Banned Books

Talking about Slaughterhouse Five at the NYPL

This week I was invited to join a panel at the New York Public Library with Hugh Ryan, Joshua Garcia, and Siddhartha Deb to share readings from our favorite banned books and to talk about what they mean to us as authors. There was also some gorgeous music by pop singer Krystopher Maison, tying all our readings together. It was such a great night and I felt so lucky to have a chance to speak with them.

Predictably, I wrote far more than I could read at the event, so I delivered a shorter version of what follows, but I wanted to share here the full text of my remarks on the novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., published in 1969 and subject to what one writer at The Atlantic has called a “never-ending crusade” to have it banned. I am also sharing the full text of Vonnegut’s letter to a school board chairman in Drake County, North Dakota here. I don’t think he’d mind.

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My first Vonnegut novel was not Slaughterhouse Five but Cat’s Cradle, which I picked up during a family vacation and immediately loved.

“No wonder kids grow up crazy,” one of the characters laments. “A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's . . ."

"And?"

"No damn cat, and no damn cradle.”

The line returns at a later moment, now in reference to God—"No damn cat, and no damn cradle.”

It was everything my agnostic little teenaged heart had always hoped to find in a book, and I immediately began to read as much Vonnegut as I could get my hands on, the weirder the better.

Soon I was obsessed by Kilgore Trout, Ice-9, the chrono synclastic infundibulum… I wandered the halls of Rumson-Fair Haven Regional High School muttering like a nut about Bokononism and seeking out the other members of my karass.

But I avoided Slaughterhouse Five. I’d been told it was about important, serious stuff like war and soldiers and the real-life firebombing of Dresden, and I wanted no part of that. I fancied myself something of a freethinker back then, which essentially meant that I almost automatically adopted a contrary response to whatever everyone else was telling me. And that year they were telling me that if I was going to read Vonnegut, I should read Slaughterhouse Five. So, I… didn’t.

In my advanced-college-level English class, I had been assigned a hefty novel by Toni Morrison and devastating memoir by Mary Karr—two voices I was lucky to be exposed to at that age, but which at the time I had trouble connecting with. I didn’t understand, yet, the worlds they were writing about. And because everyone in that class was so breathless in their praise of the novels, I was stubbornly quiet, confused, and irritated.

Meanwhile my friends back in Regular English class were reading… Slaughterhouse Five. At our lunch table they all could not stop talking about Tralfamadorians, an alien race of toilet-plunger-shaped aliens who abduct the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, a soldier who had become unstuck in time. My friends took turns eagerly reading aloud from the novel, giddy as they shared every glorious, blasphemous passage.

It was just the kind of unartful, blunt truth-telling that I could not get enough of at that age—passages that seemed to poke right in the eyes of my narrow-minded, holier-than-thou teachers.  In one passage, Pilgrim recounts what he learns from the aliens about religion:

“The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.

But the Gospels actually taught this:

Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. So it goes.

The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn’t look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought […] Oh, boy–they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!

And that thought had a brother: “There are right people to lynch.” Who? People not well connected. So it goes.”

That Morrison, or Karr, were each making this point in their own ways, about how the powerful use God as justification to torment the less powerful, I understood clearly enough. But still I was not eagerly reading their books out loud, breathlessly, at the lunch table, to my friends in Regular English.

But Vonnegut crossed that barrier like it was made of air.

My lunch table friends, generally disliked reading anything, especially a book assigned to them in school were obsessed with Pilgrim’s troopmate Roland Weary who carried a three-edged blade to make wounds that could not heal, and who also made everyone look at a photograph he kept of a woman copulating with a horse. “That’s some sick shit,” my friend B—— sighed, in a mixture of revulsion and grim respect.

As Pilgrim has a total nervous breakdown and puts Weary and the two scouts with them at risk behind enemy lines, Weary manages to save Pilgrim’s life while beating on him constantly.  After tackling him into a ditch so they won’t be spotted, Weary snaps at him,

“‘Saved your life again, you dumb bastard. […] He had been saving Billy’s life for days, cursing him, kicking him, slapping him, making him move. It was absolutely necessary that cruelty be used, because Billy wouldn’t do anything to save himself. Billy wanted to quit. He was cold, hungry, embarrassed, incompetent. He could scarcely distinguish between sleep and wakefulness now, on the third day, found no important differences, either, between walking and standing still. He wished everybody would leave him alone. ‘You guys go on without me,’ he said again and again.”

Weary abuses Pilgrim again and then tells Pilgrim how he and the two scouts have been through a lot together. According Weary they call themselves “The Three Musketeers” as if they are noble do-gooders in a novel that I’m skeptical Roland Weary ever actually read.

As Pilgrim falls apart, feverish and hallucinating, the other two musketeers suggest he and Weary find some Germans and turn themselves in, and then abandon them both.

After the furious Weary beats up on the incoherent Pilgrim, he sits down to wax on for a while about the Musketeers and their “piety and heroism […] their virtue and magnanimity, the imperishable honor they acquired for themselves, and the services they rendered to Christianity.”

Moments later Weary and Pilgrim are captured by German soldiers, who have a dog with them named Princess.

A page later they hear gunshots in the distance, the other two Musketeers being shot as they lay in wait trying to ambush the group.

So it goes.

Weary and Pilgrim end up in a POW camp, where Weary is abruptly killed. Pilgrim, still unstuck in time and mid-breakdown, has been reduced to what he likens to human fluid. He somehow survives and is taken to Dresden, which he’s told is great luck, because it is an “open, undefended city” with no troop concentrations or war machinery at all where they’ll be safe.

Of course, it is about to be obliterated by 722 RAF and 527 Air Force heavy bombers, dropping 3,900 tons of bombs on the city and killing 25,000 people.

By sheer luck Pilgrim and the other prisoners have been kept in a basement shelter that protects them. The devastation he describes as they climb up afterwards is total, the whole population turned to ash, every building and street obliterated, the cratered landscape resembling now only the surface of the moon. In a water tower they find the bodies of schoolgirls that have been boiled alive by the heat.

The cruelty is neither sophisticated nor tactical nor even really motivated by any ideology, the way I thought it was in a war.

Instead, through Pilgrim’s eyes, it is all thoughtless, pointless, stupid, awful. The trauma of it haunts him for the rest of his life—as he returns to America and becomes an Orthodontist gets married, is abducted by aliens and taken to a zoo, and returns to tell the tale. Pilgrim is, eventually, murdered by one of the other surviving Dresden prisoners, a madman who has sworn to get revenge on him for getting Weary killed. Because Pilgrim, having been unstuck in time in the war, has lived this final moment many times before, he does not mind dying at all.

So it goes.

It is, I suppose, a book which is every bit as dark as the serious, important ones I was being assigned. And yet, somehow it novel left me not just smiling but radiating—how, I wondered, could this slim little book possibly do that?

At one point Pilgrim, flashing forward to his future abduction by the Tralfamadorians, who do not experience time linearly, but see everything all at once. At one point he attempts to read one of their books. They explain to him that, even if he could read Tralfamadorian, these books aren’t like ours. They are more like a whole lot of telegrams.

“There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, seen all at once, they produce and image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, and no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of so many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”

It is a poignant description, of course, of the seemingly simple novel that Vonnegut himself has written, where time is all out of joint and the cause and effect are besides the point.

This is the only sort of logic that can exist in a brutal war, he seems to be saying to us. This can also still be beautiful because it is what being alive and dying really is, seen in some other way.

Towards the end of the novel, Vonnegut reflects on this more. “If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still—if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I’m grateful that so many of those moments are nice.”

I loved it.

Slaughterhouse Five was, above all else, constantly surprising. Here was a vision of human cruelty I had not seen coming. A view of the “good guys” in what I had previously imagined was the last noble war that had been fought. And not only was Pilgrim not heroic, not only was Weary foul-mouthed, and foolish… they were, plainly also just kids.

Not much older than me or my classmates.

The alternate title for the novel, according to Vonnegut was, “The Children’s Crusade” and in the opening chapter the narrator recalls telling a woman at a party he is writing a book about his wartime experiences. She responds in disgust.

“You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.”

He swears to her that he won’t, and they become fast friends afterwards.

If, in that Fall of 1999, I had been able to become unstuck in time like Billy Pilgrim, and could peek just two short years into the future, I’d see boys and girls in my class, and at that same lunch table, shipping off to the beginning of a new war in the aftermath of 9/11.

My friend B——, who drove around in such a heap of junk car that when he gave me a lift somewhere I had to sit behind the driver’s seat because it would slide backwards freely whenever he went uphill. My friend M——, she called me “KJ,” and who I’d once consoled in a phone booth where I’d found her weeping after a fight she’d had with her boyfriend.

In just a few years they’d be soldiers, in a war which they’d been told would be both quick and just. In the end it would go on so long that their own children could someday enlist in it too. I struggle to believe it achieved anything of lasting value at all.

Babies, sent to kill other babies. They were foul-mouthed, and foolish, and I loved them dearly. They both read Slaughterhouse Five, and it didn’t stop them from going. At some point early in the novel someone asks the narrator if he is writing an anti-war book, and he replies that one might as well write an “anti-glacier” book, for all the good that would do.

The book didn’t stop the war from starting, nor did it stop my friends from enlisting. I do wonder if they went into it with eyes more opened than they might have otherwise. They both returned safely. I don’t know what they did there or how they feel about what the war became. But I think about it. I wish I knew.

So it goes.

In my office now, I have hung up a copy of the letter that Kurt Vonnegut wrote to Charles McCarthy, the chairman of the school board in Drake County, North Dakota, on November 16, 1973, upon learning that they had decided to not only ban Slaughterhouse Five from the high school there, but to burn the existing copies of the book in the furnace of the school.

Here is what it says:

Dear Mr. McCarthy:

I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school.

Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.

I want you to know, too, that my publisher and I have done absolutely nothing to exploit the disgusting news from Drake. We are not clapping each other on the back, crowing about all the books we will sell because of the news. We have declined to go on television, have written no fiery letters to editorial pages, have granted no lengthy interviews. We are angered and sickened and saddened. And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the only copy in your hands. It is a strictly private letter from me to the people of Drake, who have done so much to damage my reputation in the eyes of their children and then in the eyes of the world. Do you have the courage and ordinary decency to show this letter to the people, or will it, too, be consigned to the fires of your furnace?

I gather from what I read in the papers and hear on television that you imagine me, and some other writers, too, as being sort of ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people. I am in fact a large, strong person, fifty-one years old, who did a lot of farm work as a boy, who is good with tools. I have raised six children, three my own and three adopted. They have all turned out well. Two of them are farmers. I am a combat infantry veteran from World War II, and hold a Purple Heart. I have earned whatever I own by hard work. I have never been arrested or sued for anything. I am so much trusted with young people and by young people that I have served on the faculties of the University of Iowa, Harvard, and the City College of New York. Every year I receive at least a dozen invitations to be commencement speaker at colleges and high schools. My books are probably more widely used in schools than those of any other living American fiction writer.

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.

After I have said all this, I am sure you are still ready to respond, in effect, “Yes, yes— but it still remains our right and our responsibility to decide what books our children are going to be made to read in our community.” This is surely so. But it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that.

I read in the newspaper that your community is mystified by the outcry from all over the country about what you have done. Well, you have discovered that Drake is a part of American civilization, and your fellow Americans can’t stand it that you have behaved in such an uncivilized way. Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.

If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the education of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books— books you hadn’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive.

Again: you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real.

Kurt Vonnegut

I sometimes find myself wondering why people still bother to ban books at all. In 1973, there was no cable news, no TikTok, no Wikipedia, no Reddit. Perhaps back then someone like Charles McCarthy believed, on some level, that he could truly prevent the students at his school from ever encountering words like “blow-job” or “motherfucker” by simply tossing books into the fire.

In any case it certainly seems a ludicrous proposition in today’s day and age. It seems about as foolish to me as writing an anti-glacier book, if I’m being honest.

And yet the bans continue. I doubt highly that even the people banning the books believe it will protect anyone from anything dangerous. I think it is all about what it always has been about—an attempt to eradicate whatever they find offensive from the world. That, it turns out, is a long list of things indeed. (Google “Project 2025 Full Document” sometime if you want to read an 800-page fever-dream about what the Charles McCarthys of today will do, if we let them.)

What would offend them all most, I suspect, about a book like Slaughterhouse Five, if they ever did actually read it, is that the book reminds us that while human beings can be eradicated far too easily, eradicating ideas remains blessedly futile.

Many of us still don’t want our children to know what a grotesque and awful thing it is, to be at war. I’m a parent. I know I guard against my children knowing too much, too soon. I don’t want them to know, yet, that wars, like glaciers, are unavoidable. I hope that when they do find that out, I’ll be able to explain that this doesn’t make the things that happen in them right or just.

As much as I seek deferment, I know I can’t eradicate those things, and that I’ll eventually they’ll know all the things they want to know, because they live in a free society, at least while the McCarthys of our society continue to be challenged by its Vonneguts.

So it goes.

Slaughterhouse Five made me sit up and pay attention to it even as I, stupidly, failed to pay attention to those other very important books. I’d have time, thankfully, to come around to them later on. But I needed Slaughterhouse Five right then. Because with its humor and crudeness and breathtaking directness, Vonnegut’s novel subverted my blockades and changed my young mind.

With its plunger-aliens and time travel, a book like Slaughterhouse Five can cut through to someone as stubborn as I was back then, and plant its message without it feeling like anything has been planted at all. That war is always absurd and ignoble, fought by children of all ages. That cities like Dresden will be burned to the ground for no particular reason at all, and the world will shrug and say “So it goes” again and again and again. What a hard truth to swallow, and yet, miraculously, the novel isn’t nihilistic in sharing this truth, but hopeful. Decent. Courageous.

As Vonnegut said to McCarthy, his book asks us to be kinder and more responsible. To value our own lives and the lives of others more than we do. Each and every person in Slaughterhouse Five is weirdly fascinating, and fully human, and in the end, we can’t help but sit back and reel a little that we’re still able to be that, in the face of all this.

But we are. Still, now.

“I am very real” Vonnegut says, several times in his letter.

Because what is real cannot be banned.

So it goes.