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BagomboSnuffBox

Bagombo Snuff Box is the third and final short story collection released in Vonnegut’s lifetime, assembled by Peter Reed, who wrote the preface, and published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 1999. It contains 23 stories, all of which had previously been printed in periodicals during the 1950s and early 1960s. When combined with the earlier Welcome to Monkey House, it was intended to contain all of Vonnegut’s remaining published short fiction. However, it lacks the short story "Christmas Contest", first printed in Farm Journal in December 1952[1] and not officially reprinted until 2008 in an alternate form under the title "While Mortals Sleep" in the collection of the same name. Three pieces—"The Powder-Blue Dragon", "The Boy Who Hated Girls", and "Hal Irwin's Magic Lamp"—were extensively rewritten by Vonnegut for republication. Vonnegut's Introduction is included in the first volume of Library of America's Vonnegut set in 2012. All the stories were reprinted in Complete Stories in 2017.

Contents[]

Reed's Preface[]

Although Vonnegut eventually gained fame as a writer of novels, the first decade or more of his career through the 1950s until the early 1960s was largely defined by his less well-known short stories for periodicals such as "Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Argosy, Redbook, and other magazines". Twenty-three of these were collected in Welcome to the Monkey House, while this book collects the rest that had been published. It is in these stories—"ingenious, varied, and well written"—that Vonnegut "honed his skills that we see evolve... [into] the topics and techniques further developed in his later work". Before he turned professional while employed by General Electric in Schenectady, New York, he began writing for The Shortridge Echo, the daily paper of his high school in Indianapolis, and later for The Cornell Daily Sun in college. In these, his "humor and witty social iconoclasm" is already apparent, but it was during his service in the Second World War that provided material for his "masterpiece", Slaughterhouse-Five. After the war and before the expansion of television, popular short story magazines were a primary entertainment. In 1949, Vonnegut submitted "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" to Collier's where editor Knox Burger recognized Vonnegut's name from Cornell and suggested revisions. He further introduced Vonnegut to his future agents, Kenneth Littauer and Max Wilkinson, who would further guide his writing style. Having sold a few stories, Vonnegut quit GE and moved to Cape Cod, devoting himself to writing full-time.

Vonnegut's time in the war is also reflected in works such as "Der Arme Dolmetscher", "Souvenir", and "The Cruise of The Jolly Roger". His experiences at GE—whose slogan "Progress is our mot important product" summed up well "the decade's optimism and... can-do spirit"—can be seen in Vonnegut's examination of how technology changes everyday life. The vision of a happy home filled with the latest gadgets, regardless of the human cost, animates the stories "The Package" and "Poor Little Rich Town", as well as his first novel, Player Piano. Pretense is attacked, often by characters who are children, in "A Present for Big Saint Nick", "Bagombo Snuff Box", "Unpaid Consultant", "Custom-Made Bride", and "The Powder-Blue Dragon". In many of these, occupation determines identity, which may overlap with family issues, as in "This Son of Mine". The role of women makes the stories seem dated to a period when women, especially after marriage, rarely worked outside the home and took their standards of womanhood for the same magazines in which these stories appeared. However, many of the romantic tales, such as "A Night for Love" and "Find Me a Dream" reflect "the burdensome expectations that can be placed on women in a man's world. This is perhaps most seen in one of his final stories from 1963, "Lovers Anonymous", which "treats humorously the social awkwardness" of the nascent women's liberation movement.

Short stories by their nature require "quick character definition" which Vonnegut does in a few paragraphs. Even in his novels, however, character is often subservient to plot, with "psychologically complex personalities" more important than physical description. Many stories are narrated by salesmen or financial advisors, who can move in different social settings and provide an immediate observational voice, grounding the stories in everyday life. They also tend to provide irony and humor in the tradition of Mark Twain's tall tales, many ending with a punchline like "Mnemonics" and "Any Reasonable Offer". Some like "Thanasphere" take this in a science fiction direction, especially with the then-unrealized prospect of space exploration. Ultimately, however, television killed the short story market and Vonnegut moved to the novels that would define his career and which remain in print. All of these stories have have not been easily accessible since their initial publication, except for "Hal Irwin's Magic Lamp" which appeared in his now rare first collection, Canary in a Cat House, and has been re-written for this edition. Curiously, the copyright page of Welcome to the Monkey House indicates that "Der Arme Dolmetscher" was originally intended to be included and, although unpublished until July 1955, may date from much earlier since its "headnote describes Vonnegut as working at General Electric", which he had left by 1950.[2]

Vonnegut's Introduction[]

These stories, assembled by Reed, were written primarily to make a living and support a family. Like those in Welcome to the Monkey House, they come from the end of the golden age of magazine fiction, which lasted until about 1953. Had he not become recognized for his novels, they would no doubt have disappeared forever. Vonnegut says he only was able to stay in print because of publisher Sam Lawrence, who bought the rights to his previous novels and encouraged him to complete Slaughterhouse-Five. Having revisited Dresden recently, Vonnegut realized that he had now lived so long that he'd seen an Atlantis before it was destroyed. Although short stories can have greatness, all of these works are merely amusing relics of the time before television. In 1938, a sixteen year old Vonnegut, hating high school in the midst of the Great Depression, would make his body comfortable in a chair and search a new Saturday Evening Post for a story with an interesting title and illustration. Among the advertisements, which actually pay for the publication, he must turn on his brain and convert strange symbols on paper into thoughts in his head. Entering a state between sleep and rest, his breathing and pulse slow and troubles drop away. Physiologically and psychologically, short stories are more akin to a peculiar form of meditation. Other narrative entertainment, such as the novel, are too long to be refreshing, while radio, unlike television, doesn't give the eyes something to do.

After returning home from the Second World War at the age of twenty two, Vonnegut married his "childhood sweetheart" Jane. The two moved to Chicago where he studied anthropology and worked a police reporter for the news bureau. However, his master's thesis on similarities between the Cubists and nineteenth century Native American uprisings was rejected and it was clear there would be no openings for reporters any time soon, since the returning veterans and the "terrific" women who replaced them during the war both intended to keep their jobs. Instead, he worked as "a publicity hack for General Electric", a company who prided themselves on innovation that made other companies outdated. Meanwhile, Vonnegut began writing short stories for both more money and "more self-respect" than GE provided. With the help of his agent and editor, he sold enough to earn a year's salary and quit his job to write full time. His first novel, Player Piano, was about what he had seen at GE and their dream that machines would soon do the jobs of human beings. However, by 1953 advertisers had begun shifting their money from magazines to television. Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 was also released in 1953, examining a future it which books, now almost entire unread, are burned and everyone lives life through the characters on their wall-length televisions, just as they do at the end of the twentieth century. GE itself would soon come to feel out of date as Bell Labs developed the transistor, replacing now archaic vacuum tubes.

With three children to raise, Vonnegut worked for a time at a boarding school on Cape Cod, writing industrial ads in Boston, and being among the first to sell Saab automobiles in the United States. Before achieving fame, he taught creative writing in Iowa, and afterward at Harvard and City College of New York. He breaks the basics of creative writing down to eight rules: use a stranger's time well; have one character the reader can root for; every character should want something; each sentence should reveal character or advance the action; start as close to the end as possible; have terrible things happen to the characters; write to please just one person; and give readers as much information as soon as possible. The greatest short story writer of Vonnegut's generation, Flannery O'Connor, broke all these rules except at least the first, as great writers tend to do. It's unknown if she wrote for only one person, but the psychiatrist Edmund Bergler in his book The Writer and Psychoanalysis argued that most writers do, whether they know it or not. Vonnegut realized this person for him was his late sister, Allie, and that the stories in this collection were really written for her, as are even the works he writes now. He guesses that writing for one person alone makes readers feel like they're "eavesdropping on a fascinating conversation between two people", as well as setting implicit boundaries to the story. Because the boundaries of Vonnegut's short stories and novels were delimited by his sister, she continues to live on.[3]

The Stories[]

Coda to My Career as a Writer for Periodicals[]

Some "minor and major glitches" which should have been fixed in the originals were repaired for this book. However, three stories—"The Powder-Blue Dragon", "The Boy Who Hated Girls", and "Hal Irwin's Magic Lamp"— so upset Vonnegut because of their initial promise and "asinine" conclusion, that he felt compelled to substantially rewrite them. He calls them "fakes on the order of Piltdown Man" but acknowledges that many publications at the time were happy to publish such mediocre works. Others of supposedly higher quality wouldn't give his submissions a second look, which he understood. He learned how to become a writer, and thus become to known himself, while doing these kind of "paid literary apprenticeships" that no longer exist, while those in "self-consciously literary publications" already knew who they were. Despite the lack of commercial appeal for the written word, many people still take these "voyages of self-discovery" as shown by the proliferation of creative writing courses. Despite the fact that writing is no longer a viable way to make a living, many people will continue to do so because unlike TV or movies—which are tremendously expensive and require one "to deal with the scum of the earth"—writing is a cheap way to externalize what is inside us, which is the nature of art, the only purpose of which is "to make one's soul grow". Although no longer writing fiction for periodicals, he will occasionally contribute an article when asked, such as the following which was recently printed in the "excellent alternative weekly in Indianapolis, NUVO" on the topic of being a native of the Middle West.[4]

"To Be a Native Middle-Westerner"[]

Like many animals, humans are instinctively territorial and it's only recently that we could stray far from our birthplace and relatives and expect to survive. Unlike in Yugoslavia or Rwanda, such divisions in North America "are by and large harmless... [and] can even be comical". Vonnegut often mentions that he's from the Middle West, but at least the "territorial vanity" in this is less than those from Texas or Brooklyn. Ultimately, the main trait he developed was "an aggressively nasal accent", the same used by Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address and Eugene V. Debs of Terre Haute, Indiana, a state which was also then the location of the national headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan. Although himself "a purebred Kraut", the Middle West is home to a diversity of people. Even his accent is really "fairly typical of European-Americans raised some distance north of the former Confederate States of America". Perhaps there is nothing that universally defines a Middle-Westerner. A crowd on Fifth Avenue in New York City will look very similar to one on State Street in Chicago, except for "an enormous presence there... almost like music": Lake Michigan. The distinction of the Middle West lies in "these tremendous bodies of pure water" in the Great Lakes, with no salt water to be found. Even now when Vonnegut swims in the ocean, the water tastes wrong. The Middle West also contains seemingly endless amounts of flat, arable land.

When Vonnegut was born, barely a century after Indiana statehood, the Middle West had regional centers of culture and education, much like the "provincial capitals" of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: "Chicago was our Vienna, Indianapolis our Prague, Cincinnati our Budapest, and Cleveland our Bucharest". The arts were a common civic institution, inspiring the young "to daydream of becoming some sort of artist or intellectual". Having writers, painters, or architects of local renown invited for dinner was common in Vonnegut's childhood, when he himself studied clarinet under the first chair of the symphony orchestra. The Middle West could continue to produce "artists of such different sorts, from world-class to merely competent", provided that funding, especially in public schools, for teaching the practice and appreciation of the arts is not withdrawn. No one has changed the course of history as much as "four hayseeds in Ohio": Orville and Wilbur Wright of Dayton who invented the airplane, and Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith and William Griffith Wilson who in Akron devised the 12 Step program of Alcoholics Anonymous. This is not even to mention the numerous musicians, architects, dancers, writers, and others who have come from the Middle West. Atlantic ports like New York and Boston retain a relationship with Europe, but almost every person of European descent in the Middle West has no connection to that national past and think of themselves as Americans. Others who arrive from other parts of the United States bring a memory of their homeland, but often their home state or region, not their place of ethnic origin. The geography of the Middle West gives the breathtaking, almost religious image of "a fertile continent stretching forever in all directions".[5]

  1. "Christmas Contest", Farm Journal, December 1952.
  2. "Preface", Peter Reed, Bagombo Snuff Box, pp. xv-xxii.
  3. "Introduction", Bagombo Snuff Box, pp. 1-14.
  4. "Coda to My Career as a Writer for Periodicals", Bagombo Snuff Box, pp. 349-351.
  5. "Coda to My Career as a Writer for Periodicals", Bagombo Snuff Box, pp. 351-357.
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