Kurt Vonnegut (November 11, 1922–April 11, 2007) endures as one of the most beloved writers of modern history, a brilliant storyteller and a stylistic shaman. He also had, however, one great father: Ku Kurt Vonnegut: Books (public library) – which also gave us the writer's precious daily routine, his beloved apartment problems, and this lovely short poem he wrote to a friend – Vonnegut adds to the great historical books of fatherly advice in a series of letters to his children. Besides his three children—Nanette, Mark, and Edith—Vonnegut and his first wife, Jane, ended up raising his sister Alice's three children after Alice and her husband died of unrelated causes within 24 hours of each other; he later adopted another daughter with his second wife, Jill.
In a 1969 letter to his 22-year-old son Mark, Vonnegut offers a series of helpful and irreverent fatherly advice:
Advice mine my father gave me: never bring alcohol to the room. Do not put anything in your ears. Be anything but an architect.
The following year, Kurt and Jane broke up, and he began living with the woman who would become his second wife 9 years later. Worried about how the divorce would affect her youngest daughter, Nanette – whom she affectionately called “Nanny,” “Nanno” or “Dear Old Nan” – wrote in a 1971 letter to the 17-year-old:
Well, it can go two ways with us: you can think that you have been abandoned by your father, and you can cry about it. Or we can stay in touch and love each other more than ever.
The second possibility is the most attractive to me. It is absolutely necessary for me. And the trouble with it is that you will have to write to me a lot, or something, anyway, and call sometimes, and so on. We should wish each other happy birthdays, and ask how work is going, and tell each other jokes, and all that. And you should visit me often, and I should pay more attention to what kinds of things are really good times instead of your chores.
Nanette – who recently wrote about her contentious relationship with her father and his fame in the introduction to this remarkable posthumous collection of Vonnegut – took the second possibility and the two remained close over the years. This inspiring quote from a 1972 letter to Nanette reveals the warmth of their relationship:
You should know that as a college student I didn't write my parents much. The most important thing to say in your first letter out there… is that you love me so much. Mark wrote me something similar recently. That helps, and it lasts for years. I think I kept that message from my parents. Either that, or I said it so often that it was pointless. Same thing, anyway.
In another letter, 50-year-old Vonnegut writes to his “Dear Nanno”:
Many parenting books contain lost parenting dreams disguised as good advice. My best advice to you is to pay someone to teach you to speak another language, meet with you two or three times a week and talk. Also: find someone to teach you how to play an instrument. What makes this advice useless and holy is that I am not dead. If it was good, I could take it easy.
(More than thirty years later, he echoed this in his wonderful book of life advice to children in a high school classroom, urging them to “practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, painting, drawing, recording, poetry, fiction, stories, reporting, no matter how good or bad, not to get money inside you, KNOWING. YOUR SPIRIT IS GROWING.”)
His most timeless advice, however, comes in a late 1971 letter to Nanette and speaks to today's recurring theme of unplanned adoption:
Hello Dear Nanno –
Now you learn that you don't live in a strong, honest, and social place – that the adults you find around you are troubled, volatile, mischievous people who were little children a few days ago. So a home can be broken up and schools can be separated, often for child reasons, and what do you have? A space traveler named Nan.
And that's OK I'm an astronaut named Kurt, and an astronaut named Jane, and so on. When things go well for days in a row, it becomes a horrible disaster.
He is disappointed that he lost a year, perhaps, because the school was disbanded. Well – I feel like I've lost years since then Slaughterhouse-Five was published, but that is surprising. Those years were not lost. They just weren't the way I planned them. It was also not a year that Jim had to stay in bed while he got over TB. There was no hearing where Mark went crazy, and then he pulled himself together again. Those years were eventful. There is no set age.
I look back on my life and I wouldn't change a thing. . . .
Later in the same letter, he adds another piece of advice:
I think it is more important to live in a good country than to live in a powerful country. Power makes everyone crazy.
He ends the book with some valuable advice for self-education outside the classroom, giving Nanette a strong admonition about expanding the soul:
Study German during your last semester at Sea Pines, and you'll learn more than you ever did in high school. I doubt they'd find you in a position to cool college boards, so to hell with college boards. Instead educate yourself. In the end, that's what I had to do, what Uncle Beaver had to do, and what we all have to do.
I will instruct you to do something new, if you haven't already. Find a collection of Chekhov's short stories and read them all. Then read “The Youth” by Joseph Conrad. I am not suggesting that you do these things. I command you to do them.
Kurt Vonnegut: Books it's always a pleasure. Pairs with Vonnegut on how to write in style, his fictional interviews with luminaries, and this NPR interview with him Second Life shortly before his death, he combined his advice with more fatherly wisdom from Einstein on the secret to learning anything, John Steinbeck on love, Ted Hughes on nurturing the inner child, and Sherwood Anderson on the creative life.
