'Love, Kurt': Vonnegut's letters to a dear wife

"Tell me," Kurt Vonnegut asks Jane Marie Cox, his future wife, "would you enjoy living with me, sleeping with me, leading a carnival life?"

He writes from Camp Atterbury in 1944, where he is an enlisted 22-year-old intelligence trainee in the 106th infantry division. "My new job is to cover my face and hands with soot and crawl into enemy lines to see what in the hell they've got," he explains.

It's classic Vonnegut, one of many nuggets of dark humor in "Love, Kurt," a collection of letters discovered by Edith, the couple's oldest daughter, in the attic of the family's home on Cape Cod. It's a preview of the wild mind that will go on to produce 14 novels including the celebrated satire "Slaughterhouse-Five." It also foreshadows the horrors that await young Kurt in Europe: He is captured during the Battle of the Bulge, listed as MIA for six months and sent to a Nazi prison camp in Dresden, where he survives the firebombing.

Above all, though, these are love letters, many of them so rapturous that were it possible to distill these pages into liquid form, it might be prescribed as an elixir for malaise.

They are also bittersweet: Kurt and Jane's union lasted roughly 25 years, until somewhere in the wake of the breakout success of his sixth novel, Kurt left. "How could a love so dazzling and singular and determined fizzle?" Edith asks in the introduction. As we read these letters, which cover the couple's early courtship, from 1941 to 1945, we can look for clues as to what went wrong, though the details are notably one-sided. Of the 226 letters collected here, there are just two from Jane: one a solicitation she sends to an agent on Kurt's behalf and one lipstick-smacked letter to him praising his work.

Kurt began writing Jane while he was a (mediocre) student at Cornell and she was studying literature (more successfully) at Swarthmore. Some typed, some handwritten, these letters are adorned with whimsical sketches and amusing ephemera, such as the coupon entitling Jane to 1,728 "loving kisses to be bestowed, one each, on every square inch of her beautiful body."

Amid all of this gushing from Kurt, one question looms large: Whither Jane? Jane graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore and was fiercely literary. Kurt frequently speaks as if he and Jane are a team, referring to "our ambition to write great books." He even suggests she is the more talented one: "I wish I could write as well as you." But he is the one who begins to pound out words, while she acts as editor, secretary and cheerleader.

Clearly Jane was influential. She gave Kurt encouragement and confidence at a tender age, and themes from these letters later find their way into his work. Presumably, Jane helped create conditions in a busy household that enabled him to write.

"Love, Kurt" is story of two people deeply in love, living through what Kurt speculates are "the most horrible times in history." It may be an exercise in delusion, but it's still heartening to bask in these letters, to take this feral love for what it was at a freeze-frame moment in time.