For me there’s just one thing to say about Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Slaughterhouse-Five. It’s astonishing, it’s everything a novel could be. I keep it near my desk and can reread that opening chapter a zillion times and never get tired of it. I know WW2 literature. S-5 is the best. It’s better than Naked and the Dead and Catch-22 and For Esme With Love and Squalor. It’s up there with All Quiet on the Western Front, the best book from WWI, and shares a theme or two with the Remarque classic.
I’m not really a Vonnegut reader. Vonnegut was Op-Art or like Roy Lichtenstein, generally. He worked with cartoons and jokes and punning language. I can’t warm up to it. I’ll try again now he’s gone, but Mother Night sucks, everything is too playful and weird.
What happened with Slaughterhouse-Five is that material Vonnegut had been trying to deal with for 20 years without success, his Dresden, WW2 experiences, finally became available to him as an artist. You feel the pow of that moment, the explosion, reading that first chapter. Vietnam did it for him, and his war buddy’s wife in Pennsylvania did it for him, Mary O’Hare, when she scowls at Vonnegut and says, Don’t write a book that glorifies war. The book’s dedicated to Mary, because she got Vonnegut plugged into his material.
And I think his editor did it for him. It’s my theory that the first chapter, the informal, first-person piece of perfection that begins (ala Huck and Catcher in the Rye) "All this happened, more or less," originated as a letter to Vonnegut’s editor, the late Seymour "Sam" Lawrence. Vonnegut addresses Lawrence late in the chapter, and that’s the clue to me that Vonnegut had already composed the novel itself, about Billy Pilgrim getting unstuck in time, and his adventures with Montana Wildhack –Vonnegut’s usual hijinks–and then Lawrence asked him a simple question, and one night Vonnegut just stayed up tapping out a long letter to Lawrence. That chapter is just exalted writing. It’s personal and real and also fanciful, and it grounds the novel in the biggest hoariest griefstrickenest questions of the 20th century. It takes all the whacko bluecaped Billy Pilgrim stuff and roots it. Because after the first chapter, the first-person is mostly gone. The "I" of the book only comes in now and then after that.
I think Sam Lawrence said, "Kurt, can you tell me more about who this ‘I’ character is?" and Vonnegut complied, and that letter became the plinth for a work of genius. Safe travels, Kurt.
