The Man from Slaughterhouse-Five:A Remembrance of Kurt Vonnegut

Steve Blakeslee

I couldn't have imagined a more welcome sight: a deserted dining room in an Olympia restaurant, a long wooden table set for dinner-and seated alone at the table, staring idly into space, Kurt Vonnegut.

It was late April of 1989, and Vonnegut had just given a talk at the Washington Center for the Performing Arts. People of all ages had packed the house, hoping for a generous dose of his loopy genius. They got it, as Vonnegut charted the plot of Hamlet on a "happiness scale," proposed a missile-defense system that would rely on video games, and advised aspiring writers to marry into money.

My work teaching English at the local community college, which sponsored the talk, had earned me an invitation to the dinner. A colleague and I had bolted to the restaurant, hoping to arrive before the mob. Now we swooped down on Vonnegut-politely-and parked ourselves at his elbows for the evening.

The draw of celebrity is powerful. But it wasn't the celebrity I was after; it was the writer, who had been my literary hero since adolescence. In honor of his visit, I had assigned my students Slaughterhouse-Five, a wildly inventive novel with a dark element of truth: the fire-bombing of Dresden in 1945, which Vonnegut witnessed as a prisoner of war. At his talk, he had publicly welcomed George Strong, an Olympia resident who had also been imprisoned in Slaughterhouse-Five. They were now in their mid-60s; I was a very young 28, trying to find my way as a writer and hoping to pick up a lesson or two.

With grace and patience, Vonnegut-who must have been ready for a rest-fielded my barrage of questions. I asked about a passage from one of his books. "Did you really tell your thesis committee at Columbia to 'take a flying f____ at the moon?'"

"Well," he allowed, "that was just a figure of speech, to convey the mood."

"And when you graded your own books and gave some of them Cs and Ds-how did you feel about that?"

He shrugged. "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."

More striking than his comments, though, was his willingness to listen. People came up with books for him to sign; one woman, as a token of her appreciation, gave him a personal check for some odd amount. With genuine curiosity, he asked each person, "Who are you? What do you do?"-then paid careful attention to the answer. By the time I left the restaurant, I had learned about more than writing.

The following morning I spoke to Vonnegut again, after a question-and-answer session at the college. He and another man were looking at snapshots of a red-brick building. When I spied a plaque on the building that read " Schlachthof-Fünf ," I realized that I was standing with George Strong. He had taken the photos on a recent trip to Dresden .

I held out my copy of Slaughterhouse-Five and asked Vonnegut if he would sign it. "Sure," he said, scribbling his autograph, "and George here will sign it too." He pushed the book at Strong, who seemed embarrassed. "Oh, he doesn't want my name on there," he murmured. Vonnegut insisted.

Afterward I walked to the parking lot with Strong, who looked at me apologetically. "I know my signature isn't of any worth to you."

"On the contrary," I said, "it means a lot to me."

Then Strong said he had never had much interest in finding anybody from Slaughterhouse-Five. "Why should we have wanted to find each other? Everything that happened to us was bad. But after 40 years you want to talk to somebody, fill in the gaps. You want to remember what happened." He told me that the German guards had taken them from Dresden and marched them near the Czechoslovakian border. "There was hardly anything to eat," he said, shaking his head. "Some of the prisoners had already died. We heard explosions in the distance, but we didn't know what was happening." He stopped and faced me. His lips were trembling, his eyes filled with tears. "It was the Russians, who liberated us."

After we parted, I wandered down a campus trail alone. In one brief conversation, Strong had brought home the awful and enduring pain of the war. More than four decades later, the horrors of Dresden were as near as his speech. And for the first time, I understood that Slaughterhouse-Five -for all its time travel and Tralfamadorians, its fantastic characters and plot-was a deadly serious book, one that Vonnegut had built around a core of terrible suffering. I had arrived at the final lesson of his visit: that being a writer requires not just mastery of craft, but emotional commitment of the deepest kind-the willingness to face and feel, and then to tell, the hardest truths.

I wrote a letter to Vonnegut to thank him for his time; to my surprise, he quickly replied. Around his note he had doodled a self-portrait, complete with dangling cigarette and no less than four bags under his eyes.

I thank you for your kind and interesting letter.. I was deeply moved to see George Strong again. I will guess that about a third of the hundred of us in Slaughterhouse-Five are dead by now.

And now one more. Kurt Vonnegut passed away on April 11, 2007 , at the age of 84.

Like so many others whom Vonnegut inspired, I mourn his absence. But even more I celebrate his presence-his brief but powerful presence in my life and, through his works, his continued presence for readers everywhere. We can be grateful that he has left so much to remember him by.

Questions and comments may be sent to Steve Blakeslee, who teaches writing at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.