The Price of Survival

SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, OR THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 186 pages. Delacorte. $5.95.

Rabbits, we are told, have mercifully been provided with short memories because they are so constantly prey to the threat of being killed. They would go mad with fear and despair if they could remember the past. Men seldom realize it, Kurt Vonnegut suggests in his latest novel, but they have more in common with rabbits than they like to think. Except that men forget on purpose, and are a prey to one another.

The occasion for these and other reflections is an agonizing, funny, profoundly rueful attempt by Vonnegut to handle in fable form his own memories of the strategically unnecessary Allied air raid on Dresden that killed 135,000 people. The book's narrator, like Vonnegut, lived through the raid as a prisoner of war in an underground slaughterhouse. Like Vonnegut, too, he has spent more than 20 years trying to mark out the limits of its metaphoric meaning in a book.

Everyman Figure. The task is beyond him. Eventually he presents his publisher with the jumbled chronicle of another American prisoner who also survived the raid, as well as some of the horrors of peace and prosperity. Too archly named Billy Pilgrim, the second survivor is hardly a real character--"there are almost no characters in this book," Vonnegut says, "because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces." But he does very well as something between a consumer-age Candide and a Vonnegut Everyman figure.

Billy lives through the war merely because he happens not to die in it, then becomes a husband and a prosperous optometrist for equally random reasons. He acquires a Reagan-stickered Cadillac and a son named Robert, who graduates from failure as a high school alcoholic to "the famous Green Berets" and becomes a fine young man, fighting in Viet Nam. The only trouble is that Billy sometimes just can't keep from bursting into tears.

Mountain Time. He visits the planet Tralfamadore (which Vonnegut invented several books ago) in a flying saucer, and learns from little green men there that time is not a river, as earthlings think, but an unmoving phenomenon like a mountain range, continually visible to the Tralfamadorians from one end to the other. Since he has become unstuck in time, like the flying-saucer people, Billy, too, experiences many times over the events of his life, repeatedly returning to recollections of Dresden, and the great fire that followed. No one of these occurrences seems more unusual to Billy than any of the others. As the narrator says resignedly, repeatedly, "So it goes."

Laid out before Billy, the events of his life and the history of the world become morally contemporary. Vonnegut has a forbearing, thoughtful sense of history, and he is working here--as in all his books taken together--on a vast, loosely linked metaphorical mosaic that portrays the condition of man. For him--as the book's subtitle suggests--the horrors of World War II and the Children's Crusade should be seen as perpetually fresh. Yet, Vonnegut suggests, most men are protectively, intentionally, numb to them. If the numbness is necessary to endure life, it also encourages the repetition of atrocities, the decking out of cruelty in self-justifying disguises--the grossest of which is the ennoblement of war.

Backward Film. Vonnegut's view of man is not new. Indeed he sometimes sounds eerily like the 16th century mystic Sebastian Franck. Appalled by the cruelties men worked upon one another in the name of religion during the Reformation, Franck wrote: "Whoever looks at mankind seriously may break his heart with weeping." Then he added: "We are all laughingstocks, fables and carnival farces before God." Formal belief in God seems to have no part in Vonnegut's philosophy, though in Slaughterhouse-Five he does suggest that the story of the Crucifixion would be more appealing if Jesus had been not the Son of God but a nobody. Few modern writers have borne witness against inhumanity with more humanity or humor.

Vonnegut's eloquent concern transforms something as pedestrian as a war movie, seen back to front, into a vision, which in its weird way is as effective as any short passage ever written against war: "American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. . . .The bombers opened their bomb-bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes.

"When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and snipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again."

Kurt Vonnegut was mourning the follies of the world with laughter long before the term "black humorist" had been coined. In a series of fictional fables he confronted a remarkable range of topics: space, religion, creeping technology, how to love the unlovable, and even doomsday, which, as he gently observes, "could easily be next Wednesday." His first book, Player Piano (1952). told how a crew of smoothly programmed engineers take over America. Another, Cat's Cradle, began with a reporter trying to fix the whereabouts of important Americans at the time the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and ended with the end of the world. A third, Mother Night, explored the guilt of a patriotic spy and propaganda agent, "a man," as Vonnegut summed him up, "who served evil too openly and good too secretly, the crime of his times."

Such themes are now fashionable. Just lately, in fact, Vonnegut has become as "in" as a good writer can decently and quietly be. Yet he has been writing, largely unnoticed, for much of the past 20 years. Some of Vonnegut's early books, today reissued and selling briskly, were first published only in paperback, and often went unreviewed by journals that today are noting Vonnegut's popularity, and have begun to celebrate the success of Slaughterhouse-Five (20,000 advance sales, Literary Guild alternate, optioned to the movies).

Another writer might be resentful of the past. But Vonnegut holds no grudges. He is, in general, a man more rueful than wrathful. Black-humorist contemporaries often vibrate with a febrile, apocalyptic rage, seeming to feel that America has the market cornered on greed and hypocrisy. Vonnegut takes a longer view. Though he has an old-fashioned Populist's distrust of the rich and powerful manipulators of society, Vonnegut's is closer kin to Twain than Kafka. Deeply pessimistic about the world, he is rarely depressed by it. Part of him, at least, would contemplate even the story of the apocalypse as some sort of cautionary tall tale.

In the Mainstream. Vonnegut does admit, though, to a slight pique at being pejoratively classified as a science-fiction writer. "I'm in the mainstream." he says flatly, and with justice. "Besides, there's no sense in creating a literary ghetto. The implication is it would be serious to write about Portnoy's complaints but frivolous to write about machinery. I just describe characters in terms of the jobs they do, rather than their sexual hang-ups."

Though he once taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he never studied writing. Instead he specialized mainly in chemistry and anthropology at a congeries of colleges (Cornell, Carnegie Tech, Chicago) during and after World War II. To earn a living in the lean years, Vonnegut, who is the son and grandson of prosperous, German-stock architects in Indianapolis, has worked as a crime reporter, a Saab dealer, and flack for General Electric in Schenectady, N.Y. "I started to write," he recalls, "because I hated that job so much." Schenectady keeps turning up in his books as a grim, upstate New York town called Ilium.

Today writing and lecturing are his only work. Breakfast of Champions, his next book, should appear this year. With characteristic irony it deals with the plight of robots who take over the Middle West (except for one flesh-and-blood Pontiac dealer), but find themselves bugged by problems of free will.

Vonnegut owns a two-story, clapboard-and-shingle house in Barnstable, Mass., shared with his wife Jane (a Swarthmore Phi Beta Kappa), their own three children and three adopted children, plus a mongrel named Sandy, also known as "the Barnstable Dust Mop." Most of his writing is done at home in morning spurts. Afternoons he is free to paint or contemplate a sign he has on the wall which reads "GOD DAMN IT YOU GOT TO BE KIND."

Rudely stated, this message lies at the heart of Vonnegut's work. For all his roundhouse swinging at punch-card culture, his satiric forays are really an appeal for a return to Christlike behavior in a world never conspicuously able to follow Christ's example. For Vonnegut, man's worst folly is a persistent attempt to adjust, smoothly, rationally, to the unthinkable, to the unbearable. Misused, modern science is its prime instrument. "I think a lot of people teach savagery to their children to survive," he observed recently. Then he added, saying it all, from Cain and Abel to the cold war, "They may need the savagery, but it's bad for the neighbors."

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