This story, the story of this letter, has moved me over and over as if I was reading it for the first time. I might as well have been. Lately it has been on my mind constantly. This is likely because I have recently entertained the possibility that I will never haunt a classroom again, at least not for money. After years in between blackboards and bored kids, mainly in southern Ontario high schools but for five recent campaigns in two northeastern Chinese universities, I may be done with all that. Hence, the Kurt Vonnegut ear-worm, my writing hero‘s blazing honesty on repeat. (How did you do it, Kurt? How did you do it? I’m reading his non-fiction again, trying to find clues, but I mainly get beaten about the ears by the impossibility of doing what he did.)

Humane, funny, tortured, conscious, brave.

Yes. So here’s the set-up. KV’s story is in the second of his “autobiographical collages”, Fates Worse Than Death. (The first was Palm Sunday, if you’re keeping score.) (Desert island books, both. I can read these things again and again.) He’s writing about his saintly “unicorn” of a father, and the stoic resilience he showed as an artist enduring commercial vulgarity and disdain, and as a man surviving the madness of his wife. Kurt Junior ends this whimsically sad tribute to a man living in the wrong era by telling of his own early days as a writer, maybe one born at the right time — if being a World War II infantryman is good timing.

At age 27, Vonnegut was paying bills by writing advertising copy for General Electric by day, but his eccentric short stories were — amazing as this seems in hindsight — being accepted by the mass-market general-interest magazines of the day. The last word on his beauty-loving Daddy was this:

 ‘I am moved to add that Father tried to make good times revisitable…by gluing cheerful documents to sheets of masonite and protecting them with varnish. Thanks to Father, this mummified letter now hangs on the wall of my workroom:

“Dear Pop:

“I sold my first story to Collier’s. Received my check ($750 minus a 10% agent’s commission) yesterday noon. It now appears that two more of my works have a good chance of being sold in the near future.

“I think I’m on my way. I’ve deposited my first check in a savings account and, as and if I sell more, will continue to do so until I have the equivalent of one year’s pay at GE. Four more stories will do it nicely, with cash to spare (something we never had before). I will then quit this goddamn nightmare job, and never take another one so long as I live, so help me God.

“I’m happier than I’ve been for a good many years. Love, K”

‘It is no milestone in literature, but it looms like Stonehenge beside my own little footpath from birth to death. The date is October 28, 1949. Father glued a message from himself on the back of that piece of Masonite. It is a quotation from The Merchant of Venice in his own lovely hand:

           ‘An oath, an oath, I have an oath in Heaven:

           Shall I lay perjury on my soul?’

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) was an American novelist, the author of Cat’s Cradle and Breakfast of Champions but most famously of Slaughterhouse 5. I mourned his passing before he ever died, and wrote about it when he finally did. I have never thought of teaching as “this goddamn nightmare job”. (Or maybe this is a polite lie. Maybe I sometimes did and never allowed myself to verbalize it. Maybe this is why this letter seizes and chokes me so. Or maybe I’m just being romantic.) Now that my decades-long “day job” might be done, I fantasize about following writerly footsteps. I can’t be a Vonnegut, but I wonder what I can achieve with some fraction of his industry and courage.

Also, a discouraging statistic: I am not 27.