Book Review: A last word from Kurt Vonnegut

Somehow, Kurt Vonnegut won’t let me go. Lately I’ve returned to the idea that Vonnegut’s works should be required reading for every high school and college student in America.

Surely that reading would bring the generations that loved his works and learned from his wacky sardonic humor and their grandchildren closer together.

This younger generation darn sure needs something to learn to laugh at their human foibles rather than so hedonistically admiring their own belly buttons.

That ability to laugh at ourselves came as Vonnegut’s fine gift to us in the 1960s and 1970s, and in return, we loved such works as “Cat’s Cradle,” “Slaughterhouse Five,” “Welcome to the Monkey House” and “Breakfast of Champions.”

Vonnegut died just over a year ago, and I reviewed “A Man without a Country,” which everyone considered his last published work.

However, a new collection of short stories and essays called “Armageddon in Retrospect,” edited by his son Mark, appeared on the anniversary of his death.

Included is the speech he planned to deliver at Cowles Hall in Indianapolis in late April, but which his son delivered for him.

Using his skip ahead, time-tripping and meandering style, Vonnegut posthumously entertained, shocked, satirized, and railed with new lines and comic oft-quoted barbs strung together in a kind of stream of consciousness technique.

For example, “If Jesus were alive today, we would kill him with lethal injection. I call that progress. We would have to kill him for the same reason he was killed the first time.His ideas are just too liberal.” His advice to writers just starting out? “Don’t use semicolons! They are transvestite herma-phrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.”

The first story in the collection, “Wailing Shall Be in All Streets,” retells Vonnegut’s anguish about the bombing of Dresden during the time he served as a prisoner of war in that city, including being forced to remove civilian bodies from the rubble.

Of course, that action became the material for his powerful “Slaughterhouse Five.”

“Giants stalked the Earth above us,” he wrote about the hours huddled below ground in the Slaughterhouse prison as wave after wave of bombers firebombed the once-glorious city.

“First came the soft murmur of their dancing on the outskirts, then the grumbling of their plodding toward us, and finally the ear-splitting crashes of their heels upon us — and thence to the outskirts again. Back and forth they swept: saturation bombing.”

Though none of the pieces ever appeared in print before, every work deserved previous publication.

Each reminds us of this powerful writer’s humane personality formed, literally and in reality, in fire.

Rather than turn hard like steel, he moved toward a more humane attitude that questions why great works of art — such as the entire city of Dresden — needed destruction to prove the revengeful nature of victorious armies.

The core story from which the title comes, “Armageddon in Retrospect,” satirizes how academia has crawled into the same coffin to sleep with the war profiteers in the name of science.

Making light of government grants and scientific studies undertaken by universities for the military complex, Vonnegut sets up a situation where study after study, even one funded by the United Nations, tries to understand the Devil.

The intent is not to know the nature of good and evil but to find a way to bargain with the Devil, perhaps to pull him to “our” side as a willing ally.

Unfortunately, the Chairman of the Board of these studies goes by the name of Dr. Lucifer J. Mephisto. Comic genius!

Taken as a whole, Vonnegut’s epilogue work elucidates our human strife while telling his trademark tales of war and the anxiety of human suffering.

For any Vonnegut fan — and that includes almost everyone of a certain age — “Armageddon in Retrospect” offers an essential final read.

For those who have never read Vonnegut, this last work provides a good beginning to knowing, enjoying and appreciating one of the greatest of all modern contemporary American authors.

A.L. Shaff is a free-lance writer.

Details

“Armageddon in Retrospect ”

by Kurt Vonnegut

G.P. Putnam’s Sons

233 pages

$24.95 retail