In the early 1950s Kurt Vonnegut became the manager of a Saab dealership in Cape Cod, a job which often involved him taking prospective clients out on test drives. Keen to demonstrate the Saab’s front-wheel drive, Vonnegut would take corners at a tremendous lick, leaving his often elderly passengers ‘sickly and green’ afterwards.
Vonnegut’s early writings left a number of editors feeling pretty sickly and green too. As the rejection slips piled up, he cast around desperately for some alternative source of income. He tried to flog a board-game he’d invented, as well as a bowtie made from ribbon the Atomic Energy Commission used to cordon off highly radioactive areas which he was convinced would prove a big hit.
He also had a try-out for a sports magazine called Sports Illustrated. Told to write an article about a racehorse that had bolted before the starting gun had gone off, Vonnegut stared at a blank piece of paper for an hour, wrote, ‘The horse jumped over the fucking fence’, then went home.
The defining event in his life had happened in 1945 when he spent 24 hours in an underground meat locker in Dresden as the city above was flattened by Allied bombing — he later won a Purple Heart for his war service. In one of his earliest letters here, Vonnegut writes about he experience in dry, Hemingway-ish tones: ‘The RAF’s combined labour killed 250,000 people in 24 hours … But not me.’
Twenty years on, he turned his time in Dresden into Slaughterhouse Five, and all at once he never had to sell Saabs or invent mad bow-ties again. The book became a tremendous hit all over the world — apart from his home town of Indianapolis. After Vonnegut had done a signing there in 1969, he wrote to a friend: ‘I signed 13 books in two hours, every one of them to a relative.
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