Sleeping Beauty

"Sleeping Beauty" is an essay first published in the June 1984 edition of Architectural Digest, featuring two photographs of Kurt Vonnegut, Sr., the article's subject, as well as one of the Bell Telephone building in Indianapolis, which he initially designed, and another of the new AT&T building in Manhattan, which is mentioned in the text. In the original article, Vonnegut's suggestion for his father's epitaph is rendered on a line drawing of a tombstone, similar to one featured in Breakfast of Champions and, later, Hocus Pocus. The piece was reprinted in Fates Worse Than Death in 1991.

Summary

AT&T Building, formerly Bell Telephone Building, Indianapolis

In his sixties, Vonnegut's architect father, Kurt, Sr., admitted that his vocation "had been no fun at all" since it was more about accounting than art. When he was young, he and his brother Bernard had the impression that their father was excited by being an architect, but when the Great Depression and then the Second World War came, almost all building stopped during what should have been the prime of the elder Vonnegut's career. Instead, he was forced to close his office which had been started by his own father, the first license architect in Indiana, and instead worked in inventory control at a saw company which had converted to weapons manufacture. His wife then died and it also became apparent that after the war, none of his children would remain in Indianapolis, instead chasing work where it could be found. When building began again, the elder Vonnegut became a partner of much younger men in a new firm, his professional reputation still excellent. One of his most admired designs was for the Bell Telephone headquarters on North Meridian Street, begun before the Depression. When more floors were to be added in the same style, Bell Telephone hired a different architect, even though the elder Vonnegut was still practicing. He retired to nearby Brown County, became a potter, and died in 1957 at seventy-two.

550 Madison, formerly AT&T Headquarters, Manhattan

Looking back at his father during his fallow period, lacking satisfying work, Vonnegut now sees him like Sleeping Beauty, waiting for a prince to awaken him with a job that would allow him to express his skill. Instead, for sixteen years his suitors were sick, turning him into Rip Van Winkle instead. With the start of the Depression, Vonnegut was taken out of private school and his new public school friends identified his father "as a unicorn". Instead of dark suits and monochromatic ties, his father wore mismatched clothes that nonetheless by their mixed texture and color were beautiful. While other fathers talked of jobs or politics, his father would urge Vonnegut's friends, and even random strangers, to admire some object, natural or man-made, as a masterpiece of construction. As a planetary citizen—uninterested in politics or national boundaries, but only beauty—the elder Vonnegut was indeed as rare as a unicorn. AT&T recently built a new building in Manhattan, designed by Philip Johnson. When Vonnegut wonders if he should "rage at Fate" for denying his father the chance to have "as much fun" with his career as Johnson has, he imagines his father speaking from "across the abyss between the living and the dead", saying that he expects no pity for having missed the potential challenges he could have faced in his prime, since it was enough to have been a unicorn.