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Kurt Vonnegut, Reconsidered
By Kyle | March 16, 2009
The publication of Loree Rackstraw’s new memoir about her onetime lover and longtime friend Kurt Vonnegut gives me an excuse to rethink Vonnegut — my favorite writer in high school, and the favorite of many an adolescent. The piece is up on wsj.com.
A reader questions my reference to Auschwitz. This New York Times article stated the following:
If thousands of innocent men, women and children perished in the fires of Dresden, the bombing of the city, as Taylor emphasizes, also saved innocent lives, and not merely by shortening the war. Here we come to one of the most spellbinding twists of the story. Just days before the raid, the minuscule remainder of Dresden’s Jews — spared by virtue of their marriages to ”Aryans” — received their final deportation notice. On Feb. 16, they were to be shipped to Auschwitz. Among those Jews saved by Allied firebombs was the diarist of wartime Germany, Victor Klemperer, who survived along with his manuscript.
UPDATE: Auschwitz was liberated before the Dresden bombing. On page 6 of Frederick Taylor’s book, “Dresden, February 13, 1945,” Taylor mentions the diary of Victor Klemperer, who wrote in his entry for February 13 that he was tasked with telling fellow Jews in the area that they will “be deported to an undisclosed ‘labor task’ on February 16. Every one of them knows what this means.”
So there is no specific reference to Auschwitz, but rather a general reference to deportation to a death camp. I therefore stand by my point, which is that Vonnegut is incorrect to view the Dresden bombing as being an example of the absurdity of war. The Dresden bombing did indeed have a valid point and was not a case of wanton destruction.
(See here for the reference to the original book.)
Topics: Books, History, Politics |
March 16th, 2009 at 11:19 am
It seems to me after reading that piece that your problem with Vonnegut is that he remained a lifelong democrat while you, scared by a horse (or whatever it was) in your thirties, turned away from the light and goodness of Democracy and became swallowed up by the darkness and evil of Republicanism. This ongoing trashing of your youthful heroes due to their liberalism is so predictable as to be cliche; it tacky, and it threatens to become tiresome.
March 16th, 2009 at 11:24 am
Thank you. Vonnegut was a brilliant writer up until his last book which was nothing but a compilation of mindless, obnoxious ranting. But that didn’t diminish the adulation from his followers, just check the comments at Amazon. Finally someone pricks the bubble of this tiresome, blathering fool.
March 16th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
I was a devoted Vonnegut fan from about 15-25. As I got older I became disenchanted with him as great artist because I came to realize that for all of his outward sentimentality, Vonnegut has a misanthropic streak that mocks the very notion of life as a gift. KV’s view is that man is to be pitied most of all, and that leaves precious little room for any appreciation of human dignity or awe. His childlike tone serves mostly to mock any pretense towards larger meaning, and thus KV’s novels, like much modern art, serves mostly to belittle its rather than to elevate or inspire. Indeed, when one sees man as nothing more than chemicals manifested as various appetites, the world does seem like a cruel joke. As I’ve gotten older this is simply not a worldview that makes sense to me.
March 16th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Life Imitates Art?
Although Smith’s recent review of Love As Always, Kurt, paints a picture of Kurt Vonnegut as ever-the-aging curmudgeon, I am sure that many of my ilk who took solace in his books during high school in the 70s, prefer to instead remember the self-effacing Vonnegut whom Rodney Dangerfield hires to help him write a term paper on the author’s own work, in the 1986 film, “Back To School”. Predictably, Dangerfield gets a lousy grade from his professor, proving that both Rodney and his tutor can’t get no respect!
March 16th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Kyle Smith is at best misleading, at worst just plain wrong, in paragraph eight of his column critiquing Loree Rackstraw’s memior regarding Kurt Vonnegut (16 March 2009). Smith challenges Vonnegut’s notion that Dresden, on the night it was bombed (13 February 1945), had little military value by noting that the city was, among other things, a way station for Jews en route to the concentration camp Auschwitz. According to Smith, the “bombing saved their lives”. But if it saved their lives, it certainly did not save them from Auschwitz. Auschwitz was liberated FOUR WEEKS BEFORE the bombing of Dresden. It was, moreover, the Soviet communists who liberated Auschwitz. The great old city of Dresden was bombed to ruins by the champions of the “Free World” (America and Britain). As an addition to this particular historical point, let me stress that Vonnegut’s perspective on human life was not entirely without validity nor was it quite as shallow as some here have suggested.
March 16th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Mr. Drwiega, thank you for your note. I have provided more information in the body of the posting above.
March 16th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
I see no reason to apologize for the bombing of Dresden. The Allies were simply repaying the Germans in kind. Was London of great military value? Were the columns of Polish refugees dive-bombed by Stukas of military value? The Nazis reaped what they sowed.
March 16th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
Kishke, surely the reply to savagery is not more savagery? Intentionally killing civilians as a reply to terror bombings is not my cup of tea.
As the great man put it:
In victory, magnanimity.
March 16th, 2009 at 7:48 pm
The war was still ongoing when Dresden was bombed. Victory had not yet been achieved. And sometimes the only way to end savagery is by exceeding it. Isn’t that what war is?
March 16th, 2009 at 9:13 pm
Not at all. The object of war is to destroy the enemy’s capacity to make war, not to humiliate him or terrorize him or rape his women.
March 16th, 2009 at 10:16 pm
The object of war is also to weaken the enemy’s will to fight. Which was the point of bombing such places as Dresden. And the point of dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, come to think of it.
To be honest, though, from my point of view, after what the Germans did, nothing done to them could be bad enough.
March 16th, 2009 at 11:21 pm
Mr. Smith’s review of the Vonnegut biography, focusing on his politics, seems to lose sight of the role of the artist. His disagreements with Mr. Vonnegut’s merits would be appropriate if Vonnegut were a nonfiction writer who wrote about and claimed credentials on world politics. Indeed, Mr. Smith seems to cross his lines when he quotes a professional historian, Frederick Taylor, to demonstrate the failings of Mr. Vonnegut’s quirky take on the bombing of Dresden
Picasso’s Guernica is both a cubist painting as well as a comment on politics. Picasso was revered as an artist, in particular his use of cubism to paint reality. He was not admired as a political commentator and claimed no credentials as such. Imagine a book reviewer dwelling on Picasso’s political views in equal measure with his cubist achievements.
I was a college student in the ’60s and disagreed with Vonnegut’s political attitudes but read all his books out of a sense of enjoyment of his humor, literary skills, and exposing me to alternative ways of viewing life’s events. Due to wealth and access to the media, many of today’s artists actively use this access to promote political causes. However, when it comes to their work as artists, we ought not to let these nonartistic activities get in the way of our appreciating the reason why they became famous, their artistic achievements. Similarly we should take the value of their political views as equal to all their training and experience in politics.
March 17th, 2009 at 10:19 am
Tazio, great screen name!
Check this out -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmCJvDUWXaY
I love the bit where the narrator says, “The British drivers drove with great courage but were pathetically inadequate.”
Tazio the man! (Well, maybe behind Clark and Fangio.)
March 17th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
If artists exploit their art to promote their political views, they are themselves erasing the divide between the two, in which case their audience is entitled to do the same.
March 17th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Mr. Smith:
I found your review of the new memoir about Kurt Vonnegut to be very insightful of that writer’s limitations. I too was one of those readers enthralled by Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” in my youth. However I recently re-read the book just to see if its “magic” would still captivate me after these many years. It did not, especially when I read a passage of the book in which Mr. Vonnegut cited a volume titled “The Destruction of Dresden”, written by “an Englishman named David Irving” as the authoritative source on the bombing of that German city by the Allies. This is the same David Irving who has been widely discredited as being a Holocaust denier. According to evidence introduced at Mr. Irving’s disastrously unsuccessful libel trial against historian Deborah Lipstadt in 2000, Irving based his estimates of the dead in Dresden on specious evidence with no supporting documentation or forged documents, and discredited witnesses. To quote Mr. Vonnegut, “So it goes.”