Armageddon in retrospect And other new and unpublished writings on war and peace

Kurt Vonnegut

Book - 2008

Twelve previously unpublished writings on war and peace include such pieces as an essay on the destruction of Dresden, a story about the first-meal fantasies of three soldiers, and a meditation on the impossibility of shielding children from the temptations of violence.

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Subjects
Published
New York : G.P. Putnam 2008.
Language
English
Main Author
Kurt Vonnegut (-)
Item Description
"Introduction by Mark Vonnegut"--Cover.
Physical Description
232 p. : ill
ISBN
9780399155086
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

THE best thing in this posthumous collection of previously unpublished odds and ends by Kurt Vonnegut is a great piece of writing, the strongest thing by him that I have read. It relates an experience - his experience during the fire-bombing of Dresden - that after years of frustration he finally dealt with in a best-selling novel. Turns out he had already told the story, better, before he found his distinctive style. This book also brings up a persistent question about that style. As his son Mark puts it in an introduction: "I couldn't help wondering, 'How on earth does he get away with some of this crap?'" The son is referring specifically to elements of a speech his father wrote and was to deliver in Indianapolis on April 27, 2007. Vonnegut died earlier that month. The speech, Mark writes, was "to kick off the year of Kurt Vonnegut." From that we may construe that Kurt's hometown had planned a yearlong celebration of him to begin when he was roughly halfway through his 84th year. A frustrating thing about this biographically piquant book is its vagueness as to occasion. At any rate, the son delivered the speech in his father's stead. As one example, from the speech, of the sort of thing his father got away with, Mark cites this joking definition of a twerp: "a guy who put a set of false teeth up his rear end and bit the buttons off the back seats of taxicabs." "His audience," Mark concludes, "made it work. I quickly realized that I was reading his words to an auditorium and a world utterly in love with my father who would have followed him anywhere." Mark also "loved him dearly," he writes, convincingly but in the context of considerable exasperation. Early on in the text of the speech, the father observes that "I am actually Kurt Vonnegut, Junior. And that's what my kids, now in late middle age like me, still call me when talking about me behind my back: 'Junior this and Junior that.'" It may be a coincidence that Mark - after writing a well-received memoir of his own victory over schizophrenia - has gone on to become a pediatrician. And perhaps a more mordant jokester than his dad. "Kurt could pitch better than he could catch," Mark writes. "It was routine for him to write and say provocative, not always kind things about people in the family. We learned to get over it It was just Kurt But when I mentioned in an article that Kurt, wanting to be a famous pessimist, might have envied Twain and Lincoln their dead children, he went ballistic.'' Understandably, I would say. "'I was just trying to pull readers in,'" Mark says he told Kurt. "'No one but you is going to take it even a little seriously.' "'I know how jokes work.' "'So do I.' "Click and click, we hung up." Ah, fathers. Ah, sons. Ah, jokes. The speech, a blithely uneven mixture of kidding, portentousness and impenetrable observation (that in 1922, for instance, Indianapolis was "as racially segregated as professional basketball and football teams are today"), strikes me as sort of wonderful. Back and forth it swings, always catchy and always off-balance: Kurt denouncing semicolons, praising the "dignity and self-respect" of "African-American citizens," giving the back of his hand to Christian hypocrisy, speaking up for Karl Marx as one who "might have said today as I say tonight, 'Religion can be Tylenol for a lot of unhappy people, and I'm so glad it works.'" The speech is the most Vonnegutian thing in this book. It is better than the various antiwar short stories included, at least one of which, a fantasy, is quite good but most of which, though heartfelt, border on hackwork. But the speech is not even the next-best thing in the book. The next-best thing is presented as a copied document, or at least (has any actual typescript ever been so neat?) a facsimile. It is dated May 29, 1945. It is a letter headed "FROM: Pfc. K. Vonnegut, Jr., TO: Kurt Vonnegut." It begins: "Dear people." It closes: "Love, Kurt - Jr." It informs his family that he is in an American repatriation camp in Le Havre after having been held prisoner by the German Army. It tells "in précis" how he was captured, transported in a cattle car and "herded ... through scalding delousing showers. Many men died from shock in the showers after 10 days of starvation, thirst and exposure. But I didn't." And how he was a captive in Dresden when Allied bombers "killed 250,000 people in 24 hours and destroyed all of Dresden - possibly the world's most beautiful city. But not me." And how his captors put him to work carrying corpses. "Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried bodies to huge funeral pyres." And how, as the Allies pressed into Germany, "our guards deserted us. On that happy day the Russians ... strafed and bombed us, killing 14, but not me." And so on. Almost effectless, is this letter, but starkly effective. The very best thing in the book is "Wailing Shall Be in All Streets," a great laconic horror story. It is Vonnegut's straightforward account of his capture and mistreatment, his survival of the fire-bombing in an abattoir's underground meat locker, and most notably his enforced corpse-gathering. The details are too nearly unspeakable to be quoted out of context. At a time when this country's invasion of Iraq has produced, according to independent estimates, some hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, "Wailing Shall Be in All Streets" hit me harder than I can recall being hit by John Kersey's "Hiroshima" or Goya's series "The Disasters of War." We are not told when Vonnegut wrote this piece. Evidently, however, it is what he set down right after the war and couldn't find a way to publish. (Partly because the American people didn't want to know what happened to Dresden.) That is what we may surmise, at least, from interviews he gave over the years and especially from his long preamble to what is generally regarded as his masterpiece, "Slaughterhouse-Five," which in 1969 attempted to cover the same ground, and which I have just reread and found considerably less impressive than "Wailing Shall Be in All Streets." Whenever anyone or anything dies in "Slaughterhouse-Five," Vonnegut repeats a refrain that has become famous: "So it goes." In that trope (but not, I think, in the earlier "but not me") there is more manner than madness. The same has been said, justly, of Vonnegut's later fiction and essays. But let us now set "Wailing Shall Be in All Streets," and the young man's aforementioned letter home, and the son's introduction, and the old man's last speech next to the rest of Vonnegut's work. With all that we can begin to appreciate - in its grimness, crankiness and confusion, its conflicted flirting with an increasingly adoring audience, its lapses into juvenility - a terrific post-traumatic witnessing. Roy Blount Jr.'s most recent book is "Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review

The first piece in this collection, a seeming facsimile of the letter Vonnegut wrote to inform his family that he had not, in fact, died in combat, sets the tone for the rest indeed, for everything he wrote afterward. In terse, reportorial prose, he describes his internment as a POW, the firebombing of Dresden, and his labors among the dead. In the subsequent speeches, essay, and stories, we see one of the twentieth-century's better minds wrestling with the horrors of the age, drafting and redrafting, sometimes losing that famous sense of humor itself surely a defense against too much feeling. The work here is uneven: Happy Birthday, 1951 is a simple, affecting story of boys' attraction to violence, while Great Day, a time-traveling farce, feels like an outtake. Several others capture the pathetic absurdity of war and its aftermath in the author's trademark tone. Not the best introduction to Vonnegut, but certainly fascinating for his countless fans. Unfortunately, review galleys don't include any provenance for the pieces, an omission that will hopefully be corrected for final publication.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2008 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

When Kurt Vonnegut died in April 2007, the world lost a wry commentator on the human condition. Thanks to this collection of unpublished fiction and nonfiction, Vonnegut's voice returns full force. Introduced by his son, these writings dwell on war and peace, especially the firebombing of Dresden, Germany. The volume opens with a poignant 1945 letter from Pfc. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. to his father in Indianapolis, presenting a vivid portrait of his harrowing escape from that city. The fiction, full of his characteristic humor, includes stories about time travel and the impossibility of peace in the world ("Great Day") and, in the title piece, a kind of mock Paradise Lost, Dr. Lucifer Mephisto teaches his charges about the insidious nature of evil and the impossibility of good ever triumphing. In his final speech, Vonnegut lets go some of his zingers (jazz is "safe sex of the highest order") and does what he always did best, tell the truth through jokes: "And how should we behave during the Apocalypse? 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." So it goes. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Acknowledging the first anniversary of Vonnegut's death with 12 unpublished works. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.