Kurt Vonnegut delivers the commencement address to the Class of 2004.

It was during a trip to Northampton County, Pa., that Kurt Vonnegut finally figured out how to write about what he had seen as a prisoner of war during the horrific firebombing of the German city of Dresden in World War II.

“I went to see my war buddy, Bernie O’Hare, who didn’t live that far from Lehigh,” Vonnegut, 81, recalls during a recent phone interview.

As the two old friends tried to remember war stories that would make good material for the book Vonnegut was writing, O’Hare’s wife, Mary, grew increasingly agitated. Finally, she blew up. “You were just babies then,” she told them.

“So that told me how to tell the truth,” Vonnegut says. “Of course, soldiers are children. Hell, those are children just fresh out of high school over in Iraq now.”

As a result of that conversation in the mid-1960s, Vonnegut wrote the classic anti-war book, Slaughterhouse Five, published to critical acclaim in 1969. In tribute to Mary O’Hare, to whom the book is dedicated, he added an alternate title: The Children’s Crusade.

For Vonnegut, who delivered the commencement address in May for Lehigh’s Class of 2004, it was a very different book than the one he set out to write.

“I’ve been lucky to see stuff,” he says. “If I hadn’t been [screwed] by the Army and kept a private, I wouldn’t have gotten to see Dresden, before and after it was bombed. So I was present at what they say was the largest massacre in European history. Now, a massacre has to occur instantly, it’s not something slow like Auschwitz.

“I had been a journalist and wanted to be a journalist, so I said, “Hell, you saw this. You’d better report it.” So I finally did. It took me a long time to figure out how to tell the truth about it. As I said in Slaughterhouse Five, I was starting to write a story for Duke Wayne and Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and other tough guys.”

”I was lucky in a lot of ways”

“Lucky” isn’t the word most would choose to describe being a prisoner of war in a city decimated by air attacks, night and day. But it is typical of a writer who The New York Times once called “a laughing prophet of doom.”

Looking back on his experiences in World War II, which include being forced at gunpoint to carry the corpses of German bombing victims from cellars to great funeral pyres, Vonnegut says: “I was lucky in a lot of ways. One was just not being killed. But another was being in a war that made sense. And there aren’t very many of those in history.”

Vonnegut considers the war in Iraq as one that doesn’t make sense. He says of President Bush: “He’s just seen movies, that’s all. He thinks he’s making a movie and nobody really dies.”

Vonnegut, who has worked in science fiction for much of the past half century, sees a similar pattern in the administration’s proposal to send a manned mission to Mars.

“I pay attention to scientists. I like them and hang out with them a lot. My brother was one,” Vonnegut says. “Again, it’s show business. It’s to send people. And instruments are the things to send. They don’t need nearly as much support, as much oxygen, food, water, and all of that. Again, the president wants to entertain. And the way to do that is to put lives at risk.”

However, that doesn’t mean Vonnegut wasn’t impressed by the recent Mars mission.

“I’m really surprised when anything works,” he says, sardonically. “The landing on Mars was really quite something. I didn’t think we were that intelligent.”

Art and music

Vonnegut, who maintains that he has written his last book, has found new outlets for his creativity, including art. He started out drawing in the margins of manuscripts, and now sells screenprints of his paintings on his official Web site.

“It’s a relief to a writer to do something artistic that doesn’t matter,” Vonnegut says. “There’s no downside, no rejection. It’s a most agreeable thing to do. It feels good, and it’s human.”

Asked how writing compares to painting, he says: “It’s very painful, and of course, if you’re making a living that way, you’re desperate.”

Vonnegut also appears on a CD single, Tock Tick by Australian musician Simon Heselev that has gotten airplay on some college radio stations. Heselev, while a student at Boston University’s Berklee School of Music, took a recording of Vonnegut reading a passage from Slaughterhouse Five and added orchestral and electronic music to it.

One of his music professors was so impressed that he passed along a copy of the finished CD to Vonnegut when the author spoke at nearby Tufts University.

“It was quite wonderful,” Vonnegut says. “Heselev had already done it without my knowing it. It was just a school exercise, so he didn’t really need my permission. But it turned out to be a terrific favor.”

Gone Hollywood

Like most successful authors, Vonnegut has seen several of his books adapted for the silver screen, with decidedly mixed results.

Of the 1971 film version of Slaughterhouse Five , directed by George Roy Hill and starring Michael Sacks as Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut modestly says: “Oh, it’s a masterpiece. It’s better than the book.”

Other film versions—including Happy Birthday, Wanda June, Breakfast of Champions , and most notably, Slapstick of Another Kind with Jerry Lewis and Madeline Kahn—have been box-office flops that were critically panned.

Vonnegut is philosophical about Hollywood’s treatment of his work.

“I remain in print, so I’m the guy who writes books and somebody else makes the movies,” he says. “There are people, like (author J.D.) Salinger, for instance, who say they will never have anything to do with movie people again.

“I’m always glad to get the money. I’m the guy who writes books. Very often, a book is out of print so its only representative is the film, where the author might feel misrepresented. I haven’t named them, but a couple of really [bad] movies based on my work have come out, but I don’t care. That isn’t me.”

To read an article on Kurt Vonnegut's commencement address, click here.

--Jack Croft

Updated on Wednesday, August 11, 2004