War and peace

It’s impossible to read Kurt Vonnegut’s “Armageddon in Retrospect” without mixed emotions. On the one hand, there’s the unexpected pleasure of encountering Vonnegut anew, a year after his death last April at age 84. On the other, the book can’t help but remind us that he is no longer available in any living way.

This is clear from almost every piece here, for although “Armageddon in Retrospect” includes one “new” effort -- the author’s final speech, which his son Mark gave for him -- it’s largely a grab bag of unpublished fiction from the 1940s and 1950s, when Vonnegut was developing his voice. That’s fine for what it is, but “Armageddon in Retrospect” seeks to frame itself as something more cohesive, less a collection of early writings than a series of meditations arranged around the themes of war and peace.

Partly, this is an attempt to follow Vonnegut’s last book, “A Man Without a Country,” which was a surprise bestseller in 2005. I say “surprise” because prior to its appearance he hadn’t published much in nearly a decade, even announcing his retirement after the release of his novel “Timequake” in 1997. “A Man Without a Country” was also a grab bag, stitched out of speeches and bits of commentary, but it had the advantage of speaking to its moment, to a nation that, Vonnegut argued, had lost its way.

“Armageddon in Retrospect” shares some of this perspective, but it’s interesting mostly as a historical curiosity. One of its most vivid pieces, in fact, is a three-page typed letter -- reproduced in facsimile -- that Vonnegut sent his family from a prisoner-of-war repatriation camp in France in May 1945. Here, we see the writer in protean form, commenting on material he would later explore in his fiction: the absurdity of war, his experience surviving the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, the futility of looking for meaning in a world gone mad. “When General Patton took Leipzig,” he writes, “we were evacuated on foot to Hellexisdorf on the Saxony-Czechoslovakian border. There we remained until the war ended. Our guards deserted us. On that happy day the Russians were intent on mopping up isolated outlaw resistance in our sector. Their planes (P-39’s) strafed and bombed us, killing fourteen, but not me.”

This “but not me” is vintage Vonnegut, a sigh of resignation not unlike “Poo-tee-weet” or “So it goes.” There are other such whispers throughout the collection: “Wailing Shall Be in All Streets,” a slice of memoir about Dresden, or “Brighten Up” and “Just You and Me, Sammy,” which also spring from Vonnegut’s time as a POW, highlighting the fine line between collaboration and survival, between what we do to preserve our bodies and what we do to preserve our souls.

But while each of these pieces has its charms, they’re ultimately little more than first impressions, initial forays into the territory Vonnegut would revisit to such searing effect in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” That’s a process he evokes in “A Man Without a Country,” when he describes an encounter with a friend’s wife that forced him to see things in a different light. “In 1968,” Vonnegut noted, “the year I wrote ‘Slaughterhouse-Five,’ I finally became grown up enough to write about the bombing of Dresden. . . . Why had it taken me twenty-three years to write about what I had experienced in Dresden? We all came home with stories, and we all wanted to cash in, one way or another. And what Mary O’Hare was saying, in effect, was, ‘Why don’t you tell the truth for a change?’ ”

Why don’t you tell the truth for a change? That’s it exactly, the inspiration that turned Vonnegut’s work into literature. This, of course, happened well before “Slaughterhouse-Five” -- with “Mother Night” or “Cat’s Cradle,” although I have a deep affection for “The Sirens of Titan,” in which he introduced the planet of Tralfamadore. Either way, what such a statement tells us is that in his earliest writings he was not yet distilling the war’s essence, as if the experience was still too raw.

To some extent, this may have to do with the short story, a form Vonnegut never took as seriously as the novel. “You can be fairly truthful about life if you have a little length,” he suggested in a 1997 interview, “but a short story has to be awfully cute -- it has to be a con.” That’s true, in its way, of the work here: “The Unicorn Trap,” a fantasy of post-Norman-invasion England, in which a 10-year-old takes on Robert the Horrible, a friend of William the Conqueror; or “The Commandant’s Desk,” in which a Czech cabinetmaker lays the same snare for a succession of occupiers -- German, Russian and American. These pieces are amusing, clever even, but if they’re memorable at all, it’s in the glimpse they offer of Vonnegut in the process of becoming the author we would later know.

Here we have the issue with posthumous publication, since what do writers leave but paper trails? Vonnegut, it turns out, left more than his share. His papers, at Indiana University’s Lilly Library, include more than 100 unpublished stories, as well as letters, scripts and other miscellany. That’s enough for dozens of volumes, but how much, really, do we want to read? Maybe it’s better to leave it all in the file boxes. “Where do I get my ideas from?” Vonnegut asks here. “I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.”

Yes, but in “Armageddon in Retrospect,” that disgust has not yet found its form.

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david.ulin@latimes.com