Kurt Vonnegut: Death of a Literary Icon

By Gaetana Caldwell-Smith / May 2007 issue of Socialist Action newspaper

Noted author, iconoclast, and champion of Vietnam War dissenters, hippies, and other counterculture enthusiasts, Kurt Vonnegut, 84, died on April 11 of a brain hemorrhage as a result of a fall.

Vonnegut has been compared to Mark Twain because of his bitingly humorous written and vocal opinions on politics, religion, oligarchic corporations and the men and women who run them—and since 2000, the Bush administration. Like Twain, he also did not stint on taking on Heaven and God.

In his books, his characters invented their own religions: The Church of God of the Utterly Indifferent and Bokononism. He was known for coining the Zen-like aphorism, "and so it goes," as an ending to conversations about unsolvable, complex issues.

He was sharp as a tack at age 82. At La Mediterranée, a posh Manhattan restaurant, he opened an interview on his latest book with, "What do you want to talk about? Politics? Our president is a complete twit. I’ll talk about the death of the novel." He believed the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan are "being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas."

His novels border on science fiction, yet they are grounded on Earth and explore such human subjects as family, marriage, and death—in other words, everyday life, including war.

His greatest and most popular novel is "Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade" (1969), a mostly autobiographical yet surreal fiction about his experience during the Allied and U.S. fire bombing of Dresden, Germany, in World War II. As a young Army private, Vonnegut had been captured behind enemy lines. He and other prisoners were sent to Dresden to work making vitamin supplements in the basement of a vacant meat-packing building (hence the title).

The firestorm passed over them. He and others made it out afterwards to witness a horrific transformation of the city once called Germany’s showplace. They were ordered to remove corpses. (He documented this experience in "Fates Worse Than Death.")

"Slaughterhouse-Five" was published when the U.S. was embroiled in the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. There was social upheaval and a counterculture that had grown out of the Beatnik era. One critic wrote of "Slaughterhouse" that Vonnegut "so perfectly caught America’s transformative mood that its story became a best-selling metaphor for the new age.

Vonnegut also wrote about the banalities of consumer culture, and as an early environmentalist—born in the Motor Speedway City of Indianapolis in 1922—he has said, "When I got here in 1922, the country was already roaring drunk on petroleum. We are still roaring drunk on petroleum." (Ironically, he once opened an auto dealership).

Of Earth, he wrote that people don’t give a damn whether the planet goes on or not, adding, "We are too cheap and lazy. Human beings, past and present, have trashed the joint."

He also felt that nothing had changed since the Nixon presidency during the Vietnam War, about which he’d written a highly critical article for Harpers. Recently, he said, "The country is still "divided between winners and losers. The government is Democratic and Republican, but look, in this last election, they had to choose between two members of Skull and Bones out of 300 million people."

It’s difficult to view a man thought by many to be primarily pessimistic as honorary president of the Humanist Association. Yet Vonnegut’s humanistic bent is demonstrated in another popular novel, "Cat’s Cradle." In it he describes a character sitting under an apple tree with an uncle drinking lemonade. The uncle ends a heated but agreeable discussion, saying, "If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is."

Along with "and so it goes," Vonnegut wanted everyone to "please notice when you are happy." He revered librarians for their strength and for holding their own against Homeland Security agents who want to search files, and do-gooders who lobby to remove books from library shelves.

Vonnegut’s last book, "A Man Without a Country," ends with one of his poems:

When the last living thing has died on account of us, how poetical it would be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon,

‘It is done.’

People did not like it here.