New England Enters the Space Age

New England Enters the Space Age, also known as Comet, was a sculpture made by Vonnegut that was installed in December 1959 at the restaurant of the newly built Logan International Motel near the Boston airport. According to scholar and friend Jerome Klinkowitz, Vonnegut would often retell the tale of his one professional foray into the plastic arts as an amusing anecdote. Klinkowitz dated the events to late 1957 and explicitly tied the design to the recently launched Sputnik probe. Vonnegut's daughter Nanette remembered the episode as taking place "in the early 1960s". However, a letter by Vonnegut definitively dates the sculpture to the latter half of 1959.

Fabrication

In the late 1950s, Vonnegut's sales in the short story market were drying up. Talking at a neighborhood party with a friend who worked for the Sheraton Corporation as a decorator, Vonnegut learned that there was a wall in the restaurant of the under-construction Logan International Motel twelve feet high and forty feet long that was still left bare. He sketched out a proposal for a comet, initially as a joke, but a month later he was given a commission for the piece for $1100, which, in need of money, he accepted. Despite some education in mechanical engineering and field assembly during World War Two, Vonnegut lacked the necessary skills. After an initial attempt to learn welding from a local blacksmith in order to produce the comet's tail, he decided instead to simply hire the job out. Next he sought a ball of granite for the comet's head, such as were common on decorative gravestones in the area. However, he soon learned at a funeral stone yard that such balls were artifacts of the nineteenth century, carved on the same lathes as cannonballs. After briefly fearing a need to grave rob to finish his sculpture, Vonnegut explained the reason for his need and learned that a "manufacturer's second" picked from many left in a nearby field a century ago would work.

Vonnegut's sketch of his sculpture in a letter to Knox Burger, dated December 7 1959. (© The Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Trust)

In a letter to Knox Burger dated December 7, 1959, Vonnegut mentioned his friend who was a decorator for motels and offered to speak with him about buying ceramics made by Knox's wife Otis. Referencing an earlier letter, Vonnegut updated Knox that his contract required him to deliver his sculpture on December 15. He noted its specific composition of "[w]elded steel, brazed copper and bronze, and a ball of Quincy granite". He noted that he and his wife Jane "had a charming afternoon" in search of one of the rare granite balls, where he was able to find "an old one for $17.00" after someone initially offered to track one down for $150. He stated his commission was "a grand" and so far he had spent $65 and was "about three-quarters through". Referring to himself as now a "middle-aged sculptor", he included a diagram of the work, indicating that the granite ball was 10 inches in diameter trailed by intertwined brass and copper rods for the full 18 feet of the sculpture. Emanating from the ball were swirls of steel rods down about half the length of the tail.

To complete assembly of the sculpture, Vonnegut glued the granite ball to the welded-steel tail. A carpenter built a platform, which Vonnegut used to take it to Boston with the help of a boatyard-owning friend with a large trailer. Despite the motel's builders allowing for zero tolerance, the sculpture fit perfectly. Half a century later, Vonnegut's daughter Nanette would describe the assembly in the family kitchen, since it was too long to take any deeper through "the tiny doors and hallways of our ancient, labyrinthine house". She remembered "a lot of swearing and everyone staying clear as he and a friend maneuvered the thing out the door". Although the only joy the project initially produced for Vonnegut was the money, when the whole family came to watch the sculpture "bolted to a wall", Nanette said that her father "was as pleased as I have ever seen him". Originally skeptical, the motel's owners were impressed and asked Vonnegut if he had other decorating ideas, but he declined, feeling he'd only done this sculpture out of a sense of whimsy and necessity. It remained up for two decades and was even depicted on the restaurant's menu and motel's stationary. The work was not attributed to Vonnegut in any way, even after his fame, and when the restaurant was remodeled in the late 1970s, the sculpture was scrapped for its steel.