RIP, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who died yesterday in Manhattan at 84

By Joseph P. Kahn

"Vonnegut Has 15 Nuggets of Talent in Harvard Class" went the headline over the New York Times story published on Nov. 19, 1970. I remember the story well. For I was among the 15 "nuggets" who'd lucked into a writing seminar with the famous author, whose novel "Slaughterhouse-Five" sat atop the Times bestseller list and who had already progressed from cult novelist to counterculture icon and commercial powerhouse.

The story behind our selection -- perhaps apocryphal, in any case not reported by the Times -- was that Vonnegut had gathered all 215 submissions, threw them down a staircase, and scooped up the first 15 that caught his eye. That's not what Vonnegut said for the record, anyway. Only 15 submissions, which included seven novel-length manuscripts, were "really good ones," he said, while the rest "ranged from mediocre to worse."

He also said the main thing students had to learn was "how to keep a reader reading. If they do not learn that they are finished."

I have no memory of what story I submitted, only that it was not a full-length novel and almost certainly unpublishable, however kind Vonnegut was to say otherwise. For the record, Vonnegut was a wonderful and thoughtful teacher, generous with his time and comments and supportive of any ambition, however foolish, to make a living in the writing game.

At 48, unstuck in time between two marriages and battling recurrent bouts of depression, Vonnegut himself was hardly finished when he came to Harvard for a semester, though his most fertile years as a novelist were mostly behind him.

Between 1952 and 1969 he wrote "Player Piano," "The Sirens of Titan," "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater," "Mother Night, "Cat's Cradle," and "Slaughterhouse-Five," the latter a fictionalized account of the Dresden firebombing by US forces, which he witnessed firsthand. (As an Allied target, he later wrote, Dresden was "about as sinister as a wedding cake.") A remarkable output by any measure -- my personal favorites are "Sirens" and "Cat's Cradle" -- but one that also stamped Vonnegut as a serious writer a la Joseph Heller and John Barth, not merely a crafter of science-fiction flavored comedies. "Slaughterhouse Five" would later rank No. 18 on the Modern Library list of the 100 best English-language books of the 20th Century. He never topped it, one might fairly say, but neither did he abandon its central themes: the folly of war, the abject helplessness of the human condition, and so on.

Did he resent the fact that we wasn't taken more seriously, both earlier and later in his career?

"A lot of critics are fastidious about me because my provenance is so scruffy," he told The Washington Post's Bob Thompson in 2005. "No, I'm not a Knopf author. No, I wasn't in The New Yorker. And on and on...." Then he told a Martians-land-in-Manhattan joke and ripped into the Washington political establishment.

God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut.

I did not keep in touch with my old writing teacher much post-Harvard. But in 1972, when I was struggling with a book-length project, he sent me a long letter of encouragement. Be yourself on the page, he counseled, and be advised that making a living writing is extremely hard to do. "What does an artist do in the free enterprise system?" Vonnegut wrote. "He scrounges. Cheers, Kurt."