What impact has the recent death of Kurt Vonnegut had on And So It Goes, the biography that Charles J. Shields (left) started working on last year? Shields says he’s pressing on, not least of all because his subject would have wanted it that way. “On the day before Vonnegut fell, I was at his home in Manhattan,” Shields recalls. The author came into the living room with a Webster’s dictionary and told his interlocutor to look him up. “I riffled though the pages and found where ‘Vonnegut, Kurt’ should be,” Shields says, but he wasn’t there, but when he flipped back at Vonnegut’s added instruction, there was an entry for Jack Kerouac. “He looked at me morosely. ‘How about that?'”
That’s a good story, but I prefer the other motivating rationale Shields offers: “My grandmother used to say, ‘If you don’t do what I asked after I’m dead, I’ll come at night and pull the bedclothes off.’ I don’t want to risk Kurt getting the same idea because I didn’t come through for him.” He’s still looking for people who had memorable encounters with Vonnegut and his writing, so feel free to get in touch through his website.