Slaughterhouse-Five review – archive, 1970

Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut (Cape, 30s)

A bullet makes a small to entry and a messy exit. Enormities in the mind do the same. “Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like ‘Poo-tee-wee.’” So how is the mind to cope with an experience like Dresden where it is known, if not comprehended, that 130,000 civilians were incinerated overnight and the huddled survivors shot up next morning? The oddest and most directly and obliquely heart-searching war book for years proves how art, in its own good time, can find a way. Here is war as a ridiculous ogre trapped by its own braces on the pillars of the firmament. Here are the dead of Dresden. Catch-22 was a splendid, savage but abstract joke compared with the irony and compassion of Mr Vonnegut’s.

To quote the fly-leaf: “Slaughterhouse Five or The Children’s Crusade. A Duty-Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut jun., a fourth-generation German-American now living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod (and smoking too much) who as an American infantry scout, hors de combat, as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, ‘the Florence of the Elbe,’ a long time ago and survived to tell the tale. This is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from. Peace.”

It is a stark and comic rendering of scarecrow men-children as lost in war as the babes of the Children’s Crusade who were fodder for African slave-markets when they thought they were bound for the Holy Sepulchre. It is the story of mind crying Stop! to Time before the corpses fill the corpse mines, and of gangling Billy Pilgrim, later successful optometrist of Ilium, Ill., former Chaplain’s assistant taken prisoner before there was time to fit him out with boots; who survived Dresden in an underground abattoir and had, somehow to live with it.

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He becomes a time-traveller, is taken by the little green men to their planet, taught not to fuss so when there is no beginning or end, no moral, no cause or effects; just bugs in the amber of eternal Now. The time warp throws up jumbled memories, precognitions, visions. With the new eyes he sees Dresden in reverse, the fires dying out, buildings reconstructed, bombs sucked back into bomb-bays, shipped home “where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly it was mostly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anyone ever again.”

In the rubble of liberated Dresden a released American is shot by Americans, for purloining a teapot. Billy’s hippy son straightens out, becomes a Green Beret. Truman applauds the A-bomb; a pre-war guide points out Dresden’s charms – sequence and order are immaterial to the time-traveller who is now naked in a cage on Tralfamadore with a movie queen, now excavating the bodies until it is decided to seal them in. The frontispiece carries a verse from “Away in a manger” and nothing in this devastating and supremely human book makes it seem out of place.