Welcome to the Monkey House Read Free Online

  Tabular array of Contents

Championship Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Praise

PREFACE

WHERE I LIVE

HARRISON BERGERON

WHO AM I THIS Fourth dimension?

WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE

LONG WALK TO FOREVER

THE FOSTER PORTFOLIO

MISS TEMPTATION

ALL THE Male monarch'South HORSES

TOM EDISON'South SHAGGY Canis familiaris

NEW DICTIONARY

Side by side DOOR

MORE STATELY MANSIONS

THE HYANNIS PORT STORY

D.P.

Report ON THE BARNHOUSE Outcome

THE EUPHIO QUESTION

Become Back TO YOUR PRECIOUS WIFE AND SON

DEER IN THE WORKS

THE LIE

UNREADY TO Clothing

THE Child NOBODY COULD HANDLE

THE MANNED MISSILES

EPICAC

ADAM

TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW

DELL BOOKS By KURT VONNEGUT

Copyright Page

For

Knox Burger

Ten days older than I am. He has been a very skillful begetter to me.

"Beware of all enterprises that crave new clothes."

--THOREAU

AMERICA'Southward GREATEST SATIRIST

KURT VONNEGUT IS...

"UNIQUE... one of the writers who map our landscapes for united states, who give names to the places we know best."

--DORIS LESSING

The New York Times Volume Review "OUR FINEST BLACK-HUMORIST. ... We laugh in cocky-defense force."

--The Atlantic Monthly "AN UNIMITATIVE AND INIMITABLE SOCIAL SATIRIST."

--Harper's Magazine

"A MEDICINE Human being, CONJURING Upwardly FANTASIES TO WARN THE Earth."

--The Charlotte Observer "A Crusade FOR Celebration."

--Chicago Sun-Times

"A LAUGHING PROPHET OF DOOM."

--The New York Times

PREFACE

HERE IT is, a retrospective exhibition of the shorter works of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.--and Vonnegut is still very much with us, and I am nevertheless very much Vonnegut. Somewhere in Germany is a stream called the Vonne. That is the source of my curious name.

I have been a writer since 1949. I am self-taught. I accept no theories nigh writing that might help others. When I write I simply get what I seemingly must get. I am vi feet 2 and weigh near two hundred pounds and am badly coordinated, except when I swim. All that borrowed meat does the writing.

In the water I am cute.

My father and paternal grandfather were architects in Indianapolis, Indiana, where I was born. My maternal grandfather owned a brewery there. He won a Golden Medal at the Paris Exposition with his beer, which was Lieber Lager. The secret ingredient was java.

My just brother, eight years older than I, is a successful scientist. His special field is physics as it relates to clouds. His name is Bernard, and he is funnier than I am. I remember a letter of the alphabet he wrote after his first child, Peter, was born and brought home. "Hither I am," that letter began, "cleaning shit off of practically everything."

My simply sister, five years older than I, died when she was forty. She was over 6 feet tall, besides, past an angstrom unit or so. She was heavenly to expect at, and graceful, both in and out of water. She was a sculptress. She was christened "Alice," simply she used to deny that she was really an Alice. I agreed. Everybody agreed. Sometime in a dream possibly I will find out what her real name was.

Her dying words were, "No hurting." Those are good dying words. Information technology was cancer that killed her.

And I realize now that the two main themes of my novels were stated by my siblings: "Hither I am cleaning shit off of practically everything" and "No pain." The contents of this volume are samples of work I sold in social club to finance the writing of the novels. Here 1 finds the fruits of Costless Enterprise.

I used to exist a public relations man for General Electric, and and then I became a free-lance writer of so-called "slick fiction," a lot of it science fiction. Whether I improved myself morally past making that change I am not prepared to say. That is one of the questions I hateful to inquire God on Judgment Mean solar day-- forth with the one near what my sis's name actually was.

That could easily exist next Wed.

I have already put the question to a college professor, who, climbing down into his Mercedes-Benz 300SL gran turismo, assured me that public relations men and slick writers were equally vile, in that they both buggered truth for coin.

I asked him what the very everyman class of fiction was, and he told me, "Science fiction." I asked where he was leap in such a rush, and learned that he had to catch a Fan-Jet. He was to speak at a meeting of the Modernistic Language Clan in Honolulu the next morning. Honolulu was three thousand miles away.

My sis smoked besides much. My begetter smoked also much. My mother smoked too much. I fume too much. My blood brother used to fume as well much, and then he gave information technology upwardly, which was a miracle on the social club of the loaves and fishes.

And in one case a pretty girl came up to me at a cocktail political party, and she asked me, "What are y'all doing these days?"

"I am committing suicide by cigarette," I replied.

She idea that was reasonably funny. I didn't. I thought it was hideous that I should scorn life that much, sucking away on cancer sticks. My brand is Curtain Mall. The authentic suicides enquire for Pall Malls. The dilettantes ask for Pell Mells.

I have a relative who is secretly writing a history of parts of my family. He has showed me some of it, and he told me this virtually my grandfather, the builder: "He died in his forties-- and I think he was but as glad to be out of it." By "it," of grade, he meant life in Indianapolis--and there is that yellow streak about life in me, besides.

The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a adequately certain, fairly honorable form of suicide.

Information technology is disgraceful that I should ever have wanted out of "it," and I don't want out whatever more. I take 6 children, three of my ain and three of my sister's. They've turned out gloriously. My get-go matrimony worked, and continues to work. My wife is however beautiful.

I never knew a author's wife who wasn't beautiful.

In honor of the marriage that worked, I include in this drove a sickeningly slick love story from The Ladies' Home Journal, God aid united states, entitled past them "The Long Walk to Forever." The title I gave information technology, I think, was "Hell to Get Along With."

Information technology describes an afternoon I spent with my wife-to-be. Shame, shame, to have lived scenes from a woman's magazine.

The New Yorker once said that a volume of mine, God Anoint You, Mr. Rosewater, was"... a series of narcissistic giggles." This may be some other. Perhaps it would be helpful to the reader to imagine me as the White Rock girl, kneeling on a boulder in a nightgown, either looking for minnows or doting her own reflection.

WHERE I Alive

NOT VERY LONG Agone, an encyclopedia salesman stopped past America's oldest library building, which is the lovely Sturgis Library in Barnstable Village, on Cape Cod's north shore. And he pointed out to the easily alarmed librarian that the library'southward almost recent general reference piece of work was a 1938 Britannica, back-stopped by a 1910 Americana. He said many important things had happened since 1938, naming, among others, penicillin and Hitler's invasion of Poland.

He was brash to take his astonishment to some of the library'south directors. He was given their names and addresses. There was a Cabot on the list--and a Lowell and a Kittredge, and some others. The librarian told him that he had a chance of communicable several directors all at once, if he would go to the Barnstable Yacht Social club. So he went down the narrow yacht club road, most broke his cervix every bit he hitting a series of terrific bumps put in t

he route to discourage speeders, to kill them, if possible.

He wanted a martini, wondered if a nonmember could go service at the bar. He was appalled to detect that the club was naught merely a shack fourteen feet wide and thirty feet long, a touch of the Ozarks in Massachusetts. It contained an hilariously warped ping-pong table, a wire lost-and-found basket with sandy, fragrant contents, and an upright piano that had been nether a leak in the roof for years.

There wasn't any bar, whatsoever telephone, any electricity. There weren't any members there, either. To cap information technology all, there wasn't a drop of h2o in the harbor. The tide, which can be as great as fourteen feet, was utterly out. And the so-called yachts, antique wooden Rhodes 18'southward, Beetlecats, and a couple of Boston Whalers, were resting on the bluish-brown glurp of the emptied harbor's floor. Clouds of gulls and terns were yelling near all that glurp, and almost all the skilful things in it they were finding to eat.

A few men were out in that location, too, excavation clams as fatty as partridges from the rim of Sandy Cervix, the ten-mile-long sand finger that separates the harbor from the ice-common cold bay. And ducks and geese and herons and other waterfowl were out there, as well, teemingly, in the bang-up salt marsh that premises the harbor on the w. And, near the harbor's narrow mouth, a yawl from Marblehead with a half dozen-foot keel lay on her side, waiting for the water to come dorsum in again. She should never have come to Barnstable Hamlet, not with a keel like that.

The salesman, very depressed, insensitive to the barbarous beauty all around him, went to luncheon. Since he was in the seat of the most booming canton in New England, Barnstable County, and since the boom was a tourist smash, he had reason to look something mildly voluptuous in the way of a place to eat. What he had to settle for, though, was a chromium stool at a formica counter in an aggressively un-cute, un-colonial establishment chosen the Barnstable News Store, some other Ozarks touch, an Ozarks department store. The motto of the place: "If it's any good, nosotros've got it. If it's no proficient, we've sold it."

Subsequently tiffin, he went trustee-hunting once again, was told to try the hamlet museum, which is in the old brick Customs House. The building itself is a memorial to long-gone days when the harbor was used past fair-sized ships, before it filled up with all that bluish-chocolate-brown glurp. There was no trustee there, and the exhibits were excruciatingly boring. The salesman found himself strangling on apathy, an affliction epidemic amongst casual visitors to Barnstable Hamlet.

He took the customary cure, which was to spring into his automobile and roar off toward the cocktail lounges, motor courts, bowling alleys, souvenir shoppes, and pizzerias of Hyannis, the commercial heart of Cape Cod. He in that location worked off his frustrations on a miniature golf course called Playland. At that fourth dimension, that particular course had a pathetic, maddening feature typical of the random slaughter-house of the Greatcoat's south shore. The form was built on the backyard of what had once been an American Legion Postal service--and, right in the heart of the cunning trivial bridges and granulated cork fairways was a Sherman tank, set there in simpler and less enterprising days as a memorial to the veterans of World State of war Two.

The memorial has since been moved, but information technology is still on the south side, where it is leap to be engulfed by indignities again.

The dignity of the tank would be a lot safer in Barnstable Village, only the hamlet would never accept it. It has a policy of never accepting anything. As a happy consequence, it changes most as fast as the rules of chess.

The biggest change in recent years has taken identify at the polls. Until half dozen years agone, the Autonomous poll watchers and the Republican poll watchers were all Republicans. At present the Democratic poll watchers are Democrats. The consequences of this revolution have not been most equally awful as expected--so far.

Another break with the past has to do with the treasury of the local amateur theatrical society, the Barnstable Comedy Society. The club had a treasurer who, one time a calendar month for thirty years, angrily refused to say what the balance was, for fear that the club would spend information technology foolishly. He resigned concluding year. The new treasurer announced a residuum of four hundred dollars and some odd cents, and the membership blew it all on a new curtain the color of spoiled salmon. This ptomaine curtain, incidentally, made its debut during a production of The Caine Mutiny Court Martial in which Captain Queeg did not nervously rattle steel balls in his hand. The balls were eliminated on the theory that they were suggestive.

Another big change took place about sixty years ago, when it was discovered that tuna were good to eat. Barnstable fishermen used to call them "horse mackerel," and curse whenever they caught one. Nevertheless cursing, they would chop it up and throw it back into the bay as a warning to other horse mackerel. Out of courage or plain stupidity, the tuna did not go abroad, and now make possible a post-Labor Day festival chosen the Barnstable Tuna Derby. Sportsmen with reels as big as courthouse clocks come from all over the Eastern seaboard for the upshot, the villagers are always mystified as to what brought them. And nobody e'er catches annihilation.

Another discovery that nonetheless lies in the future for the villagers to brand and to acquire to live with is that mussels can be eaten without causing instant death. Barnstable Harbor is in places clogged with them. They are never disturbed. Ane reason for their being ignored, mayhap, is that the harbor abounds in two other delicacies far simpler to set--striped bass and clams. To go clams, i can scratch about anywhere when the tide is out. To get bass, one follows the birds, looks for cone-shaped formations of them, casts his lure to the identify where the cone points. Bass will be feeding there.

Equally for what else the future holds: Few Greatcoat villages have much chance of coming though the present greedy, tasteless boom with their souls intact. H. L. Mencken once said something to the effect that "Nobody ever went broke overestimating the vulgarity of the American people," and fortunes at present being made out of the vulgarization of the Cape surely behave this out. The soul of Barnstable Village just might survive.

For 1 thing, it is not a hollow village, with everything for rent, with half of the houses empty in the winter. Near of the people live there all yr round, and almost of them aren't former, and most of them work--equally carpenters, salesmen, masons, architects, teachers, writers, and what have you lot. It is a classless society, a sometimes affectionate and sentimental ane.

And these total houses, oftentimes riddled by termites and dry out rot, only skilful, probably, for a few hundred years more, have been built chockablock forth Main Street since the stop of the Civil War. Developers observe very little room in which to piece of work their pious depredations. In that location is a seeming vast green meadow to the west, but this is salt marsh, the bluish-brown glurp capped past a mat of salt hay. It was this natural hay, by the manner, that tempted settlers downwards from Plymouth in 1639. The marsh, laced past deep creeks that can be explored by small-scale boats, tin never exist built upon by anyone sane. It goes underwater at every moon tide, and is capable of supporting a human and his canis familiaris, and not much more.

Speculators and developers got very excited for a while well-nigh the possibility of improving Sandy Neck, the long, slender bulwark of spectacular dunes that bounds the harbor on the n. At that place are grotesque forests of expressionless trees out in that location, trees suffocated by sand, then unburied again. And the outer beach, for all practical purposes infinite, puts the embankment of Acapulco to shame. Surprisingly, too, fresh water can be had out at that place from quite shallow wells. Only the local government, give thanks God, is buying up all of Sandy Neck simply the tip, at the harbor mouth, and is making information technology a public park to be kept unimproved forever.

There is a tiny settlement on the tip of the neck, the tip that the government is not taking over. It is clustered around the abandoned lighthouse, a lighthouse that was once needed when there was h2o plenty effectually to permit large ships come and go. The bleached and tacky settlement can be reached only by boat or beach buggy. There is no electricity in that location, no telephone. It is a private resort. Less than a mile from Barnstable Village, the tip of the neck is where many villagers go when they need a vacation.

And all of the anachronistic, mildly xenophobic, charming queernesses of Barnstable Hamlet might entitle it to the epithet, "Concluding Stronghold of the True Cap

e Codders," if information technology weren't for 1 affair: Inappreciably anyone in the village was born on Cape Cod. Merely every bit petrified wood is formed by minerals slowly replacing organic materials, so has the nowadays-day petrified Barnstable been formed by persons from Evanston and Louisville and Boston and Pittsburgh and God-merely-knows-where-else, slowly replacing accurate rural Yankees.

If the real Cape Codders could rise from their churchyard graves, cast aside their beautifully lettered slate headstones, and attend a meeting of the Barnstable Village Borough Association, they would approve of the proceedings. Every proposal that has ever come before the organization has been hotly debated and voted down, except that a new siren be bought for the rescue truck. The siren goes bweep-bweep-bweep instead of rowrrr, and is guaranteed to be audible at a distance of iii miles.

The library, incidentally, now has a new Britannica, and a new Americana, too, purchases it made effortlessly, since it has money coming out of its ears. But so far, the school marks of the children and the conversation of the adults have not conspicuously improved.

Since the village exists for itself, and non for passersby, and since it specializes in hastening tourists on to paradises elsewhere, visitors play hell finding anything to like nearly information technology. For a quick sample of how good information technology can be, a visitor might finish off at St. Mary'southward Church on Main Street, which has, unadvertised anywhere, the nearly enchanting church garden in America. The garden is the work of one man, Robert Nicholson, an Episcopalian minister, a good human who died young.

At a village cocktail party one fourth dimension--and the villagers do drink a lot--Father Nicholson was talking to a Roman Catholic and a Jew, trying to find a word to describe the underlying spiritual unity of Barnstable. He constitute i. "We're Druids," he said.

(1964)

HARRISON BERGERON

THE Year WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't merely equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than everyone else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than everyone else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper Full general.

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