Welcome to the Monkey House: The Special Edition (42 page)

The job is to seduce, to make the decision to go through with the final exit smooth and seamless for those who dare venture through the front door. In an era when war, disease, and old age have been abolished by science, death is for volunteers—a tiny sliver of freedom preserved in this totalitarian society. There is pressure on the hostesses to meet quotas and thus make the garish population thermometer in front of each establishment move, however infinitesimally, in the right direction. Vonnegut is as ever a sympathetic student of human pride: patrons routinely, poignantly overestimate the impact of their demise and are disappointed when informed of the statistical facts. “Every inch,” one client is told, “is 166,666,666 people.”

In the final version of “Monkey House,” “Billy the Poet” is the reputedly fearsome messiah-leader of the “nothing-head” rebels (“bombed out of their skulls with the sex-madness that came from taking nothing”). He is the id of this cold and regimented world, and his wildly lewd guerrilla verses are just the provocation to heat things up. Outwitting the authorities, Billy appears in disguise at the Hyannis Port parlor and abducts one of its hostesses, Nancy. At the age of sixty-three (though she looks twenty-two, thanks to antiaging shots) she is, like all of her colleagues, a virgin. Nancy is boastfully belligerent beneath her false charm, practiced in the martial arts and spoiling for a fight. She is vaguely bored with life, finding it “pointless” with its absence of pleasure and warmth, but these misgivings are repressed as she goes about her job. Billy the Poet leads his hostage down a manhole and through an elaborate sewer system. In the darkness Nancy goes through the same disorientation in space and time that Billy Pilgrim and his fellow POWs will soon experience in the subterranean meat locker of
Slaughterhouse-Five
.

Helped by the male and female members of his gang, Billy proceeds in his mission, initiating Nancy with clinical detachment into the world of sex. The deed is done on a sailboat anchored in Hyannis Port. Despite his braggadocio, Billy turns out to be less fearsome than advertised, a bespectacled, book-reading “shrimp” to Nancy’s Amazon warrior. She is a “nothing-head” herself now, alive and awakening, and one day she may be grateful for the chance to find real love on her own terms.

·    ·    ·

Walking though the multiple drafts of the manuscript, with their keystrokes and cross-outs and inserts, we enjoy the perspective over Vonnegut’s shoulder, our view obscured by smoke, the ashtrays at his elbows crammed with spent Pall Malls. “When he writes, he sits on a padded Danish easy chair,” one observer recalled after a visit to his study—the one his handyman neighbor had built. “With his long legs drawn up and his back hunched, he leans forward to type on a machine set on a coffee table. Papers, folders and books are strewn about the table and the floor.” Vonnegut’s wife, Jane, often heard him talking to himself in his workroom as he acted out the dialogue and experimented with how different word combinations sounded. He tried to deny this playacting, without much luck. “I must be talking on the telephone,” he half-protested.

Daughter Nanny recalled the raucous atmosphere that surrounded him during the family years on the Cape:

How he did it was by following routines, showing up, and letting the distractions of the world fall away. “My father kept standard, nine-to-five working hours,” Nanny also tells us. “In those hours he became a mumbling ghost to all of us.”

The quality we notice above all in the draft pages is the sheer
doggedness
of approach, the enormous effort that went into even the most apparently offhanded language and “transparent” effects as the author honed them into shape. These are the ingredients of what John Updike admiringly called Vonnegut’s “come-as-you-are prose,” a way of writing much more difficult to pull off than readers imagine.

In his Iowa classes Vonnegut divided his students into
bashers
and
swoopers
, according to how they went about their business, and the excerpts that follow reveal him to be firmly in the first camp. Fast execution, automatic writing with revisions left for later—this was in general
not
his way, as much as he might have preferred it to be. “You beat your head against a wall until you break through to page two and you break through to page three, and so on,” he once explained of his practice.

Here we see the author starting and restarting the story—and restarting it again—in that quaint, pre-word-processing era that seems like another planet to us today. Vonnegut shuffles and reshuffles the deck, plays God, tries out new ideas and different points of view, adds and eliminates plot lines and characters, tweaks and discards turns of phrase, only to have them sometimes reappear later. Every “keeper” is hard won, and we know there are plenty of overflowing wastebaskets along the way. There must be at least forty start-overs in the drafts of what would become the story “Welcome to the Monkey House,” with multiple provisional titles, just one indication of how plastic the author viewed his materials. “If Sherman’s Horse Can Take It,” “Desire Under a Hot Tin Streetcar,” “Nancy Warren”—these and other experiments were run, lived for while, then ended up on the shoproom floor.

The published version of “Welcome to the Monkey House”—the end product we all know—is a classic in the Vonnegut
catalog. It functions as satire, with the author able to make his points (“I’ve always had to have an axe to grind to write”), and there are inimitable Vonnegut passages and jokes in abundance, enough to satisfy even the casual fan. The primary story template in all its iterations to finished work addresses some of the author’s pet concerns: an ambivalence about death, the question of free will versus determinism, the decidedly mixed blessings of automation. In Vonnegut’s imagined future, the mass of people have been relieved of work thanks to machines, and they are content to take their pills and learn the art of “consuming intelligently,” something they did by “watching television, which was the government.” Seen from the second decade of the twenty-first century, some might say, this has a prophetic ring to it.

Other themes are raised, too, in the drafts of this wickedly dark, deceptively simple little narrative: Vonnegut’s sense of the Janus-faced nature of women and the weakness of men in their presence, the hypocrisy of the Religious Right and its dogmas of abstinence and opposition to euthanasia, the often catastrophic results of scientific inquiry and innovation. And there are wry references to the junk of our everyday landscape, including a museum dedicated to Cape Cod’s heavily marketed Kennedy dynasty. The fable also functions as Vonnegut’s commentary on the Pill, the warring positions of the Catholic Church and feminists on issues of reproductive freedom. It alerts us to the costs that come with suppressing our animal nature, and it urges us to accept and love ourselves as we are, to celebrate our capacity for pleasure and joy. Thus, “Welcome to the Monkey House.”

For all of its cleverness, and its ultimately redemptive message, though, to my mind the published version has always felt more mechanical, its vulgarities more forced, than what we find in Vonnegut’s best work. What sets his novels and stories apart, I observed in my book on Vonnegut,
Unstuck in Time
, is the way we fall in love with each character. To borrow a phrase from Mark Twain, we “develop a warm personal interest in
their fortunes.” Such was the author’s sympathy for the trials of the human condition that he had trouble creating truly unlikeable people, and when he tries, it doesn’t always come off. Here, Billy and Nancy are too harshly drawn for us to care about them. It is as though Vonnegut doesn’t quite know how to use the new license of expression opening up in the 1960s, hasn’t figured out yet how to navigate the collapse of old rules without resorting to the temptations of the sledgehammer. Like so many other artists in that tumultuous time, the writer in his liberation is still feeling his way.

The most exciting thing I discovered in these drafts is a second story, in which, instead of the World Government/police state theme, we have something more in keeping with the kindly, world-weary side of Vonnegut’s genius. Here the lead character, with the strange name of “Greta Garball” (“Garbo” in some drafts), is a hustler, a streetwise businessman who (à la Dr. Kevorkian) saw a market for an affordable, dignified passage to death. Garball transforms a converted garage on Chicago’s South Side into an assisted suicide parlor with bare-bones equipment—a phone booth and a garden hose leading from the tail-pipe of his car. In one draft his sole employee, a dwarf named “Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,” testifies before Congress, in others he reminisces more conversationally about his deceased boss. In stature and surreality, “Kurt” reminds us of little Newt Hoenniker from
Cat’s Cradle
, and the use of his own name is a gesture toward the kind of authorial intrusion we would soon see in
Slaughterhouse-Five
and
Breakfast of Champions
. Even without advertising, Garball’s venture booms. Men and women want to make their final exit for all kinds of reasons, serious and trivial. “You would be surprised,” “Kurt” tells an inquisitive congressman, “how many people want to die because their baseball team isn’t doing well.” But Mr. Garball would be appalled if he could see how his little mom-and-pop corner store has evolved into a network of thousands of franchised locations whose only values are efficiency and the bottom line. These are death mills, plain and simple, disguising their purpose with a stage set of domestic
trappings sure to push prospective clients over the edge—Barcalounger recliners, recorded music, the uplifting bromides of Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale. If the founder was around, “Kurt” insists, he would condemn the whole thing as a betrayal of his original intent, with none of the personal touches he cultivated. There is almost no space for agency in this slick production line, little or no room for reprieve.

Things certainly
were
different when the old man was in charge. Despite an apparently morbid trade (and his very crusty exterior), Garball was a zealous champion of
life
, and we can’t help liking him for that. In this regard he is like the author, whose tragicomic stories are actually briefs in favor of the grace and beauty that make our hardships worth enduring. “In my own peculiar way, I’m proud of the merchandise,” Garball explains, defending the integrity of his trade.

We’re told that in the old days Garball took time to sit down with customers. He had to get to know them as people, understand their complaints, have them appreciate the gravity of the step they were contemplating—he didn’t
want
them to be comfortable. With his cigar-chomping, hard-boiled gruffness (“What makes you think I want your lousy fifty bucks?”), Greta Garball was a tough gatekeeper, a kind of counselor-priest-social-worker. This curmudgeon did not make it into print in 1968, but he represents in utero the gallery of grouchy, no-nonsense humanists who would populate Vonnegut’s later novels. From here it is a direct line to the Kilgore Trout of
Breakfast of Champions, Jailbird
’s, Walter Starbuck,
Bluebeard
’s Rabo Karabekian, and Gene Hartke in
Hocus Pocus
.

·    ·    ·

In his preface to the
Monkey House
paperback collection, Vonnegut was (as usual) shy about its contents—produced strictly for the money, he insisted, “the fruits of Free Enterprise.” How would it all hold up under scrutiny, and what might it offer to those seeking guidance in the techniques of storycraft? “I have been a writer since 1949,” he cautioned. “I am self-taught. I
have no theories about writing that might help others. When I write I simply become what I seemingly must become.”

Theories, rules of thumb, advice on tricks of the trade—these all have their place, and Vonnegut was generous in sharing them in the course of his career. Much of his guidance concerns economy of expression, “cutting to the chase”—principles drawn from his background in the sciences and journalism and public relations. The overriding spirit is to be kind to the audience, to be helpful in their difficult job of getting imaginatively engaged with a story. “Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for” was one suggestion. “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water” was another. Also, “Be a sadist. Make awful things happen to your characters in order that we can see what they are made of.” And, of course, “start as close to the end as possible.” (Vonnegut perversely reminded students that the best writers abandoned the rules all the time, with brazen delight!)

The raw materials that follow contain their own lessons, less succinct perhaps than a list of do’s and don’ts but just as indispensable. They are testimony from a self-described
basher
who showed up in front of his typewriter every day, stared down the blank paper in the carriage, and created a written legacy that has not only moved countless readers but inspired many influential artists, including Dave Eggers, George Saunders, and the Japanese master Haruki Murakami. “Reading Vonnegut, a sudden understanding of what ‘genius’ might mean, in our time, swept over me,” Saunders has observed. “He is, in my view, the great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century.”

There is something kinetic and
alive
in the keystrokes of the work in progress, even with its repetitions and false starts. Watching how Vonnegut built the Monkey House helps us answer the question he must have asked himself often as he stood back to survey his various handiworks:

As Vonnegut began each new effort on the story that would become “Welcome to the Monkey House,” he first typed the mailing address of his literary agents, who would eventually be submitting the material: