134
MAUREEN HOWARD
ulous creatures really
were
American fighting men fresh from the
front. They smiled, and then they laughed. Their terror evaporated.
There was nothing to be afraid of. Here were more crippled human
being, more fools like themselves. Here was light opera.
Or Billy's memory of coming out of a meat locker the day after
Dresden was destroyed:
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.
American fighter planes came
in
under the smoke to see
if
any–
thing was moving. They saw Billy and the rest moving down there.
The planes sprayed them with machine-gun bullets, but the bullets
missed. Then they saw some other people moving down by the river–
side and they shot at them. They hit some of them. So it goes.
The idea was to hasten the end of the war.
i
"So it goes," is the refrain in
Slaughterhouse-Five,
and though it grows
weak with familiarity like the wry "Good Night, Chet" after the last
ironic bit of seven o'clock news, I don't presume that Vonnegut means
to draw a moral blank. The subtitle of the novel is "The Children's
Crusad~'
for he wants to impress upon us a retrospective view of the
follies of war. I hope that James Kunen, participant in the Columbia
riots,
if
he's still reading at all, will discover that there was nothing
haphazard about Dresden. He claims though to have been so committed
to
Lord Jim
when the cops came into the building he was occupying
that he did not jump out the window with one hundred and twenty-seven
students but went right on reading, not bravely but gratuitously. So it
goes.
Leonard Michaels' collection of short stories,
Going Places,
is a re–
markable first book with a strong sense of style. Though the range is
wide, Michaels' mark is on all of his stories from a rather weightless
tale of obsessive jealousy of one college roommate for another ("Finn")
to a brutal prothalamion ("Crossbones") and the fable ("Isaac") steeped
in a yiddish idiom. The distinctive quality of all the stories is an inter–
play of reality and fantasy..Scenes wash out from tangible places (room,
street, subway) to a psychic landscape. Thoughts of hostility and anger
transfer to actuality-not the mere expressed intention "I wanted to
jump out the window," but the jump taken, the wild crash of the emo–
tions executed in a verbal reality. One might say that Michaels uses
metaphor where we are conditioned to simile.
