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1 - Vonnegut’s 1950s: Human Structures
- University of South Carolina Press
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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 Vonnegut’s 1950s 18 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...