Chapter 6
Breakthrough
How did Kurt Vonnegut finally make his breakthrough to Slaughterhouse-Five? As is self-evident, he got old enough, distant enough from the actual events, and experienced enough as a writer. Then there occurred a fortuitous confluence of Fate and Commitment.
He got a job teaching at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop (1965–67). He gained a community of writers, an atmosphere, shoptalk. He earned a steady paycheck. He committed himself to writing his war book.
Besides the cauldron of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the counterculture, lots of things were bubbling up about the shape and content of writing in those days. At the workshop, people were keenly aware of them. Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe capsized the notion of objectivity in journalism. John Barth (who gave a delightful performance of his work once at Iowa), Jorge Luis Borges (who visited as a guest speaker), Robert Coover (who was hired to teach the year Kurt left), and Julio Cortázar, to mention a few, were having a great time messing around with form, breaking conventions right and left. Critics grouped and labeled them. The New Journalism, magical realism, metafiction. Robert Scholes, a critic teaching at Iowa, wrote The Fabulists, and included Kurt Vonnegut.
The New York Times asked Vonnegut to write a review of the new Random House Unabridged Dictionary. He wrote it in his honest, idiosyncratic style. He quoted Random House’s publisher, Bennett Cerf. When asked whether Lyndon Johnson should be colloquial when speaking of the Vietnam War, Cerf said, “Now’s not the time for the President of the United States to worry about the King’s English.” The review caught the eye of Seymour Lawrence, formerly a vice president at Random House under Cerf. Lawrence now worked for Delacorte, scouting for new authors. Lawrence and Vonnegut met. Vonnegut told him he was working on Slaughterhouse-Five but that his books didn’t sell. Lawrence offered him a three-book contract.83
So now, besides his own dedication to the story, he had an obligation to Lawrence and Lawrence’s faith that he would make good on that obligation.
Making a commitment like that is powerful. Commitment invites Fate to be your Fairy Godmother Collaborator, to close and open just the doors you need.84
And so Fate did.
She brought him fresh, key perceptions about form and content on the one hand, and a top book publisher on the other.
These appear sequentially because the conventions of narrative nonfiction dictate that they do so. I don’t know the order. They ought to look like scrambled eggs.
1. Mary O’Hare, the wife of his war buddy Bernard O’Hare, confronts him and says, “in effect, ‘Why don’t you tell the truth for a change?’”—that is, that he and the other soldiers were children, not heroes like those portrayed by movie stars.85
2. He discovers that, in fact, he can’t remember much about it. Necessity is the mother of invention. And he has to invent, to fill out the story. He conjures up Tralfamadore out of his old sci-fi hat along with his sci-fi writer-character Kilgore Trout. (Together they add 7,251 words, about 25 pages. The Tralfamadore sections add 4,851 words, the Trout about 2,400.)
3. He came up with the notion of writing the first chapter straightforwardly, violating a cardinal rule of fiction, which is to maintain the dream of the fictional story. He confides right off the bat, “All this happened, more or less.” He describes the basis for it, his POW Dresden firebombing story, and his struggle and process writing it. He invites the reader in, like a friend.
How did he arrive at this? Random House reissued his out-of-print third novel, Mother Night, in 1966, and Vonnegut wrote a preface, reproduced ever since, in which he says outright what he thinks its lesson is, so this precedent may have contributed to the idea. The Writers’ Workshop and atmosphere of experimentation must have as well. He’d already tried writing about Dresden both as nonfiction and as fiction. Now he simply combined those impulses. But I suspect the most significant factor was his underlying urgency to ensure that he conveyed how much he cared about this subject and how much he wanted the reader to understand it.
4. His wife Jane told me, when I visited them in Barnstable a year or so after Slaughterhouse-Five was published, that she’d disliked the first autobiographical chapter intensely until she realized it was about time. Vonnegut quotes Céline and Roethke in that chapter, both in regard to time. He says, “And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”86 This soulful line sings of middle age. That’s where Vonnegut was then, in the continuum of life. His sense of time passing must have spurred him to get on with it and go for broke.
5. He gave up. He yielded to his sense that it would not be the book he’d always imagined, that he would fail to realize it in the way he’d wanted. Surrendering perfection happens, more or less, to all writers.87 Some passages from Vonnegut’s drafts are as vivid as any in the finished manuscript. He had to sacrifice his dream of what the book might be for the sake of what he could in fact now deliver.
But deliver he did.
He concludes his first chapter alluding to Lot’s wife, who failed to heed God’s warning about looking back and was turned into a pillar of salt.
I’ve finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun. This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt.
It’s… it’s very thin… about as long as The Bobbsey Twins.
It was such a short book that Ramparts Magazine, who serialized it, inquired of him if they’d got it all.88
Writers can’t write great things all the time. You do the best you can, then you have to move on. Otherwise you’ll end up writing the same book your whole life.89
vonnegut’s breakthrough-cluster converted into advice:
1. Make a commitment.
2. Trust fate, your Fairy Godmother Collaborator.
3. Tell the truth.
4. Keep on truckin’.
5. Surrender perfection.
Heed what you need. Alter to fit your own left foot.
I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know.…
But I think the Vietnam War freed me and other writers, because it made our leadership and our motives seem so scruffy.… We could finally talk about something bad that we did.… And what I saw, what I had to report, made war look so ugly. You know, the truth can be really powerful stuff. You’re not expecting it.
Then he added,
Of course, another reason not to talk about war is that it’s unspeakable.90
[The prisoners] were brought at last to a stone cottage at a fork in the road. It was a collecting point for prisoners of war. Billy and Weary were taken inside, where it was warm and smoky. There was a fire sizzling and popping in the fireplace. The fuel was furniture. There were about twenty other Americans in there, sitting on the floor with their backs to the wall, staring into the flames—thinking whatever there was to think, which was zero.
Nobody talked. Nobody had any good war stories to tell.91
In Mother Night, the central character, Howard Campbell, originally a playwright before he altered his occupation to double agent with the advent of World War II, has this dialogue as an old man:
“You don’t write anymore?” she said.
“There hasn’t been anything I’ve wanted to say,” I said.
“After all you’ve seen, all you’ve been through, darling?” she said.
“It’s all I’ve seen, all I’ve been through,” I said, “that makes it damn nearly impossible for me to say anything. I’ve lost the knack of making sense. I speak gibberish to the civilized world, and it replies in kind.”92