And so it went
Kurt Vonnegut, in a final collection, reflects on his distaste for war and embrace of individuality
Armageddon in Retrospect: And Other New and Unpublished Writings on War and Peace
By Kurt Vonnegut
Putnam, 232 pp., illustrated, $24.95
"Writing was a spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in. . . . His models were Jonah, Lincoln, Melville and Twain." So begins the moving and illuminating introduction to this posthumous collection of Kurt Vonnegut's work by his son Mark. A writer himself ("The Eden Express") as well as a pediatrician in Greater Boston, Mark Vonnegut tells us his father "had a hard time letting himself be happy, but couldn't quite hide the glee he got from writing well. . . . It wasn't until the Iraq War and the end of his life that he became sincerely gloomy."
Over lunch in New York three years ago Kurt told me he didn't want to write anymore, that he felt his writing had always been based on "optimism, and pride in my country. I don't have that now." He had become, like the title of his next collection, "A Man Without A Country."
One of Vonnegut's last works was a talk he didn't live to deliver last April in his hometown of Indianapolis to kick off what the city had declared "The Year of Vonnegut." At the start of that speech, which is included in this book, he noted: "In only three years time, during World War Two, I went from Private to Corporal, a rank once held by Napoleon and Adolf Hitler."
It was in the crucible of that war that much of the message of Vonnegut's work was formed, and it can be seen here in microcosm in the three-page letter he wrote his family on May 29, 1945, after having been declared "missing in action" while a prisoner of war in a Dresden work camp. He told how many of his captured company died when they were herded into scalding showers after days of starvation, thirst, and exposure, "but I didn't"; how the American and RAF firebombing of Dresden destroyed the city and killed 250,000 people, "but not me"; how the prisoners who were evacuated after General George Patton took Leipzig were strafed by Russian planes and many were killed, "but not me."
One can hear in these cadences the future trademark that served as punctuation in Vonnegut's work: "So it goes." Vonnegut survived the Allied destruction of Dresden in an underground meat locker that became, in his famous fiction, Slaughterhouse Five. One piece in this book, "Wailing Shall Be in All Streets," recounts the nightmare of the saturation bombing of Dresden, and how in its aftermath Vonnegut and his fellow POWs were given the "ghoulish mission" to search for bodies "and carry them to mass funeral pyres in the parks. . . . There was not enough labor to do it nicely, so a man with a flame-thrower was sent down instead and he cremated them where they lay."
The short stories that compose the bulk of this book seem born of that experience - as does all of his work - in direct or thematic ways. In "Guns Before Butter" a trio of American POWs deal with their near-starvation rations by exchanging recipes and describing their favorite meals. "Food was the only thing on the P.W.'s pale level of existence that could have any effect on their spirits. Patton was a hundred miles away."
In "The Commandant's Desk" a Czechoslovakian woodworker and his daughter are subjected to the demands and insults of their passing conquerors - German, Russian, and American. The woodworker, a World War I veteran, comments that "when I hear of a division of war-lovers from an enlisted man, maybe I will believe it, provided the man is sober and has been shot at. If there are such divisions, perhaps they should be preserved between wars in dry ice."
These stories are "mostly undated and all unpublished," but references in some to the American-Russian standoffs of the Cold War suggest that many are early works, ones that simply didn't fit the mold of the 1950s magazine fiction that was Vonnegut's first market. They are no less accomplished or interesting for that, and will come as a final gift for fans.
In his later years, Vonnegut channeled much of his creative energy into painting and drawing, including posters with his thoughts and messages. One of these constitutes the last page of the book:
"Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him.
"It was music.
"I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization."
It was disgust with the kind of civilization that reduced Dresden "to crushed stone and embers; disemboweled her with high explosives and cremated her with incendiaries," the kind of civilization that in another era brought "shock and awe" to Baghdad.
The dark irony that lies beneath Vonnegut's wry, satiric work is always in the service of the individual -- Billy Pilgrim surviving the firebombing of Dresden, Eliot Rosewater giving his fortune away to help particular people with their problems - and against the system, the destructive side of civilization, represented here by the conqueror Robert The Horrible in Vonnegut's neat medieval morality tale, "The Unicorn Trap."
The story's hero, Elmer the serf, resists the conqueror's offer to make him a tax collector, part of the corrupt system, at the risk of his own neck. He explains his philosophy to his family: "The wreckers against the builders! There's the whole story of life!"
Novelist Dan Wakefield is writer in residence at Florida International University. 