Kurt Vonnegut wiki
Advertisement

"A Song for Selma" is a short story on which Vonnegut worked until at least 1959 but remained unpublished until it was featured in the posthumous collection Look at the Birdie in 2009. It was later reprinted in Complete Stories in 2017. Except for the rewrite of the second half of "The Boy Who Hated Girls" which was published in 1998, it is the final work to feature band director George M. Helmholtz. Like other works featuring Helmholtz, it was intended for publication in The Saturday Evening Post, but by the late 1950s the space set aside for short stories was shrinking and this story "didn't make the new, stricter grade."[1]

Plot Summary[]

Alvin Schroeder, a short, serious junior at Lincoln High School, is the first student with a genius level I.Q., although he doesn't know it. He has focused this genius on music performance and composition. However, while George M. Helmholtz leads the beginner's C Band through one of Schroeder's pieces, he enters the band room and announces that he's done with music. That same day Big Floyd Hires, the pleasant but unintelligent C Band bass drum player, says he's through "loafing" with his music and has in fact composed his own work, "A Song for Selma". At lunch Helmholtz learns that Big Floyd has also told other teachers he's going to start applying himself academically. They surmise that the Selma of the song is probably Selma Ritter, a "shy, and not very popular" student who sits with Big Floyd and Schroeder (who's meant "to pull [them] up" academically) at the same physics table. Helmholtz also learns that Selma works the telephone switchboard in the principal's office while the staff takes their lunch.

Helmholtz visits the principal's office to talk with Selma, whom he finds looking through the confidential records which contain every student's I.Q. on a card; the cards also have various other numbers which represent data on sociability, dexterity, weight, height, various aptitudes, etc. Determining which numbers represent what requires a decoding card with holes punched in it. Selma is looking at Helmholtz's file and has learned that according to his own testing as student he has a 183 I.Q., in the genius range, which he says surely can't be correct. Selma has also learned that Schroeder is in fact not the genius of the school, but Big Floyd is and told them both so. Realizing what has happened, Helmholtz invites the three students to visit his office at 4p.m. where he tells them that Selma has actually been looking at weight and not I.Q. Big Floyd says that he always knew he wasn't smart and despairs that life holds nothing in store for him. Helmholtz takes the students to the band room where a hastily arranged group of grand piano, brass sextet, and glockenspiel backs the sixty member glee club in a magnificent performance of Big Floyd's song for Selma, who faints.[2]

  1. "Short Stories of the American 1950s, Inc., Kurt Vonnegut, Proprietor", Jerome Klinkowitz, Complete Stories, pg. xxiii.
  2. "A Song for Selma", Complete Stories, pp. 843-852.
Advertisement