Love, Kurt

by Kurt Vonnegut

  Don’t poop yourself out typing up my stories, Sweety. They’re not worth it. They are exercises and not much more. Exercises for what we both hope will be something amazingly good. I’ve an awful lot to say, Sweety, in response to your awe-inspiring letters. But let it wait a while––17 days.

  Please, Angel, send me five-bucks (if you haven’t already) by air mail, as I haven’t the price of a coke or a movie.

  I wish I could write as well as you. Right now you’re the composer and I’m the musical instrument. We periodically swap roles.

  I’m blissfully married, Darling. Be patient with me, Woofy, and keep in mind that I’ve been asleep for almost three years. I’m seeing the world through the eyes of Rip Van Winkle. Do you understand that all of this is NEW to me; that on every page of every book I read and in every kiss is a revelation? I’m amazed and staggered, Sweety. Be patient.

  KURT

  P.S. Practically everyone here thinks that I am a nut. This is highly encouraging.

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  LEAVE US NOT BE APPREHENSIVE, WOOFY––

  THIS LETTER CONTAINS NO BAD NEWS

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  16 NOV 45—FRIDAY

  6 P.M

  Dear Wife:––

  It happens to every couple, naturally––this business of the marriage marking major emotional and intellectual shakeups and realignments. But the products of our particular adjustment are hellish exciting. Apart from the fabulous pleasures in bed––the blessed bliss of which I’d never expected or experienced––an amazing collection of hopes and ideas has spontaniously (at least on my Rip Van Winkle part) demanded, and will get, our attention.

  ………Darling, you’ve written remarkable letters this past month. After reading them I feel like kicking myself for having sent you the infantile mass of crap most of my letters are.

  I’ve finished a fiendishly revealing book on psychiatry; the first of its sort that I’ve ever read: The Human Mind––by Dr. Karl Menninger. Reading it has startled me into recognizing some things about myself, motives; it has shredded several cherished falsehoods, thrown light into obscure corners––and given me a million ideas as to what I should write about, and as many accurate plots (case histories) to go with them. I think we’d better buy it. NO other book ever hit me this hard before.

  ………All of which leads me to wonder. Just how shrewd an analyst are you, Angel? I realize now that my letters to you are almost dreamlike in their wandering lack of inhibition––and to anyone with an inkling of psychiatric theory, my aimless symbolism and imagery would illuminate my befouled mental sewers. Methinks you’ve been uncommonly shrewd.

  …Take my wanting you to open up and engulf me…Take my attachment to Aunt Edna and Phoebe…Take their enthusiastic return of it…Take your outspoken maternal instinct…Take your unquestioning love of your father…Take your occasional outbursts against your mother…Take my baseless distrust of my father…Take the fact that you and I have almost gravitated together into marriage…Take the fact that we share a love that seems unreasonable in its magnitude at times…This retrospection shows nothing abnormal. It does, I think, give a true picture of your motives––which mesh perfectly, giving the classic picture of Ying and Yan. It explains and confirms the happy ending. Or the happy beginning.

  I wonder if you are going to have a baby. We’ll get you a pregnancy test when I get home. When will I get home? Oh Dammit, Angel, I still don’t know. The orders haven’t come down yet. Everyone, including the officers, expected them to come down yesterday. Believe me––they can’t hold them up much longer. We’ve been going through a dismaying series of broken promises. It has been rough on me and I suppose a thousand times as rough on you. It wouldn’t surprise me if that were the cause of your uneasy little tummy. I love your tummy.

  I’m afraid one requisite of being a full fledged and accredited intellectual is an astounding scholastic record. You have one. I don’t. And I doubt if I’ll ever have one. I can’t explain it, but I’m not academically worth a damn. Another requisite is a string of advanced degrees. My record is not encouraging in that august direction, and I’ve neither the time nor the money to pursue them. Sweety, we’ll have to blunder our way into World respect through channels other than those followed by Stringfellow Barr and Milton Mayer. I think we have a chance of doing it––despite your devoted husband’s painfully evident short-comings––by starting with “Compassion is the first if not the only law of human existance,” and by reading until we’re blind, talking things over until our teeth fall out, writing until our hands are hamburger, and staying madly in love until Hell freezes over.

  Your perfect letter has made me think of hundreds of things, Dear Heart. One day soon we’ll exchange the things we’ve been saving.

  I love you, Wife. KURT XXXXXXX

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  21 NOV 45

  DEAR WIFE:

  Let’s talk about something pleasant for a change. My perpetually being on the brink of despair is childish: there’s no real reason for my being a gloomy and bitching Gus when this foolish story that took three years to tell has practically come to THE END.

  If we’re to set up a home: if we’re to fly the nest properly; if we’re to establish our individual dignity as Mr. and Mrs. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.––then we’d better start thinking about money. We think we’ve got remarkable minds: they’ll be tested presently for World-worthiness.

  FOOD: In speaking with several of my married collegues I’ve discovered that it is entirely possible to feed two people for a week for $12 to $15. I gather that this amount, properly administered will do the job nicely.

  SHELTER: We’ll have to find out what apartments cost in Chicago. Didn’t the Boorstons say something about $50-$75 per month? Get Ruth Lieber to land us an apartment if I’m not home by December 10th. If, through outrageous fortune, I’m not home by then you may have to go to Chicago and pick out home without me.

  CLOTHING: My discharge pay will fit me out satisfactorily. Dear Heart, of what apparel are you in need?

  ASSETS: Tuition and $75 a month ($90 pending legislation) from the great white-bearded idiot; about $800 in the bank; a mess of bonds I haven’t counted; $20,000 in securities on which we can and will borrow. Financially that’s it. Spiritually we’ve promise of a great deal more. Sweety, we’ll have to borrow to give ourselves a boost.

  I’m not worried. Don’t you be worried either. I can hardly wait to get started. If it weren’t for loving you I wouldn’t feel this way.

  XXXXXXX

  KURT

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  Saturday night—November 24th

  1945

  WIFE DARLING:

  I’m not very glib this evening––probably because I think I’ve something to say for a change.

  Primarily, I think it’s this:––

  The time is not distant that we’ll be reunited, and that reunion will actually mark our being married. We’ve had thirty turgid days together, Darling, during which we’ve set a dozen beds to creaking and groaning with the unfathomable delights of making love to each other. I hope we continue to make beds complain for the next fifty years, Beloved, at the end of which heavenly time we dry up simultaniously––sleeping peacefully in twin beds, each with a high regard for the brains of the other. Sweety, to date we’ve been lovers. In a week or less from the time you get this we’ll be man and wife––a new situation. My first night home will be our wedding night (and I’ll probably act it!). From then on we’ll be together for the rest of our lives. Our being married will have some meaning. And when we die let’s hope the same will be said for our lives. That’s the big thing: we’ll be free to make our lives significant as well as happy. If we are both charred beyond recognition in the Atomic War, let’s die with the assurance that IF a
ny life survives us we will have left some little nucleus of truth or goodness on which the scorched survivors may build. These are the most colossal times in history. Man has evidently released a source of energy from within himself that is overpowering––subtle, insidious. Decay. Resignation, rot. Suicide. Carbon-monoxide: tasteless, colorless, odorless.

  Application blanks for discharge of men with 55–60 points were distributed today. I filled one out and turned it in. I have 57 points. Nothing has been said about the P.O.W.’s, but the men in the above point group are to be released starting on December 1st. I have my replacement so nothing is likely to hold me up. The P.O.W. release announcement was a filthy trick on the part of the War Department, to make the bamboozled citizenry think that demobilization was going a great rate. I’ll be home by the fifth easily, Angel. I’ll telegraph when I know for sure. We’ll stay in Indianapolis until I can get some clothes and then toddle up to Chicago. If I’m not mistaking, poor Wife, you will be in a sad condition for my homecoming. We’ll wait until you get over that befor we go home hunting.

  Answer this letter immediately by air mail. It will be the last letter you’ll ever have to write your loving husband…

  KURT

  XXXXXXX

  Jesus: time creepeth.

  GOLLY BUT I LOVE YOU A LOT, SWEETHEART.

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  December 1st, 1945

  Saturday Afternoon

  Dear Wife:

  Periodically, in a cycle that I will one day for the helluvit graph, I go completely off my unstable nut––on a jag of hitching my little red wagon to big silver stars. It happened to me again last night. Reading an unusually stimulating issue of LIFE (the one that raises Hell with Indianapolis) set me off. I wanted to be another Bennett Cerf and I wanted to be a top drawer diplomat and I wanted to be an ace motion picture director and I wanted to be a playwright and I wanted to be another Spencer Tracy. Patient and Beautiful Wife, the slightest stimulus will and always has set my roulet-wheel mind whirling around the “Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief––Doctor, Lawyer, Merchant, Chief…” axis. ’Round and ’round she goes, and where she stops, nobody knows.

  Beloved Wife, methinks you’re not overly fond of my parapitetic ambitions. Sweet wife, I am that way because I’m fascinated by the remarkable lot of good and delightful work there is to be done on Earth. Also, I am passionately worshipful of competance. I love and respect intellectual authority. I have been a constant antithesis of intellectual authority as a perfectly rotten student. Now I want to be a mental big shot myself, and, bottled up in the Army as I have been, I’ve not had a chance to take much of an academic step in any direction. So, Oomph Girl, I’ve been like a Brooklyn tenement dweller thumbing through a seed catalogue. “If I had a garden I’d plant these Rosalinda Gladiolas, with a border of Amsterdam Velvet Tulips––or maybe these Lord Dudley Zinnias would look better…etc.”

  Whatever the outcome, Anthropology will be the foundation. The more I think about it the more pleased I am with the choice of the course of study. Dear Heart, it entails my going to school until I’m 26. During these next three years I’m going to be making assaults on fame and income in every way I can think of. I’m looking forward to a heavenly time the rest of my life because I love you so much, Wife.

  Sweety, I gather that no one but father is now living in Vonnegulch. When I come home I imagine that it will be in the afternoon, though I don’t know by what means I’ll come. I’ll come straight to Williams Creek––and I’d like you to be there when I arrive. That is selfish of me, I suppose, but that’s what I’d like. So, we’ll revise the code a little. You’ll get the telegram on the day prior to my arrival. If it says UNCLE LOUIS DIED THIS MORNING AND LEFT A COOL MILLION be at Vonnegulch in the morning. Oh what the hell, Angel. I must be off my rocker with the excitement. I’ll send you a straight wire or call you up to give you the dope.

  I love you………….veddy much.

  XXXXXXX

  Kurt

  P.S. Tomorrow I leave Fort Riley forever. I report to Fort Leavenworth Monday morning. That, Dear Heart, is when the marvelous business of separating me from the goddamned service begins.

  JOY BLISS ECSTASY HEAVEN DELIGHT SPLENDID FUN LOVE

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  Saturday

  Darling––

  It is GOOD!!!!!!! Sweety, Love, it is a jewel, a gem; you are wonderful!!! Darling, I just don’t know how you do it. . There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s PERFECT. . You couldn’t have done better if you had had umpteen trillions of courses in short story writing. . Sweety, I married a GENIUS…That is all there is to it…I feel the way I did when I discovered how wonderful Chekhov is––only this is you, and I just can’t believe it, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t…But it’s TRUE…Oh, my love, I am completely and utterly overcome, I don’t know when I’ve been so excited, I’m shaking. . Mother is reading it now, and then I’m taking it to Allie to read right away…Sweetheart, let me try to tell you why I’m so awfully excited––I always knew you could write––but suddenly I am finding out that you seem automatically to know technical details about form and exposition, and so forth, that most people have to spend years reading books and taking correspondence courses to find out, and then they can’t do it…Phoebe and I were just talking about it last night––how hard it is to achieve all the little tricks that are necessary to any particular form of writing in order to make it SELL. . A good short story is an awfully hard thing to write––there’s so much you have to put in it, and so much you have to leave out. . You’ve never written a short story, and now suddenly you write one, and there’s nothing wrong with it…Sweets, it too astounding to believe…You’ve got just the right words in just the right places; your description is perfect, you know how to wind it in and around the dialogue, which is also perfect; the way you have made the emphasis fall as much on the character and lifetime of the ice-man as on the story of the rose––for the story of the rose serves as much to bring him out as he brings it out––is a master-stroke, darling, which never occurred to me. . The feud between the two ladies is beautifully done; and the tie-up between the characters, including you and me, is clear-cut and subtle at once. . Have you read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man?? You must. . Anyway, in that, Stephen Dedalus, talking of Art, quotes Aquinas: “Ad pulcritudinem tria requiruntur integritas, consonantia, claritas….. Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radience.” You have created a thing of beauty, my Love, for that little story has those three things, wholeness, harmony and radience. . Darling, I am firmly convinced that you are the best writer on the face of the earth today. I know it. I don’t know much, but I know that. . You’re not as good as Chekhov yet, simply because you haven’t said anything of as much importance–– But you know HOW to say it, and as time goes on, you’ll have more and more of it to say. . You write as well as any short story writer I have ever read…I am so proud of you I want to EXPLODE…

  Allie thought it was wonderful; so did Mother and Daddy. Monday I am going to take it to Phoebe; because she is frightfully, frightfully interested and she knows how good you are too. . Phoebe and I had a most interesting talk about you and writing and me and books and her and writing and writing and writing. . She is going to give me a little book with some of the rules in it. . She says you have already read it……

  I love you, I love you, I love you………

  Now, I am going to call Mrs. Gould and get the name of that agent. . June Brown is no good because she is only interested in selling her own things and won’t like the idea of someone else using her agent. . There is no point at all in wasting any more time without an agent––he would be SURE to sell it. It is New Yorker, dear, not Atlantic Monthly or Esquire…It is New Yorker more than anything else…

  I love you, I love you, I love you…

  WRITE more, de
ar. . WRITE, WRITE, WRITE…You are tremendously good, believe me…You are out of this world you are so tremendously good…

  I feel more happy, enthusiastic, inspired, excited, blissful than I have since you left…You make me so awfully happy, darling…I love you…

  WOOFIE

  XXXXXXX

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  November 7, 1945

  Indianapolis, IN

  Dear Mr. Lockwood

  Thank you for your prompt reply to my query. I am enclosing four of my husband’s short stories. There are more, but I don’t want to send them until we hear what you have to say about these.

  In answer to the request in your booklet for personal information: My husband is twenty-three years old, and is at present leading a stagnant life as a corporal at Fort Riley, Kansas. He was born and raised in Indianapolis. He attended Cornell University, where he was a moderately successful misfit in Bio-chemistry, but spent most of his time writing for the Cornell Daily Sun, of which he became managing editor in his Junior year. He enlisted in the army before he entered his Senior year and spent the next two years and a half pursuing the usual undistinguished career of a private in the Infantry, the climax of which was his capture last December in the Battle of the Bulge. He was a prisoner of war for six months in Dresden—concerning which dreadful experience he has a long and potentially remarkable article in mind, and which he intends to write after he is discharged. He was liberated by the Russians in May, returned home, regained some fifty-odd pounds, became engaged to me in July, and married me on September 1st. We are very happily married, in case that has anything to do with it. Since everyone tells him he can write, he is now writing.