The Hand of Time

Dresden had no military significance. It was, Vonnegut has written, "a famous world art treasure, like Paris or Vienna or Prague, and about as sinister as a wedding cake."

"Fwuuuh," he says now, evoking the whooshing noise made by the incendiary bombs. After the night bombing, American bombers followed up with daytime runs "to make the firemen stay underground."

Because the Dresden bombing was just a small part of the massive Allied campaign intended to weaken German resistance by obliterating cities -- and because it was overshadowed by the atomic annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- it almost disappeared from the historical record.

As for Vonnegut . . .

Well, let's just say Dresden didn't make him happy.

Eventually he found a way to tell the story his own way.

He gave the starring role to Billy Pilgrim, an innocent who finds himself "unstuck in time." He sent his hero skipping from the present to the past to the future, assigning him both the grim duty of witnessing Dresden and the happier task of mating with a film star named Montana Wildhack on the planet Tralfamadore.

And whenever someone died -- whether it was Billy's gun-loving father, shot dead in a deer-hunting accident, or tens of thousands of civilians fried in a man-made hell -- Vonnegut ushered them offstage with his famous tag line: "So it goes."

"Slaughterhouse-Five" came out in 1969, near the height of the Vietnam War. It earned its author both the attention of elite critics and a mass readership. Vietnam had a great deal to do with this, according to Peter Reed, emeritus professor of English at the University of Minnesota, who has made Vonnegut something of a specialty.

"There was a whole generation hungry for this sort of thing," Reed says. "They liked the irreverence -- and the bluntness."

No one disputed that the Nazis were the embodiment of evil. But the Vietnam context made it possible to bring up bad things our side had done.

Martians at the Waldorf

He's still bringing them up. He can't seem to stop -- or at least he won't.

Right now, he's sitting on the edge of that sofa, holding that cigarette and talking about his war buddy, Bernie O'Hare -- "In the infantry, you marry one guy and you look out after each other" -- who was with him at Dresden. They sailed home together on a ship that docked at Newport News, Va.

"As we were parting there, I said: 'Okay, what did you learn?' And he said: 'I'll never believe my government again.' He was ashamed that we were just showering explosives on people ."

Dresden shows up again in "A Man Without a Country." Why not? It still makes Vonnegut unhappy, 60 years after the fact.

Lots of things have happened to him, of course, in the years since "Slaughterhouse-Five" was published.

He's gotten divorced, remarried and almost divorced again. He's bought his New York townhouse and he's burned part of it down, a few years back, by falling asleep while smoking.

He's taught writing at Harvard, where an old newspaper photograph shows a smiling Prof. Vonnegut diagramming the plot of "Cinderella" on the blackboard. He's seen his money worries vanish.

He's seen "Slaughterhouse-Five" get the Hollywood treatment. He's seen it selected No. 18 on the Modern Library's list of the hundred best English-language novels of the 20th century and "Cat's Cradle" anointed by Yale critic Harold Bloom as part of the "Western canon." And he's written more than a dozen additional books, among them "Breakfast of Champions," "Slapstick," "Galapagos," "Hocus Pocus" and "Timequake," which have been published -- this is putting it gently -- to diminishing critical acclaim.

He's got his theories about this. "A lot of critics are fastidious about me because my provenance is so scruffy," he says. "No, I'm not a Knopf author. No, I wasn't in the New Yorker. And on and on . . ."

Others have theories, too.

He's been repeating himself, some say, and appears not to put much effort into his writing. This isn't true, argues Reed, who notes that Vonnegut "rewrites and rewrites" and suggests that the appearance of "postmodern randomness" in his work conceals a careful deployment of thematic images.

He's got an adolescent streak, say others. Fair enough: Reed says that Vonnegut himself has described his stance toward authority as being like that of a 13-year-old who keeps asking, "Well, why? Well, why? Well, why?"

But never mind. He's done with novels anyway. He had been trying to write one -- about a stand-up comedian at the end of the world -- but all he's got to show for it is a joke or two.

He tells one.

Seems the Martians have landed in Manhattan and checked into the Waldorf. That's the bad news. "The good news is, they only eat homeless people . . . and they pee gasoline." He recites from memory a poem he wrote:

"The Crucified Planet Earth," it begins, "should it find a voice and a sense of irony, / might now well say / of our abuse of it, / 'Forgive them, Father. / They know not what they do.' / The irony would be / that we know what / we are doing . . ."

He talks about what's wrong with Washington. ("We have government run entirely by people who are beholden to rich people or who are themselves rich.") He talks about politicians who are indifferent to the consequences of their acts. ("Bap, bap, we do this, we do that -- and they don't care what happens next.")

"I think human beings are awful animals," he says. "Let's pack it in. Let's stop reproducing. We're wrecking the place."

"There's an optimist lurking inside Kurt Vonnegut," his publisher, Simon, claims -- but it seems a debatable point.

"Please notice when you're happy," Vonnegut has been advising audiences for years. It's a cheery notion that carries an unstated implication: Unhappiness will recapture your attention soon enough.

Today's visit is over. Vonnegut gets up, walks stiffly to the door. Tomorrow, he's leaving town for a two-week vacation.

Last question: Where's he going?

Once more he shifts time into reverse.

"Back when I was 9 years old in Indianapolis," he says.