Bagombo Snuff Box

Kurt Vonnegut

v1.1. Fixed line breaks, chapter headings.

These stories, and twenty-three of similar quality in my
previous hardcover collection, Welcome to the Monkey House, were written at
the very end of a golden age of magazine fiction in this country. For about fifty
years, until 1953, say, stories like these were a mild but popular form of entertainment
in millions of homes, my own included.

This old man’s hope has to be that some of his earliest
tales, for all their mildness and innocence and clumsiness, may, in these
coarse times, still entertain.

They would not be reprinted now, if novels I had written
around the same time had not, better late than never, received critical
attention. My children were adults by then, and I was middle-aged. These
stories, printed in magazines fat with fiction and advertising, magazines now
in most cases defunct, were expected to be among the living about as long as
individual lightning bugs.

That anything I have written is in print today is due to the
efforts of one publisher, Seymour “Sam” Lawrence (1927-1994). When I was broke
in 1965, and teaching at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa all
alone, completely out of print, having separated myself from my family on Cape
Cod in order to support them, Sam bought rights to my books, for peanuts, from
publishers, both hardcover and softcover, who had given up on me. Sam thrust my
books back into the myopic public eye again.

CPR! Cardiopulmonary resuscitation of this author who was
all but dead!

Thus encouraged, this Lazarus wrote
Slaughterhouse-Five
for Sam. That made my reputation. I am a Humanist, and so am not entitled to expect
an afterlife for myself or anyone. But at Seymour Lawrence’s memorial service
at New York City’s Harvard Club five years ago, I said this with all my heart: “Sam
is up in Heaven now.” I returned to Dresden, incidentally, the setting for
Slaughterhouse-Five
,
on October 7th, 1998. I was taken down into the cellar where I and about a
hundred other American POWs survived a firestorm that suffocated or incinerated
135,000 or so other human beings. It reduced the “Florence of the Elbe” to a
jagged moonscape.

While I was down in that cellar again, this thought came to
me: “Because I have lived so long, I am one of the few persons on Earth who
saw an Atlantis before it disappeared forever beneath the waves.”

Short stories can have greatness, short as they have to be.
Several knocked my socks off when I was still in high school. Ernest Hemingway’s
“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and Saki’s “The Open Window” and O.
Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” and Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek
Bridge” spring to mind. But there is no greatness in this or my other collection,
nor was there meant to be.

My own stories may be interesting, nonetheless, as relics
from a time, before there was television, when an author might support a family
by writing stories that satisfied uncritical readers of magazines, and earning
thereby enough free time in which to write serious novels. When I became a
full-time free-lance in 1950,1 expected to be doing that for the rest of my
life.

I was in such good company with a prospectus like that. Hemingway
had written for
Esquire
, F. Scott Fitzgerald for
The Saturday Evening
Post
, William Faulkner for
Collier’s
, John Steinbeck for
The
Woman’s Home Companion
.

Say what you want about me, I never wrote for a magazine
called
The Woman’s Home Companion
, but there was a time when I would
have been most happy to. And I add this thought: Just because a woman is stuck
alone at home, with her husband at work and her kids at school, that doesn’t
mean she is an imbecile.

Publication of this book makes me want to talk about the peculiar
and beneficial effect a short story can have on us, which makes it different from
a novel or movie or play or TV show. If I am to make my point, though, you must
first imagine with me a room in the home of my childhood and youth in
Indianapolis, in the middle of the previous Great Depression. The previous
Great Depression comprised from the stock market crash on October 24th, 1929, until
the Japanese did us the favor, for the sheer hell of it, of bombing our
comatose fleet of warships in Pearl Harbor, on December 7th, 1941. The little
yellow bastards, as we used to call them, were bored to tears with the Great
Depression. So were we.

Imagine that it is 1938 again, I am sixteen again. I come
home again from yet another lousy day at Shortridge High School. Mother, who
does not work outside the home, says there is a new Saturday Evening Post on
the coffee table. It is raining outside, and I am unpopular. But I can’t turn
on a magazine like a TV set. I have to pick it up, or it will go on lying
there, dead as a doornail. An unassisted magazine has no get-up-and-go.

After I pick it up, I have to make all one hundred sixty
pounds of male adolescent meat and bones comfortable in an easy chair. Then I
have to leaf through the magazine with my fingertips, so my eyes can shop for a
story with a stimulating title and illustration.

Illustrators during the golden age of American magazine
fiction used to get as much money as the authors whose stories they illustrated.
They were often as famous as, or even more famous than, the authors. Norman
Rockwell was their Michelangelo.

While I shop for a story, my eyes also see ads for
automobiles and cigarettes and hand lotions and so on. It is advertisers, not
readers, who pay the true costs of such a voluptuous publication. And God bless
them for doing that. But consider the incredible thing I myself have to do in
turn. I turn my brains on!

That isn’t the half of it. With my brains all fired up, I do
the nearly impossible thing that you are doing now, dear reader. I make sense
of idiosyncratic arrangements, in horizontal lines, of nothing but twenty-six
phonetic symbols, ten Arabic numerals, and perhaps eight punctuation marks, on
a sheet of bleached and flattened wood pulp!

But get this: While I am reading, my pulse and breathing
slow down. My high school troubles drop away. I am in a pleasant state
somewhere between sleep and restfulness.

OK?

And then, after however long it takes to read a short story,
ten minutes, say, I spring out of the chair. I put
The Saturday Evening Post
back on the coffee table for somebody else. “

OK?

So then my architect dad comes home from work, or more
likely from no work, since the little yellow bastards haven’t bombed Pearl
Harbor yet. I tell him I have read a story he might enjoy. I tell him to sit in
the easy chair whose cushion is still dented and warmed by my teenage butt.

Dad sits. I pick up the magazine and open it to the story.
Dad is tired and blue. Dad starts to read. His pulse and breathing slow down.
His troubles drop away, and so on.

Yes! And our little domestic playlet, true to life in the
1930s, dear reader, proves exactly what? It proves that a short story, because
of its physiological and psychological effects on a human being, is more
closely related to Buddhist styles of meditation than it is to any other form
of narrative entertainment.

What you have in this volume, then, and in every other collection
of short stories, is a bunch of Buddhist catnaps.

Reading a novel,
War and Peace
, for example, is no
catnap. Because a novel is so long, reading one is like being married forever
to somebody nobody else knows or cares about. Definitely not refreshing!

Oh sure, we had radios before we had TV But radios can’t
hold our attention, can’t take control of our emotions, except in times of
war. Radios can’t make us sit still. Unlike print and plays and movies and boob
tubes, radios don’t give us anything for our restless eyes to do.

Listen: After I came home from World War Two, a brevet corporal
twenty-two years old, I didn’t want to be a fiction writer. I married my
childhood sweetheart Jane Marie Cox, also from Indianapolis, up in Heaven now,
and enrolled as a graduate student in the Anthropology Department of the
University of Chicago. But I didn’t want to be an anthropologist, either. I
only hoped to find out more about human beings. I was going to be a journalist!

To that end, I also took a job as a police reporter for the
Chicago City News Bureau. The News Bureau was supported by all four Chicago
dailies back then, as a sensor for breaking news, prowling the city night and
day, and as a training ground. The only way to get a job on one of those
papers, short of nepotism, was to go through the News Bureau’s hazing first.

But it became obvious that no newspaper positions were going
to open up in Chicago or anywhere else for several years. Reporters had come
home from the war to reclaim their jobs, and the women who had replaced them
would not quit. The women were terrific. They should not have quit.

And then the Department of Anthropology rejected my M.A.
thesis, which proved that similarities between the Cubist painters in Paris in
1907 and the leaders of Native American, or Injun, uprisings late in the nineteenth
century could not be ignored. The Department said it was unprofessional.

Slowly but surely, Fate, which had spared my life in
Dresden, now began to shape me into a fiction writer and a failure until I was
a bleeding forty-seven years of age! But first I had to be a publicity hack for
General Electric in Schenectady, New York.

While writing publicity releases at GE, I had a boss named
George. George taped to the outside of his office door cartoons he felt had
some bearing on the company or the kind of work we did. One cartoon was of two
guys in the office of a buggy whip factory. A chart on the wall showed their
business had dropped to zero. One guy was saying to the other, “It can’t be our
product’s quality. We make the finest buggy whips in the world.” George posted
that cartoon to celebrate how GE, with its wonderful new products, was making
a lot of other companies feel as though they were trying to sell buggy whips.

A broken-down movie actor named Ronald Reagan was working
for the company. He was on the road all the time, lecturing to chambers of commerce
and power companies and so on about the evils of socialism. We never met, so I
remain a socialist.

While my future two-term president was burbling out on the
rubber-chicken circuit in 1950, I started writing short stories at nights and
on weekends. Jane and I had two kids by then. I needed more money than GE would
pay me. I also wanted, if possible, more self-respect.

There was a crazy seller’s market for short stories in 1950.
There were four weekly magazines that published three—or more of the things in
every issue. Six monthlies did the same.

I got me an agent. If I sent him a story that didn’t quite
work, wouldn’t quite satisfy a reader, he would tell me how to fix it. Agents
and editors back then could tell a writer how to fine-tune a story as though
they were pit mechanics and the story were a race car. With help like that, I
sold one, and then two, and then three stories, and banked more money than a
year’s salary at GE.

I quit GE and started my first novel, Player Piano. It is a
lampoon on GE. I bit the hand that used to feed me. The book predicted what has
indeed come to pass, a day when machines, because they are so dependable and
efficient and tireless, and getting cheaper all the time, are taking the
halfway decent jobs from human beings.

I moved our family of four to Cape Cod, first to
Provincetown. I met Norman Mailer there. He was my age. He had been a college-educated
infantry private like me, and he was already a world figure, because of his
great war novel The Naked and the Dead. I admired him then, and do today. He is
majestic. He is royalty. So was Jacqueline Onassis. So was Joe DiMaggio. So is Muhammad
Ali. So is Arthur Miller.

We moved from Provincetown to Osterville, still on the Cape.
But only three years after I left Schenectady, advertisers started withdrawing
their money from magazines. The Buddhist catnaps coming out of my typewriter
were becoming as obsolete as buggy whips.

One monthly that had bought several of my stories, Cosmopolitan,
now survives as a harrowingly explicit sex manual.

That same year, 1953, Ray Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451.
The title refers to the kindling point of paper. That is how hot you have to
get a book or a magazine before it bursts into flame. The leading male
character makes his living burning printed matter. Nobody reads anymore. Many
ordinary, rinky-dink homes like Ray’s and mine have a room with floor-to-ceiling
TV screens on all four walls, with one chair in the middle.

The actors and actresses on all four walls of TV are
scripted to acknowledge whoever is sitting in the chair in the middle, even if
nobody is sitting in the chair in the middle, as a friend or relative in the
midst of things. The wife of the guy who burns up paper is unhappy. He can
afford only three screens. His wife can’t stand not knowing what’s happening on
the missing fourth screen, because the TV actors and actresses are the only people
she loves, the only ones anywhere she gives a damn about.

Fahrenheit 451
was published before we and most of
our neighbors in Osterville even owned TVs. Ray Bradbury himself may not have
owned one. He still may not own one. To this day, Ray can’t drive a car and
hates to ride in airplanes.

In any case, Ray was sure as heck prescient. Just as people
with dysfunctional kidneys are getting perfect ones from hospitals nowadays,
Americans with dysfunctional social lives, like the woman in Ray’s book, are
getting perfect friends and relatives from their TV sets. And around the clock!