Sample Book Reviews
Our Grand Old Man
Jerome Klinkowitz
Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction
Kurt Vonnegut
Delacorte Press
http://www.randomhouse.com
272 pages; hardcover, $27.00
Look at the Birdie continues the publication plan undertaken following Kurt Vonnegut’s death in 2007 by Donald C. Farber (his attorney and long-time agent) and Mark Vonnegut (his son, a Boston pediatrician and executor of the estate). What a lawyer and a doctor do with a literary archive can be quite different from how an academic scholar would handle such material, and in Kurt’s case, the matter is a sensitive one.
He was reluctant to have old magazine pieces collected. Getting him to permit publication of Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons in 1974 was extremely difficult, with the case won only at the cost of dropping the short stories in favor of just his essays. Twenty-five years later, Peter Reed convinced him to release these previously published but never collected stories as Bagombo Snuff Box. Kurt had worried that they’d been considered unfit three times before, for Canary in a Cat House (1961) and Welcome to the Monkey House (1968) as well as for the Wampeters volume. To justify their reappearance, he wrote an introduction explaining why the pieces were first written and a coda indicating the method of their composition—as if they were etudes rather than major parts of his canon. Factor in that he was old and tired and despairing of fulfilling his two-book contract with Putnam’s, and you have a pretty good idea of why he let the book appear.
Because the second book on this contract had been paid for but not delivered by the time of his death, Farber and Kurt’s son the doctor (as the old man had been fond of calling him) assembled Armageddon in Retrospect (2008), a volume of stories and an essay from the early 1950s that had never been published at all, accompanied by a letter the twenty-two-year-old Vonnegut had written his family after being repatriated from a prisoner-of-war camp in World War II Germany. Here the rejection factor was exponential: they had been deemed unworthy of publication by magazine editors in some cases, but Kurt’s agents in others, and in a few instances by himself. It was easy to see why. The stories were much weaker than what had made it to Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post (and to Welcome to the Monkey House after that), with their narrative innovations quite limited while sentimentality was asked to carry the day. Kurt’s better work had pushed the format of family weeklies in cleverly surprising ways. The pieces in Armageddon actually retreated a bit into these journals’ more tired conventions, a timidity prompted by the risk Kurt was taking with their theme, which was anti-war. With World War II, a fresh memory, and the Korean conflict at hand, this was not a popular sentiment.
"Vonnegut restricts himself in Look at the Birdie to exploiting social and domestic themes familiar to his family magazine clientele."
Against this sense of failure stood Kurt’s letter to his family, which unlike the rejected magazine pieces was bright and lively, using the vernacular rhythms that would not fully characterize his work until Slaughterhouse-Five, published in the decidedly anti-war climate of 1969. By then the country was ready for his pacifistic theme, just as Kurt himself felt confident enough to speak personally and directly, as he’d done so many years before but only to his family. Thus, while the doctor and the lawyer could settle the business of a big advance, Vonnegut scholars could find interest in the making of a great author-to-be before their eyes.
Look at the Birdie presents a tougher problem, partly because its stories are better. They had better be, given the sizeable publication plan worked out with Delacorte Press, who’d published Kurt from 1968 through 1987. Kurt had left this firm because it had dropped its business agreement with Seymour Lawrence, his loyal supporter, and sold out to a German corporation, for which the author didn’t want to work. Now, from his grave, he’ll be making money for them again, not just with this collection but another to come, complemented by a volume of letters and a memoir by his son (to be called Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So). In addition, Kurt’s sixteen earlier Delacorte books will be reissued with artwork by the late author. But if these stories are better, they still fall pitiably short of what Vonnegut accomplished in his fully canonical magazine work of the 1950s, work that led by an interesting path to his early novels and eventually Slaughterhouse-Five.
Rather than trying to sell an anti-war theme to an unready readership, Vonnegut restricts himself in Look at the Birdie to exploiting social and domestic themes familiar to his family magazine clientele. Of the collection’s fourteen stories, four present so-called specialists in innovative fields that border on quackery. As a publicist for General Electric’s Research Laboratory, Kurt had spent a few years promoting ideas that would make postwar life easier and more enjoyable. In his own short stories, these experiments blow up in their users’ faces. It’s interesting that he locates the offices of these quacks in old mansions now cut up into smaller units and crumbling in decay—an indication that such notions as “better living through chemistry” and “progress is our most important product” might be nothing more than twisted ideas foisted upon the future from a bankrupt economic order. Other pieces flirt with temptations of grandness, then resolve themselves by rewarding simple virtue. There is less sentimentality than in the Armageddon stories, but enough to explain why “Hello, Red” and “The Honor of a Newsboy” were too simplified for even an early 1950s family market. Much better are “Little Drops of Water” and “Look at the Birdie,” in which the very structure of these stories (and not any laid-on theme) produce a surprising but satisfying conclusion.
For dedicated readers of the Vonnegut canon, Look at the Birdie features early appearances of characters familiar from Kurt’s novels. Francine Pefko, secretary from the company’s “Girl Pool” in Cat’s Cradle, drives the plot of “F U B A R,” while “Little Drops of Water” uses the structures of the Bluebeard (1987) fairy tale to characterize (and then cleverly trap) its protagonist. George M. Helmholst, the high school bandmaster who counseled woeful teenagers in so many stories from Welcome to the Monkey House and Bagombo Snuff Box, plays his role once more in “A Song for Selma,” a weaker appearance than in the previously published pieces but indicative of his last hurrah in The Sirens of Titan (1959), when he and another retired teacher show up as afternoon drinkers in a cocktail lounge, recognizable to the bartender as two old Saturday Evening Post characters at the end of their road.
Which leads to the problematics of this book: how does it fit into the larger plan of Kurt Vonnegut emerging from the toils of family magazine writership to become a genuine innovator of the postmodern novel? Of course, the former happened in the early 1950s and the latter in the closing years of the 1960s, two decades that by themselves offer a startling contrast in manners and mores. But the genius of such works as Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five is that they locate their deconstruction of assumptions and fragmentation of attitudes squarely within the vernacular that the author and his broadly used readership share. Those assumptions and attitudes were first tested, most gingerly so, in the stories from the 1950s Kurt wished to save, and did so in Welcome to the Monkey House, collected just a year before his breakthrough to both fame and innovation with Slaughterhouse-Five. And for him, that was enough.
Given Kurt Vonnegut’s still-controversial reputation, one fears that by publishing such self-apparently weak work his executors may provide ammunition for those who would discount the author’s entire legacy. As Loree Rackstraw indicates in her recently published, Love as Always, Kurt (2009), there exists a hatred of this man among elements of the intellectual and academic establishments that borders on the irrational, a hatred prompted by his success at pushing aside the gatekeepers and making the delights of postmodern fiction available to all. The lawyer and the doctor’s posthumous publication plan will make some money now, but will it be at the cost of Vonnegut’s healthy backlist income, which for the past forty years has benefitted from all his books being not only in print but comprehensively stocked and always selling well?
On the other hand, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded how confining the early 1950s were, and how desperate were some of our better writers to fight their way out. Look at the Birdie offers fourteen attempts at doing so. Some are charming, a few are strikingly clever, and all remind readers what a long time ago this was. Anyone under sixty will have to ask an elder why a character’s car has two horns instead of one, and why to drive away she has to press a starter pedal. For these and greater matters, Kurt Vonnegut remains our grand old man.
BIO: Jerome Klinkowitz teaches at the University of Northern Iowa and is the author (most recently) of Kurt Vonnegut’s America (2009).
