So He Goes, Not Quietly

The closest he got to a truly happy moment, in an interview that ran for well over an hour, came during a conversation about the firebombing of Dresden in 1945.

He'd been a prisoner of war in Dresden, had huddled in an underground meat locker to survive. Tens of thousands of civilians had died. "Fwuuuh," he said, evoking the whooshing sound made by the Allied incendiary bombs that turned that ancient city first into a fireball, then into a morgue.

Vonnegut incorporated his Dresden experience in "Slaughterhouse-Five," the 1969 novel that made him famous and captivated the Vietnam generation. In it, along with scenes of a Dresden survivor having sex with a Hollywood starlet on the planet Tralfamadore, there is a passage in which the bombing is described as if it were unfolding in reverse. Planes fly backwards over the flaming city. They suck bombs back inside bomb bays as the flames die out. The planes fly back to England; the bombs go back to bomb factories; and in the end, all the airmen become school kids again.

"Oh, I've made a recording of that," Vonnegut said when this was mentioned. All elbows and creaky angles, he bent down, retrieved a CD and hit the "play" button. Out came his Dresden-in-reverse passage, set to jazz.

He sat back on the sofa and grinned. You could almost say he looked exhilarated.

In any case, he finally lit his cigarette.

When the war was over, Vonnegut had trouble getting out of the army. "They found out I could type and they sent me out to Fort Riley and I was typing other people's discharges," he said, laughing at the memory. "And my feeling was then: Please, can't I go home? I've done everything I was supposed to do."

He stopped laughing.

"So that's how I feel now," he said. "Please, I've done everything, you know? Raised kids and all that, worked, tried to do good work -- can't I go home now? And I think about where home is. It's Indianapolis when I was 9 years old, and you can't go back there. But I had a mother and a father, a big sister, a big brother, a dog, a cat -- and yeah, that's where I'd like to go."

If there is a God and if He or She is kind -- which, it must be said, the author of "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" would have been the first to doubt -- that is exactly where Kurt Vonnegut is right now.