By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

Climbing the Andes one windy January afternoon, watching peak after peek emerge on the horizon like giant mounds of moss, I found myself wondering about the clear line toward the top where the green ends and the reddish-brown of the barren rock begins, wondering how the trees and shrubs know when to stop, how far to keep pushing, where the point is past which the conditions become too inhospitable for growth, for flourishing, for survival.

This may be the hardest equation to balance in all of existence: when to keep trying and when to stop. Nowhere is it more confounding, because nowhere is the calculus of reason more haunted by emotion, than in our intimate relationships. There, all the variables are too charged with feeling to be weighed accurately; there, the most vulnerable part of the ego keeps factoring itself into the arithmetic. Because time is something we can measure and tenderness is not, we keep trying to ward off the singular sense of personal failure that the loss of love can bring by measuring the success of a relationship by quantity of time rather than quality of being, only to find ourselves on barren rock.

Kurt Vonnegut (November 11, 1922–April 11, 2007) was twenty-two and just home from his wartime duty in Europe, where he had been held as a prisoner of war in Dresden and barely survived the Allied bombing of the city, when he married his college classmate Jane Marie Cox — two young people not yet having become themselves, unformed and unhealed, trying to be together.

They loved each other, but as they grew up, they grew apart, grew askance. And yet, dragged by the momentum of culture, they had a son, then a daughter, then another as Vonnegut struggled to make a living as a writer.

Vonnegut at 33 with his family.

When his sister died of cancer two days after her husband was killed in a train accident, he adopted their three young sons. In that way life has of denying us any alternative experimental condition but our lived experience, no one knows what might have become of the couple in an experimental design other than a small house pattered by six hungry children. They fought more and more, until even the most mundane conversation couldn’t but become an argument.

Vonnegut tried to take refuge in writing, but his twin peaks of bills and rejection slips came to tower over his dream. Middle-aged and penniless, he was about to give up when he received an unexpected offer to teach at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, procured through the kindness of a single reader touched by the work of this obscure unhappy writer. It was a lifeline both professional and personal. Vonnegut packed his bags and headed to Iowa, knowing in his heart, though he was not yet ready to allow the thought, that this was the end of his life with Jane.

Two years into teaching, as his writing was finally beginning to receive recognition, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and used the prize money to travel back to Dresden, only to find much of the city still in ruins. I wonder if he thought about love then, how it too is a world that can be left in ruins beyond repair if the warfare is too brutal or too long.

Suddenly catapulted into public success — after five novels and countless short stories, Vonnegut was lauded as an overnight success with Slaughterhouse-Five — he remained lodged in the pit of personal failure. He and Jane had been together for a quarter century, happy for only a fraction of it. Torn between his emotional inability to hold on to the relationship and his cerebral unwillingness to give up, he began drowning his discontent in drink.

In the last year of his forties, he moved out and headed for New York, but couldn’t bring himself to end the marriage. Taking solace in Margaret Mead’s assurance that “a couple which has had children has an irreversible and undissolvable relationship,” he wrote to Jane:

We hurt each other back and forth so much, almost absent-mindedly, that it was common sense for us to separate, if only to break the rhythm.

He shaded in this stark contour in a letter to a friend, painting a haunting portrait of a dead relationship:

I myself am living alone in two rooms and a garden in New York, attempting to draw useful electricity from the millions of milling strangers around me. I am no longer living with Jane for this reason, as nearly as I can tell: We are no longer capable of conducting amiable conversations. When we try to talk, to amuse each other and pass the time, our words are wooden, stilted, queer, distant, and — finally — quietly bitter. That is too bad, and many people regard me as heartless for leaving her. But the hours and days and years dragged so. I am happier now, though far from hilarious and proud. I have achieved a sort of Limbo, which is a distinct improvement over what I had before. I am beginning to write again. That had stopped for a while. I do not wish to marry again. I’m not in love with anybody else.

Kurt Vonnegut at 50.

Writing remained his one oasis of sanity amid the limbo of his Middle Passage. Some part of him — that wise part that lives in each of us, whispering what we don’t want to but need to hear — knew that he had to reimagine his life if he were not to squander it. But he was not ready. So he reimagined his writing, taking the skeleton of a play he had written fifteen years earlier and enfleshing it anew. Happy Birthday, Wanda June ran for five months to mixed reviews, but the world was finally paying attention.

Having documented Martin Luther King, Jr.’s historic speech during the March on Washington and worked as a war photographer in Vietnam, Jill Krementz was unperturbed by the cantankerous writer whose process she was hired to capture for a magazine profile. She immediately felt both Vonnegut’s brilliance and his brokenness, felt the sharp edge on which his own heart was breaking, saw to the roiling core of his wounded tenderness. He immediately decided he didn’t like her. (“There is no terror like that of being known,” Emerson shuddered at the discomposing intimacy that bloomed between him and Margaret Fuller.)

Within months, they were living together.

Just before he moved in with Jill, Vonnegut wrote to his seventeen-year-old daughter Nanette:

Dear old Nanny —

You certainly deserve a letter from me. A hundred letters would be more like it, I love you so.

I will be home from time to time to see you. But I will not stay for long. I still love your mother, but we can’t be together much without fighting. We have tried to do things about this, but nothing helps, and each fight hurts more than the last one.

I wasn’t stolen away by another woman. I don’t think people can steal other people. I simply went away because the fighting was making everybody so unhappy. I’ve done that several times before. Going to Iowa was an example. Every time I went away I simply went to aloneness. There was never any other woman beckoning me to come.

This time, for instance, I couldn’t make myself come home after the play opened, and I was alone. I hardly knew Jill at all, and I didn’t like her much, and whatever happened between us happened long after I’d decided home was too uncomfortable for me.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print.

Eighteen years his junior but in many ways his spiritual elder, Jill enveloped him in a kindness so entirely new he didn’t know what to do with it, a love he hadn’t thought possible. He tried to fight with her, out of reflex, but she simply loved him, and so he slowly unbraced the oppositional stance that had become his default, slowly stopped self-medicating. He grew healthy, grew happy, grew himself.

Still, it took him six years to meet the emotional truth of his failed marriage with the hard fact of divorce. When he finally decided to do it, he wrote to Nan:

As for the divorce: I will always love your mother, as must have been evident on Sunday. But we could never live together again. Our conversations go so badly. Also: I want to be fair to Jill, who saved me from knocking myself off or turning into an alcoholic. I will not marry Jill, but I will stop asking that she live with a married man. And Jane, who is fond of marriage, should have the chance to marry again. I am not pursuing happiness through divorce. I am permanently damaged by the break-up of marriage. Those wounds will never heal. I am simply trying to make the best of an unpleasant situation. Let me say again, too, that Jill did not break the marriage. It was broken long before that — about the time I went to Iowa. There was no other woman beckoning me to Iowa. Later on, there was no woman beckoning me to New York City. I arrived both places in total solitude, and feeling simply awful.

There will be no acrimonious argle-bargle about divorce this time. We will not make the mistake of hiring two strangers to fight each other on our behalf. Jane and I will arrive at some sort of division of property, and some scheme for my sending her money regularly. She already owns the Cape house and some stocks and a large savings account in cash. I will add to that treasure, so she won’t have much to worry about as long as I’m popular and productive. Then Don Farber will draw up a simple agreement, and that will be that. The legal steps will be brief formalities, without any arguments to be made before a judge.

It took him another two years to formalize his relationship with Jill. By the time they decided to marry, he was fifty-seven and one of the most beloved authors in America. His daughter was the first person he told:

Dearest Nanny —

I want you to be the first person in our family to find this out: That Jill and I have decided to marry each other in November, probably a couple of days after Thanksgiving. Jill will then be three months shy of being forty, and we will have lived together about nine years. The first years of the relationship were tempestuous. Much of the tempest was my fault, surely. I was in a frenzied state of mourning and dismay over the failure of my once good marriage to Jane. Jill had nothing to do with that failure, but she was handy to blame. Be that as it may, Jill and I behave most affectionately and reasonably toward each other now, and unselfishly. We are in love. Our heads are clear. We are working and playing most cheerfully.

I do not endorse serial marriage for anyone. I myself have always wished to be as monogamous as a swan. I was monogamous with your mother until the very end, and will be so with Jill.

After a rough sketch of the wedding (“It will be very private. We don’t want our pictures in the paper.”), he added:

I sympathize fully with the mixed loyalties you and all the rest of my children would feel on such an occasion. So I of course invite you all, and hope you all will come. If the ceremony and party are going to cause you pain, you should not subject yourself to that pain. Your coming or staying away will not be a vote for or against anything.

Mostly, dear Nanny, I want you to know how happy I am just now, and that I have every reason to look forward to some very good years ahead.

Kurt Vonnegut and Jill Krementz a decade into their love. (Photograph: Adam Scull.)

Kurt and Jill remained together until his death, thirty-six years after they met. It was there, in the safety and sweetness of their love, that he discovered the simple secret of happiness.

(Contributed by John Atwater, H.W.)