Kurt Vonnegut on When to Stop Trying and When to Try Again – The Marginalian

Climbing the Andes one windy January afternoon, looking at the peak after peeking out from above like huge mounds of moss, I found myself wondering about the clear upward line where the vegetation ends and the reddish-brown of the barren rock begins, wondering how the trees and shrubs know when to stop, how far to keep pushing, where the conditions grow, where the passpitable grows. survival.

This may be the most difficult equation in all of life: when to keep trying and when to stop. Nowhere is it more confusing, because nowhere is the calculation of thought more affected by emotion, than in our intimate relationships. There, all variables are highly charged with the feeling that they can be accurately measured; there, the most vulnerable part of the ego keeps putting itself into arithmetic. Because time is something we cannot measure and sensitivity is not, we keep trying to drive away one sense of personal failure that loss of love can bring by measuring the success of a relationship by the quantity of time rather than the quality of presence, only to find ourselves in an empty rock.

Kurt Vonnegut (November 11, 1922-April 11, 2007) was twenty-two years old and just home from his military service in Europe, where he had been imprisoned as a prisoner of war in Dresden and barely survived the Allied bombing of the city, when he married his college classmate Jane Marie Cox – two young people still and unchanged.

They loved each other, but as they grew up, they broke up, more and more. And yet, pulled by the pressure of tradition, they had a son, then a daughter, one as Vonnegut tried to make a living as a writer.

When her sister died of cancer two days after her husband died in a train accident, she took in their three young sons. In that way life can deny us any different experimental situation but our lived experience, no one knows what would happen to a couple in an experimental design outside of a small house where six hungry children are eating. They continued to fight, until the normal conversation failed but turned into an argument.

Vonnegut tried to take refuge in writing, but his two debt peaks and rejection slips got in the way of his dream. Middle-aged and penniless, he was about to quit when he received an unexpected offer to teach at the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop, courtesy of a single student touched by the unhappy writer's work. It was a lifeline both professionally and personally. Vonnegut packed his bags and headed to Iowa, knowing in his heart, though he was not ready to allow the thought, that this was the end of his life with Jane.

Two years into teaching, as his writing began to gain recognition, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and used the prize money to return to Dresden, only to find much of the city in ruins. I wonder if he thought about love at that time, what kind of country is left in irreparable ruin if the war is cruel or too long.

Suddenly found in public success – after five novels and countless short stories, Vonnegut was hailed as an overnight success. Slaughterhouse-Five – he remained locked in the pit of his failure. He and Jane had been together for half a century, happy for only half of it. Torn between his inability to hold on to relationships and his brain's unwillingness to let go, he began to drown his discontent in drink.

In the last year of his forties, he left and went to New York, but failed to consummate the marriage. Taking comfort in Margaret Mead's assurance that “a couple who have had children have an irrevocable and indissoluble bond,” she wrote to Jane:

We hit each other back and forth, almost mindlessly, and it made sense to break up, if only to break the rhythm.

She shed some light on the blatant scam in a letter to a friend, painting a grim picture of a dead relationship:

I myself live alone in two rooms and a garden in New York, trying to draw useful electricity from millions of grinding strangers. I don't live with Jane anymore for this reason, as much as I can say: We can't have pleasant conversations anymore. When we try to talk, to entertain each other and pass the time, our words are wooden, stilted, queer, distant, and – finally – bitter silence. That is very bad, and many people consider me heartless for leaving him. But hours and days and years dragged on like that. Now I am very happy, although I am far from funny and proud. I achieved the Limbo version, which is a different development than what I had before. I'm starting to write again. That had stopped for a while. I don't want to get married again. I'm not in love with anyone else.

Writing remained his sole focus in the limbo of his Middle Passage. Some part of him – that wise part that lives in each of us, whispering what we don't want but need to hear – knew he had to rethink his life if he wasn't going to waste it. But he wasn't ready. So he rethought his writing, taking the skeleton of a play he had written fifteen years earlier and revamping it. Happy Birthday, Wanda June ran for five months to mixed reviews, but the world finally took notice.

After writing the historic speech of Martin Luther King, Jr. at the March on Washington and working as a military photographer in Vietnam, Jill Krementz was ignored by the brutal writer she was hired to shoot for a magazine profile. He immediately felt Vonnegut's brilliance and his brokenness, felt the sharp edge where his heart was breaking, saw his wounded grief. She quickly decided she didn't like him. (“There's no fear like the known,” Emerson shuddered at the demise of his relationship with Margaret Fuller.)

In a few months they were living together.

Shortly before moving in with Jill, Vonnegut wrote to his seventeen-year-old daughter Nanette:

Dear old Nanny –

You certainly deserve a letter from me. A hundred letters would be like it, I love it so much.

I will be home from time to time to see you. But I won't stay long. I still love your mother, but we can't be together much without fighting. We have tried to do things about this, but nothing helps, and each battle hurts more than the last.

I was not stolen by another woman. I don't think people can steal from other people. I just left because fighting made everyone unhappy. I have done that several times before. Going to Iowa was an example. Every time I went, I went alone. No other woman was begging me to come.

In this case, for example, I could not come home after the opening of the game, and I was alone. I didn't know Jill at all, and I didn't like her very much, and whatever happened between us happened long after I decided that home was treating me badly.

Eighteen years younger but in many ways his spiritual elder, Jill showered him with a kindness he didn't know what to do with, a love he never thought he could have. She tried to fight him, out of thought, but she just loved him, so she slowly accepted the oppositional stance that was her fault, and she slowly stopped treating herself. He grew up healthy, happy, and raised himself.

Still, it took him six years to face the emotional reality of his failed marriage and the harsh reality of divorce. When he finally decided to do it, he wrote to Nan:

About the divorce: I will always love your mother, as should be obvious on Sunday. But we would never live together again. Our conversations are going very badly. Also: I want to say goodbye to Jill, who saved me from shooting myself or becoming an alcoholic. I won't marry Jill, but I will stop asking if she lives with a married man. And Jane, who loves marriage, should have the opportunity to remarry. I am not pursuing happiness through divorce. I was permanently damaged by the breakup of the marriage. Those wounds will never heal. I'm just trying to make the best of an unpleasant situation. Let me say it again, Jill did not destroy the marriage. It was broken long before that – about the time I went to Iowa. No other woman was begging me to go to Iowa. Later, no woman was begging me to go to New York City. I came to both these places alone, and I feel very sad.

There will be no unpleasant conflict regarding divorce at this time. We will not make the mistake of hiring two strangers to fight alone on our behalf. Jane and I will come to some sort of property division, and some arrangement to send him money regularly. He already owns a house in Cape Town and some shares and a large cash savings account. I will add to that wealth, so he doesn't have to worry too much as long as I'm popular and productive. Then Don Farber will make an easy deal, and that will be that. Legal actions will be short procedures, without any arguments to be made before a judge.

It took him another two years to make his relationship with Jill official. By the time they decided to marry, she was fifty-seven and one of America's most popular writers. His daughter was the first person to tell him:

Dear babysitter –

I want you to be the first person in our family to find this out: That Jill and I decided to get married in November, about a few days after Thanksgiving. Jill will be three months shy of forty, and we will have been together for almost nine years. The early years of the relationship were stormy. Most of the storm was my fault, really. I was overwhelmed with grief and disappointment over the failure of my once happy marriage with Jane. Jill had nothing to do with that failure, but she was ready to be blamed. However, Jill and I behave more lovingly and considerately now, and without selfishness. We are in love. Our heads are clear. We work and play with great joy.

I do not recommend serial marriage to anyone. I myself have always wanted to be monogamous like a duck. I was married to your mother until the end, and so will Jill.

After a rough sketch of the wedding (“It's going to be very private. We don't want our pictures on paper.”), he added:

I fully sympathize with the mixed loyalty you and all my other children would feel at such an event. So I invite you all, and I hope you will all come. If the event and the party are going to hurt you, you shouldn't put yourself through that pain. Your coming or staying away will not be a vote for or against anything.

Above all, dear Nanny, I want you to know how happy I am now, and that I have reason to look forward to the best years to come.

Kurt and Jill lived together until his death, thirty-six years after they met. It is there, in the safety and pleasure of their love, that he discovers the simple secret of happiness.