Culture » December 23, 2009 » Web Only

Slaughterhouse-Five at Forty (cont’d)

An unfashionable patriot

Vonnegut later described Dresden as having possessed the strategic importance of a wedding cake. Life there was spartan, for civilians and prisoners alike, but not so disagreeable. The Americans were put to work every day in a plant making vitamin-enriched malt syrup for pregnant women, slipping each other clandestine samples under the eyes of the old men and teenagers who guarded them. At night they repaired to their improvised billet, Schlachthof-funf, building number 5 of a sprawling slaughterhouse complex.

One night, Howard W. Campbell, the notorious propagandist from Mother Night, shows up in the bunker, spewing viciously racist interpretations of the war and seeking recruits to fight for Hitler on the Eastern Front. Hungry and emaciated as they were, none of the men stepped forward to volunteer, even with the enticement of all the steak, mashed potatoes and mince pie they could eat.

Outraged by Campbell’s display, “Poor old Edgar Derby lumbered to his feet,” Vonnegut writes, “for what was probably the finest moment of his life”:

His stance was that of a punch-drunk fighter. His head was down. His fists were out front, waiting for information and battle plan. Derby raised his head, called Campbell a snake [and] spoke movingly about the American form of government, with freedom and justice and opportunities and fair play for all.

These young men, he declared with steely eyes to his smiling, reptilian adversary, were united in their willingness to die for those ideals, and they would prevail in the end, thanks to “the brotherhood of the American and Russian peoples, as they worked together to crush the disease of Nazism.” Derby believed, in good faith, the declared purposes of the war, and he was ready to risk all to stand up for them.

Kurt Vonnegut was not mocking Edgar Derby. He was using him to voice the idealism he had learned as a boy, the civic religion of Midwesterners Lincoln and Twain, the New Deal optimism he had drunk deeply and never stopped defending. It is true that Vonnegut was a man of the left, broadly speaking. He loved the socialism of his German-American forebears, and the labor militancy of fellow Hoosier Eugene Debs. He saw firsthand the effects of the “survival of the fittest” capitalism that had wrecked so many lives during the stock crash and its aftermath–an experience he always called, even more than the war, the defining historical episode of his life.

Vonnegut was freethinking and pacifist by inclination, inspired by the “Merchants of Death” anti-militarism of the 1930s and opposed to knee-jerk nationalism. Vonnegut condemned, early and publicly, the tragic folly of the Vietnam War and the shredding of the Constitution that accompanied it. He was an instinctive communitarian in politics, and approved of many aspects of the youth revolt of the 60s–civil rights, women’s equality, environmentalism and challenges to illegitimate authority.

But through it all he remained a “patriot,” of the kind that was quite unfashionable when Slaughterhouse appeared. Vonnegut disliked the anti-intellectual proclivities of the later New Left, the violence of its rhetoric, even as his books were deployed on the insurgent side in the political wars of the day. In a 1973 interview with Playboy, he disagreed with the idea that he was a “radical.”

“Everything I believe,” he said, “I was taught (during the Great Depression…) at School 43 in Indianapolis, with the full approval of the school board…I simply never unlearned junior civics. I still believe in it. I got a very good grade.” In short, Edgar Derby is an expression of Kurt Vonnegut as what Michael Walzer once called a “connected critic,” a lover of his county and culture even as he anguishes about its shortcomings and failed promise. He was a brokenhearted American dreamer, not a bull-in-a-china-shop revolutionist.

Beyond Vietnam

There is much more to be said about Slaughterhouse on its fortieth anniversary–about the firebombing and its aftermath, Edgar Derby’s absurd death, and Billy Pilgrim’s travels in time and space, which are an escape from the oppressive demands of post-war domesticity and breadwinner masculinity.

But Slaughterhouse needs to be seen in a larger context, as an attempt (which Vonnegut declared, at the start, a “failure”) to come to terms with the ravages of war–the one he survived, and all wars. It is a commentary on Vietnam–”[e]very day,” Vonnegut laments in the final chapter, “my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science”–but it is more universal than that, and more sad than angry in its tone.

Vonnegut remained proud, if troubled, by his service in World War II, and declared it a “good war,” despite the many crimes committed by the winning side. Speaking of his ingrained sense of duty, Vonnegut once said that if he had been younger he probably would have enlisted for service in Vietnam, as wrongheaded as he thought that war to be.

Slaughterhouse needs to be “unstuck” from our conception of it as simply an artifact of the Vietnam era, and instead read for its expression of humanist values by a self-described “child of the Great Depression.” Call it the ethics of “poor old Edgar Derby,” the 1960s’ most unlikely hero, a living symbol of moderation, decency and idealism.