Kurt Vonnegut (From Norton)

342 | KURT VONNEGUT
Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler
dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that
blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore
in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the
forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old
Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.
1957
KURT VONNEGUT
1922–2007
A s a counterculture hero of the turbulent 1960s and a best-selling author among

readers of popular fiction in the four decades afterward, Kurt Vonnegut was at
once more traditional and more complicated than his enthusiasts might believe. To
a generation of young people who felt their country had forsaken them, he offered
examples of common decency and cultural idealism as basic as a grade-school civ-
ics lesson. For a broader readership who felt conventional fiction was inadequate
to express the way their lives had been disrupted by the era’s radical social changes,
he wrote novels structured in more pertinently contemporary terms, bereft of such
unifying devices as conclusive characterization and chronologically organized
plots. His most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), takes as its organizing
incident the Allied firebombing of the German city of Dresden late in World War II,
as witnessed by the American prisoner of war Billy Pilgrim. Yet despite its origins in
the 1940s, the manner of its telling is much more akin to the writing of Ameri-
cans of the 1960s, who were coming to terms with the Vietnam War. Like the war
in Southeast Asia, Slaughterhouse-Five abjured the certainties of an identifiable
beginning, middle, and end; both presented a mesmerizing sense of confused, appar-
ently directionless present, with no sense of completion or conclusion. Together,
this World War II novel and the later war during which it was written speak for the
unsettling nature of the American 1960s; the assassination of presidential candidate
Robert F. Kennedy figures in the book’s concluding chapter. Yet this unconventional
structure is paired with the language of American vernacular (much in the manner
of Vonnegut’s hero, Mark Twain). Where more elevated speech would obscure his
point, this author speaks plainly and simply, drawing his words, phrases, and inflec-
tions from the American middle class and its common experiences of life.
Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to a family prominent in business
and the arts. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the sensitive, well-read
teenager saw his mother’s inherited wealth dissipate, his father’s career as an archi-
tect crumble for lack of work, and his extended family scatter around the country in
search of new careers. Ser vice as a World War II infantryman taught him not only
how politics reshapes the world but also how science (Vonnegut had been studying
biochemistry in college before enlistment) could be used to create effects as destruc-
tive to humankind as the Dresden firestorm, which Vonnegut himself endured as a
prisoner of war. Working as a publicist for the General Electric Corporation after
the war, the author learned firsthand about the strategies for managing the lifestyles
KURT VONNEGUT | 343
At left, Dresden in 1945, following the Allied firebombing. At right, Senator Robert F.
Kennedy lies mortally wounded by an assassin’s bullet on June 4, 1968. These two events
bookend Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.
of millions. In short, before writing his first story in 1950 Kurt Vonnegut had shared
many formative experiences of his generation. Reworking those experiences would
yield fictions and a public stance that helped his fellow Americans adjust to a rein-
vented postwar world.
Vonnegut’s advice, like Mark Twain’s, would be unapologetically lowbrow. Part of
each writer’s appeal is that he pokes holes in the pseudo-sophistications of suppos-
edly more serious approaches. In a 1982 lecture, “Fates Worse Than Death,” Von-
negut noted that the self-consciously highbrow New Yorker magazine had never
published his work. Indeed, he wrote his short stories of the 1950s for the immensely
more general readership of Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post. These stories
(collected in 1968 as Welcome to the Monkey House) deflate the pretentions of
wealth, expertise, and influence with demonstrations of middle-class values and
common sense. At the same time Vonnegut was writing novels in formats borrowed
from popular subgenres: science fiction dystopia for Player Piano (1952), space
opera for The Sirens of Titan (1959), spy thriller for Mother Night (1961), scientific
apocalypse and intrigue for Cat’s Cradle (1963), and prince-and-the-pauper critique
of riches for God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965). Each work challenges the techni-
cal and thematic conventions of the novel, yet each time within the familiarity of a
popular form.
In the middle 1960s, with his family-magazine markets having gone out of busi-
ness, Vonnegut began writing essays for popular magazines such as Esquire, McCall’s,
and the Ladies Home Journal. Reviewing The Random House Dictionary for the
New York Times Book Review (October 30, 1966), he contrasted the assignment’s
linguistic complexity with his own shuffling, hands-in-pockets approach; as lexicog-
raphers debated theories like prescriptive versus descriptive standards of language,
Vonnegut could just shrug and say that the former, “as nearly as I could tell, was like
an honest cop, while descriptive was like a boozed-up war buddy from Mobile, Ala-
bama.” In other essays the author’s similarly self-effacing humor undermined posi-
tions that used intellectual pretentions to support their points. To the overenthusiasts
for science fiction who try to include writers like Leo Tolstoy and Franz Kafka in their
344 | KURT VONNEGUT
brotherhood, he objects that “it is as though I were to claim everybody of note

belonged fundamentally to Delta Upsilon, my own lodge, incidentally, whether he
knew it or not. Kafka would have made a desperately unhappy D.U.”
With the success of Slaughterhouse-Five and the widespread appreciation of his
essays and personal appearances, Kurt Vonnegut became much more publically out-
spoken about major issues. From his new home in New York City (where he moved in
1970 following nearly two decades of writing in obscurity on Cape Cod, Massachu-
setts) the author wrote novels such as Galápagos (1985), Hocus Pocus (1990), and
Timequake (1997), works treating such topics as the evolution and possible devolution
of humankind and America’s economic and social role at the end of the twentieth
century. Vonnegut’s challenges to the conventions of traditional fiction make him
as innovative as any of the literary disruptionists of the postmodern era, yet he
trusts in the honesty of plain and accurate statement. His last book was a series of
sociopolitical essays collected as A Man without a Country (2005). Two years before
his death, the author found himself once more embraced by a new young audience
seeking an explanation for their era’s woes. Hence his advice in “How to Write with
Style,” from his 1981 collection, Palm Sunday: “I myself find that I trust my writing
most, and others seem to trust it most, when I sound like a person from Indianapo-
lis, which I am.”
From Slaughterhouse-Five
Chapter 11
All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much
true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden2 for taking a teapot that
wasn’t his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal
enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I’ve changed all
the names.
I really did go back to Dresden with Guggenheim money3 (God love it) in
1967. It looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has.
There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground.
I went back there with an old war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare, and we
made friends with a cab driver, who took us to the slaughterhouse where
we had been locked up at night as prisoners of war. His name was Gerhard
Müller. He told us that he was a prisoner of the Americans for a while. We
asked him how it was to live under Communism, and he said that it was
terrible at first, because everybody had to work so hard, and because there
wasn’t much shelter or food or clothing. But things were much better now.
He had a pleasant little apartment, and his daughter was getting an excel-
lent education. His mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storm. So
it goes.
He sent O’Hare a postcard at Christmastime, and here is what it said:
1. In conventional terms an autobiographical be an autobiographical epilogue.

preface. Vonnegut’s innovation is to format it as 2. City in southeastern Germany destroyed in a
indistinguishable from the eight chapters of fic- bombing raid by the British Royal Air Force on
tive narrative that follow (in which he identifies the night of February 13–14, 1945.
himself as a participant three times), before a 3. Fellowship funded by the Guggenheim Foun-
final chapter that in conventional terms would dation, New York City.

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342 | KURT VONNEGUT

A s a counterculture hero of the turbulent 1960s and a best-selling author among

brotherhood, he objects that “it is as though I were to claim everybody of note

1. In conventional terms an autobiographical be an autobiographical epilogue.

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