Weeks 7–8: Slaughterhouse-Five, or the Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969)

While Vonnegut identifies Cat's Cradle as his "flagship" (i.e. his favorite of his own books) it's no understatement to call Slaughterhouse-Five his masterpiece — when raking his own books against one another in 1981's Palm Sunday, those two are the only to receive a mark of A+ (though The Sirens of Titans, Mother Night, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Jailbird all get As). Certainly, it's one of his more formally-inventive novels, and one in which his use of science-fiction tropes and cutting-edge postmodern literary technique meld beautifully to produce a narrative that remains true to the horrors Vonnegut witnessed in Dresden as a POW during WWII.

Always a prolific and dedicated writer — God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, for example, came together in a little over a year — Slaughterhouse-Five posed a serious challenge to Vonnegut, who tried (and failed) for the better part of two decades, to find the right way to tell his Dresden story. This exchange from a composite interview (published by The Paris Review as part of their "Art of Fiction" series in 1977) outlines a very important shift in Vonnegut's approach that granted him the freedom to finish the manuscript (an important anecdote that's also contained in the book itself and gives it its subtitle):

INTERVIEWER

Did you intend to write about [Dresden] as soon as you went through the experience?

VONNEGUT

When the city was demolished I had no idea of the scale of the thing . . . Whether this was what Bremen looked like or Hamburg, Coventry . . . I’d never seen Coventry, so I had no scale except for what I’d seen in movies. When I got home (I was a writer since I had been on the Cornell Sun, except that was the extent of my writing) I thought of writing my war story, too. All my friends were home; they’d had wonderful adventures, too. I went down to the newspaper office, the Indianapolis News, and looked to find out what they had about Dresden. There was an item about half an inch long, which said our planes had been over Dresden and two had been lost. And so I figured, well, this really was the most minor sort of detail in World War II. Others had so much more to write about. I remember envying Andy Rooney, who jumped into print at that time; I didn’t know him, but I think he was the first guy to publish his war story after the war; it was called Air Gunner. Hell, I never had any classy adventure like that. But every so often I would meet a European and we would be talking about the war and I would say I was in Dresden; he’d be astonished that I’d been there, and he’d always want to know more. Then a book by David Irving was published about Dresden, saying it was the largest massacre in European history. I said, By God, I saw something after all! I would try to write my war story, whether it was interesting or not, and try to make something out of it. I describe that process a little in the beginning of Slaughterhouse Five; I saw it as starring John Wayne and Frank Sinatra. Finally, a girl called Mary O’Hare, the wife of a friend of mine who’d been there with me, said, “You were just children then. It’s not fair to pretend that you were men like Wayne and Sinatra, and it’s not fair to future generations, because you’re going to make war look good.” That was a very important clue to me.

INTERVIEWER

That sort of shifted the whole focus . . .

VONNEGUT

She freed me to write about what infants we really were: seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. 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 that was a problem.

Later in the same interview, he speaks about Dresden in comparison to the Holocaust, and attempts (with a combination of survivor's guilt and his trademark black humor) to address the senseless scale of destruction and his place in relation to it:

INTERVIEWER

It was the largest massacre in European history?

VONNEGUT

It was the fastest killing of large numbers of people—one hundred and thirty-five thousand people in a matter of hours. There were slower schemes for killing, of course.

INTERVIEWER

The death camps.

VONNEGUT

Yes—in which millions were eventually killed. Many people see the Dresden massacre as correct and quite minimal revenge for what had been done by the camps. Maybe so. As I say, I never argue that point. I do note in passing that the death penalty was applied to absolutely anybody who happened to be in the undefended city—babies, old people, the zoo animals, and thousands upon thousands of rabid Nazis, of course, and, among others, my best friend Bernard V. O’Hare and me. By all rights, O’Hare and I should have been part of the body count. The more bodies, the more correct the revenge.

INTERVIEWER

The Franklin Library is bringing out a deluxe edition of Slaughterhouse Five, I believe.

VONNEGUT

Yes. I was required to write a new introduction for it.

INTERVIEWER

Did you have any new thoughts?

VONNEGUT

I said that only one person on the entire planet benefited from the raid, which must have cost tens of millions of dollars. The raid didn’t shorten the war by half a second, didn’t weaken a German defense or attack anywhere, didn’t free a single person from a death camp. Only one person benefited—not two or five or ten. Just one.

INTERVIEWER

And who was that?

VONNEGUT

Me. I got three dollars for each person killed. Imagine that.

Slaughterhouse-Five was made into a film in 1972 — an ambitious and faithful adaptation that pleased the author immensely: "I love [director] George Roy Hill and Universal Pictures, who made a flawless translation of my novel Slaughterhouse-Five to the silver screen ... I drool and cackle every time I watch that film, because it is so harmonious with what I felt when I wrote the book." Here's an extended trailer:

Here's our reading schedule for the next three classes:

• Weds. October 5: chapters 1–2
• Fri. October 7: chapters 3–4
• Mon. October 10: chapters 5–7
• Weds. October 12: chapters 8–10

Additionally, here are a few supplemental links for your enjoyment:

• The aforementioned (and highly-recommended) Paris Review "Art of Fiction" interview: [link]
• The New York Times' review of Slaughterhouse-Five: [link]
• Harlan Ellison's 1969 review of the book in The Los Angeles Times: [link]
• a 2007 NPR tribute to Vonnegut featuring the author reading an excerpt from Slaughterhouse-Five: [link]
• a 2003 NPR interview with Vonnegut about Slaughterhouse-Five: [link]
• Vonnegut's May 1945 letter to his family in Indianapolis from a Red Cross camp in France: [link]
• A 1949 letter of rejection from The Atlantic Monthly, to whom Vonnegut had sent two stories, along with an account of his experiences in Dresden: [link]
• Wikipedia entry on the Dresden bombing: [link]
• Vonnegut speaks in Chicago on the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima:

Weeks 6–7: God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine (1965)

Though Vonnegut's writing career began in earnest in 1950 (with the publication of "Report on the Barnhouse Effect") he wouldn't gain public renown or financial comfort until the mid-to-late 1960s, and if not for an invitation to teach at the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop in the fall of 1965 (not long after the publication of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater), he might've given up on writing entirely. Nonetheless, the 60s represent the high water mark for Vonnegut's writing — specifically the trifecta of Cat's Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Slaughterhouse-Five — and after the widespread success of that final book, he'd spend much of the 1970s in a tailspin, struggling with questions of his public persona, artifice and substance. It wasn't until a massive aesthetic reinvention, starting with Jailbird and continuing through Deadeye Dick, Galapagos and Bluebeard that he'd regain the fine fictional form of this earlier period.

Though the titular Eliot Rosewater is our protagonist, Vonnegut tells us in the novel's opening sentence that "[a] sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees." Specifically, he's talking about $87,472,033.61 (a lot of money then and now). Eliot is the primary trustee of the Rosewater Foundation — a philanthropic organization set up by his father, an Indiana senator, as a tax shelter — to whom the money belongs. At the heart of the novel is the question of qualities such as charity, fellowship, selflessness and generosity (as embodied by Eliot) and the place they occupy in a capitalist society. These concerns are perhaps even more important now than they were in the mid-60s, when Vonnegut's quaint sociological notions about humankind's duties to one another captured the imagination of young readers.

As Vonnegut slowly but surely worked his way towards being able to write Slaughterhouse-Five, we learn that Eliot, like Vonnegut, is scarred by his experiences during WWII and a major part of how he comes to terms with that is by valorizing the role firefighters play in society. Vonnegut himself had been a volunteer firefighter in the hamlet of Alplaus while he worked at GE, and his own admiration for them is mirrored in the novel, where he observes that they are:

almost the only examples of enthusiastic unselfishness to be seen in this land. They rush to the rescue of any human being, and count not the cost. The most contemptible man in town, should his contemptible house catch fire, will see his enemies put the fire out. There we have people treasuring people as people.

Two prints by artist Tim Doyle of one of Vonnegut's most famous quotations (taken from this novel).

 God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater also serves as our first introduction to Kilgore Trout, one of Vonnegut's most-cherished creations. As depicted in the Arena documentary we watched on the first day of class, Trout is a prolific science fiction writer — author of more than 117 novels and 2000 short stories — albeit not one who has gained either critical or financial recognition: his work is usually published as filler in pornographic magazines. Eliot Rosewater is a diehard fan of his work, however, and through his influence, so is Billy Pilgrim, protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five. He'll also appear in that novel, as well as Breakfast of Champions, Jailbird, and Timequake, while Galapagos is narrated by the ghost of Trout's son, Leon Trotsky Trout. In 1975, Trout even published a novel in the real world, Venus on the Half-Shell (shown at right), though contrary to popular belief, the book wasn't written by Vonnegut, but rather a little-known science fiction author, Philip José Farmer. While Vonnegut had given Farmer permission to use Trout's name, he'd soon grow to regret that decision as casual fans and dedicated readers alike couldn't tell the difference between the two authors.

Like Trout, Eliot Rosewater would also become one of Vonnegut's favorite recurring characters, showing up again in our next two novels, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions, as well as the later novel Hocus Pocus (which won't be part of our reading list this semester).

Here's our reading schedule for the book:

• Mon. September 26: chapters 1–4
• Weds. September 28: chapters 5–8
• Fri. September 30: chapters 9–11
• Mon. October 3: chapters 12–14

And here are a few supplemental links:

• "Do Human Beings Matter?," Martin Levin's New York Times review of the book: [link]
• A lovely essay in The New Inquiry on "Vonnegut's Firefighters," including his thoughts on the first responders who perished on 9/11: [link]
• A second essay called "Vonnegut's Firefighters," this one by Gregory Sumner: [link]
• The title of Vonnegut's 1999 collection of NPR vignettes, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, consciously parodies this book: [link]

In the late-70s, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater was adapted into (I kid you not) a Broadway musical. Here's video of its opening act:

And here's footage from its summer 2016 revival:

A Playbill behind-the-scenes article on the show can be found here: [link]

Class Canceled 9/9

Please accept my sincerest apologies for having to cancel class today. Thanks to my lovely little germ bomb I've picked up some sort of nasty virus that's knocked me off my feet, and even if I could drag myself in to campus I wouldn't want to put you at risk of catching it.

We'll pick up on Monday combining that day's readings and today's, with responses from both day's scheduled respondents. If you have any questions, drop me a line, and again, I'm sorry to have to cancel class.

Weeks 4–5: Cat's Cradle

After jumping forward almost a decade between Player Piano and Mother Night our next book comes just two years later. Cat's Cradle was the first novel to bring Kurt Vonnegut to the attention of wider audiences (even though it would take several years to achieve that popularity). Graham Greene would hail the book as "one of the three best novels of the year by one of the most able living writers," and Vonnegut himself, in a 2000 interview with the Harvard Crimson, named the book as his "flagship."

I've already discussed Vonnegut's disdain for his work being labeled as science fiction (note the prominently placed label on the book cover to the right), and as was the case with Player Piano, this is by no means a tired exercise in that genre, but rather a book that's firmly rooted in the realm of science, which it uses as a satirical weapon against contemporary society. Likewise, it was largely inspired by the author's time as a GE public relations agent in Schenectady, NY (which again returns as the fictional city of Ilium), where scientists were hired to do "pure research" — i.e. to work on whatever pet projects might interest them — and Vonnegut's job was to interview them in search of human interest stories. One scientist in particular, Nobel Prize-winner Irving Langmuir, who worked alongside Bernard Vonnegut on a groundbreaking cloud-seeding project and would serve as the foundation of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, who sets the novel's action in motion. In fact, ice-nine, the dangerous substance at the heart of the novel, was a fabulation of Langmuir's, devised to entertain visiting science fiction author H.G. Wells in the early 30s.  Charles Shields gives us the details:

Cat's Cradle appeared in 1963, after a long gestation, but the idea for it had occurred to Kurt as far back as his days at General Electric. A story often repeated at the Schenectady plant concerned H. G. Wells's visit in the 1930s. The head scientist, Irving Langmuir, had proposed an idea to Wells for a story about a form of water that solidified at room temperature. Wells, the most famous science fiction writer of the day, expressed interest, but his novels, at their core, were parables about humanity — a scientific conundrum didn’t interest him. 

Kurt, on the other hand, was intrigued by Langmuir's suggestion. Taking the concept a step further, he asked: what if water, the most common liquid on the planet, could be weaponized, the way that matter torn apart by nuclear fission had created the atomic bomb? At a party of mostly General Electric scientists and their wives one evening, Vonnegut described his idea to a crystallographer, explaining that humanity, in his story, would be threatened by water becoming stable like ice at room temperature. The scientist nodded and went over to a chair. He sat there, ignoring the talk and laughter, just thinking. Finally, as things were winding down, he returned and said, "No. There could be no such ice." 

Vonnegut might have put the idea aside except that his brother Bernard's cloud seeding experiments at General Electric convinced him that weather modification raised ethical issues more important than how water actually crystallizes. In 1952, the Cape Cod Standard-Times had interviewed Kurt about his next novel after Player Piano. "'Actually,' Mr. Vonnegut said in a worried tone, 'the atmosphere can be fouled up by anybody with an oil burner pointing at the right kind of cloud.' The situation is so explosive that he believes restrictive legislation is needed everywhere right now.'"

Again, much like Player Piano, we see faith as a driving force in Cat's Cradle, here taking the form of Bokononism, through which Vonnegut is able to trace the role of religion in society and the balance between church and state. However, while Vonnegut was an avowed atheist / humanist / freethinker, his views towards religion — as well as towards other folk social groups (cf. the various lodges [the Moose, the Parmesans, etc.] as well as the Meadows teams and the Ghosts Shirt Society in Player Piano; the concept of nationalism and particularly Nazi ideology in Mother Night) were quite sympathetic, honed by his (incomplete) graduate studies in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. While his first thesis (on the correlation between Cubist painting and Native American uprisings) was turned down Vonnegut eventually convinced (or publicly shamed) the University to accept Cat's Cradle in lieu of a formal thesis and granted him his degree. In particular, the interplay between faith and technology (especially the apocalyptic power of technology in the atomic era) — along with its influence on questions of predestination and free will — are worth keeping an eye on here.

Here's the reading schedule for the novel:

• Fri. September 16: Ch. 1, "The Day the World Ended," to Ch. 34, "Vin-Dit"
• Mon. September 19: Ch. 35, "Hobby Shop" to Ch. 66, "The Strongest Thing There Is"
• Weds. September 21: Ch. 67, "Hy-u-o-ook-kuh!" to Ch. 94, "The Highest Mountain"
• Fri. September 23: Ch. 94, "I See the Hook" to Ch. 127, "The End"

And here are a few supplemental links for this week:

• Wikipedia page on Bokononism (includes a glossary): [link]
• The Books of Bokonon: [link]
• author and screenwriter Terry Southern reviews Cat's Cradle in The New York Times: [link] 
• Benjamin Kunkel's 2008 appreciation of the novel in The Guardian: [link]
• Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (Opinions) (1974), Vonnegut's first volume of collected nonfiction pieces, takes its name from three Bokononist key terms: [link]