There are novels so potent, and so perfected in their singularity, that they have the unexpected side effect of permanently knocking out the novelist: Nothing produced afterward comes close. Had Russell Hoban written no books before Riddley Walker, and no books after it, his reputation today would be exactly the same. Should William S. Burroughs, post–Naked Lunch, or Joseph Heller, with the last line of Catch-22 on the page (“The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off.”), have tossed their typewriters out of the window? Probably. And Kurt Vonnegut, at the age of 46, with Mother Night and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (those twin magnificences) under his belt, was projected into a state of creative culmination/exhaustion by Slaughterhouse-Five.
“I suppose that flowers, when they’re through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served,” he mused horticulturally to a Playboy interviewer in 1973. “Flowers didn’t ask to be flowers and I didn’t ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five, I had the feeling that I had produced this blossom. So I had a shutting-off feeling, you know, that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK. And that was the end of it.”
Fifty years have passed since the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five. It’s the same age as me. And the older I get, and the more lumps fall off my brain, the more I find that rereading is the thing. Build your own little cockeyed canon and then bear down on it; get to know it, forward and backward; get to know it well. So I don’t know how many times I’ve read Slaughterhouse-Five. Three? Four? It never gets old, is the point. It never wanes in energy. This book is in no way the blossom of a flower. Slaughterhouse-Five is more in the nature of a superpower that the mutant author had to teach himself to master—and then could use, at full strength, only once.
The self-training took decades. The mutating event was, as always, brief. Between February 13 and February 15, 1945, Allied bombers dropped nearly four thousand tons of high explosives and incendiaries on the historic German city of Dresden. The effect was elemental: Air became fire. Vonnegut, an American prisoner of war, was there—but 60 feet underground. Captured during the Battle of the Bulge, conveyed to Dresden by boxcar, and billeted in a derelict slaughterhouse as the bombs fell, he was sheltering with some fellow POWs and a couple of dazed German guards in a basement meat locker. They emerged to rubble, ash, twisted metal, death. Somewhere between 18,000 and 25,000 people (we still don’t know) had been killed.
The innumerability and anonymity of this mass death was in contrast to the one very unique and countable corpse that Vonnegut already had in his life—that of his mother, who had died by suicide less than a year before. How did this bereaved and half-starved young man, stepping out into the necropolis of Dresden, manage not to lose his mind? Native resilience, or ontological elasticity, or something else again—his writerly atman maybe, the eternal indestructible essence that blinked its turtle eyes behind all his ironies and observations.
It took him, anyway, 25 years to figure out what to do. There’s a haunting sentence in Charles J. Shields’s Vonnegut biography, And So It Goes: “How to write about a tremendous event of war that he had been there for, and yet had not been there for, because he was suspended underground?” There but not there, midair but buried—suspended underground. This is the limbo zone of Wilfred Owen’s 1918 poem “Strange Meeting,” the behind-the-trenches half-world that the poet enters in a dream or in death: “It seemed that out of battle I escaped / Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped.” In the end Vonnegut had no choice. To get out of the tunnel, he had to write a book about the impossibility of writing a book about Dresden. About the impossibility of even holding a continuous idea of Dresden in your head.