Take life seriously but none of the people in it
The Letters of Kurt Vonnegut
Today, 11th November 2022, marks 100 years since the birth of Kurt Vonnegut. Most—but not all—of the following excerpts come from Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, a superb collection of Vonnegut’s correspondence ably edited by his friend, Dan Wakefield. According to a sum I just did, that book was published a decade ago; and yet still I return regularly to my well-thumbed copy, the vast majority of its pages folded at the corner. The final letter below, to Xavier High School in New York, can be found in the second volume of Letters of Note—reprinted by kind permission of Kurt Vonnegut’s estate and Xavier High School.
P.S. The last time I saw you, you were certainly one of the nicest people I had ever seen. Now I hear that you are learning to dance. That makes you just about perfect.
Kurt Vonnegut
Letter to his daughter, Nanette
30th September 1965
Take life seriously but none of the people in it.
Kurt Vonnegut
Letter to Gail Godwin
25th November 1967
There’s no hope in war.
Kurt Vonnegut
Letter to the Draft Board
28th November 1967
Advice my father gave me: Never take liquor into the bedroom. Don’t stick anything in your ears. Be anything but an architect.
Kurt Vonnegut
Letter to his son, Mark
7th May 1969
I think it’s important to live in a nice country rather than a powerful one. Power makes everybody crazy.
Kurt Vonnegut
Letter to his daughter, Nanette
20th November 1971
You are dismayed at having lost a year, maybe, because the school fell apart. Well—I feel as though I’ve lost the years since Slaughterhouse-Five was published, but that’s malarky. Those years weren’t lost. They simply weren’t the way I’d planned them. Neither was the year in which Jim had to stay motionless in bed while he got over TB. Neither was the year in which Mark went crazy, then put himself together again. Those years were adventures. Planned years are not.
Kurt Vonnegut
Letter to his daughter, Nanette
20th November 1971
Most letters from a parent contain a parent’s own lost dreams disguised as good advice. My good advice to you is to pay somebody to teach you to speak some foreign language, to meet with you two or three times a week and talk. Also: get somebody to teach you to play a musical instrument. What makes this advice especially hollow and pious is that I am not dead yet. If it were any good, I could easily take it myself.
Kurt Vonnegut
Letter to his daughter, Nanette
20th September 1972
If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.
Kurt Vonnegut
Letter to Charles McCarthy
16th November 1973
I thank you for your comments on how slowly my literary reputation is dying. Part of the problem, surely, is that all my books remain in print, and people continue to give me credit for having written them.
Kurt Vonnegut
Letter to critic Anatole Broyard
19th April 1981
I am off to the city tomorrow, Thursday, and then to the outskirts of Chicago, to Harper College, where I will tell my audience about the pregnant woman who asked me in a letter if it was wrong to bring an innocent baby into a world as awful as this one. I told her that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me was all the saints I met almost anywhere, people who were behaving decently in an indecent society. I will tell the audience that I hope some among them will become saints for her child to meet.
Kurt Vonnegut
Letter to Robert Maslansky
16th October 1992
I myself wonder about rattlesnakes and lightning bugs. Only a completely humorless person could believe that such preposterously elaborate Dr. Seuss creatures could be the result of judicious shopping in the marriage market, so to speak. I have the same problem with the Big Bang Theory. Anybody with a sense of humor has to laugh.
Kurt Vonnegut
Letter to Stephen Jay Gould
6th March 1999
It may give us some comfort in these worrisome times to know that in all of history only one country has actually been crazy enough to detonate atomic weapons in the midst of civilian populations, turning unarmed men, women and children into radioactive soot and bonemeal. And that was a long, long time ago now.
Kurt Vonnegut
Letter to the New York Times
12th September 2002
I cannot be of any use to you and your students nowadays, alas, since, at 84, I resemble nothing so much as an iguana, hate travel, and have nothing to say. I might as well send a spent Roman candle in my stead.
Kurt Vonnegut
Letter to Professor Alice Fulton
6th February 2007
Make your soul grow
In 2006, a group of students at Xavier High School in New York City were given an assignment by their English teacher, Ms. Lockwood, that was to test their persuasive writing skills: they were asked to write to their favourite author and ask him or her to visit the school. It’s a measure of his ongoing influence that five of those pupils chose Kurt Vonnegut, the novelist responsible for, amongst other highly-respected books, Slaughterhouse-Five; sadly, however, he never made that trip. Instead, he wrote this wonderful letter. He was the only author to reply.
November 5, 2006
Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:
I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.
What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.
Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.
Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?
Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.
God bless you all!
Kurt Vonnegut
"Those years were adventures. Planned years are not." I'm going to keep this line close to me today. Thank you Kurt. Thank you Shaun!
Instructive and illuminating. Thank You.