Source of book: I own this
This is one of the cheap trade paperbacks I was given by a legal colleague when he downsized - and that format is perfect to take along on a backpacking trip. Light, small, and you don’t feel bad if you accidentally get it wet or abraded.
This book is a collection of short stories, mostly written in the 1950s. They are all over the place as far as style, from realistic vignettes based on Vonnegut’s experiences, including those as a salesman, to science fiction, to “meet-cute” love stories.
The quality is, as might be expected since Vonnegut wrote them to pay his bills, a bit uneven. Some are pretty boilerplate plots, and some seem forced. But the best ones are truly excellent, so the collection itself, as a whole, is a good read.
Vonnegut himself acknowledged that the stories were not always his finest work. In the brief (and hilarious) preface, he spells it out:
And I realize now that the two main themes of my novels were stated by my siblings: “Here I am cleaning shit off practically everything” and “No pain.” The contents of this book are samples of work I sold in order to finance the writing of the novels. Here one finds the fruits of Free Enterprise.
Because I mostly read this on a backpacking trip, I didn’t write down many notes. I did make some mental notes about the stories that I thought made the most impression on me.
The opening one, “Where I Live,” is a rather fun picture of a small town near Cape Cod, with its slow pace and quirky institutions, as seen through the eyes of a travelling encyclopedia salesman.
Another of the realistic stories, “Who Am I This Time?”, is my favorite of the “meet-cute” genre, and a unique spin on the idea. I particularly like it because it involves a local community theater - regular readers know I am a big fan of local theater and the devoted and passionate work they do on stage.
Harry Nash is that guy, the one truly excellent actor in the troop, the one who gets tabbed to play the hardest parts, because he is so good at them. The problem is, he has zero personality off stage. He is painfully shy, antisocial, and the antithesis of how he is with a script.
The title comes from his signature line, whenever asked to play a new part. Into this world comes the new telephone clerk, recently arrived to train people in using the automatic systems. Helene Shaw has never put down roots, and, while beautiful, seems devoid of personality. Even when reading lines.
But, under the spell of Harry, she discovers how to act, responding to his every nuance, and bringing down the house.
The problem is, when the lights go off at the end of the show, Harry disappears, and Helene is never able to actually talk with him.
She finds a creative solution, however: she brings scripts with her, and when the two of them are free, she insists he read passages with her. And thus begins a courtship. She provides him with the necessary romantic lines from the scripts, and she responds. It’s a match…a peculiar one…but it works.
The title story, “Welcome to the Monkey House,” is another one that fascinated me. This one is science fiction, imagining a future world where overpopulation is a huge problem. Rather than tackling this in a way that balanced human needs with the greater problem, humans have (as we too often do) picked a truly horrid approach.
One prong is to encourage suicide, through “ethical suicide” centers run by attractive virgin women. The other is to mandate the use of so-called “ethical birth control.”
How does that work, and what makes it “ethical”?
The pills were ethical because they didn’t interfere with a person’s ability to reproduce, which would have been unnatural and immoral. All the pills did was take every bit of pleasure out of sex.
As we find out, the pill was created by a man who was horrified during a zoo visit to see the monkeys doing sex things in plain view. By creating the pill, monkeys could be made “family-friendly.”
The people who understood science said people had to quit reproducing so much, and the people who understood morals said society would collapse if people used sex for nothing but pleasure.
Hey, know any of those people? I do. That is, unfortunately, the lingering hangover of Augustine’s mommy and daddy issues, and the (usually) unspoken underlying basis for all kinds of sexual puritanism. There is deep suspicion about people having sex for pleasure alone - particularly women.
The setup for the story is pretty good then, as is the idea of the “Poet” - an escaped convict - targeting the suicide women for kidnapping and eventual recruitment to his side.
What is not so good is that he first rapes them, thus spoiling their eligibility for their prior job. And also, as the Poet explains, for much of history, most women had a similar and similarly unpleasant experience on their wedding night, which is not exactly wrong. So, a flawed story in that way, but still interesting.
At the end, he leaves the women deflowered and without their “ethical birth control,” but with old-fashioned contraceptives (from our own time), and the cryptic encouragement to use it stating “Welcome to the monkey house.”
There is one more line in the story that I think sums up how I feel about all the sexual baggage I was raised with as an evangelical.
“If you go back through history, you’ll find that the people who have been most eager to rule, to make the laws, to enforce the laws and to tell everybody exactly how God Almighty wants things here on earth - those people have forgiven themselves and their friends for anything and everything. But they have been absolutely disgusted and terrified by the natural sexuality of common men and women.”
Another story I liked was “The Foster Portfolio.” It is about a man who inherits significant wealth from his grandfather, but doesn’t tell his wife. He wants to continue to keep living their modest, hardworking life. But he also has a secret that he can’t tell her.
His “second job” isn’t waiting tables, as he tells her, but playing piano in a jazz club. He can’t confess this, because it is exactly what his dissipated deadbeat dad did, and he can’t have her think he is like his dad.
Whatever one thinks of the morality of his actions, it is hard to begrudge him this one guilty pleasure, that he knows his wife will take away from him if she knew.
I’ll also briefly mention “New Dictionary,” which isn’t really a story, but more a brief musing on language and what becomes “official.”
“Next Door” is a bit of a horror story, where parents leave their child behind to go to a movie they deem “inappropriate” for his age, only for him to be witness to an attempted murder by his next door neighbor’s mistress.
“The Hyannis Port Story” is a political tale, about an “old money” man living next to President Kennedy. Who has a giant illuminated sign for Barry Goldwater that he trolls his neighbor for. But everything goes to hell when his son starts dating a Kennedy cousin.
I thought “The Barnhouse Effect” was a most intriguing science fiction story. It is about a professor who manages to learn a form of telekinesis, and is then recruited by the military. Instead of cooperating, he goes into hiding and uses his powers to destroy all of the world’s armaments, to the fury of politicians and generals everywhere. It’s quite imaginative, and certainly fits with Vonnegut’s pacifist stance.
Another unique SciFi story is “The Euphio Question.” What if a device was invented that made people euphoric? Would it be ethical to sell it? And would it be ethical to use it to make obscene profits? Good questions raised in this one for sure.
After I got back and finished the book, I ended up jotting down a few things from another philosophic SciFi story, “Unready to Wear.” In it, significant numbers of humans have learned to essentially separate their souls from their bodies, living mostly without them, but then borrowing unused bodies from a warehouse when they want to do human things. Meanwhile, the humans who have not figured out how to do this have created a totalitarian state hellbent on finally catching and exterminating the “amphibians” who do not need bodies.
Some of the lines from this story are quite interesting.
Usually, the enemy is talking about old-style reproduction, which is the clumsiest, most comical, most inconvenient thing anyone could imagine, compared with what the amphibians have in that line. If they aren’t talking about that, then they’re talking about food, the gobs of chemicals they have to stuff into their bodies. Or they’ll talk about fear, which we used to call politics - job politics, social politics, government politics.
And:
I guess there is a war on between them and us. But we never do anything about holding up our side of the war, except to keep our parade sites and our storage centers secret, and to get out of our bodies every time there’s an air raid, or the enemy fires a rocket, or something.
That just makes the enemy madder, because the raids and rockets and all cost plenty, and blowing up things nobody needs anyway is a poor return on the taxpayer’s money.
I am kind of reminded of Trump and Kegsbreath’s illegal war against Iran, which mostly has cost us a crap-ton of money without accomplishing anything useful whatsoever.
Ultimately, the point Vonnegut makes is that this end to the need for bodies has equaled the end of fear. And we don’t even need to get out of our bodies for that, really.
“Now I understand you poor fish. You couldn’t get along without fear. That’s the only skill you’ve got - how to scare yourselves and other people into doing things. That’s the only fun you’ve got, watching people jump for fear of what you’ll do to their bodies or take away from their bodies.”
I want to mention “The Kid Nobody Could Handle,” even though overall it is one of the weaker stories. It has a line in it, though, and a general idea of supporting teachers and teachers of the arts in particular. So I will forgive it some weak plotting for that.
The kind fat man was George M. Helmholtz, a man of forty, head of the music department at Lincoln High School, and director of the band. Life had treated him well. Each year he dreamed the same big dream. He dreamed of leading as fine a band as there was on the face of the earth. And each year the dream came true.
And how did his dreams come true?
“Think of it this way,” said Helmholtz. “Our aim is to make the world more beautiful than it was when we came into it. It can be done. You can do it.”
Honestly, that’s actually my core goal in life. It is what drives my passion for music, my love of books, my joy in the wilderness, my love for my family, my desire to see my students learn, and even what I do in my legal practice. I don’t always succeed, but I try to make the world more beautiful.
Kurt Vonnegut certainly left the world a more beautiful place, and even in his “hack” work, brought a thoughtfulness to everything he wrote.
This is a good collection, and worth checking out, even if Vonnegut wrote it to pay for his longer, better known works.
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Prior Vonnegut posts:
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