Kurt Vonnegut in 1972.

Someone has been telling lies about Billy Pilgrim.  

And they’ve been doing it for a very long time, saying the “preposterous” time-tripping hero of Kurt Vonnegut’s semi-autobiographical Slaughterhouse Five is a filthy sex maniac and pottymouth. Or something like that.  

Last month Menomonee Falls (Wis.) High School banned it and 32 other books – some of which are classics on Advanced Placement English lit reading lists – for being too "sexually explicit" for students.   Although I was 16 when I read Slaughterhouse Five and saw the 1972 George Roy Hill film, I was no longer a student (that’s another story). And other than a gorgeous and naked Valerie Perrine in the movie, I don’t recall any sex.

Vietnam was still raging. At 16 I was in an anti-war phase in my reading habits. I read the book and viewed the film as an anti-war story, written by a combat veteran.

Yes, the time-tripping Billy Pilgrim, who has become “unstuck in time,” does find himself naked and on display for the residents of Tralfamadore, with the movie star Montana Wildhack (played by Perrine in the film). The Tralfamadorians hope the two will mate.

Below must be the sexually explicit passage the Menomenee School nutjobs must object to:   “In time, Montana came to love and trust Billy Pilgrim. He did not touch her until she made it clear that she wanted him to. After she had been on Tralfamadore for what would have been an Earthling week, she asked him shyly if he wouldn’t sleep with her. Which he did. It was heavenly.”  

Vonnegut has long been a target of censors. In 1973 a North Dakota high school teacher had his English class read the book, until the school board chair heard about it and ordered all copies of the book be burned in the school furnace.  

Exactly 50 years ago today, November 16, 1973, Vonnegut wrote an amazing letter to the school board chair. It deserves repeating.  

November 16, 1973

Dear Mr. McCarthy:

I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school. Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me.

The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.

I want you to know, too, that my publisher and I have done absolutely nothing to exploit the disgusting news from Drake. We are not clapping each other on the back, crowing about all the books we will sell because of the news. We have declined to go on television, have written no fiery letters to editorial pages, have granted no lengthy interviews. We are angered and sickened and saddened. And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the only copy in your hands. It is a strictly private letter from me to the people of Drake, who have done so much to damage my reputation in the eyes of their children and then in the eyes of the world.

Do you have the courage and ordinary decency to show this letter to the people, or will it, too, be consigned to the fires of your furnace?

I gather from what I read in the papers and hear on television that you imagine me, and some other writers, too, as being sort of ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people. I am in fact a large, strong person, fifty-one years old, who did a lot of farm work as a boy, who is good with tools. I have raised six children, three my own and three adopted. They have all turned out well. Two of them are farmers.

I am a combat infantry veteran from World War II, and hold a Purple Heart. I have earned whatever I own by hard work. I have never been arrested or sued for anything. I am so much trusted with young people and by young people that I have served on the faculties of the University of Iowa, Harvard, and the City College of New York. Every year I receive at least a dozen invitations to be commencement speaker at colleges and high schools. My books are probably more widely used in schools than those of any other living American fiction writer.

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that.

And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.

After I have said all this, I am sure you are still ready to respond, in effect, “Yes, yes— but it still remains our right and our responsibility to decide what books our children are going to be made to read in our community.” This is surely so. But it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that.

I read in the newspaper that your community is mystified by the outcry from all over the country about what you have done. Well, you have discovered that Drake is a part of American civilization, and your fellow Americans can’t stand it that you have behaved in such an uncivilized way. Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them.

If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own. If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the education of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books— books you hadn’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive.

Again: you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real.

Kurt Vonnegut