Kurt Vonnegut's America

Jerome Klinkowitz

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781570039553, 9781570038266
• eBook ISBN: 9781611171150
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

A definitive look at the symbiotic relationship between Vonnegut's writing and American culture.

Kurt Vonnegut's death in 2007 marked the passing of a major force in American life and letters. Jerome Klinkowitz, one of the earliest and most prolific authorities on Vonnegut, examines the long dialogue between the author and American culture—a conversation that produced fourteen novels and hundreds of short stories and essays. Kurt Vonnegut's America integrates discussion of the fiction, essays, and lectures with personal exchanges and biographical sketches to map the complex symbiotic relationship between Vonnegut's work and the cultural context from which it emerged—and which it in turn helped shape.

Following an introduction characterizing Vonnegut as Klinkowitz came to know him over the course of their friendship, this study charts the impact of Vonnegut on American society and of that society on Vonnegut for more than a half-century to illustrate how each informed the other. Among his artistic peers, Vonnegut was uniquely gifted at anticipating and articulating the changing course of American culture. Kurt Vonnegut's America shows us that Vonnegut achieved greatness by passing his own test—opening the eyes of his audience to help them better understand their roles and possibilities in the common culture they both shared and crafted.

1

VONNEGUT'S
1950s

Human Structures

Kurt Vonnegut's debut as a writer of fiction came on February 11, 1950, when Collier's, one of the great family oriented weekly magazines of the era, published his story “Report on the Barnhouse Effect.” But as the key date in his literary career, October 28, 1949, looms more important. For it was then, with the acceptance from Collier's in hand and with assurances from the editors there that two more were likely to be taken as well, that the new author wrote his father—not just with the news, but with a solemn promise to continue in this field, no matter what.

On that day in 1949, Kurt was just two weeks short of his twenty-seventh birthday, a husband and father himself, and established in a career that promised to take him smoothly into the postwar world of corporate success. As a publicist for General Electric's Research Laboratory, where “Progress Is Our Most Important Product,” he was on the cutting edge of his culture, not just watching new technologies be devised but promoting their embrace by the culture at large. His own brother, Bernard, was one of the lab's star scientists. But even at twenty-seven, Kurt was still the baby of the family, and, at this important juncture of his life, he thought it important to check in back home.

Home was Indianapolis, Indiana, where he'd been raised at the core of a large extended family. But in these postwar years it was becoming dispersed. His father's architectural practice had been ruined by the Great Depression, his mother had become so disturbed by the changing nature of the times that she took her own life, his older brother and sister were out east (like him), and the once-prosperous hardware business his uncles had run was on its way to being run out of business by foreign competition. For a solid midwesterner who'd loved the sense of family, community, and civic order Indianapolis had provided for his childhood, his move to GE in 1948 had opened up a brave new world indeed. In England, where even more startling social, political, economic, and cultural transitions were taking place, George Orwell had reversed that year's last two digits for his own novelist view of how things were changing, 1984. Working for GE in Schenectady, New York, Kurt Vonnegut found his own vision was a troublesome one as well—troublesome, that is, if he stayed within the corporate structure that promised to dominate the new era.

He desperately wanted out, and, with the acceptance from Collier's, it looked like he had found a way. That's why he was writing his father: not just to merit the old man's faith, but to make a promise to himself, bonded with someone who'd helped create him.

He'd just sold his first story, but he had done something more than just that. At noon yesterday, on lunch break from GE, he had put the entire payment for it in the bank. He'd do the same for the next two likely to be accepted, and he hoped to do the same for the two after that. This would give him a savings account equal to a year's salary at the publicity office, where he'd not been comfortable at all. But there was more news, and an even more serious promise.

Made in 1949, in a letter reproduced in the author's autobiographical collage published in 1991, Fates Worse Than Death, it involves the nature of the rest of his life. With the income from five short stories banked to live on, “I will then quit this goddamn nightmare job, and never take another one so long as I live, so help me God.” With a paragraph break for emphasis, he says what every parent hopes for his or her child: “I'm happier than I've been for a good many years” (26).

Kurt has this letter on hand in 1991 because his father not only saved it, but enshrined it as workroom plaque, varnishing the page to a board decorated with a quotation from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice: “An oath, an oath, I have an oath in Heaven: / Shall I lay perjury on my soul?” Since his father's death in 1957, it had hung in his own workroom, a space dedicated to writing fiction and personal essays. This, not Orwell's world of 1984, would be Kurt Vonnegut's.

Some of that work involved writing his own novel, Player Piano (1952), to accompany George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World as classics of dystopian fiction. In 1959 he published an even more apparently futuristic novel, The Sirens of Titan. But both books are really about the present, about Kurt Vonnegut's 1950s, a decade he was doing all he could to prevent the development of the nightmare world Orwell and Huxley had foreseen. They are best read in the company of the short stories he'd continued doing for Collier's and soon for its senior competitor, the Saturday Evening Post. Five a year for these venues would equal the annual salary he'd been earning in the corporate world, but now he was doing it on his own terms, drafting works that suggested how progress for its own sake wasn't a very good cultural product at all. As a husband of a sensitive, conscientious woman and as the parent of no less than six children, living in the middle-class community of West Barnstable, Massachusetts, he damn well knew it! His fiction was now in close touch with neither utopians nor dystopians, technocrats nor idealistic dreamers. Instead it spoke the language, fed the interests, and answered the concerns of people like himself.

Kurt Vonnegut stayed a member of that economic class for the next twenty years, averaging no more than five stories per year, which gave him (as he liked to recall) the salary a high-school cafeteria manager could earn. (Until 1969, when Slaughterhouse-Five became his first best seller, the novels rarely earned more than their small advances, taken as stopgaps when no stories were being accepted.) How close were these stories to his daily life? Although his own autobiographical collages either focus on the present or gravitate to his experiences in youth, Kurt's wife and son each wrote memoirs of that period. In 1987, Jane, recently remarried as Jane Vonnegut Yarmolinsky, had her heirs publish Angels without Wings: A Courageous Family's Courageous Triumph over Tragedy (she herself had died of cancer in December the previous year). The tragedy involved the deaths of Kurt's sister and brother-in-law within days of each other, while the triumph was achieved by Kurt and Jane's immediate adoption of their three orphaned nephews. But both terms also reverberate among the details of living on the meager earnings of an unfamous author and coping with the pressures of his creative life. Wouldn't suffering all that drive someone crazy? It did have an impact on the eldest, Mark, Kurt and Jane's first child, who later on as a young man aged just twenty-two underwent a full-fledged schizophrenic breakdown. He not only recovered, but wrote a book about it published in 1975, The Eden Express. With ample material about his childhood, it serves as another key account of Kurt Vonnegut's America taking shape in the 1950s.

Two other texts frame the author's 1950s: his preface to Welcome to the Monkey House (1968) and his introduction to Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (1999). The first volume, published before he was famous but with the support of an initial three-book contract from Seymour Lawrence that within a year would take him there, comprises Kurt's selection of what he then considered his best short fiction. The second, published toward the end of his career, adds the culls—material that in 1974 I'd thought good enough to be included in Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (Kurt demurred and had to be argued into reprinting even his essays) and that a quarter century later Peter Reed, having written an excellent study of all Vonnegut's short fiction, persuaded him should be saved, albeit as “uncollected.”

As scholars would say, the canon for Kurt Vonnegut's 1950s is complete: not just the published stories from that period and the two novels, but commentary on their lives at the time from all parts of the family, including father, mother, and son. Having this context clarified is essential, even in terms of literary art, as during these years the author was generating his material from who he was and where he lived.

“Where I Live” is the first piece in Welcome to the Monkey House, technically an essay but written in the new manner of personal journalism that used the techniques of fiction—character, imagery, development by dialogue, and the like—in order to present a more personally credible, imaginatively rich picture of the subject. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, a cadre of self-styled “New Journalists” had appeared, including Dan Wakefield, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and others. Vonnegut's essay, first published as “You've Never Been to Barnstable?” in a slick monthly called Venture—Traveler's World, is indicative of the new forms and markets he'd sought after his short story outlets, Collier's and the Post, began cutting back on fiction before eventually shutting down completely. But its manner is one with his stories, and, as a portrait of his life in the 1950s, while making a middle-class living among other tradespeople and professionals in this thoroughly conventional Massachusetts community, it sets the tone for his older Post and Collier's stories that follow. How it squares with his own prefatory accounts and memoirs from his wife and son seals the case that the 1950s being presented in Welcome to the Monkey House and Bagombo Snuff Box were Kurt Vonnegut's own.

Its format is a traditional one, a device favored by Mark Twain and other nineteenth-century writers: a stranger comes to town and has to be educated to the community's ways. This is precisely what Kurt, Jane, and son Mark experienced in 1951 after pulling up stakes in Schenectady and moving to the cape. Provincetown, any writer's first choice, had proved too arty for what Vonnegut had in mind for his home life and the type of fiction he wanted to write. In “Where I Live,” the incomer is an encyclopedia salesman, eager to bring the town's library (and its citizenry) up to date. Instead he finds a social group set comfortably in its ways. True, these ways are quaintly idiosyncratic and in some cases downright stupid. Consider the town's fishermen, who for years refused to believe that tuna were any good to eat, instead calling them “horse mackerel” and throwing them back into the bay, chopped up as a warning to other horse mackerel. But the community, unfashionable as it is, has prospered in a way highly valued by the author: there's a role for everyone, from the eccentric yacht-clubbers to the Episcopalian minister who made his special contribution as a church gardener. Set as it is near the root of Cape Cod, West Barnstable is the diametric opposite of Provincetown, and a good place where Kurt could raise a family and write his fiction. Why so? Despite being a gateway to holiday-land, it made a quiet point of existing for itself, not for passersby.

As a coda to his tale, the author adds that the library finally has an up-to-date encyclopedia, but so far there have been no improvements in children's school grades or the level of adult conversation. Apparently those grades and the small talk had been good enough all along.

Right here is the structure of more than half the stories Kurt Vonnegut would write and publish in the 1950s. Individuals, couples (dating or married), families, and communities would be tempted away from their core values. For a time they'd be enthralled by illusions, be it the perfect social personality, sudden wealth, designer lifestyles, or utopian technology. That would be the action's first movement, akin to West Barnstable's exposure to the encyclopedia salesman. Then, in each story's second act (as it were), they'd be disappointed in not getting what the illusions had promised. Sometimes they'd even look weak or stupid, as with the first piece's fishermen who chopped up expensive tuna and tossed them into the water. But don't fear: their simple standards would triumph in the end, proving that their own original ways were best. “Poor Little Rich Town,” “Custom-Made Bride,” “The Foster Portfolio,” “Who Am I This Time?”—again and again Vonnegut would exploit this formula, riffing many variations as a jazz musician might on the familiar pattern of a twelve-bar blues. The permutations were endless, truly infinite, because their structure was based on a fundamental essence of human social behavior.

Kurt knew the formula from life. He'd tried deviating from it in his career as a corporate publicist for the General Electric Research Laboratory. But what he'd seen promised no happiness. Progress for its own sake eroded core values, simple values based on the most central structures of human society. If asked, he could have quoted chapter and verse from the latest findings in anthropology, which he'd spent two years studying on his postwar G.I. Bill benefits at the University of Chicago. During the time he was there (1945–1947), the department's leading scholar, Dr. Robert Redfield, was developing his thesis of the folk society, demonstrating how groups of about two hundred people could not only survive self-sufficiently but do so in a pleasing manner, keeping every one happy because there was a job for each member, a way every person could feel that he or she was of use.

Not surprisingly, a character in Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano, holds a master's degree in anthropology. But he's a Protestant minister as well, indicative of how, for his larger works of the 1950s, the author would seek his own sense of structure in both areas of human activity, the social and the religious. A religion had been the focus of Kurt's own intended master's thesis at Chicago: the Ghost Dance Society of Plains Indians in the 1890s. These Native Americans had used a form of religion to organize their revolt against the encroaching white civilization, and as a student of anthropology Kurt wanted to use them as the variable in his study of what it took to form a revolutionary community (his control group was the world of Cubist painters in early-twentieth-century Paris). And so revolution in art was a matter of Vonnegut's structural interest as well. But taking the issue this far, by comparing primitive and civilized societies, was at the time considered too radical, and so was Kurt's next idea, comparing the plot lines of folktales and modern magazine stories. Both were rejected by his professors. As an aspiring author, Vonnegut learned his lesson well. For what would become his family's bread and butter, the fifty-some stories he'd publish during the 1950s for the great family magazines of the time, he stuck to conservative structures, ones that affirmed well-being of the community for what it was. It would be in his novels Player Piano (written as the decade was beginning) and The Sirens of Titan (done at end of the 1950s) that toyed with the revolutionary aspects, respectively, social and religious, of structure.

If the social climate at General Electric in the late 1940s was anything like the futuristic world portrayed in Player Piano, it's easy to see why Kurt Vonnegut wanted out. There's science and technology aplenty in this novel, but what's important are the human relations, of people trying to make their way among the altered structures of this new-style world. Supposedly, as in all utopias, the changes have been for the better. Here in this new era, following a presumed third world war, all the drudgeries of human labor have been effaced. Ingenious machines do everything, providing a decent standard of living for everyone. No one except the engineers has to work, and their work involves more company politics than intellectual labor. There's the first problem: their work as such is meaningless, with no more substance to it than the abstraction of General Electric's slogan, which presented progress as its own goal. As for the goods provided to the people, they are adequate. But lives themselves are empty: with no real work to do, no one can have a sense of being useful, of being needed for anything. Vonnegut knows people believe that life must have purpose. When it seems not to, they invent it. His persistent hope is that they do it harmlessly, on the level of art and play. The danger is when “purpose” is construed as a God-given absolute, as happens when religions take themselves too seriously. The Sirens of Titan demonstrates just this. But religion is also a force in Player Piano. That's why the revolution's leader is not just an anthropologist but a minister. And what he opposes is the way technology has become its own reason for being, its own justification of life—in other words, its own religion.

This is the structure Kurt Vonnegut's novel hopes to reveal. Supporting it are two classic narrative devices, ones the author often cited as the basics for an infinite number of stories. A stranger comes to town. A man and a woman seek each other and either do or do not find happiness. In Player Piano the stranger is a minor functionary, a simple observer (from the outside) of the action. He's a stranger indeed, the Shah of Bratpuhr, visiting the factory on a State Department tour. His questions sound quaint, phrased as they are in his native language with colorful words such as khabu (where), siki (what), and akka sahn (why). But by shading these terms with an exotic hue, Vonnegut lets them pierce the official smugness that would obscure the true nature of life in this utopia, which the Shah's disarming comments reveal to be much more dystopian than the government and technology experts can admit.

The Shah of Bratpuhr's words sound like nonsense syllables, because they are. But his nonsense clears away the official version of sense in this technocratic society, showing how it has given itself over to a worship of the machines. The government and company spokespersons are speechless, but not the machines. They themselves have plenty to say, such as “Furrazz-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ak! ting! Furr-azz-ow-ow,” “Vaaaaaaa-zuzip! Vaaaaaaa-zuzip!,” and “Aw-grumph! tonka-tonka. Aw-grump! tonka-tonka” (10) and so forth, a virtual musical suite. At a company party, fireworks are set off to similar sounds. On a drill field, a company of soldiers is given commands in a similar panoply of barked half-syllables. It's all mechanical, just like the automatic washer at the home of the man and woman seeking happiness with each other, Dr. Paul Proteus and his wife, Anita. Their washing machine comments on its own work cycle: “Urdle-urdle-urdle,” “Urdle-urdle-ur dull,” and “Znick. Bazz-wap!,” ending with a conclusive “Azzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Froomph!” (96). The couple, trying to make sense of life with a happy marriage, can of course speak, and they do. But most often their conversations end with a mechanical mantra of “I love you, Paul,” and “I love you, too, Anita,” the rote repetition of which means little more than the “urdles” of their automatic washer.

Is there any meaning at all? Were he a simple dystopian, Vonnegut could easily say no. But nihilism is not the American way, certainly not the way of a beleaguered middle class struggling to find its way in the new postwar reality. Consider the longest line in all the Shah of Bratpuhr's dialogue, the most complete statement in this novel from the religious leader of six million people, whose comments have deflated the pretenses put before him. “Puku pala koko, puku ebo koko, nibo aki koko,” he intones. A secret of Eastern wisdom, the key to solving all these problems in the West? No, just a set of instructions to the barber, translated as “a little off the sides, a little off the back, and leave the top alone” (174–75).

A line, when translated, that could be spoken by any Saturday Evening Post character of the time! In The Sirens of Titan, one such person appears, described as such, sporting a tell-tale dab of shaving cream behind his ear, and bearing the name of one of Kurt Vonnegut's recurrent family-magazine characters, bandmaster George M. Helmholtz (86). It's a joke, of course, but not a morbidly meaningless one. Instead the strange new world that at times seems so fearful proves to be utterly familiar, even in the person of the mysterious stranger venturing in.

Does this constitute sentimentalism, akin to what the Post was putting on its covers as paintings by Norman Rockwell? Only if, as when viewing a Rockwell canvas, one stops at the surface. The drawback with great public art is that the public may, if it wishes, leave the work with simply a first-glance impression. That impression will not be wrong but misses the chance for a deeper sense of completion, of resolution. Consider the famous Rockwell depiction of a bad moment...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Vonnegut Released
• Chapter 1 - Vonnegut's 1950s: Human Structures
• Chapter 2 - Vonnegut's 1960s: Apocalypse Redone
• Chapter 3 - Vonnegut's 1970s: A Public Figure
• Chapter 4 - Vonnegut's 1980s: Arts and Crafts
• Chapter 5 - Vonnegut's 1990s: Autobiography and the Novel
• Conclusion: Vonnegut Uncaged
• Bibliography
• Index