Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five: Bookmarked. Curtis Smith
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and children were incinerated; other estimates place the tally closer to 30,000. Exact numbers are impossible—the city, thought safe by many, was full of refugees. A population uncounted. The destruction so complete.
Some contend the first, and most complete, massacre inflicted upon humankind occurred around 2350 BC with the Great Flood. Listen to Genesis 7: 21-22: “And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: all in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.”
Drowning often makes lists of the most-feared ways to die. A drowning man will attempt to hold his breath until he gives over to the breathing reflex. Consciousness can linger for minutes. The panic is thought to be terrifying.
I can imagine all those people beneath the water thinking, Please help me, God!
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The Ardmore Bookstore was nestled in a long brick row, the same block as the Army-Navy and a generations-old theater destined to fade in the coming age of multiplexes. I lived a little over a mile away, a walk through blue-collar neighborhoods just outside Philly’s city line. Our neighborhood white, the bordering neighborhood black, a passing made with caution. Sometimes words were exchanged, sometimes I ran. The cruelty of children.
Forty years have passed. I see my sneakers on baking July sidewalks. I see them kicking brown leaves and sliding over powdery snow. All trips become one trip, a trick of memory. I am thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. There’s money in my pocket—singles and quarters. Perhaps a five. I am alone or with a friend or two. Those different times, my house left with only the promise to be back by dinner.
A parking lot sat behind the bookstore. The terrain on a gentle slant, the spaces filled on weekend nights for the theater’s latest films. A hundred parking meters, a hundred sundial shadows, thin stains that stretched longer as the afternoon wore on. Of course the bookstore had a front entrance, the wide sidewalk, the avenue’s bustle, but I preferred the back. A simple sign, a clandestine portal. A bell on the door. The hallway a cramped passage. A choking of boxes, deliveries and returns. The store long and narrow, the shelves running parallel from front to back. The space brighter in the front. The counter with the register, its newspapers for sale. The plate glass window that looked upon Lancaster Avenue. Behind the register, the owners, the husband or wife or sometimes both, a quiet couple, their attention often on the books they read between ringing up customers.
No scent of brewing coffee flavored the air, no music played. Only stillness and the hushed voices of searchers like me. Here was my ritual: I roamed the aisles, selecting books. In my hands, the weight of voices and stories. I was a shaggy-haired teen with only a few dollars in my pocket, but I was never hurried along. I’d find a corner and read first pages, and one by one, I returned the books to their shelves, a whittling that left me with the book I would take home.
I still have my first copy of Slaughterhouse-Five. The price is marked on the cover—1.50—and although I have no recollection of that day, I see myself counting change on the counter, see myself walking home in the sun or cold or rain. Forgotten or not, the moment exists, knotted into the fabric that will disappear with my death.
Forty years, and I remove the rubber bands that hold the book together. I open the cover. The taped spine crackles.
*
Biblical experts believe the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah occurred around 2065 BC. As punishment for their wickedness, the Lord rained down fire and brimstone, destroying the city and its evil residents. Only Lot, a man deemed the sole virtuous inhabitant of Sodom, and his family were spared. The angels instructed Lot and his clan not to look back upon their burning city. When Lot’s wife disobeyed, the death count increased by one.
How did Lot prove his worthiness to the angels the Lord had sent to find the righteous in Sodom? When an angry mob gathered at Lot’s door, demanding the flesh of his angel visitors, he instead offered them his virgin daughters. That’s how.
Sodom was burnt to cinders, but it’s lived on in the word “sodomy.” Prior to the 1970’s, many states had sodomy laws that prohibited oral sex between married couples.
Being burnt alive often tops drowning in lists of most-feared ways to die.
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Another list: Slaughterhouse-Five sits at 29th place on the American Library Association’s ranking of most frequently banned books. Since its release, Slaughterhouse-Five has been pulled from school curriculums and library shelves. In 1972, a Michigan Circuit judge deemed the story of Billy Pilgrim “depraved, immoral, psychotic, and anti-Christian.” In North Dakota, a collection of classroom copies was burned in the high-school furnace. Kurt Vonnegut, who knew a thing or two about fire and Nazis, might have been amused.
Few who’ve read Slaughterhouse-Five believe it’s been attacked for its mentioning of blowjobs or baby-making. There is disgust in the book. There is, beneath the sardonic laughter, a tide disturbing and deep. Cruelty. Inhumanity. The crimes of war. The layers of human bone meal beneath a once-beautiful city. Here are the book’s real obscenities.
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” So says First Corinthians, and here is Vonnegut’s true crime—the holding close of a dark glass. He ingratiates himself with humor and a breezy voice and then slays us with truth. War is fought by children. So much is beyond us. The wheel turns, and we’re ground to dust. We have been lied to, over and over again. Slaughterhouse-Five is un-American if being American means unquestioning obedience. It’s subversive—if being subversive isn’t believing one’s birthright guarantees one residence in the shining city upon the hill. It’s anti-Christia—if one’s view of Christianity is more aligned with Sodom-leveling God of the Old Testament than with the New’s gospel of love thy neighbor.
I’ve taught in a public high school for the past thirty-three years. I know a thing or two about learning. I’ve had my good days and bad. I worry about the state of the profession I still love, its hijacking by bureaucrats, its allegiance to standardized testing. We have lost the fact that not all values can be quantified and that data can’t trump the nuances of perception or the gift of appreciation. Here’s what I know: within ten years, 95% of current algebra students won’t remember how to graph a parabola. History students will forget the details of the Compromise of 1850. They will have no idea how to calculate planetary motion. What will remain are the times that they were asked to engage in the questioning and defense that forms the framework of a compassionate mind. What they won’t forget are the books and teachers who’ve challenged them to look in the dark glass and describe what they see.
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And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate the librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to the thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.
So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of public libraries.
*
By the time I graduated high school, I’d read most of Vonnegut’s novels—Mother Night, Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions. An English teacher noticed the titles. “So you like science fiction,” he said. Thing was I didn’t like science fiction, or at least I didn’t like Tolkien, Heinlein, or Herbert. True, Vonnegut wrote about time travel and aliens, but his other-worldly elements paled beneath his humanity. His humor. His questioning of a society that had lost its way. His precipice-toeing view of the abyss that lurked beneath America’s postwar dream. He was unafraid to shout that the emperor had no clothes, and