The Writings Of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
On May 29, 1945, twenty-one days after the Germans had surrendered to the victorious
Allied armies, a father in Indianapolis received a letter from his son who had
been listed as "missing in action" following the Battle of the Bulge.
The youngster, an advance scout with the 106th Infantry Division,
had been captured by the Germans after wandering behind enemy lines for several
days. "Bayonets," as he wrote his father, "aren't much good against
tanks." Eventually, the Indianapolis native found himself shipped to a
work camp in the open city of Dresden, where he helped produce vitamin supplements
for pregnant women. Sheltered in an underground meat storage locker, the Hoosier
soldier managed to survive a combined American/British firebombing raid that
devastated the city and killed an estimated 135,000 people - more than the number
of deaths in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
After the bombing, the soldier wrote his father, "we were put to work
carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters; women, children, old men; dead from
concussion, fire or suffocation. Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried
bodies to huge funeral pyres in the city." Freed from his captivity by
the Red Army's final onslaught against Nazi Germany and returned to America,
the soldier - Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - tried for many years to put into words what
he had experienced during that horrific event. At first, it seemed to be a simple
task. "I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction
of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen,"
Vonnegut noted. It took him more than twenty years, however, to produce "Slaughterhouse-Five,
or The Children's Crusade, A Duty-Dance With Death".
The book was worth the wait. Released to an American society struggling to
come to grips with its involvement in another war - in a small Asian country
called Vietnam - Vonnegut's magnum opus struck a nerve, especially with young
people on college campuses across the country. Although its author termed the
work a "failure," readers did not agree, as "Slaughterhouse Five"
became a best-seller and pushed Vonnegut into the national spotlight for the
first time.
His experiences, it seems, have always helped shape what Vonnegut writes. Especially
important was his life growing up as a boy in Indianapolis. Revisiting his birthplace
in 1986 to deliver the annual McFadden Memorial Lecture, Vonnegut told a North
Central High School audience: "All my jokes are Indianapolis. All my attitudes
are Indianapolis. My adenoids are Indianapolis. If I ever severed myself from
Indianapolis, I would be out of business. What people like about me is Indianapolis."
This connection has not escaped notice by readers. Fellow Hoosier writer Dan
Wakefield once observed that in most of Vonnegut's books there is at least one
character from Indianapolis and compared it to Alfred Hitchcock's habit of appearing
in each of his movies.
The connection between the Vonneguts and Indianapolis stretch back to the 1850s
when Clemens Vonnegut Sr., formerly of Westphalia, Germany, settled in the city
and became business partners with a fellow German named Vollmer. When Vollmer
disappeared on a trip out West, Vonnegut took over a business that grew into
the profitable Vonnegut Hardware Company - a company Kurt Vonnegut Jr. worked
for during the summers while attending high school at Shortridge.
Kurt's grandfather, Bernard Vonnegut, unlike his grandson, disliked working
in the hardware store. Possessing an artistic nature, he studied architecture
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and also received training in Hannover,
Germany. After a short stint working in New York, Bernard returned to Indianapolis
in 1883 and joined with Arthur Bohn to form the architectural firm of Vonnegut
& Bohn. The firm designed such impressive structures as Das Deutsche Haus
(The Athenaeum), the first Chamber of Commerce building, the John Herron Art
Museum, Methodist Hospital, the original L.S. Ayres store, and the Fletcher
Trust Building.
Kurt Vonnegut's father, Kurt Vonnegut Sr., followed in his father's footsteps
and became an Indianapolis architect, taking over his father's firm in 1910.
On Nov. 22, 1913, Kurt Senior married Edith Lieber, the daughter of millionaire
Indianapolis brewer Albert Lieber. The couple had three children, Bernard, born
in 1914; Alice, in 1917; and, Kurt Jr., who came into the world on Nov. 11,
1922. Fourth-generation Germans, the Vonnegut children were raised with little,
if any, knowledge about their German heritage - a legacy, Kurt believed, of
the anti-German feelings vented during World War I.
With America's entry into the Great War on the side of the Allies, anything
associated with Germany became suspect. In Indianapolis, the city orchestra
disbanded because its soprano soloist was German; city restaurants renamed kartoffel
salade as Liberty cabbage; the Deutche Haus became the Athenaeum; and the board
of education stopped the teaching of German in schools. The anti-German feeling
so shamed Kurt's parents, he noted, that they resolved to raise him "without
acquainting me with the language or the literature or the music or the oral
family histories which my ancestors had loved. They volunteered to make me ignorant
and rootless as proof of their patriotism."
His parents did pass on to their youngest child their love of joke-telling,
but, with the world his parents loved shattered by World War I, Vonnegut also
learned, as he put it, "a bone-deep sadness from them." As the offspring
of a wealthy family, the two eldest Vonnegut children had been educated at private
schools - Bernard at Park School and Alice at Tudor Hall School for Girls. The
Great Depression, however, reduced the elder Vonnegut's commissions to a mere
trickle. Hit hard in the pocketbook, the Vonneguts pulled young Kurt from the
private Orchard school after the third grade and enrolled him at Public School
No. 43, the James Whitcomb Riley School, located just a few blocks from the
family's Illinois Street home. Kurt Jr.'s mother Edith, a refined lady used
to comfort and privilege, attempted to reassure her son that when the Depression
ended he would resume his proper place in society - swim with the children of
Indianapolis's leading families at the Athletic Club, play tennis and golf with
them at the Woodstock Golf and Country Club. But Kurt thrived in his new surroundings.
"She could not understand," he later said, "that to give up my
friends at Public School No. 43 ... would be for me to give up everything."
Even today, Vonnegut said, he feels "uneasy about prosperity and associating
with members of my parents' class on that account." Part of that unease
may have come from the idealism he learned while a public school student - an
idealism that is often reflected in his writings.
To Vonnegut, America in the 1930s was an idealistic, pacifistic nation. While
in the sixth grade, he said he was taught "to be proud that we had a standing
army of just over a hundred thousand men and that the generals had nothing to
say about what was done in Washington. I was taught to be proud of that and
to pity Europe for having more than a million men under arms and spending all
their money on airplanes and tanks. I simply never unlearned junior civics.
I still believe in it."
Along with instilling Vonnegut with a strong sense of ideals and pacifism,
his time in Indianapolis's schools started him on the path to a writing career.
Attending Shortridge High School from 1936 to 1940, Vonnegut during his junior
and senior years edited the Tuesday edition of the school's daily newspaper,
The Shortridge High School Echo. His duties with the newspaper, then one of
the few daily high school newspapers in the country, offered Vonnegut a unique
opportunity to write for a large audience - his fellow students. It was an experience
he described as being "fun and easy." "It just turned out,"
Vonnegut noted, "that I could write better than a lot of other people.
Each person has something he can do easily and can't imagine why everybody else
has so much trouble doing it." In his case that something was writing.
Looking back on his school days, Vonnegut felt lucky to have been born in Indianapolis.
"That city," he writes in his collection Fates Worse Than Death, "gave
me a free primary and secondary education richer and more humane than anything
I would get from any of the five universities I attended." Vonnegut also
had high praise for the city's *widespread system of free libraries whose attendants
seemed, to his young mind, to be "angels of fun and information."
After graduating from Shortridge, Vonnegut went east to college, enrolling
at Cornell University. If he had gotten his way, the young man would have become
a third-generation Indianapolis architect. His father, however, was so full
of sorrow and anger about having had no work as an architect during the Great
Depression, that he persuaded his son that he too would be unhappy if he pursued
the same trade. Instead of architecture, Vonnegut was urged by his father to
study something useful, so he majored in chemistry and biology. In hindsight,
Vonnegut believed it was lucky for him as a writer that the studied the physical
sciences instead of English. Because he wrote for his own amusement, there were
no English professors to tell him for his own good how bad his writing might
be or one with the power to order him what to read. Consequently, both reading
and writing have been "pure pleasure" for the Hoosier author. To the
young Vonnegut, Cornell itself was a "boozy dream," partly because
of the alcohol he imbibed and also because he found himself enrolled in classes
for which he had no talent. He did, however, find success outside the classroom
by working for the Cornell Daily Sun.
Before the end of his freshman year, Vonnegut had taken over the "Innocents
Abroad" column, which reprinted jokes from other publications. He later
moved on to write his own column, called "Well All Right," in which
he produced a series of pacifistic articles. Reminiscing about his days at Cornell
at an annual banquet for the Daily Sun, Vonnegut recalled that he was happiest
at the university when he was all alone late at night "walking up the hill
after having helped put the Sun to bed." Vonnegut's days at the eastern
university were interrupted by America's entry into World War II. "I was
flunking everything by the middle of my junior year," he admitted. "I
was delighted to join the army and go to war." In January 1943 he volunteered
for military service. Although he was rejected at first for health reasons -
he had caught pneumonia while at Cornell - the Army later accepted him and placed
him in its Specialized Training Program, sending him to study mechanical engineering
at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and at the University
of Tennessee.
Some have wondered how Vonnegut, who stresses pacifism in his work, could volunteer
so eagerly to go to war. It is a question even Vonnegut has trouble answering.
"As for my pacifism," he has said, "it is nothing if not ambivalent."
When he asks himself what person in American history he would most like to have
been, Vonnegut admits to nominating none other than Joshua Lawrence Chamberlin,
college professor and Civil War hero whose valiant bayonet charged helped save
the day for the Union at the Battle of Gettysburg. Although Vonnegut received
instruction on the 240-millimeter howitzer, which he later dubbed the ultimate
terror weapon of the Franco-Prussian War, he eventually ended up as a battalion
intelligence scout with the 106th Infantry Division, which was based
at Camp Atterbury, just south of Indianapolis. It was while he was with the
106th that he met and became friends with Bernard V. O'Hare, who
joined Vonnegut as a POW in Dresden and would go on to play a large role in
the genesis of Slaughterhouse-Five.
On Mother's Day in 1944 Vonnegut received leave from his duties and returned
home to find that his mother had committed suicide the previous evening. Edith
Vonnegut had grown increasingly depressed over her family's lost fortune and
her inability to remake that fortune by selling fiction to popular magazines
of the day. "She studied magazines," her son recalled, "the way
gamblers study racing forms." Although Edith was a good writer, Vonnegut
noted that she "had no talent for the vulgarity the slick magazines required."
Fortunately, he added, he "was loaded with vulgarity," and when he
grew up he was able to make her dream come true by writing for such publications
as Collier's, Cosmopolitan, The Saturday Evening Post, and The Ladies' Home
Journal. Three months after his mother's death, Vonnegut was sent overseas just
in time to become engulfed in the last German offensive of the war - the Battle
of the Bulge.
Captured by the Germans, Vonnegut and other American prisoners were shipped
in boxcars to Dresden - "the first fancy city" he had ever seen, Vonnegut
said. As a POW, he found himself quartered in a slaughterhouse and working in
a malt syrup factory. Each day he listened to bombers drone overhead on their
way to drop their loads on some other German city. On Feb. 13, 1945, the air
raid siren went off in Dresden and Vonnegut, some other POWs and their German
guards found refuge in a meat locker located three stories under the slaughterhouse.
"It was cool there, with cadavers hanging all around," Vonnegut said.
"When we came up the city was gone. They burnt the whole damn town down."
In recalling the aftermath of the bombing, which created a firestorm that killed
approximately 135,000 people, for the Paris Review, Vonnegut described walking
into the city each day to dig into basements to remove the corpses as a sanitary
measure: When we went into them, a typical shelter . . . looked like a streetcar
full of people who'd simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting in
chairs, all dead. They were loaded on wagons and taken to parks, large open
areas in the city which weren't filled with rubble. The Germans got funeral
pyres going, burning the bodies to keep them from stinking and from spreading
disease. It was a terribly elaborate Easter egg hunt.
Freed from captivity by Russian troops, Vonnegut returned to the United States
and married Jane Marie Cox on Sept. 1, 1945. The young couple moved to Chicago
where Vonnegut worked on a master's degree in anthropology at the University
of Chicago. While going to school, he also worked as a reporter for the Chicago
City News Bureau. Failing to have his thesis, "Fluctuations Between Good
and Evil in Simple Tales," accepted, Vonnegut left school to become a publicist
for General Electric's research laboratories in Schenectaduy, New York.
As an aside, in 1971 the University of Chicago finally awarded Vonnegut a master's
degree in anthropology for his novel Cat's Cradle. While working for GE, Vonnegut
began submitting stories to mass-market magazines. His first published piece
"Report on the Barnhouse Effect," appeared in Collier's February 11,
1950 issue - an article for which he received $750 (minus, of course, a 10 percent
agent's commission). Writing his father of his success, Vonnegut confidently
stated: "I think I'm on my way. I've deposited my first check in a savings
account and . . . will continue to do so until I have the equivalent of one
year's pay at GE. Four more stories will do it nicely. I will then quit this
goddamn nightmare job, and never take another one so long as I live, so help
me God." Vonnegut was almost as good as his word. He quit his job at GE
in 1951 and moved to Cape Cod to write full time.
Although he sold a steady stream of stories to a succession of magazines, the
Hoosier writer did have to take other jobs to supplement his income. He worked
as an English teacher in a school on Cape Cod, wrote copy for an advertising
agency, and opened one of the first Saab dealerships in the United States. With
his short stories, and novels like Player Piano, published in 1952, and The
Sirens of Titan, released in 1959, Vonnegut was often typecast by critics as
a science fiction writer. "The feeling persists," Vonnegut has said,
"that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand
how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city."
It was also during these years that his father and sister died.
In the novels Vonnegut published leading up to Slaughterhouse Five, which also
included such works as Mother Night, Cat's Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,
themes emerged that would find their full flowering with Slaughterhouse Five.
There is, according to Vonnegut, an "almost intolerable sentimentality
beneath everything" he writes - a sentimentality he might have learned
from a black cook employed by the Vonnegut family named Ida Young. Young often
read to the young Kurt from an anthology of idealistic poetry about "love
which would not die, about faithful dogs and humble cottages where happiness
was, about people growing old, about visits to cemeteries, about babies who
die."
The essence of Vonnegut's work might be best expressed by one of his characters,
crazed millionaire Elliot Rosewater, who proclaims: "Goddamn it, you've
got to be kind." After all, Vonnegut has reminded us time after time, "pity
is like rust to a cruel social machine." After briefly touching on his
World War II experience in other works - Rosewater, for example, hallucinates
that Indianapolis becomes engulfed in a firestorm - Vonnegut finally, in 1969,
delivered to the reading public a book dealing with the Dresden bombing.
Slaughterhouse Five is the story of Billy Pilgrim, like Vonnegut, a young infantry
scout captured by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge and taken to Dresden
where he and his other prisoners survive the Feb. 13, 1945 firebombing of the
city. Pilgrim copes with his war trauma through time travels to the planet Tralfamadore,
whose inhabitants have the ability to see all of time - past, present, and future
- simultaneously. The book is so short, jumbled and jangled, Vonnegut explained,
because "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody
is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again."
Vonnegut's strange, yet fascinating, trip through World War II, which one critic
called "an inspired mess," did not come easy. He worked on the book
on and off for many years. In 1967 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and returned
to Dresden with his fellow POW Bernard O'Hare to gather material for the book.
Three years earlier Vonnegut had visited O'Hare at his Pennsylvania home and
received, as he recounts in the opening chapter to Slaughterhouse Five, a rather
chilly reception from his friend's wife, Mary, who believed the Hoosier author
would gloss over the soldiers' youth and write something that could be turned
into a movie starring Frank Sinatra or John Wayne. "She freed me,"
Vonnegut reflected, "to write about what infants we really were: 17, 18,
19, 20, 21. We were baby-faced, and as a prisoner of war I don't think I had
to shave very often. I don't recall that was a problem." He promised Mary
O'Hare that if he ever finished his Dresden book there would be no parts in
it for actors like John Wayne; instead, he'd call it "The Children's Crusade."
Vonnegut kept his word. Slaughterhouse Five, or The Children's Crusade, A Duty
Dance with Death, with its recapitulation of previous themes and characters
(such old favorites as Kilgore Trout, Eliot Rosewater and Howard Campbell Jr.
appear), brings together in one book all of what Vonnegut had been trying to
say about the human condition throughout his career. With wild black humor mixed
with his innate pessimism and particular brand of compassion, Vonnegut asks
his readers not to give up on their humanity, even when faced with potential
disaster - offering as an example Lot's wife who was turned into a pillar of
salt for daring to look back at her former home.
Although Vonnegut considered the book a failure - it had to be, he said, as
it "was written by a pillar of salt" - the public disagreed. Written
during the height of the Vietnam War, Slaughterhouse Five's compassion in the
face of terrible slaughter struck a nerve with an American populace trying to
come to grips with the war and a society that seemed to be, at best, headed
for major changes. After all, Vonnegut's book was released during a year that
saw such shocking events as Neil Armstrong taking the first step on the moon,
the New York Mets winning the World Series, more than a half a million youngsters
gathering on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in New York for a music festival called
Woodstock, and the uncovering of a massacre of Vietnamese civilians by American
troops in a village named My Lai.
Slaughterhouse Five's success, and the release of a feature film based on the
book in 1972, gained Vonnegut a position as an American cultural icon. College
students, in particular, responded well to Vonnegut's sense of the absurd, his
Cassandra-like warnings about the bleak future the planet faced. "I do
moralize," Vonnegut has admitted. He added that he tells his readers "not
to take more than they need, not to be greedy. I tell them not to kill, even
in self defense. I tell them not to pollute water or the atmosphere. I tell
them not to raid the public treasury." For those wondering about the phrase,
"So it goes," which appears every time a character dies in Slaughterhouse
Five (which happens one hundred and three times, by the way), Vonnegut was inspired
to use the phrase after reading French author Celine's masterpiece, Journey
to the End of the Night. Using the phrase, Vonnegut noted, exasperated many
critics, and seemed fancy and tiresome to him too, but it "somehow had
to be said."
Since its publication, Slaughterhouse Five has retained its reputation as Vonnegut's
greatest, and most controversial, work. It has been used in classrooms across
the country, and also been banned by school boards. In 1973 school officials
in Drake, North Dakota, went so far as to confiscate and burn the book, an action
Vonnegut termed "grotesque and ridiculous." He was glad, he added,
that he had "the freedom to make soldiers talk the way they do talk."
Asked for his thoughts on the book, Vonnegut responded by claiming that only
one person on the entire planet benefited from the bombing. "The raid,"
Vonnegut said, "didn't shorten the war by half a second, didn't free a
single person from a death camp. Only one person benefited - not two or five
or ten. Just one." That one person was Vonnegut who, according to his own
reckoning, has received over the years about five dollars for every corpse.
