Savoring Vintage Vonnegut From Golden Age of Magazine Fiction

These 23 stories date from early in Kurt Vonnegut’s writing career, from the 1950s--”the very end of a golden age of magazine fiction in this country,” he notes, before TV seduced us away and drained the advertising from large, general-circulation magazines, such as the Saturday Evening Post, that used to be fat with stories aimed at nearly everyone.

Stories for everyone! Not literary, not pornographic, not specialized for any niche audience, but not exactly meant for the lowest common denominator either. Stories for the so-called general reader, young and old. We see nothing like them today.

I recall them only dimly. My parents subscribed to the Post during what I think of as its three-name years. It ran serials by Erle Stanley Gardner and Clarence Budington Kelland and, at a higher level, Old West cavalry tales by James Warner Bellah. Once in a while, I’ve learned since but don’t remember, something truly wonderful flew in under everybody’s radar, like Thomas Pynchon’s “The Secret Integration.”

I don’t remember reading Vonnegut then either, but that isn’t surprising. He wasn’t the Vonnegut we know yet, whereas Pynchon, it seems, was always Pynchon. Just a few years back from World War II, Vonnegut was learning his craft, writing for the market, feeding his family. The stories in “Bagombo Snuff Box” are slices of white bread that blended with all the others in the thick loaves those magazines offered us. They are snappy and often humorous, gentle even when sad. Some have trick endings--the early Vonnegut, he tells us, was an admirer of O. Henry. Most have morals. And the characters know what the morals are; the willingness of even the pretentious and deluded among them to learn from their comeuppances reflects a kind of optimism we don’t expect from the author of “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Cat’s Cradle.”

In the title story, for example, a self-styled soldier of fortune decides to visit a woman to whom he was briefly married. He gives her a snuffbox from his last posting, Bagombo, Ceylon, and dazzles her and her new husband with tales of his exotic adventures. When the couple’s 9-year-old son notices that the snuffbox was made in Japan, however, the adventurer (who is really a potato-chip salesman) knows it’s time to leave.

In “The Package,” a self-made businessman who paid for his Ivy League education by waiting on tables for rich swells--an experience that still rankles--retires and moves into a custom-built, fully automated house. He’s still learning which buttons to push when one of the ex-swells comes to visit, shabbily dressed. The businessman, flaunting his own success, imagines only that the other man wants to touch him for a loan and gets rid of him as quickly as possible. Discovering later that his visitor was imprisoned and deported by the “Commies” after 30 years as a doctor in China, the businessman laments: “I’d like to start today all over again. Show us which button to push (for that).”

Sudden wealth and lingering poverty, status envy, the siren songs of technology and efficiency--these ‘50s themes still resonate today, if only because the ‘90s in America are more like the ‘50s than anything we’ve seen in between.

Still, the three stories about George M. Helmholtz, benign monomaniac and bandmaster extraordinaire at a Midwestern high school, are as purely of their time as “Ozzie and Harriet.” Vonnegut’s irony here is muted to a whisper.

More in tune with our time are a science-fiction story, “Thanasphere,” in which the first astronaut enters space thick with ghosts whose messages to the living drown out his Cold War intelligence reports; and “Souvenir,” in which Germans and freed American prisoners are overtaken at the end of World War II by a column of Soviet tanks. “Everybody who could got out of the way of the juggernaut,” Vonnegut writes--suddenly in that boiled-down style we know so well. “Some were not so lucky. They were mangled. They were squashed.”