Teaching and outreach assistant Helen Gunn looks for Vonnegut in his drafts of Slaughterhouse-Five.
A walk through the Lilly Library’s stacks is a journey through time and space, a new discovery beckoning, sometimes only by luck. One of my favorite things is getting to explore in directionless abandon. In this instance, though, I had a sure path. I was searching for a specific quotation from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. It was a cut-and-dry task. And then it wasn’t.
So it goes.
The specific quotation that led me to the manuscript collection was a wonderfully anti-war and anti-massacre quotation1 in the official publication’s first chapter; a quotation that is so Vonnegut and makes me love him all the more. As I sifted through the different drafts of Slaughterhouse-Five in an effort to find this surprisingly elusive quotation, I saw Vonnegut grapple with trying to write a war book, often referred to by him as his “Dresden book.” The drafts begged questions. How does one narrativize war? How does one come to terms with their own part in it? How does one make sense of the senseless?
A short answer to these questions that I can glean from Vonnegut’s drafts is: very difficultly. There’s a fragmentary nature to the drafts themselves that speaks to this. Vonnegut would start writing a chapter, then abruptly stop. He had pages of first paragraphs only, before stopping and starting all over again–often with the same words as the previous draft. In his drafts, Vonnegut reveals that he’d written thousands of pages in the twenty years since his return from the war, but had thrown them out. The pages I got to peruse in the Lilly happen to be the pages that survived, pages from the twentieth anniversary of the Dresden fire bombing on.
I will admit that the man was not a genius all the time–who is? There were certainly pages I read where I understood Vonnegut’s impulse to destroy his older drafts. But, there were pages that I loved because, in the way that the story of Lot’s wife does for Vonnegut, they made the author so human to me.
The human who struggles to come to terms with the inhumane shines in several moments throughout Vonnegut’s drafts. While reading through the reams of paper, I noticed that Vonnegut would find one thread of a story, and then go on a tangent, unspooling until he found a new version of the story to tell. His account of his time with Bernard and Mary O’Hare slips and shifts, from talk about the Great Depression leading into the war, to grenades and Frank Sinatra. In between two versions of a conversation with the O’Hares, Vonnegut takes a delightful sketch break, including a rough outline of his plans for part of the book and then switching to what appears to be a schedule for a trip to Baltimore. Part of the answer to how life goes on after terrible events is in this; the artist writing to make sense of the past so that we might bear witness to its tragedies is also a person whose life continues despite the guilt he feels.
As Vonnegut says in another one of his drafts, “I can see now that this is a book about death, and how little it means” (Vonnegut mss. Box 10, Folder 15). The senselessness of death and suffering appears not only in Vonnegut’s paragraphs on his time in Dresden, but also in his reflection on the death of his father and sister. Vonnegut spends pages of his drafts detailing his father’s cancer diagnosis, the visits he took with his sister to see his ailing father, and his sister’s later cancer diagnosis and death. The story ends with both Vonnegut’s father and his sister dying within three years of the other. To all this, Vonnegut writes, “I tell this undignified story now because I want to dump it somewhere. I don’t want it nagging at me anymore, suggesting that it should be a book” (Box 10, Folder 19). While this particular story does not make it into the final draft of the book, it is clear what else “nags” at Vonnegut. The indignity of his comrades’ deaths in Dresden, and the firebombing’s wake of corpse and ash haunt Vonnegut’s prose. The effects of these dark matters draw our attention to both the impossibility of finding words to describe such destruction and the need to try.
In the end, what I can observe is that some separation of self from the events that occur is necessary for Vonnegut to tell his story. As he says, “I saw what Billy Pilgrim saw, but I wasn’t Billy Pilgrim. Billy is modeled after a real chaplain’s assistant I knew in Dresden, who died there because his health was so poor… In this book, I have let him live some more” (Box 10, Folder 19). The story is no longer only Vonnegut’s; it is shared by those who found themselves forced to watch violence, war, and loss. In this way, Vonnegut gets to give the men he watched die a little more time to live. Most of all, he gives the lost the chance to have their stories told.
As the world we live in continues to ask us to bear witness to atrocities, and as its stories become harder to tell, I will take comfort in the hard work that is possible. Vonnegut’s drafts of Slaughterhouse-Five show not just the labor behind narrating trauma and experience, but also the necessity of doing so. To tell a story is to ask others to listen, to understand, and, above all, to learn. And so, the next time I read that Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time, so too will I. Perhaps I shall fall into the past to remember the work that those before me did to tell their tales, or maybe slip into a future borne of resistance and hope. In the meantime, the birds continue to sing.
About the Author: Helen Gunn is a graduate student pursuing a PhD in English, with a focus on 20th century drama. She is a teaching and outreach assistant at the Lilly Library. Her favorite part of the week is getting to give the Friday tour, and she loves exploring the Lilly’s stacks.
- “I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.” ↩︎
Leave a Reply