Stuff from the Attic

For the first twenty years of his writer's career, Kurt Vonnegut lived on Cape Cod, producing short stories for popular magazines of the time. Although critically unknown, he did earn a living for himself and his large family—about what the operator of a high school cafeteria would make, as he liked to recall. Then fame and fortune arrived with the great success of his novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and within a year, he moved to New York City, leaving family life behind—and also some typescripts. His ex-wife saved them, along with meticulous records of his published work (Kurt liked to boast that he didn't save anything). Over the years, his grown children would come back to sort through this material in the attic. In 1996, his son Mark found a box of stationery for Saab Cape Cod, the car dealership Kurt had started during a period of lean magazine sales. Not wanting to waste paper, Kurt dutifully used it up for his correspondence from Manhattan over the next few months. "Kurt Vonnegut, Manager," read his name on the letterhead, the only sign on antiquity being the phone number with a "Forest 2-" prefix. Imagine dialing those digits today and having Kurt answer! Well, that's what reading While Mortals Sleep is like.

Following his father's death in 2007, Mark Vonnegut went through this stuff in the attic again, finding a trove of short stories written in the 1950s but never published—some because they were rejected, others that Kurt's agents declined to handle, and a few he decided against himself. This new volume completes the dusty harvest that began with Armageddon in Retrospect (2008) and Look at the Birdie (2009). All told, this material retrieved from among the mouse droppings comprises forty stories (plus an essay and letter to his family in the first volume), which is almost as much as Vonnegut judged worth collecting and reprinting in his lifetime, as Welcome to the Monkey House (1968) and Bagombo Snuff Box (1999). The sixteen stories in While Mortals Sleep contain some of the best fiction from this archive, and some of the worst. Should readers bother with it? Yes, if only because the last pieces, "Money Talks" and "The Humbug," are two of the finest Kurt Vonnegut ever wrote. Why were they not published? Probably because their quirkiness was ahead of their time. Better that they weren't printed, for now readers can get right to them without having to page through a year's worth of Collier's and Saturday Evening Post features on Marilyn Monroe, bomb shelters, and the Dionne quintuplets.

Trash and treasures from the 1950s litter these stories, and the worst of them can't carry the burden into postmodern times. Several have a good idea behind them, that human needs bleed through the coverings of technology, but wind up being short on flavor and tediously overt on message—the very faults Vonnegut found with science fiction, which he tried his hardest not to write. To make technology palatable to family magazine readers, he had to blend it with middle-class manners, but in stories like "Jenny" and "The Epizootic," he feels compelled to dumb down the action to the level of banal sitcoms. Once in a while, genius strikes, as when in "Girl Pool" a stenographer dramatizes a relationship with the speaker on the Dictaphone disk she's transcribing. Here a bright idea finds the right literary language for it, as happens brilliantly in "Money Talks" when a twelve million dollar inheritance does just that, perfectly integrated with the credibly human action taking place. Vonnegut fans will recall the "girl pool" from Cat's Cradle (1963); in other stories, there are characters with names from this same novel, Hoenikker and Breed. Huge corporations much like the General Electric Vonnegut worked for in the late 1940s and which figures in his first novel, Player Piano (1952), are settings for several pieces here. There's even a guy named Lazarro...