Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [110]
Until that day, if it comes, I suspect that fellow writers will keep his reputation alive. We are especially shocked and enlightened by what he says. We are filled with a giddy sort of gratitude.
I have heard it suggested that Céline may live on far longer in English than in French—for technical rather than political reasons. The argument goes that Céline’s gutter French was so specialized as to time and place that gobs of it are incomprehensible to Frenchmen.
Those who have translated it into English, however, have used more durable crudities, which will be clear enough still, God willing, in one hundred years.
As I say, this is not my idea. I heard it somewhere. I pass it on. If it turns out to be true, it seems that simple literary justice would eventually require that his translators be acknowledged as coauthors of Céline. Translation is that important.
There is at least one significant document by Céline that is out of print in English. And it would be punctilious of me to say that it was written not by Céline but by Dr. Destouches. It is the doctoral thesis of Destouches, “The Life and Work of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis,” for which he received a bronze medal in 1924. It was written at a time when theses in medicine could still be beautifully literary, since ignorance about diseases and the human body still required that medicine be an art.
And young Destouches, in a spirit of hero-worship, told of the futile and scientifically sound battle fought by a Hungarian physician named Semmelweis (1818-1865) to prevent the spread of childbed fever in Viennese hospital maternity wards. The victims were poor people, since persons with decent sorts of dwellings much preferred to give birth at home.
The mortality rate in some wards was sensational—25 percent or more. Semmelweis reasoned that the mothers were being killed by medical students, who often came into the wards immediately after having dissected corpses riddled with disease. He was able to prove this by having the students wash their hands in soap and water before touching a woman in labor. The mortality rate dropped.
The jealousy and ignorance of Semmelweis’s colleagues, however, caused him to be fired, and the mortality rate went up again.
The lesson Destouches learned from this true story, in my opinion, if he hadn’t already learned it from an impoverished childhood and a stretch in the army, is that vanity rather than wisdom determines how the world is run.
17
A NAZI CITY MOURNED AT SOME PROFIT
I HAVE NOT ONLY PRAISED a Nazi sympathizer, I have expressed my sorrow at the death of a Nazi city as well. I am speaking of Dresden, of course. And I have to say again that I was an American soldier, a prisoner of war there, when the city was simultaneously burned up and down. I was not on the German side.
I mourned the destruction of Dresden because it was only temporarily a Nazi city, and had for centuries been an art treasure belonging to earthlings everywhere. It could have been that again. The same was true of Angkor Wat, which military scientists have demolished more recently for some imagined gain.
Being present at the destruction of Dresden has affected my character far less than the death of my mother, the adopting of my sister’s children, the sudden realization that those children and my own were no longer dependent on me, the breakup of my marriage, and on and on. And I have not been encouraged to go on mourning Dresden—even by Germans. Even Germans seem to think it is not worth mentioning anymore.
So I myself thought no more about Dresden until I was asked by Franklin Library in 1976 to write a special introduction to a deluxe edition they were bringing out of my novel, Slaughterhouse-Five.
I said this:
This is a book about something that happened to me a long time ago (1944)—and the book itself is now something else that happened to me a long time ago (1969).