadorian comic-epic,
The Sirens of Titan
(1959). Fame came with
Cat’s Cradle
(1963), another whimsical dystopia centred on a miraculous new chemical compound (‘ice nine’). It caught the fancy of the campus market. Other novels followed and his reputation grew. World
fame, and critical respect, did not come until
Slaughterhouse-Five
, a novel which he brought into its final shape with the help of a Guggenheim grant to revisit Dresden (described in the novel’s non-fiction first section), a stint at the University of Iowa’s writers’ workshop, and acute personal problems with his family.

Slaughterhouse-Five
was a bestseller, as were the novels which followed. None, however, garnered great esteem with pundits. Vonnegut’s whimsy, when not fused with Kurtzian ‘horror’, was not regarded as truly serious. His first marriage was dissolved in 1979 and he remarried the photographer Jill Krementz, whose portraits perfectly catch Vonnegut’s sardonic charm. That charm, and his anti-war convictions, wittily purveyed, served him well on talk-shows and as a lecturer in his later years – particularly with campus audiences, who remained faithful to him long after the popularity of
Cat’s Cradle
among the larger reading public had waned. His last public words, after a college lecture, were: ‘Thank you for your attention, and I’m outta here.’

Absorbing, terrifying, beautiful and appalling.
Ruth Rendell on
Tony and Susan

Question: What do the following have in common?

1. Dorothy L. Sayers

2. J. I. M. Stewart

3. Austin M. Wright

4. Trevanian

5. Lionel Trilling

6. David Lodge

Answer: they are all university professors of literature who wrote novels ‘with their left hand’. ‘Hobbyists,’ the professionals might sneer. Ambidexters is the more friendly verdict. On the face of it, the conjunction ‘professor-novelist’ is unsurprising. Marinaded career-long in fiction, lecturing on it omnisciently for a living, who would not try their arm at what they were so good at pontificating about? Creative writing. But what is surprising, on reflection, is that so few professors have done it
or, more precisely, done it and got their work published, and the majority of those who have done it (the above are exceptions) seem to have been second-raters or worse.

In philosophy, a discipline which nestles alongside literature in university arts faculties, professors of philosophy (A. J. Ayer, Bertrand Russell, Isaiah Berlin, Wittgenstein) have been great philosophers. Professors of literature … the canon speaks for itself. For those of a cynical cast of mind, it bears out the Wildean quip that those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach: scholarly eunuchs in the harem of literature. Those university teachers who have gone into the real world of fiction have, in general, taken one of a few paths. That most favoured in the early twentieth century was donnish amateurism, and a daring descent from high to low literature, as a country clergyman might daringly visit a brothel. Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels belong to this category as, more worthily, does J. I. M. Stewart’s (pen name ‘Michael Innes’) forty-odd crime novels – of which the most admired remains the first he published,
Death at the President’s Lodging
(1937). A fellow of Christ Church College, Oxford, for most of his long career Stewart was entrusted with the last volume of the
Oxford History of English Literature
, covering the modern period. Crime fiction does not get a look in. The right hand of scholarship wilfully does not know what the left hand is doing.

Lionel Trilling is an interesting case, and almost unique among professorial novelists. The first Jewish academic to get tenure at Columbia, a leading member of the leftist ‘New York Intellectuals’ who clustered around the
Partisan Review
, Trilling wrote one work of fiction,
The Middle of the Journey
(1947). Intelligence, believed Trilling, is a human being’s moral duty.
The Middle of the Journey
is an excessively intelligent rumination on the political hysteria which would climax with the outright madness of McCarthyism and the emasculation of American universities for a generation. The book is generally found dull, not helped by the self-aggrandisingly Dantean title.

The other most-favoured mode is setting literary criticism and literature in a relationship analogous to that between theoretical and applied physics. ‘Applied fiction’ we might call it. The principal exponent of this genre in the UK is David Lodge, currently the country’s leading novelist of ideas – principally literary critical ideas. For him the novel is a laboratory, where those ideas can be tested.

In America, more arresting because of its rather different mixture of modes, is the case of Austin M. Wright. According to the terse memorials on his death, aged eighty, Wright’s life was uneventful and modestly successful. Born in Yonkers, New York, he graduated from Harvard, with a degree in geology, in 1943. On graduation he was conscripted and then demobilised from the army in 1946. Taking advantage
of the GI Bill, Wright switched his intellectual interests, taking an MA and Ph.D. in Literature at the University of Chicago. The departmental ‘line’ at the time was firmly that of the theorist Kenneth Burke, whose
Philosophy of Literary Form
(1941) was a dominant influence. Chicago, at that period, was fascinated by the mechanics of fiction.

The newly graduated Dr Wright took up an appointment at the University of Cincinnati in 1962, marrying in the same year. He would have three daughters in the course of his fifty-two-year-long marriage. He remained in Ohio until his retirement in 1993, and beyond, rising through the ranks to an endowed chair. In his last ten years he enjoyed the status of an admired emeritus member of his department. Wright was the regular winner of awards for teaching excellence, but published only two monographs:
The Formal Principle in the Novel
(1982) – a work whose contents are as Burkean as its title – and
Recalcitrance, Faulkner, and the Professors: A Critical Fiction
(1990). Neither book created much stir in a subject currently intoxicated with French theory from the pens of younger trendier professors.

Wright also wrote seven crime thrillers, all of which play with the idea of narration. One of Wright’s novels,
Tony and Susan
(1993) stands out: not merely for its thrill (testified to by every reader) but its cunning play with the aesthetics of fiction. The central character, Susan, has made a successful – if obscurely uneasy – second marriage. Her husband, Arnold, is a surgeon, away at a conference in New York. He too is on his second marriage. His first wife, Selena, went homicidally mad, and is incarcerated (Mrs Rochester-style) in an asylum. Susan receives a mysterious package out of the blue. It is a manuscript novel by her ex-husband (of fifteen years) Edward. His ambition to write was frustrated during the course of their marriage and he blamed Susan for having to do boring office work instead. The manuscript is entitled ‘Nocturnal Animals’. As the story opens, a professor of mathematics, Tony Hastings, is driving by night (a daring departure from his normal practice) from Ohio to his holiday home in Maine. Travelling with him are his wife and teenage daughter. Their car is hijacked; Laura and Helen are raped and killed by three low-life drifters. Tony runs away – is he driven by self-preservation (they would surely kill him as well) or cowardice? A year later, the criminals are apprehended – but look as if they are going to get off on a legal technicality. With the aid of a local lawman, who is dying of terminal cancer and doesn’t give a damn what he does, Tony embarks on a
Death Wish
-style vigilante campaign. He turns himself into an animal of the night.

So far, so conventional. What makes
Tony and Susan
unconventional is that the chapters are interspersed with Susan’s chapter-by-chapter responses to the text she is reading. And as she reads, the gothic novel gradually permeates her cosy
bourgeois home, and demons, long suppressed from her first marriage, are released. Obliquely, the novel is directed not to her, but at her. It works on her not as entertainment, but infection.
Tony and Susan
is a classic work of high-end crime fiction – and something more. It embodies decades of thinking about fiction. The novel was reprinted, seven years after Wright’s death, in 2010. Its republication was accompanied by a round of belated applause. Saul Bellow, no less, praised it as ‘marvellously written – the last thing you would expect in a story of blood and revenge. Beautiful.’

It calls out to be considered alongside
Recalcitrance, Faulkner, and the Professors
, which was written at the same period. Novels within novels are common enough (there are notable examples in
Don Quixote, Tom Jones
and
The Pickwick Papers
). Common too are ‘framework narratives’ – such as those in
The Turn of the Screw
or
Heart of Darkness
, in which the narrator tells his story to a listening audience. But that audience does not interrupt, interject, interpose or interact. They are literary décor and gradually fade into background invisibility. The double foreground of
Tony and Susan
is an unusual experiment in fiction, based on a classroom experiment described in
Recalcitrance, Faulkner, and the Professors
. That work recounts the diverse running response of a group of students to their first reading of William Faulkner’s
As I Lay Dying
, giving equal attention to what was read and how it was received as it was read. Like the novel on its first appearance, the monograph (published by an obscure university press) made little impact.

For Wright’s purpose, crime fiction was the ideal raw material. He explains why in
chapter seven
of
Tony and Susan
:

Susan Morrow is running out of book … Violence thrills her like brass in the symphony. Susan, who is well past forty, has never seen a killing. Last year in McDonald’s she saw a policeman with a gun jump a guy eating a sandwich. That’s the size of violence in her life … In a book there is no future. In its place is violence … Never forget what’s possible, it says.