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Kurt Vonnegut: “Those years weren’t lost. They simply weren’t the way I’d planned them. Those years were adventures. Planned years are not.”

Published: May 11, 2020
Category: Fiction

On May Day, 1970, Kurt Vonnegut — the suddenly famous author of “Slaughterhouse-Five” — drove from his home on Cape Cod to a hippie farm near Brattleboro, Vermont. There was a Maypole. Dancing. Music. Drugs, of course. Some nudity, of course. I was an outsider, an observer. I watched Kurt, who seemed bemused. I watched his wife Jane, leaning against the car, weeping.

In 1987, as a benefit of marriage, I came to know Kurt Vonnegut and his wife, the noted photographer Jill Krementz. There were dinners, weekend visits; I saw Kurt deliver his famous “chalk talk” (below). It was my privilege to introduce him at a reading before an overflow crowd at the Union Square Barnes & Noble. “We’re going to give this guy a standing ovation at the end,” I said. “Why don’t we do it now?” The room rocked.

The past. Anecdotal. Doesn’t matter. It comes up for me because I knew and cherished the man, and so I hear his voice in some things he wrote.

Start with his letter to Charles McCarthy, head of the school board at North Dakota’s Drake High School, who in 1973 ordered its copies of Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” and other novels burned because they were “obscene.” Benedict Cumberbatch reads it here as if he had been born in America.

And another letter, this one to his daughter:

Dear Old Nanno —

You’re learning now that you do not inhabit a solid, reliable, social structure — that the older you get people around you are worried, moody, goofy human beings who themselves were little kids only a few days ago. So home can fall apart and schools can fall apart, usually for childish reasons, and what have you got? A space wanderer named Nan.

And that’s O.K. I’m a space wanderer named Kurt, and Jane’s a space wanderer named Jane, and so on. When things go well for days on end, it is an hilarious accident.

You’re dismayed at having lost a year, maybe, because the school fell apart. Well — I feel as though I’ve lost the years since “Slaughterhouse-Five” was published, but that’s malarkey. Those years weren’t lost. They simply weren’t the way I’d planned them. Neither was the year in which Jim had to stay motionless in bed while he got over TB. Neither was the year in which Mark went crazy, then put himself together again. Those years were adventures. Planned years are not.

And, finally, the most famous passage from “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Billy Pilgrim has become “unstuck” in time — he jumps back and forth between moments of his life. He’s watching a World War II movie, but because he’s “unstuck” in time, he is seeing it in reverse.

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. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. 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 containers were stored neatly in racks. 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. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the rack and shipped back to the United States, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous content 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 anyone ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

Isn’t the way we wish we could experience what we’re living now?

BONUS VIDEO: THE “CHALK TALK”