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144 pages

English

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The story of Kurt Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse-Five, an enduring masterpiece on trauma and memory Kurt Vonnegut was twenty years old when he enlisted in the United States Army. Less than two years later, he was captured by the Germans in the single deadliest US engagement of the war, the Battle of the Bulge. He was taken to a POW camp, then transferred to a work camp near Dresden, and held in a slaughterhouse called Schlachthof Funf where he survived the horrific firebombing that killed thousands and destroyed the city. To the millions of fans of Vonnegut's great novel Slaughterhouse-Five, these details are familiar. They're told by the book's author/narrator, and experienced by his enduring character Billy Pilgrim, a war veteran who "has come unstuck in time." Writing during the tumultuous days of the Vietnam conflict, with the novel, Vonnegut had, after more than two decades of struggle, taken trauma and created a work of art, one that still resonates today. In The Writer's Crusade, author Tom Roston examines the connection between Vonnegut's life and Slaughterhouse-Five. Did Vonnegut suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? Did Billy Pilgrim? Roston probes Vonnegut's work, his personal history, and discarded drafts of the novel, as well as original interviews with the writer's family, friends, scholars, psychologists, and other novelists including Karl Marlantes, Kevin Powers, and Tim O'Brien. The Writer's Crusade is a literary and biographical journey that asks fundamental questions about trauma, creativity, and the power of storytelling.

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Publié par	ABRAMS BOOKS
Date de parution	09 novembre 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781683359241
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0932€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Copyright 2021 Tom Roston
Cover 2021 Abrams
Kurt Vonnegut s unpublished quotes from his archives at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, copyright Kurt Vonnegut, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.
Published in 2021 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021934857
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4489-1
eISBN: 978-1-68335-924-1
Abrams books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact specialsales@abramsbooks.com or the address below.
Abrams Press is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

ABRAMS The Art of Books 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007 abramsbooks.com
To all peace-loving pilgrims who confront life s traumas with beauty and truth and jokes.
If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.
- TIM O BRIEN
Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.
- KURT VONNEGUT
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE Kurt Vonnegut, Nazi Slayer!
CHAPTER TWO Slaughterhouse-Five and the PTSD Prism
CHAPTER THREE The Road to Dresden
CHAPTER FOUR Onwards and Upwards
CHAPTER FIVE Writing Slaughterhouse-Five, or, This Lousy Little Book
CHAPTER SIX A Reading of Slaughterhouse-Five, or, Stopping a Glacier
CHAPTER SEVEN What Really Happened to Vonnegut in World War II, or, the War Parts, Anyway
CHAPTER EIGHT A History of War Trauma
CHAPTER NINE A PTSD Primer and an Infinite Jester
CHAPTER TEN What s Wrong with Billy?
CHAPTER ELEVEN Diagnosing Mr. Vonnegut
CHAPTER TWELVE Kurt, After the Crusade
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Slaughterhouse-Five s Place in History (Despite That Whole Timelessness Thing)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN One Last Joke
-
AUTHOR NOTE
A NON-TRALFAMADORIAN TIMELINE OF VONNEGUT S LIFE
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
CHAPTER ONE
KURT VONNEGUT, NAZI SLAYER!
All this happened:
I really did begin research on this book in November 2018, and by November of the next year I made a remarkable discovery about Kurt Vonnegut. Or what appeared to be. I had tracked down Bernie O Hare and interviewed him over the phone. He was talking on his Bluetooth headset while driving to Oneonta in upstate New York, and I was sitting on my living room couch in Brooklyn using a cordless phone attached to a digital recording device. I wanted to talk to Bernie about his father, Bernard V. O Hare, because I had come to think that his dad may have had an even greater significance to 1969 s Slaughterhouse-Five than its author, Vonnegut, had led us to believe.
Vonnegut and O Hare had buddied up during World War II and had been captured together by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and put in a prison camp and eventually in a meat locker under a slaughterhouse, where they miraculously survived the Allies devastating firebombing of Dresden. It was a turning point in Vonnegut s life, one that he documented in his famous novel, which took him twenty-three years to complete.
Most of this you probably already know because you ve read his book. Vonnegut writes about this experience with O Hare in the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five as if it s nonfiction, but then the next nine chapters are about a fictional character, Billy Pilgrim, who travels in time and is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, and whose war experiences loosely parallel Vonnegut s, all of which makes it metafiction , meaning it upends the conventional fictional narrative by blurring the line between the author and the story being told.
Vonnegut didn t even set that initial chapter apart by calling it a preface or an author s note. He just dropped himself into that first chapter and then sporadically throughout. I d like to do that!
I wanted to know more about O Hare because, despite there being reams of commentary about Slaughterhouse-Five by Vonnegut and others, there isn t a whole lot about this seemingly essential character, other than what Vonnegut writes in the book and what he mentioned occasionally in interviews and essays.
As a middle-aged freelance journalist and author of a couple of middling successful nonfiction books, I wanted my Slaughterhouse-Five book to break new ground on how people perceive Vonnegut s masterpiece, and I thought the path might be through O Hare. I needed the money from writing the book, yes, and a groundbreaking book could result in more of it. But I also felt like I was running out of time to make my mark as a writer. So I went all out. I bought $255 tickets on Delta from New York to Vonnegut s hometown of Indianapolis, reserved a room at the Cascades Inn in Bloomington, Indiana, and made plans to visit the Lilly Library at Indiana University, where I wanted to dig into Vonnegut s discarded drafts of Slaughterhouse-Five to find a literary Holy Grail, some secret Da Vonnegut Code that no one had found before.
On the first day at the Lilly, a weird thing happened. While I sat in the spacious reading room with high ceilings and large wood tables, an older, heavy-set librarian crashed into a door that swung out at her and she quietly collapsed into a heap on the floor. One of her fellow librarians broke the silence by gasping, Oh! I got up from my chair, unsure if I should approach, but quickly sat back down as several other librarians gathered with hushed voices. Medics arrived and asked the woman if she knew what year it was. I believe she answered correctly before they rolled her out on a gurney.
I really enjoyed my time in Bloomington, eating breakfasts of yogurt, toast, and Square Donuts ( Never cut corners is the local franchise s slogan) in the common area of the Cascades Inn, a nondescript white motel by the side of the road, which was also hosting an international group of ethnomusicologists who were gathering in the heartland for a conference at the university. The European and Latin American music geeks-I say this with affection-were mostly young graduate students dressed in scarves and wool sweaters, while the Americans were old enough to be their grandparents, dressed in fleece and L.L.Bean boots. Both seemed to be equally delighted to be there, talking excitedly about the merits of juice not from concentrate and string instrument esoterica while an electric heater with a digital fireplace display hummed nearby.
On the morning of my third day at the Lilly, I was putting my belongings in a locker as requested-they have more than Vonnegut s drafts to protect; the Lilly houses a first folio of Shakespeare, a first edition of The Canterbury Tales, and Spider-Man No. 1, among other relics-when the lights went out. It was totally dark in the locker area. I walked out of the room and I again witnessed librarians in a moment of crisis. They were as calm, swift, and organized as Austrians. Visitors and staff were led into a windowless common area where we were informed that the building would be closed for the day.
I pleaded with a head librarian that I had flown 750 miles to be there, but she remained firm and waited for me to stop talking. I wandered over to the nearby I. M. Pei-designed IU Eskenazi Museum of Art building, which had backup generators, so I sat and watched a troupe of dance students dressed in white leotards and lace perform a dance called Ascension, in honor of the museum s reopening, up and down the stairs of the vast space. I occasionally walked over to the Lilly to see if the electricity was back on until the librarian and I worked out that I could return the following Monday before regular opening hours. I later found out that there was an oversurge at a nearby substation that had put most of the university campus in the dark until later that night.
I mention these moments to attest to how random, awkward, and fallible life can be. And how, when working on a book about Vonnegut, one becomes more mindful of such things because Vonnegut wrote books about life s strange rhythms, from the mundane to the horrific, in a way few other writers could. Perhaps he did it best in Slaughterhouse-Five when he writes, So it goes, after each and every death, a phrase that became a slogan for a generation.
And so. Rifling through hundreds of typed pages, some with coffee stains and Vonnegut s scribbles, I saw that he had indeed tried to feature O Hare in more prominent ways, including dedicating the entire book to him at one point, before he ultimately dedicated it to a German cabdriver, Gerhard M ller, and Bernard s wife, Mary O Hare, whom he credited for inspiring him to write the book in a way that would resist glorifying war by showing that it is, in fact, complete and utter tragedy and pain.
After returning to New York, to further pursue my hunch about O Hare, I searched for his and Mary s son Bernie. And it was Bernie who told me something new, something I d never heard before, something, until now, that you ve never heard before. Bernie said he once spoke to a Vietnam veteran who went out drinking with his father and Vonnegut and that the two World War II veterans had strongly intimated to the Vietnam vet that in the brief lull after they were liberated in 1945, they hunted down one of their sadistic German prison guards. Then they killed him.
Whoa.
I hope that we share the same shock at the implications of this information. After all, Vonnegut s actual war experience is what gave his legendary anti-war novel and subsequent activism such gravitas. The man saw the worst things that war can do! His combat experience is notable for its wretchedness and abs