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By Gregory Sumner

I can think of no more stirring symbol of man’s humanity to man than a fire engine.

—Kurt Vonnegut

As we reflect on the heartbreaking, inspirational images of first responders this tenth anniversary of 9/11, I think of Kurt Vonnegut, who always held firemen in the highest regard, in his life and in his art. In October 2001 the author joined others from his east-side Manhattan neighborhood at a candlelight vigil in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza to remember those who had died in the Twin Towers from the local firehouse, Engine Company 8, Ladder Company 2, Battalion 8.

That night Vonnegut recalled how men from that unit had saved his life less than two years earlier, when smoke and flames from an errant cigarette filled his Turtle Bay townhouse.  “Whether some who did that for me are dead now I have not dared to ask,” he said, before solemnly reciting the list of names of those since lost—ten in all.  “Chief Tom DeAngelis, dead at fifty. Captain Fred Ill, dead at forty-seven. Firefighter Mike Clarke, dead at twenty-seven, the kid of the bunch….All but two left widows and children.”

Vonnegut’s identification with these civil servants was personal and deep-rooted.  References to their constancy, professionalism and quiet heroics are a theme running throughout his half-century of novels and stories. Firemen symbolized for him the Midwestern ethic of neighborliness and mutual aid he had learned growing up in Indianapolis.  His appreciation for the job they did was confirmed when he was a young adult, by brutal life experience.  His 1965 novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, an especially popular book among the idealistic young of that decade, is built around an alter ego who evangelizes madly about the “band of brothers” who stood guard in firehouses in every city and town across the country. Like the author, Eliot Rosewater is a traumatized combat veteran of World War II.  He can never forget how he had charged with bayonet drawn into a German factory complex and, in the chaos, killed three civilians—“ordinary villagers, engaged in the brave and uncontroversial business of trying to keep a building from combining with oxygen.” Back home Eliot devotes his life to coming to terms with his sense of guilt, to transforming horror into healing, in the name of the dead.  His admiration for firefighters as models of good citizenship makes sense.  “[W]hen the alarm goes off,” Vonnegut writes, they are “almost the only examples of enthusiastic unselfishness to be seen in this land.” 

 

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