So Vonnegut Goes

The novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1922–2007), who died last week, was an original literary tinkerer, fusing together genres like science fiction and satire in masterfully rhythmic prose in his best books, such as “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Cat’s Cradle.” His jokey, tricky style was peppered with repeated phrases as a kind of punctuation, such as “so it goes” and “hiho.” These exclamations — others included “I had to laugh” and “small world” — seemed deliberately designed to prevent academics from trying to take his writings entirely seriously. In this humorous guise, he also aspired to the literary example of one of his idols, Mark Twain, but more often landed closer to lesser 19th-century dark-hearted wits such as Ambrose Bierce and Petroleum V. Nasby (also unread today). He became a cult writer for 1960s and ’70s youth, not because Vonnegut’s voice was spectacularly new, it just reflected writers who were no longer read by the young.Vonnegut’s German ancestry, of which he regularly reminded readers, might have been another influence. Middle-European irony, sarcasm, and pessimism about society, politics, and history, as personified by writers such as Karl Kraus and Peter Altenberg, are a strong tradition that may explain in part Vonnegut’s strong popularity among European readers. His impulse to write science fiction in the 1950s may have resulted from a less-than-total grasp of orthodox science, which allowed room for imaginative fancy. Thus in “Cat’s Cradle,” Dr. Felix Hoenikker was a caricature of Dr. Irving Langmuir, a renowned scientist in the General Electric research laboratory where Vonnegut was employed as a publicist. A key plot element in the novel, Ice-9, a form of water which would freeze at room temperature, was a running gag around the office, supposedly concocted by Langmuir.Vonnegut’s elder brother Bernard (1914–97) was a noted atmospheric scientist who discovered that silver iodide could be used to seed clouds in order to produce rain. Bernard Vonnegut and his father, a distinguished architect, decided that young Kurt should study chemistry at Cornell, where Vonnegut soon dropped out and later recalled as a “boozy dream … I was enrolled exclusively in courses I had no talent for.” His post-graduate studies, in anthropology at the University of Chicago, would be equally unfinished, underlining the unsystematic nature of this writer’s imagination. Scientific studies also delayed Vonnegut’s becoming aware of much great literature as he confessed in a Paris Review interview: “I was thirty-five before I went crazy about Blake, forty before I read Madame Bovary, forty-five before I’d even heard of Céline.”Between these two periods of study, Vonnegut enlisted in the army, and famously survived the Battle of the Bulge in 1944–5 as an advance scout with the U.S. 106th Infantry Division, as well as the devastating February 13-15, 1945, bombing of Dresden, Germany. Vonnegut survived among a few other slave laborers stationed in an underground meatpacking cellar labeled “Schlachthof-fünf” (“Slaughterhouse Five”), which became the title of his most famous book. In its introduction, Vonnegut confesses the impossibility of understanding the disaster, warning that the novel is a failure “because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” Indeed, Vonnegut showed no historian’s curiosity about the bombings, and continued to cite the Dresden death toll as 130,000, whereas a 1994 study by the German historian Friedrich Reichert reduced the figure to around 30,000, still ghastly but considerably smaller.Exhibiting considerable survivor’s guilt, Vonnegut once told a university audience that since the firebombing of Dresden did not advance the war, his personal success with “Slaughterhouse Five” was the only apparent good which came of it: “Only one person on earth clearly benefited, and I am that person. I got about $5 for each corpse, not counting my fee tonight.” It is a rare firebrand who attacks himself with the same gusto as his usual satirical targets. And few writers these days — even murderers recounting their crimes — are delicate enough to view an author’s royalties as blood money.Vonnegut’s output was very uneven, which he himself acknowledged in a 1981 miscellany, “Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage,” in which he grades his own output, from “A+” for “Cat’s Cradle” and “Slaughterhouse-Five” to “C” for “Breakfast of Champions” and even “D” for “Slapstick.” He also notes a tendency for aging writers to behave like “gut-shot bears” out of sheer anguish. This was his own trajectory, which included a suicide attempt in 1984, and steadily advancing emphysema due to decades of heavy smoking (typically, he threatened to sue cigarette companies because despite their label warnings, tobacco had not indeed killed him promptly enough).As his health declined, his public pronouncements retained vigor, but became ridiculous. In March, 2006, he told an Ohio State audience that the “only difference between” President Bush and Adolf Hitler is “that Hitler was elected.” The year before, in a contentious interview with Vonnegut in the Australian, an alarmed journalist described his 83-year-old emphysemic subject as someone who “doesn’t want to live any more … and because he can’t find anything worthwhile to keep him alive, he finds defending terrorists somehow amusing.” To goad the interviewer, who was expecting a pro forma denunciation of terrorism, Vonnegut hazarded that the terrorists might be “very brave people” and rambled on, quoting from the Latin poet Horace, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (“Sweet and seemly it is to die for one’s country”). Even the World War I poet Wilfred Owen did not take this Latin tag at face value in his eponymous poem on the horrors of battle, and Vonnegut’s history as a pacifist suggests these remarks were meant satirically. But the world press took this unhappy interview literally and stories appeared with headlines like “Vonnegut Says Terrorists Are Sweet.” His last and least works and interviews apart, Vonnegut’s contribution in novels such as “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Cat’s Cradle” is solid and secure.Mr. Ivry last wrote for these pages on Nancy Cunard.

So Vonnegut Goes

So Vonnegut Goes

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