THE BEST THING OF ALL IN THIS posthumous collection of previously unpublished odds and ends by Kurt Vonnegut is a great piece of writing, the strongest thing by him that I have read.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 o
f Dresden – that after years of frustration he finally dealt with in a best-selling novel. It 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?'"
Mark writes: "Kurt could pitch better than he could catch. 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.
A speech written by Kurt, but actually delivered a few days after his death last year by Mark, is the most Vonnegutian thing in this book. It is better than the various anti-war 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 facsimile. 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 precis how he was captured, transported in a cattle car and "herded ... through scalding delousing showers. Many men died from shock in the showers after ten days of starvation, thirst and exposure. But I didn't." And it tells 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. The letter is near affectless 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 the invasion of Iraq has produced hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, "Wailing Shall Be in All Streets" should be essential reading for all Vonnegut's countrymen.
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 Americans 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.
The full article contains 771 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
