Kurt Vonnegut remembered.

• Position: It Seems to Me - In memoriam

Kurt Vonnegut, who died recently at eighty-four, liked to quote Eugene Debs, when Debs addressed the judge who sentenced him to ten years in prison for protesting U.S. entrance into the First World War: "Your honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on Earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Kurt Vonnegut and I became friends about ten years ago, when he phoned me, out of the blue. He had a rich telephone voice: "Hello, this is Kurt Vonnegut. That's a damn good piece you wrote on Machiavelli and U.S. foreign policy." After that, we would talk on the phone from time to time. We had things in common: the Second World War, bombing, books, the future of the world. He was gloomy about the ongoing destruction of the planet, yet had faith in the capacity of ordinary human beings to resist stupidity.

When he phoned, there was always something specific on his mind, an event in the news, or, one time, the death of his friend Joseph Heller, whom Kurt affectionately called "a holy clown." Heller's novel Catch-22 has the wild humor and dead seriousness of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, both bitter-comic commentaries on war, uninhibited by all the romanticization of the "Good War."

Slaughterhouse-Five came out of Vonnegut's experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden, trapped--fortunately--in a meat locker underground as U.S. and British planes turned the city into an inferno, causing the deaths of perhaps 100,000 people.

In the book, his alter ego is an innocent young American named Billy Pilgrim, who emerges from the meat locker the day after the bombing and sees a sky black with smoke. "The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead. So it goes."

Kurt Vonnegut had a profound hatred of war. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were never far from his mind. He could not abide the slaughter in Vietnam, or the hypocrisy of the United States government holding on to thousands of nuclear weapons while creating hysteria about any other nation that might develop one.

When the newspapers were full of alarms about Iran possibly developing a nuclear bomb, Kurt sent me a copy of a very short letter he wrote to The New York...