catapult magazine

A recall for arms

by Mitchell Terpstra

Two-and-a-half years ago, Kurt Vonnegut took a tumble, conked his head and “irreversibly scrambled his precious egg,” as his son Mark put it. He never recovered. A few weeks after his fall, Vonnegut died, and so went one of the world’s most brilliant — and saddest — writers.

Vonnegut’s life was defined by an inescapable melancholy, a permanent reaction to what he witnessed in Dresden near the end of World War II. He had been shipped to Europe as a member of the 106^th Infantry Division and fought briefly in the Battle of the Bulge, where his division was quickly destroyed. His comrades dead, he wandered around until he was caught by the Germans — he had wandered behind enemy lines. They sent him to Dresden, Germany’s architectural magnum opus, to make vitamin supplements in an underground meat locker.

His work detail in the meat locker — called Schlachthaus-Fünf (“Slaughterhouse-Five”) — saved his life. While he worked underground, the Allies ravaged the city with firebombs, razing it to the ground. Vonnegut’s work detail changed. His new duty was to scour the smoldering heaps for burnt corpses, uncover and count them, and bury them in mass graves. Because of the exorbitant death count, the task soon proved impractical, and the new method was to stick the muzzle of a flamethrower in the pockets of rubble and incinerate the bodies without counting them.

Vonnegut couldn’t believe it: a gem of a city and its 150,000 people erased. And on Valentine’s Day, of all days. What love. Or in Vonnegut’s despondent words, “So it goes.”

The gouges this made on Vonnegut’s psyche are evident in most of his novels, especially Slaughterhouse-Five, the quasi-autobiographical novel titled after his former workhouse. The gouges are also evident in Armageddon in Retrospect, his posthumously published mishmash of essays, letters, speeches and short stories dealing with war and peace.

Armageddon in Retrospect, Vonnegut’s only posthumous work, will be his last moral trumpet call for kindness. His writing was always a genre-bending mixture of science fiction, off-the-wall humor, philosophy and moral didacticism. One of Vonnegut’s fictional ambassadors to the real world, his character Mr. Rosewater from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, succinctly captures how Vonnegut stirred these ingredients together: “Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’”

Though an oddball collection of his trademark quirkiness and pessimistic wit, Armageddon in Retrospect is no less significant for its simple moral message. The included short stories — most notably “Wailing Shall Be in All Streets” and “The Unicorn Trap” — target the established authorities’ hankering for war and highlight the situation of the underdog, the laymen who lose everything when men in power make rash affirmations of war. More desperate yet, “Happy Birthday, 1951” conveys the difficulty, even futility, of sheltering the next generation from the temptation of violence. And Private Vonnegut’s letter to his father from the front lines, after being a P.O.W., corralled like cattle in boxcars and forced to march sixty miles without food or water, evinces his growing cynicism borne of the inhumanity of humanity.

Both the saggy, sallow bags below Vonnegut’s eyes and his novels betrayed his world-weariness. So what kept Kurt going?

It’s hard to say, exactly. As a self-proclaimed humanist and honorary president of the American Humanist Association (“that utterly functionless capacity,” Vonnegut would joke), he professed no belief in the afterlife, but only that he behaves as best he can “without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an Afterlife” — although even this mission barely kept him going. In 1984, Vonnegut tried to do himself in by overdosing on pills and alcohol. “The children of a suicide naturally think of death, the big one, as a logical solution to any problem,” Vonnegut once wrote. He was a child of a suicide; his mother had committed suicide shortly before he was shipped to fight in Europe.

Vonnegut’s response to his failed suicide was telling, however: he would joke about how he had botched the job. Humor, even dark humor, was Vonnegut’s answer, his antidote to the unbearableness of life. “If laughing and crying were equally valid reactions to the miseries of life, he preferred laughing, which required ‘less cleaning’ afterward,” one of his obituaries said. No one could joke about the tragic tenor of life like Kurt Vonnegut and still maintain his high reverence for it.

He summarized the corpus of his work well in one of his cartoony works of art, a sampling of which are spliced between his short stories in Armageddon in Retrospect:

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.