Private Vonnegut survived the bombing in a slaughterhouse meat locker. In its aftermath, he and his fellow captives were ordered to wade ankle deep in “an unsavory broth” of viscera searching out the dead, whom they found in charred pieces. “Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried bodies to huge funeral pyres in the city,” he writes, until the impossibility of transporting that many corpses and limbs became apparent and the job was turned over to men with flamethrowers who “cremated them where they lay.”
This didn’t square with those civics lessons learned in the public schools of Indianapolis. Without ever losing sight of the evil of the Nazi regime, Vonnegut declares, “The killing of children—‘Jerry’ children or ‘Jap’ children, or whatever enemies the future may hold for us—can never be justified.”
(Not included in this volume is a prewar editorial from the Cornell Daily Sun in which Vonnegut, true to his Midwestern pacifist roots, defended the most controversial isolationist of the day: “Charles A. Lindbergh is one helluva swell egg, and we’re willing to fight for him in our own quaint way. . . . The mud-slingers are good. They’d have to be to get people hating a loyal and sincere patriot. On second thought, Lindbergh is no patriot—to hell with the word, it lost it’s [sic] meaning after the Revolutionary War. . . . The United States is a democracy, that’s what they say we’ll be fighting for. What a prize monument to that ideal is a cry to smother Lindy.”)
Several of the stories in Armageddon in Retrospect concern American POWs in 1945 Germany: Vonnegut territory. Typical is the character who is so hungry that “if Betty Grable had showed up and said she was all mine, I would have told her to make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.” These are, for the most part, decent men, believers in the verities, who find themselves in a topsy-turvy world in which collaborators and snitches are the top rails. What’s an Indiana Boy Scout to do? Refuse. Resist. Laugh. Vonnegut said that his afflatus—the reason “stuff came gushing out” of him—was “disgust with civilization.” But he was not a misanthrope, just a man who never lost his capacity for righteous outrage. Wars, he believed till the end of his life, are hell and the negation of all that Jesus taught. The draft-dodgers and chickenhawks who lie and drag us into them should be boiled in that viscera broth.
About Jesus. Descended of a long line of freethinkers, Vonnegut, a self-described “Christ-worshipping agnostic,” was a nonbeliever who respected, even praised, varieties of religious belief. He knew that sniping at religion can become tiresome. You need village atheists—you just don’t want atheist villages. Vonnegut’s doodles and doggerel decorate the book; among them is this apothegm, above a skull and crossbones: “Darwin gave the cachet of science to war and genocide.”
Vonnegut sometimes called himself a socialist. My late friend Barber B. Conable Jr., long-time ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee, told me that every now and then his old Cornell classmate lobbied him for better tax-law treatment of authors. Even socialists resent the IRS, I guess.
On that note, the collection includes an amusing anarchist fable (“The Unicorn Trap”) about an honest serf and his harpy wife arguing over the husband’s potential elevation to tax collector for Robert the Horrible. Their exchange:
“If a body gets stuck in the ruling classes through no fault of their own,” she said, “they got to rule or have folks just lose all respect for government.” She scratched herself daintily.
“To their sorrow,” said Elmer.
“Folks got to be protected,” said Ivy, “and armor and castles don’t come cheap.”
They still don’t, Ivy.
***********
Vonnegut once asked his son Mark, “Does anyone out of high school still read me?”
I hadn’t in many years. As a teenager I played the usual Slaughterhouse-Five to Breakfast of Champions to Player Piano/Cat’s Cradle combination, after which the enthusiasm fizzles. Happy Birthday, Wanda June? Slapstick? I cringe to recall. Vonnegut wrote some bad books, but he wrote some very good ones, too. In our age of an America perpetually at war, he is, perhaps, more necessary than ever.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq, writes Mark, “broke his heart not because he gave a damn about Iraq but because he loved America.” His crest fell; didn’t anyone else believe those civics lessons? “It wasn’t until the Iraq War and the end of his life that he became sincerely gloomy.”
The last piece of advice Kurt Vonnegut ever offered was this: “We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog, if you don’t already have one.”
You got a better idea?
A Gem of a State
The American Conservative, 2010
I am polybiblious—not, I hope, polybilious—in that I often read two books over the same period, alternating as the mood strikes. Seldom are they counterpoints or complements; they are merely the cheerfully incongruous products of happenstance. During a recent week of travel, I paired Vardis Fisher, Idaho’s gift to local color and regional history, with a whole lotta pages (When Giants Walked the Earth) on Led Zeppelin, a headachingly boring band I have never liked, not for a single godforsaken beat. (I did learn that Led Zeppelin’s most interesting, if sinister, member, Aleister Crowley disciple Jimmy Page, votes Tory.)
Yesterday I broke up Willa Cather with a 1952 hockey novel for boys (Scrubs on Skates) written by Scott Young. I’d long wanted to read one of Young’s YA novels. He is the father of Neil “There is a town in North Ontario” Young, provincial Canada’s gift to American music. Scott’s edifying tale is set in Winnipeg and references streets also mentioned in Randy Bachman’s melancholic anthem of Manitoba (and its betrayal by talented sons), “Prairie Town.”
You will note that the only obscure figure cited above is the one who stayed home: Vardis Fisher, who is known today, if at all, as the author of Mountain Man, source of one of Robert Redford’s best films, Jeremiah Johnson (1972), scripted by the anarchist surfer John Milius.
Vardis didn’t surf, but the apostate Mormon did play football (150-pound starting center for the University of Utah), tutor Wallace Stegner, novelize his place and his frontier forebears, and compile a WPA guide to Idaho in the publication series that is the New Deal’s best legacy. He also drove away most of his modest readership by producing a bizarre twelve-book history of mankind called the Testament of Man. That’s the thing about cranks: they can’t help themselves.
Like so many American writers, Vardis Fisher hated FDR, despised the regimenting state, and proclaimed “a distaste for American graves in foreign fields, no matter how thick the poppies might be.” (Project for a young Idahoan: track down and write up the political columns Fisher penned for the Idaho Daily Statesman, which sound like 180-proof Old Right.)
Fisher seems to have been almost a parody of the cantankerous libertarian/village atheist. He was “temperamental, obstinate, rude, ill-tempered, [and] tactless,” his biographer Tim Woodward concedes. But he was a true son of Idaho, crotchety and strange yet pertinaciously loyal, and can you blame him for resenting that part-time resident Ernest Hemingway was feted as the Gem State’s author?
Woodward quotes Fisher lamenting his neglect: “[I]f I had stayed in Manhattan and gone on teaching, and if I had learned to scratch some backs in New York and had cottoned up to some of those important people in the literary world—it would have been easy enough to do—and if I had slipped the word to them that I was saying good-bye to Idaho as Glenway Wescott said good-bye to Wisconsin, and had agreed that it was a desolate land out there not only in regard to rainfall but also in regard to culture and everything else, and that it was very good to get back to the complex of culture in New York—with all that, my sales record and my review record