And So It Goes

Thomas Meaney reviews a couple of Vonnegut books, and a two volume release of his works (h/t Ritholtz):

In the spring of 1945, three weeks after VE Day, Private First Class Kurt Vonnegut, Jr wrote a letter home to inform his family that he was alive. His infantry unit had been smashed by Panzer divisions in the Ardennes; his unmarked POW train attacked by the RAF; miraculously, he and a handful of fellow prisoners escaped incineration by American and British bombers. “Their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden – possibly the world’s most beautiful city”, Vonnegut wrote. “But not me.” Already we are privy to the early stirrings of Vonnegut’s prose – the cool sarcasm (“combined labors”), the ostentatious airing of factoids, and the signature smirk of the absurd (“But not me”). How that last phrase, which recurs throughout the letter, got reprised as the faux-stoic refrain of Slaughterhouse-Five (“So it goes”) is the story of Vonnegut’s style. As Charles Shields tells us in his wonderfully shaggy biography, the demands of Slaughterhouse-Five consumed Vonnegut for twenty-five years, and nearly broke him. With justice, it was the book that made him into more than a cult figure.
For Vonnegut has a strangely central place in American fiction despite his occasional insistence on his own marginality. He owes his position to two extraordinary, and related, achievements. First, as a novelist forged by the war, he adopted an ironic approach to his great subject that was a strong counterpoint to the mawkishness of the Vietnam novels that appeared in the wake of Slaughterhouse-Five. Second, Vonnegut continues to be a writer embraced by teenagers; his novels somehow perform successful reconnaissance missions behind the lines of each new generation. Far from symptomatic, this teen appeal gets at the very essence of Vonnegut: the way his gallows humour and sentimentality depend on each other. His heartfelt adages (“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be”) and earnest declarations (“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind”) come encased in a hard, sardonic shell. Consume enough of it and you can simulate hard-boiledness that you haven’t earned but Vonnegut certainly did. A story that never failed to draw a wheeze of laughter from the author in later years was of breaking the news of Pearl Harbor to his college fraternity brother in the shower, who promptly slipped and died.

Vonnegut is fascinating to read, but the challenge he leaves us with is to find the humor and joy in a life in which he points us to the saddest, most cruel aspects of our time here.  I get the feeling he looked at life and said, "Aw fuck it, I shouldn't find this humorous, but I'm bound for madness if I don't."  But yet, he still managed to see beauty in life.  It seems to have been wrapped up in our species brave ability to overlook all of the terrible things we can do to one another and find love for others.  His work was a gift to us.