50 years on Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five remains untouched by time

Laughter and sobbing are physiologically the same thing,” said Kurt Vonnegut. “I prefer laughter to tears because there’s less cleaning up to do afterwards.” Always with the jokes. Vonnegut was unable to make a joke without leaving a tragedy around the next corner and unable to pass up the opportunity to undermine his most profound utterances with a laugh. That, for him, was reality, however unreal it seemed.

This is a story about stories. It’s about how experience is turned into art and how horror becomes beauty. It’s about how something beyond expression can become something expressed in a way no one had thought of before and, in particular, it’s about how one very funny but damaged writer turned a catastrophic loss of human life into a novel that can just about save your faith in humanity.

Vonnegut wrote many good books and several great ones. He also endured his own tragedies, which, if they were in one of his novels, would be treated as accidents: events designed to test humans’ ability to see beyond themselves – to understand even the most heartbreaking suffering as merely a moment in time and space. Exactly 50 years ago, Vonnegut published Slaughterhouse-Five, the novel that made his fortune and reputation. It was an idea he had been struggling with for two decades, because it was the story of his experiences as a prisoner of war during the Allied destruction of Dresden in 1945. It always seemed an impossible tale to tell, always out of reach. It was, he said, “unspeakable”. What he had seen made the human race itself seem ugly and worthless. But it was a story he had to tell to save his own life.

The Vonnegut family arrived in the US from Germany in 1848, settling in Indianapolis among other émigrés. His grandfather and father were architects and his elder brother became an accomplished scientist (and influence on his early science fiction). But this highly respectable family was hit hard by the Great Depression and his mother was traumatised by this collapse of status and privilege.

By the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, Kurt Vonnegut Jr was a lanky 6ft 2in 19-year-old with an inferiority complex. He spent a year or so in the Reserve Officer Training Corps at Cornell until bad grades and his mockery of the Corps in print saw him drop out, meaning he had to enlist or be drafted. That his mother’s officer-class son was going into the army as a private was another shame to torture her. While he was at home on leave from army training on Mother’s Day 1944, he discovered she had killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills. It was to be the first of these black milestones in his life, the passing of which he revisited often in his work. He later recalled, “I laugh at the wrong things all the time. It’s my response to grief and when people say, ‘Be serious,’ I say, ‘I am being serious.’”

Likewise, the firebombing of Dresden would always stay with Vonnegut. The first letter he sent home at the end of the war contains the kernel of all his subsequent writing and the tone and form of Slaughterhouse-Five in particular. Dated 4 July 1945, it’s full of wit, resignation and punchy prose. But most interesting is his use of the phrase “But not me”, with which he bookends descriptions of death and suffering. It’s the prototype of his most famous saying, “So it goes”, used to mark every death in Slaughterhouse-Five.

In 1945 he married school friend Jane Cox and with her encouragement declared his intention to become a writer. Jane handled the submission of manuscripts and Vonnegut began a master’s degree in anthropology at the University Of Chicago and worked as a reporter. Their first son, Mark, was born in 1947. Daughters Edie and Nanny followed in 1949 and 1954 and the family relocated to Cape Cod.

Years later, as a greybeard star of the college lecture circuit, Vonnegut would borrow from his failed anthropology thesis called “The Shapes Of Stories” and draw a graph on a blackboard with a chalk line that charted the development of the main characters. Depending on which of the archetypes he was explaining, the lines were one variety of wave or another. His own life was just such a wavy line. Aren’t they all, he was saying?

‘I experimented with sci-fi to get distance from the atrocity. It seemed to lighten the enterprise'

After the usual trickle of rejections, he sold a story to Collier’s magazine in 1949 for $750 and soon after quit his hated job as a PR man at General Electric. The first novel, 1952’s Player Piano, was moderately successful but tied him into the straitjacket of science fiction, from which he never completely wriggled free. It seemed every good year for the Vonneguts was followed by a fallow one – and among his money-making schemes were a proposal to market novelty bow ties made of ribbon discarded by the Atomic Energy Commission, a failed pitch for a board game called HQ and running a Saab dealership.

The third great tragedy of Vonnegut’s life occurred in 1958. His sister, Alice, was in hospital in Newark with terminal cancer. According to Charles J Shield’s biography And So It Goes, Vonnegut always wrote “for” Alice, testing his ideas and jokes by how much he imagined she would like them. “She was the secret of whatever artistic unity I had ever achieved,” Vonnegut said. “She was the secret of my technique.”

One mid-September morning, Alice’s husband, James Adams, boarded a train to go to work. After leaving the station, the engineer had a suspected heart attack and the train hurtled off a bridge over Newark Bay. The engines and front two cars dived into the water below and 48 people, Adams among them, drowned. The next day, Vonnegut told his sister and she died the same night. He and Jane took in the three oldest Adams boys, who, although never formally adopted, were brought up as close to their own as possible.

Vonnegut got into the habit of being drunk, sucking on Pall Mall cigarettes and calling his old war buddy Bernard O’Hare for late-night talks (only war makes men “buddies”). Being a full-time writer in a house of six children was never going to be plain sailing and the moods of this imposing man with wild curly hair would swing from avuncular to grouchy and terrifying. His nephew Tiger Adams described the worst moments as “the most blistering lecture that would peel your skin back”.

The second novel, 1959’s The Sirens Of Titan, showed how he was pickling science fiction into something nuggety and subversive. Mother Night was published in 1961 and went largely unnoticed, but is now considered one of his most important works, dealing with the kaleidoscopic morality of an American traitor who writes Nazi propaganda but is in fact a double agent. Cat’s Cradle came out in 1963 and God Bless You, Mr Rosewater in 1965. Cat’s Cradle conflates two recurring themes: the inevitability of an apocalypse and the importance of belonging to a family or community (however dotty). Rosewater follows a wealthy socialite who decides to give his inheritance away. It’s about a Christ-like kindness to strangers, but also the strangeness of kindness, as if being good had become immoral in America.

Rosewater also includes the first appearance of Kilgore Trout. During the Fifties, Vonnegut knew Theodore Sturgeon, a fellow science fiction writer in Cape Cod. Sturgeon and Vonnegut became the models for Trout, an unappreciated, downtrodden writer and his most famous recurring character. “Kilgore is what I thought I might become,” said Vonnegut. “He is a measure of how I felt from book to book. Kilgore is suspicious of human families. He fears pressure on thought and he wants to be free to be an original thinker and to think of all mankind instead of just a limited group.”

Once Rosewater was out, the need to face Dresden again became pressing. In 1983 Vonnegut said, “I tried and I tried and I tried and it would not work, and I thought the problem was there was no discussing a massacre of this order... I experimented with the science fiction elements to get some distance from the atrocity. It seemed to be amusing and lighten the whole enterprise.”

Dan Wakefield, author, friend and editor of Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, told me that his favourite Vonnegut saying was “The truth is shocking because we hear it so seldom.”

Accidents. Coincidences. Fate. There’s a lot of this stuff in Vonnegut and the dreadful prospect of inevitability is partnered with humour as a way to cope. One accident was the intervention of Bernie O’Hare’s wife, Mary, whose contribution to Slaughterhouse-Five is explained in the book’s opening confessional. After a night of heavy drinking, Mary turned to the soldiers with scorn and said, “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them.” He finally understood. “‘I tell you what,’ I said. ‘I’ll call it The Children’s Crusade.’”

But in late 1965 he was out of print and almost broke, so he accepted an offer to teach “Form And Texture Of Fiction” at the Writers’ Workshop at the University Of Iowa, where he could leave the obligations of family life to Jane to make a tilt at the Dresden book. In a letter written in 1975 he recalled, “Suddenly writing seemed very important again. This was better than a transplant of monkey glands for a man of my age.” He was also having his first major affair, with second-year student Loree Rackstraw, and the physical vim with which he experienced life in Iowa lent a fresh confidence to his writing.

The great American novelist John Irving was taught by him in Iowa and told me, “Many of my fellow students were literary snobs. They had not bothered to read Vonnegut, because they’d heard that Kurt was a hack who wrote science fiction. Those of us in Kurt’s class had taken the trouble to find his paperbacks and read them. We knew he was someone special; I thought, from my first encounter, he was the most original contemporary novelist I had read.”

When he returned to West Barnstable on Cape Cod for the summer, Jane found out about his affair, but nothing seemed to change beyond a glacially slow deterioration of their marriage. It is in this context that dissenting voices about Vonnegut practising what he preached emerged from some family members and friends, who have gone on record to contradict the image of him as some soft-hearted, clownish sage with stories of his temper and impatience. Violent mood swings are also a well-known behavioural trait of someone with post-traumatic stress disorder.

He returned to Iowa in August 1966, but a year later a Guggenheim Fellowship grant meant he could leave for a research trip to Dresden and Eastern Europe. He also received an admiring letter from an editor turned publisher, Sam Lawrence. He approached Lawrence in Boston, who offered him a -three-book deal and bought the rights to his previous books. Slaughterhouse-Five, Or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death made them both rich.

When Vonnegut was captured in the Ardennes during the Battle Of The Bulge in 1944, O’Hare shouted “Nein scheissen!” to the Germans, thinking he had said “Don’t shoot.” The Germans fell about laughing because he had shouted “Don’t shit.” Things pretty much went downhill from there.

Vonnegut and tens of thousands of Americans marched for two days to Gerolstein, where they were squeezed into boxcars – 60 men in each, with floor covered in cow dung. Loading the men took two whole days and over Christmas week the train moved them from one POW camp to another. A few weeks later 150 were selected to go on work detail in Dresden.

As Slaughterhouse-Five reminds us, the German military and residents of Dresden believed it was safe from major bombing raids because it had no strategic value and was so treasured as an area of world-renowned beauty. Vonnegut and the others were encamped in a slaughterhouse, Schlachthof-Fünf, then put to work in a factory making tonic for pregnant women. The scenes of their wretched existence were cut with views of medieval churches and the stucco pastels of baroque halls, while their starvation ached to the sound of the anthems of the Hitler Youth, who massed in front of giant swastikas draped over the facades of municipal buildings.

On Shrove Tuesday – 13 February 1945 – the weather lifted as children prepared for carnival. Air raid sirens wailed at 9.51pm and minutes later 800 RAF planes began dropping their bombs, guided by the flares that lit up the city for one final view of what had stood for 700 years. The Americans joined the hanging beef in the Schlachthof underground with only four German soldiers, who shut the steel door behind them.

Sheer walls of heat blockaded the city. Within, the tornado of fire created by the incendiary bombs was so intense that the air crews could feel the heat from 8,000 feet up. A second wave of RAF bombers attacked three hours after the first.

Vonnegut moved rubble and located the dead in basements. He called it ‘corpse mining’

When the POWs emerged on Wednesday, Dresden was gone. Mardi Gras had become a grotesque parade, the streets filled with charred corpses frozen in time, with remains of children in fancy dress and dead animals everywhere – even the horror of people boiled alive after diving into water tanks and fountains. In the afternoon a third wave of aircraft, American B-17 bombers, attacked the remains. The Americans were moved through this three-dimensional Bruegel painting to the barracks of South African POWs housed four miles south of the city centre. Modern historians believe 25,000 people died over the three days and 100,000 refugees fled the city.

On Thursday the POWs were instructed to help the clear-up: moving rubble, piling bodies and salvaging anything worthwhile. Vonnegut was told to locate the dead in basements, what he called “corpse mining”. Over the next few weeks, the harder-to-reach bodies began to decompose and those hunting them were driven mad by the leaking viscera from families of disintegrating cadavers, so the Germans decided their only option was to incinerate them with flame throwers.

As Vonnegut himself says in the introduction, all this is “pretty much true” and the war experiences of the main character, Billy Pilgrim, mirror his own. But here’s the thing: the firebombing of Dresden covers little more than a page. What Slaughterhouse-Five becomes is metafiction with a sigh.

Billy has become “unstuck in time” and claims he has been kidnapped by aliens who reveal to him how their species see in four dimensions. Billy is placed in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore and partnered in captivity with an adult-film star, Montana Wildhack, with whom he has a child. “The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments past, present and future always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains.”

Morality is out of joint, since doing something differently to change the future becomes irrelevant

So far, so zany. Once Billy learns to see as Tralfamadorians do, he moves from Germany to Ilium, New York and from his post-war life as an optometrist to captivity on a distant planet to childhood with his father to his escape from a plane crash and even his own death. Each event becomes observable – “a bug trapped in amber” – but it means Billy sees it all one step removed. Morality is suddenly out of joint, since doing something differently to change the future becomes irrelevant.

Vonnegut inserts “so it goes” – a Tralfamadorian expression – for each death we encounter. Anything or anyone that dies is levelled in time, from Billy’s dog and the bubbles in Champagne to the lice on the uniforms of American soldiers and inhabitants of Dresden. “When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition at that particular moment.”

Vonnegut’s literary Möbius strip works because he finds a way to balance horror and humour, philosophy and farce, narrative and chaos. In Germany, Billy ends up dressed in a torn woman’s jacket and the silver boots he stole from British POWs after a performance of Cinderella. When Billy watches a war movie backwards, Vonnegut recounts the sight of bombs being sucked back into the bellies of aircraft, corpses coming back to life and crews returning safely to base. The pace and simplicity of the telling is what makes it so moving.

Vonnegut is a moralist, which would be impossible if he really believed in some kind of cosmic predestination. The purpose of this book is to open the mind like a flower: it is not there to teach doctrine. How can you decry ambiguity when we see where certainty led him and us? In a New Republic review in 1969, Michael Crichton wrote, “He refuses to say who is wrong. The simplest way out of such a predicament is to say that everybody is wrong but the author. But Vonnegut refuses. He ascribes no blame, sets no penalties... His description of one character might stand for all mankind in his view: ‘She had been given the opportunity to participate in civilisation and she had muffed it.’”

It may be that Vonnegut sees the world as Billy does, or it may be that it is a symptom of Billy’s trauma, or it may be a metaphor for his trauma. Maybe Kilgore Trout put the idea in Billy’s head or maybe he’s just jerking around. They all seem likely explanations to me. It makes your head spin and it’s supposed to.

Articulation is left to the birds. “There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre... Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like ‘Poo-tee-weet?’”

With napalm soon to be dropped on Vietnamese villages, Slaughterhouse-Five was just about the perfect book for 1969. At the same moment, a New York Times review was calling Vonnegut “a true artist”, hippies, college radicals and stoners found his message about the absurdity of war and quantum-lite time travel irresistible. He spent the rest of his career dug in against accusations that he was either a hack or the minstrel for a bourgeois counterculture. “The New York literary establishment are still uncomfortable with him,” Dan Wakefield told me.

Life wasn’t getting any easier, so no change there. Mark Vonnegut (now a successful paediatrician) was committed to an institution after a breakdown in 1971 and Kurt’s daughters saw their father drifting further and further away from their mother. Vonnegut wrote to Nanny, “So home can fall apart and schools can fall apart – and what have you got? A space wanderer named Nan. And that’s OK. I’m a space wanderer named Kurt, and Jane’s a space wanderer named Jane, and so on. When things go well for days on end, it is an hilarious accident.”

His next book, Breakfast Of Champions, is my favourite, but received mixed reviews. It’s the darkest, funniest and most satirical of all – a broken-down story about a personal and national breakdown. Towards the end Kilgore Trout realises he is a character in the novel. The bigger the joke, the more moving Vonnegut’s writing is. He says of Trout, “I had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth.”

Slapstick in 1976 was panned and he was not again given kind notices until his second wind in the Eighties, while living in Manhattan with his second wife, photographer Jill Krementz, and adopted daughter, Lily. Novels such as Bluebeard and Galápagos restored his reputation, but his obsessions remained set: what humans inflict on each other, fate, time and a yearning for the restorative powers of love.

Vonnegut was a peace rally regular and fought all his life against censorship, which is hardly surprising seeing how many small-town schools banned his books for any number of specious reasons. He also loved a chat show and a lecture, where his freewheeling style made him the most entertaining and scurrilous old geezer of American letters. On a Canadian TV show in 1978, he was asked about his support for the First Amendment.

“Any parent who says, ‘I don’t want my kids reading that garbage by Vonnegut’ – it’s a perfectly sensible statement,” he said.

“I want my kids to read Vonnegut and they do,” replied the interviewer.

“Well, that’s a better statement.”

As if to accept the legacy left him by his mother, he attempted suicide on 13 February 1984 by taking an overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol. It was the 39th anniversary of the Dresden firebombing. It was also the day in 1976 Billy Pilgrim died once and forever in Slaughterhouse-Five. But Vonnegut lived, so more a case of “but not me” than “so it goes”.

In 2000, Vonnegut was watching the Super Bowl when an ashtray containing one of his Pall Mall cigarettes turned over and started a fire in his apartment. He was in hospital with smoke inhalation for four days. Smoke inhalation! A year before his death he repeated another of his stock lines during an interview: “I’m suing the cigarette company, because on the package they promised to kill me and here I am.” The steps of his brownstone did what nicotine could not: he fell, and a few weeks later, on 11 April 2007, he died.

We must listen to people who have seen such things as Vonnegut. Far from nihilism, he extols empathy, generosity and the notion of common decency personified by the character Edgar Derby – the soldier who survived Dresden only to be executed for stealing a teapot.

John Irving told me, “Truly, Kurt was the embodiment of the advice he dispenses to the newborn babies in God Bless You, Mr Rosewater – namely, ‘You’ve got to be kind.’ He was. I loved the man and his writing. I miss him. I can’t imagine how funny, and how deadly accurate, he would be on the subject of the orange man in the White House.”

It is the easiest thing to ignore war for those who have not known it. Vonnegut was plagued by the idea that humans could kill each other in such a way. We need him to express that obsession, because most of us will never understand it. Hopefully. It seems that we are now closer to another global conflict than any time since the Sixties. It’s almost like we can’t avoid it. That, sadly, is about as Vonnegut a sentiment as you get. At least we can still laugh. Kurt Vonnegut made you ashamed to be human, but glad to be alive.

The 50th anniversary edition of Slaughterhouse-Five (Penguin, £11) is out now. With thanks to Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library. vonnegutlibrary.org

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