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Summary
Summary
View our feature on Kurt Vonnegut's Armageddon in Retrospect .
Published on the first anniversary of Kurt Vonnegut's death in April 2007, Armageddon in Retrospect is a collection of twelve new and unpublished writings on war and peace. Written with Vonnegut's trademark rueful humor, the pieces range from a visceral nonfiction recollection of the destruction of Dresden during World War II-a piece that is as timely today as it was then-to a painfully funny story about three privates and their fantasies of the perfect first meal upon returning home from war; to a darker and more poignant story about the impossibility of shielding our children from the temptations of violence. This is a volume that says as much about the times in which we live as it does about the genius of the man who wrote it. Also included here is Vonnegut's last speech, as well as an assortment of his drawings, and an introduction by the author's son, Mark Vonnegut.
Author Notes
The appeal of Kurt Vonnegut, especially to bright younger readers of the past few decades, may be attributed partly to the fact that he is one of the few writers who have successfully straddled the imaginary line between science-fiction/fantasy and "real literature." He was born in Indianapolis and attended Cornell University, but his college education was interrupted by World War II. Captured during the Battle of the Bulge and imprisoned in Dresden, he received a Purple Heart for what he calls a "ludicrously negligible wound." After the war he returned to Cornell and then earned his M.A. at the University of Chicago.He worked as a police reporter and in public relations before placing several short stories in the popular magazines and beginning his career as a novelist.
His first novel, Player Piano (1952), is a highly credible account of a future mechanistic society in which people count for little and machines for much. The Sirens of Titan (1959), is the story of a playboy whisked off to Mars and outer space in order to learn some humbling lessons about Earth's modest function in the total scheme of things. Mother Night (1962) satirizes the Nazi mentality in its narrative about an American writer who broadcasts propaganda in Germany during the war as an Allied agent. Cat's Cradle (1963) makes use of some of Vonnegut's experiences in General Electric laboratories in its story about the discovery of a special kind of ice that destroys the world. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) satirizes a benevolent foundation set up to foster the salvation of the world through love, an endeavor with, of course, disastrous results. Slaughterhouse-Five; or The Children's Crusade (1969) is the book that marked a turning point in Vonnegut's career. Based on his experiences in Dresden, it is the story of another Vonnegut surrogate named Billy Pilgrim who travels back and forth in time and becomes a kind of modern-day Everyman. The novel was something of a cult book during the Vietnam era for its antiwar sentiments. Breakfast of Champions (1973), the story of a Pontiac dealer who goes crazy after reading a science fiction novel by "Kilgore Trout," received generally unfavorable reviews but was a commercial success. Slapstick (1976), dedicated to the memory of Laurel and Hardy, is the somewhat wacky memoir of a 100-year-old ex-president who thinks he can solve society's problems by giving everyone a new middle name. In addition to his fiction, Vonnegut has published nonfiction on social problems and other topics, some of which is collected in Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (1974).
He died from head injuries sustained in a fall on April 11, 2007.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
When Kurt Vonnegut died in April 2007, the world lost a wry commentator on the human condition. Thanks to this collection of unpublished fiction and nonfiction, Vonnegut's voice returns full force. Introduced by his son, these writings dwell on war and peace, especially the firebombing of Dresden, Germany. The volume opens with a poignant 1945 letter from Pfc. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. to his father in Indianapolis, presenting a vivid portrait of his harrowing escape from that city. The fiction, full of his characteristic humor, includes stories about time travel and the impossibility of peace in the world ("Great Day") and, in the title piece, a kind of mock Paradise Lost, Dr. Lucifer Mephisto teaches his charges about the insidious nature of evil and the impossibility of good ever triumphing. In his final speech, Vonnegut lets go some of his zingers (jazz is "safe sex of the highest order") and does what he always did best, tell the truth through jokes: "And how should we behave during the Apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog, if you don't already have one." So it goes. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
The first piece in this collection, a seeming facsimile of the letter Vonnegut wrote to inform his family that he had not, in fact, died in combat, sets the tone for the rest indeed, for everything he wrote afterward. In terse, reportorial prose, he describes his internment as a POW, the firebombing of Dresden, and his labors among the dead. In the subsequent speeches, essay, and stories, we see one of the twentieth-century's better minds wrestling with the horrors of the age, drafting and redrafting, sometimes losing that famous sense of humor itself surely a defense against too much feeling. The work here is uneven: Happy Birthday, 1951 is a simple, affecting story of boys' attraction to violence, while Great Day, a time-traveling farce, feels like an outtake. Several others capture the pathetic absurdity of war and its aftermath in the author's trademark tone. Not the best introduction to Vonnegut, but certainly fascinating for his countless fans. Unfortunately, review galleys don't include any provenance for the pieces, an omission that will hopefully be corrected for final publication.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE best thing 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 of Dresden - that after years of frustration he finally dealt with in a best-selling novel. 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?'" The son is referring specifically to elements of a speech his father wrote and was to deliver in Indianapolis on April 27, 2007. Vonnegut died earlier that month. The speech, Mark writes, was "to kick off the year of Kurt Vonnegut." From that we may construe that Kurt's hometown had planned a yearlong celebration of him to begin when he was roughly halfway through his 84th year. A frustrating thing about this biographically piquant book is its vagueness as to occasion. At any rate, the son delivered the speech in his father's stead. As one example, from the speech, of the sort of thing his father got away with, Mark cites this joking definition of a twerp: "a guy who put a set of false teeth up his rear end and bit the buttons off the back seats of taxicabs." "His audience," Mark concludes, "made it work. I quickly realized that I was reading his words to an auditorium and a world utterly in love with my father who would have followed him anywhere." Mark also "loved him dearly," he writes, convincingly but in the context of considerable exasperation. Early on in the text of the speech, the father observes that "I am actually Kurt Vonnegut, Junior. And that's what my kids, now in late middle age like me, still call me when talking about me behind my back: 'Junior this and Junior that.'" It may be a coincidence that Mark - after writing a well-received memoir of his own victory over schizophrenia - has gone on to become a pediatrician. And perhaps a more mordant jokester than his dad. "Kurt could pitch better than he could catch," Mark writes. "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. "'I was just trying to pull readers in,'" Mark says he told Kurt. "'No one but you is going to take it even a little seriously.' "'I know how jokes work.' "'So do I.' "Click and click, we hung up." Ah, fathers. Ah, sons. Ah, jokes. The speech, a blithely uneven mixture of kidding, portentousness and impenetrable observation (that in 1922, for instance, Indianapolis was "as racially segregated as professional basketball and football teams are today"), strikes me as sort of wonderful. Back and forth it swings, always catchy and always off-balance: Kurt denouncing semicolons, praising the "dignity and self-respect" of "African-American citizens," giving the back of his hand to Christian hypocrisy, speaking up for Karl Marx as one who "might have said today as I say tonight, 'Religion can be Tylenol for a lot of unhappy people, and I'm so glad it works.'" The speech is the most Vonnegutian thing in this book. It is better than the various antiwar 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 copied document, or at least (has any actual typescript ever been so neat?) a facsimile. It is 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 précis" how he was captured, transported in a cattle car and "herded ... through scalding delousing showers. Many men died from shock in the showers after 10 days of starvation, thirst and exposure. But I didn't." And 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. Almost effectless, is this letter, 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 this country's invasion of Iraq has produced, according to independent estimates, some hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, "Wailing Shall Be in All Streets" hit me harder than I can recall being hit by John Kersey's "Hiroshima" or Goya's series "The Disasters of War." 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 the American people 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. Roy Blount Jr.'s most recent book is "Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South."
Guardian Review
"So it goes" was a universal catchphrase of the 1960s counter-culture in America, constantly quoted by hippies, causeless rebels and flower persons. I dare say it was the last literary phrase to enter the demotic language. It came from an iconic novel of the time, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five , and in sad irony it remains a tacit leitmotif of this posthumous book, a mixed collection of Vonnegut's late writings. Sad, because such anthologies from the grave are, by the nature of things, seldom merry, and often unworthy of the writer. Ironic because, although Armageddon in Retrospect comes nearly 40 years after Slaughterhouse-Five , the famous phrase seems to have expressed to the end Vonnegut's view of the world - so it goes, so it goes, so it goes . . . He died of brain damage in 2007, after a fall on the front steps of his New York home, and his life was punctuated by calamity. His mother killed herself on Mother's Day, 1944. His only son endured a period of insanity. Within two days in 1958 his sister died of cancer and her husband died in a car accident, leaving three little boys for Vonnegut to adopt. His personal archives were destroyed by fire in 2001. He was often savaged by reviewers, and he tried to commit suicide in 1984. But the seminal tragedy of his life was the Dresden fire-bombing of 1945. Vonnegut experienced this as a prisoner of war in the city, and was later put to work by his German captors exhuming corpses from the wreckage. Twenty-five years later it became the theme of Slaughterhouse-Five , which was to make him rich and celebrated and, in its visionary mixture of reportage, allegory, protest, science fiction, tragedy and magic realism, was to mould his attitudes for ever after. The best thing in Armageddon in Retrospect , for my money, is its introduction by Mark Vonnegut, happily recovered from his psychotic breakdown and now a successful paediatrician, and an author too. He tells us that writing was the only thing Kurt Vonnegut really believed in, his literary models including Lincoln, Melville and Twain - Lincoln for wise decency, I surmise, Melville for imaginative style, Twain for humour. Humour was essential to his craft. I don't often find him funny, but his wry quips do speak to us directly from the temper of his American times - those disturbing years which, after the second world war, had taken his country through the miseries of Vietnam to the disillusionments of Iraq. I can well see that, for a man whose only faith was in literature, laughter was an antidote to reality. "So it goes" was his shrugging mantra of escape. But Mark Vonnegut assures us that, despite appearances and popular legend, his father was never depressed. "He didn't want to be happy . . . He was like an extrovert who wants to be an introvert, a very social guy who wanted to be a loner, a lucky person who would have preferred to be unlucky." His unhappiest moments, it seems, were his periodic episodes of writer's block - itself an almost symbolical ailment of his times and his nation. The last words of his last speech, reprinted here, were: "And I thank you all for your attention, and now I'm out of here." One cannot escape the feeling, all the same, that Vonnegut's final emotion was despair. It wasn't, I suspect, so much that he hated the world, more that the world had let him down, and this farewell volume has left me with sympathy, affection, admiration and gratitude, but without much hope. All the things he despaired of - technology in general, computers in particular - seem to have let us down, too. The book's 12 pieces are interspersed with enigmatic drawings and epigraphs by Vonnegut himself, and include his first letter home after the second world war, a surprisingly deadpan narrative of miseries. The rest are mostly short stories, concerned in one way or another with wars, now and then tinged with the particular Vonnegutian vein of fantasy. They are skilled and wonderfully readable. As Mark Vonnegut observes, "even if the content of any given piece isn't interesting to you, look at the structure and rhythm and choice of words". But don't look for hope. Vonnegut is closest to light-hearted when he indulges his own fascination with time and space. It was, above all, the mystic muddling of time that made Slaughterhouse-Five so much more than just another war book, and took it into the realms of literature. Time-shift occurs less often in Armageddon in Retrospect , and so Vonnegut's gift of nuanced ambiguity is less apparent too. Closing this book with a touch of disappointment, I went back to Slaughterhouse-Five and found a passage that is my own epitome of the Vonnegut genius. The day after the destruction of Dresden, largely by US bombers, the American prisoners are taken to the edge of town and bedded down in the stables of an inn, kept by a blind inn-keeper. All is peaceful out there, but just behind them the smoking remains of Germany's most beautiful city lie silent, empty and dead. When the sightless innkeeper leaves the prisoners of war to their sleep, he listens for a moment to the rustle of their straw bedding and then says: "Goodnight, Americans. Sleep well." Was he being kind or sarcastic? Did he stand for hope or despair? Was his blindness symbolical? Is he then or now? Only Kurt knows, and he's out of here. Jan Morris's A Venetian Bestiary is published by Faber. To order Armageddon in Retrospect for pounds 15.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-vonnegut.1 "So it goes" was a universal catchphrase of the 1960s counter-culture in America, constantly quoted by hippies, causeless rebels and flower persons. I dare say it was the last literary phrase to enter the demotic language. It came from an iconic novel of the time, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five , and in sad irony it remains a tacit leitmotif of this posthumous book, a mixed collection of Vonnegut's late writings. [Mark Vonnegut] assures us that, despite appearances and popular legend, his father was never depressed. "He didn't want to be happy . . . He was like an extrovert who wants to be an introvert, a very social guy who wanted to be a loner, a lucky person who would have preferred to be unlucky." His unhappiest moments, it seems, were his periodic episodes of writer's block - itself an almost symbolical ailment of his times and his nation. The last words of his last speech, reprinted here, were: "And I thank you all for your attention, and now I'm out of here." They are skilled and wonderfully readable. As Mark Vonnegut observes, "even if the content of any given piece isn't interesting to you, look at the structure and rhythm and choice of words". But don't look for hope. Vonnegut is closest to light-hearted when he indulges his own fascination with time and space. It was, above all, the mystic muddling of time that made Slaughterhouse-Five so much more than just another war book, and took it into the realms of literature. Time-shift occurs less often in Armageddon in Retrospect , and so Vonnegut's gift of nuanced ambiguity is less apparent too. - Jan Morris.
Library Journal Review
Acknowledging the first anniversary of Vonnegut's death with 12 unpublished works. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
