The Vonnegut Effect

Chapter Three: Speaking Personally: Slaughterhouse-Five and the Essays

75 Chapter Three speaking personally Slaughterhouse-Five and the Essays “the hyannis port story” is more than Kurt Vonnegut’s last piece of fiction for the Saturday Evening Post. That it never appeared there, waiting for publication five years later in Welcome to the Monkey House, makes it fit into the author’s canon all the more comfortably, for in this narrative he looks forward to the next stage in his career. As a short story it uses a formula Vonnegut had exploited from his start with the family magazines, the theme of homely simplicity triumphing over wealth and pretension. But the device is played out with several major differences. The wealth and fame are immensely greater than in “Custom-Made Bride” and any of the other earlier tales. As well they should be, for these trappings belong not to fictive creations but to actual people, the family of President John F. Kennedy living in Hyannis Port. It is the third distinguishing element of this story that shows the method Vonnegut began using at that time and which would bring him his greatest success: the story’s events, as richly fabulous yet historically true as they are, get measured from the narrator’s highly personal point of view. In “The Hyannis Port Story,” President Kennedy is much like the actual sitting president, and the narrator is much like Kurt Vonnegut. In bringing the two together a refreshing perspective is gained, one that the author would exploit for the rest of his career, propelling himself to great fame with Slaughterhouse-Five and sustaining his role of public spokesmanship ever after. In terms of short-story salesmanship this Kennedy piece was surely a lastgasp effort. Already having reduced its fiction, the Post would soon go the way of Collier’s, Vonnegut’s other big market, and cease publication. To fill this gap in his income the author turned to something new, writing highly personal essays on current topics for other popular magazines, among them Esquire, McCall’s, and Life. In need of money, he took on book reviews, especially tough ones such as covering the new Random House Dictionary , personalizing the experience as best he could. This personalization the vonnegut effect 76 drew the notice of publisher Seymour Lawrence, who figured that anyone who could write so engagingly about a dictionary would surely be interesting as a novelist. In the meantime Vonnegut had taken an instructorship in creative writing at the University of Iowa, earning less than eight thousand dollars per year. A twenty-five-thousand-dollar advance from Lawrence let him quit and work full time on Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel whose structure shows the effects of all this personal essay writing. Yet before the novel and before the first essay stands “The Hyannis Port Story,” evidence that Vonnegut was developing in this direction well in advance of economic need. If as a Saturday Evening Post story it marked the end of one road, its narrative method signposted a grand new avenue toward the ultimate Vonnegut effect. The current events of this piece are as solid and as necessary as those in any essay. Its readership in 1963 would not just remember Dwight D. Eisenhower’s recent presidency but would also know that this two-time winner had never been accepted by the Republican Right, which made a conservative hero of Sen. Robert Taft from Ohio. They would also know more about Walter Reuther than that he was president of the United Auto Workers, for at the time this man was even more important for his involvement with Kennedy politics. Because the Kennedys had such starlike popularity even Post readers could be trusted to know such particulars as the fate of Adlai Stevenson, beaten out for the nomination and given an awkward ambassadorship to the United Nations instead. All of this information would be crucial for an essay, but for his special purposes Vonnegut uses them as key elements in his fiction. Why fiction? Because he has noted that by 1963 the Kennedy fame has become as fabulative as any piece of creative writing, with both legendary narratives and literary references—the PT-109 war story, for example, and the constant comparisons of the Kennedy style to life in King Arthur’s Camelot. Why not mix in some fiction of his own, particularly from the plain and simple world outside? This was the world, after all, that was real. The Kennedy hysteria was something else indeed. “The farthest away from home...