Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, edited by Dan Wakefield, has been on my shelf now for twelve years. In May 2009 I read five Vonnegut books and then never went back to him. When Letters came out in 2012 I bought it and left it at my parents. My dad read it and said it was a good book about art and commerce, so I held onto it.
And he was right. Before becoming The Conscience of the Sixties or whatever, Vonnegut was a returning serviceman with a family, writing stories for “the slicks”—what were called womens’ magazines, which published several stories every issue and paid well. He supported his family and learned his craft, catching the attention of Collier’s editor Knox Burger who helped him break into the paperback science fiction market. After twenty-odd years of toiling, Vonnegut mined his experiences as a POW who survived the bombing of Dresden and wrote Slaughterhouse-Five.
It’s the years of toiling in the pulps that interest me. Vonnegut’s career was almost identical to John D MacDonald’s—World War Two service, an area of study at college that wasn’t creative writing (science in KV’s case, business in JDM’s), pulp and paperback apprenticeship followed by hardcover glory. The two were friends.
A few quotes gleaned from the Letters, organized by subject:
[Writing to his daughter to offer thoughts on her art show]:
You are sophisticated, and you are also in financial trouble—so, like me, when I was young, you have to try to do all sorts of financial and artistic things all at once….But I hope that one of the many things you do will incorporate your only deeply personal hopes and fears and joys and angers and so on. …The things of yours which earn you the most money just now will no doubt be your cleanest, clearest works…But I want to know, even if I never see them, that the crazily thoughtful, most private part of you is making pictures, too. I would feel cheated, if that part of you were to be wholly suppressed. This is an indirect way of saying, I suppose, that I found your show serene.
[To his son on royalty advances and money]
Thinking about money games now will simply fuck you up. Concentrate on creative games. That’s your job. If your book makes a lot of money, which really good books usually don’t, you will get that money as it is earned—in straight royalties.
[To a former student]
Are you willing to pander to popular tastes in order to be published? If so, write about a love affair. It isn’t so terrible to write for the women’s magazines. That is how I supported myself more or less for about twelve years. I do not feel dishonored. What the hell. You’d be surprised what you can say in a woman’s magazine these days.
And I’ve taken jobs a damned sight worse than writing for Hallmark. Most people have.
[On teaching at the Iowa Writers Workshop for two years
The important novelist Richard Yates and I used to deliver a highly unpopular joint lecture each semester at the Writers Workshop in Iowa City on the subject of how to survive in a Free Enterprise Economy by means of hackwork. We had both done a lot of that, without serious damage, seemingly, to our souls or intellects. Not that it felt good.
[firing his semi-retired agent]
You say that you have not retired, but I tell you as your client that you have felt retired to me. I can’t use what you are offering out there.
[writing to Dorothy MacDonald after her husband’s death]
John and I were members of an unacknowledged school of writing rooted in the Golden Age of Magazine Fiction which followed World War Two…John’s reputation as a writer was sky high at the time of his death. The huge body of absolutely first rate work he gave the world is sure to remain popular well into the next millennium. Think of that! I hope he knew I loved and admired him, and was grateful for the encouragement he gave me from time to time.
P.S. If our school of writing had a name, what would be a good one? I suggest this: “The Professionals.”
[Part of the eulogy he wrote for John and Dorothy]
When we came home from the Second World War, and having published nothing, wer were determine to prosper by selling stories to the then exceedingly rich and popular magazines. When I saw “we,” I include the wives and eventually the children we had, since freelance story-telling was and remains very much a family enterprise. Without our mates, we would have sunk like stones.
John D. and Dorothy are now both gone, still beloved and sorely missed…Still alive is Knox Burger, an agent now, who, when fiction editor of Collier’s Magazine, insisted that John D. and I and many returning veterans like us could become effective writers if we did not give up, if we kept on and on.
So we kept on and on. John D. achieved greatness, and so did Dorothy. They were one flesh, and God love them.