Men and boys
HENRY TUBE
Slaughterhouse Five or The Children's Crusade Kurt Vonnegut, Jr (Cape 30s) If I say that Kurt Vonnegut's new novel is about the destruction of Dresden and that it is a book he has always wanted to write, ever since, as an American prisoner-of- war, he survived what a hundred and thirty five thousand people did not, the reader will perhaps form expectations and turn away. If t say that it is a very short and funny book, it is possible that I shall lose the attention of those few serious souls that have clung on; so conditioned are we to divide subjects into the serious and the comic, to take the serious manner as earnest of the serious content, the comic of the comic.
Mr Vonnegut himself has evidently re- quired this length of time to suit the manner to the subject and indeed tells us in his candid opening chapter that: 'the best out- line I ever made, or anyway the prettiest one, was on the back of a roll of wallpaper. I used my daughter's crayons, a different colour for each main character . . . The destruction of Dresden was represented by a vertical band of orange cross-hatching, and all the lines that were still alive passed through it, came out the other side.'
What we get is something much more like a patchwork quilt or the contents of some- body's mind, a piece of Dresden here, a piece of twenty years later there, another piece of Dresden and so on. There are even fragments of documentary information in- serted at appropriate points, such as that nearly twice as many people died in the destruction of Dresden as in the destruction of Hiroshima. But Mr Vonnegut's main in- tention is to introduce us to the grotesque and pathetic aspects of his experience, rather than the thrills of the tragedy. To this end, he makes little of the firestorm itself, which his hero escapes by remaining in an under- ground meat-safe, but much of an earlier scene in which a hundred or so tattered and broken-down American prisoners are tem- porarily billeted in a German camp on the Czechoslovakian border. This camp is already occupied by fifty middle-aged Eng- lish officers, all escapers from other camps, all cast in homeric mould : 'The English- men had been lifting weights and chinning themselves for years. Their bellies were like washboards. The muscles of their calves and upper arms were like cannonballs. They were all masters of checkers and chess and bridge and cribbage and dominoes and anagrams and charades and ping-pong and billiards, as well.'
As the Americans come to a ragged halt, the Englishmen are singing a chorus from The Pirates of Penzance. They have organ- ised a banquet and a performance of Cinder- ella to welcome the new arrivals. Mr Vonne- gut is not, as it first appears, poking fun at perfectly gallant heroes, he is emphasising that they belong to another sort of story, a war-story, instead of a destruction-story. His Americans are not comrades for Ulysses, but members of that mediaeval Children's Crusade, many of whom were drowned, many more sold into slavery, while a few returned home by mistake.
The same point is made in a different fashion.when a large and clumsy conscript, escaping through a German forest with two experienced scouts, is reminded of the Three Musketeers. Seeing his companions halted on either side of the path, he 'draped a heavy arm around the shoulder of each. "So what do the Three Musketeers do now?" he said'. The scouts vanish and the conscript finds himself facing a posse of equally unwarlike Germans.
Though his matter owes something to Catch 22 and his manner, including elements of fantasy, something to Giinter Grass, Mr Vonnegut's agility and lightness of touch are peculiar to himself. At a time when so many American novelists are still in the wallpaper and coloured crayon stage, his bitter patchwork morality is a rare pleasure to read.
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