‘I have to keep reminding myselP, he told me, ‘that J wrote those early books. I wrote that. I wrote that. The only way I can regain credit for my early work is — to die.’
The shaping experience of Vonnegut’s life and art is easy to pinpoint. It occurred on February 13, 1945. On this night, Vonnegut survived the greatest single massacre in the history of warfare, the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden. Over 135,000 people lost their lives (twice the toll of Hiroshima); and Dresden, the Florence of the Elbe, a city as beautiful, ornate — and militarily negligible — as the city of Oz, was obliterated. Vonnegut, a prisoner of war, a gangly private, was billeted in the basement of a slaughterhouse — Schlachthof-fünf. Slaughterhouse-Five is the title of his most celebrated novel, the book that in turn reshaped his career and his life. Everything that he wrote before 1969 leads up to Slaughterhouse-Five; everything he has written since leads away from it.
In another sense Vonnegut was uniquely well placed to write about Dresden, about war, violence and waste, with maximum irony. He is a German-American. His parents were German-speakers; all eight of his great-grandparents were part of the Teutonic migration to the Midwest between 1820 and 1870, as he reveals in an unreadably ample genealogy in Palm Sunday (one of his two volumes of autobiographical meanderings). In the superb early novel Mother Night, this genetico-political accident — together with his peculiar charm and moral subtlety as a writer — empowered him to attempt the impossible: to write a funny book about Nazism. He succeeded. Hitler is a longstanding obsession, and duly plays his part in the new novel Deadeye Dick.
Vonnegut grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana — a cultural Nothingville, like Swindon or Stoke. The characters in his books come from nowhere: Ilium, Midtown, Midland City. Indianapolis, Vonnegut insists, remains the centre of his cultural universe: ‘Not Rome, not Paris — Indianapolis.’ In his fiction Vonnegut’s most crucial imaginative habit is to gaze down at humanity as if from another world, fascinated by Earthling mores yet baffled by our convulsive quests for order, certainty and justice. ‘This attitude was a result of my studies in biochemistry [at Cornell], before the war and anthropology after the war [at Chicago]. I learned to see human culture as an artefact, which it is — vulnerable, precarious and probably futile.’ His latest novel, Galapagos, concerns itself with Darwinism — ‘our only alternative to conventional religion. It’s all modern man has.’
Pre-Slaughterhouse, Vonnegut was loosely regarded as a science-fiction writer, a genre man. In fact only his first novel, Player Piano (1951), and a few short stories can be classified as hard SF. His real mode has always been something dreamier, crazier, more didactic, nearer to Mark Twain than to Fred Pohl. The standard Vonnegut novel works as follows: a semi-fantastical plot (with outrageous vicissitudes and reversals), an attack on some barndoor-sized moral target (atomic warfare, economic inequities, loneliness) and, in between, round the edges, a delightfully weighted satire of ordinary, unreflecting, innocent America.
The early novels were taut, concise and sharply constructed. ‘My first trade was newspapering,’ said Vonnegut, typically down-home. ‘You said as much as you could, as soon as you could, and then shut up.’ The later novels, on the other hand… Well, I was enjoying our lunch, and decided to postpone discussion of the later novels. ‘My public stance is not to take myself seriously,’ he had remarked. ‘I do that in order to be likeable. Vonnegut is likeable all right. But he takes himself seriously too. Of course he does.
During the Sixties Vonnegut was making ‘a good middle-class income’ from journalism and from writing short stories ‘for the slicks’; yet his responsibilities were considerable. Through a gruesome coincidence, which would sound implausible even in a Vonnegut plot outline, his sister and brother-in-law died within twenty-four hours of each other. He died in a New Jersey rail disaster; she died in hospital the following day, of cancer. Vonnegut and his first wife adopted the three orphaned children. They already had three of their own. Alice was Vonnegut’s only sister. He still writes with her in mind. “‘Alice would like this,” I say to myself. “This would amuse Alice.’“