The Volunteer Fireman

Because he isn’t likely to discover the meaning of existence, a sane man will forget about looking for it. We are all, however, quite mad, so when Kurt Vonnegut revealed in one of his novels that all of earth’s history was merely a signal for a replacement part arranged by a very patient space traveler with a broken motor, we felt a lot better. We also worry about the imminent destruction of civilization by atomic war, so in another novel Vonnegut obligingly arranged for the sudden end of the world by freezing — and we were able to get down to business for a few days.

We are best cheered by untruths, so the bigger the whopper, the better — says Vonnegut. In his masterpiece, Cat’s Cradle, the founder of a new religion insisted at every step that his own doctrines were lies. Solace, apparently, came immediately. In the preface to this collection of short stories, he announces that one of the themes of his novels is “No pain.” Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., probably our finest Black Humorist, is offering us comfort.

by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Delacorte, $5.95)

He is the little Dutch boy stopping the hole in the dike: while he conscientiously aids us, he reminds us that we live in the shadow of deep waters. Or, to use the idea that appears frequently in his work as a main character, a minor figure, part of the background, or the tail of a metaphor, he is the volunteer fireman, unselfishly and innocently rushing to put out the random blazes of civilization. His comforts frighten us with their inadequacy, and we laugh in self-defense.

Vonnegut’s special enemies are science, morality, free enterprise, socialism, fascism, Communism, all government — any force in our lives which regards human beings as ciphers. His villains are simple egotists, indifferent to other people, his protagonists men who adapt events to their own discontent with the system, rolling with the times to create change, which is rarely, in Vonnegut’s world, an improvement. His third group of characters, his saints, his volunteer firemen, are content to aid others in their own small world, unaware of the larger actions that swirl around them. Failing to participate in events, they nevertheless become the focus of all activity, their relevance being the undeniable fact that they exist.

Vonnegut is a pessimist. But he is also an idealist; his irony is not cynicism. His writing has a disarming directness, and his few statements about style reinforce this simplicity, yet the apparent slickness of his short, tight paragraphs — almost a paradigm of the popular magazine — fails to conceal the size of his concepts. And what appears at first to be gratuitous satire is always integral to the tale.

For instance, the title story occurs in an overcrowded world of the future where even Howard Johnson’s is nationalized, where, to reverse the population trend, all citizens are required to take pills which make them numb from the waist down. “The pills were ethical because they didn’t interfere with a person’s ability to reproduce, which would have been unnatural and immoral. All the pills did was take every bit of pleasure out of sex.” Curiously, in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, a novel that Vonnegut wrote several years before the story, this setting is attributed to the inventiveness of an old science-fiction writer named Kilgore Trout, whose “favorite formula was to describe a perfectly hideous society, not unlike his own, and then, toward the end, to suggest ways in which it could be improved.”

The story, which first appeared in Playboy, climaxes with a rape in the “ancient Kennedy Compound” in Hyannis Port: “On the green cement, in front of the ancient frame houses, were statues representing the fourteen Kennedys who had been Presidents of the United States of the World. They were playing touch football.” While recent events have made this scene poignant, its original intention was not so much satire as explanation of the future’s quiteacceptable-to-Catholics method of birth control.

Further, that Billy the Poet, the hedonist rebel against the social order, after raping a girl to restore her sensuality, reads her Elizabeth Barrett’s “How Do I Love Thee?” sonnet seems a put-on, a cheap irony, or worse, until one realizes that the whole situation of the story comments on the fabled Browning romance. It is not only of interest to psychologists that Elizabeth had been thrown from a horse at puberty and remained an invalid until she married Robert Browning. Freed from her domineering father, she rapidly regained her health on her honeymoon. “What you’ve been through,” says Billy the Poet to his rapee, “is a typical wedding night for a strait-laced girl of a hundred years ago.” The poem is functional to the story, for this whole society, numb from the waist down, is more sexually repressed than any Victorian lady poet.

Like the settings of the novels, those of the stories remain close to Vonnegut’s own experience. The Kennedys at Hyannis Port, who appear in several stories, are not gratuitous in that respect either, for Vonnegut lives on Cape Cod; a nouveau Yankee, he resents the tourists, hot on the Kennedy trail, who despoil his haven. His boyhood home in Indianapolis, the General Electric plant where he was a public relations man, and his new home on Cape Cod — these settings are common to almost all his novels and short stories.

The style may bring to mind another Black Humorist, Terry Southern. But only Southern’s filmscript for Dr. Strangelove approaches Vonnegut’s brilliance. Both authors use the cliché for effect, but where the sardonic Mr. Southern uses the commonplace to reinforce our own complacency, Vonnegut uses it to throw new light on those thoughts which we hoped were not ordinary. A cliché is dead language, as when an author deliberately inserts one into the unresisting mouth of a character, he is registering contempt for that character, labeling him dead. In Cat’s Cradle, a nihilist strangles a cat and hangs a “Meow” sign around its neck. Vonnegut does not find that funny.

Roughly half of Vonnegut’s published short stories are included in this collection. It is a good selection, although an unimpressive review of the big Random House dictionary has unaccountably crept in. Vonnegut’s writing has only recently brought him a fair amount of success, and these stories occasionally bear the scars of their commercial birth. His predilection for sciencefiction modes has limited his acceptability as far as the upper-class journals are concerned. Respectability has its own limitations.

The reader should not expect fullfledged apocalypse from these pleasant tales, only brush fires of varying intensity that a good fireman can handle. “The contents of this book are samples of work I sold in order to finance the writing of the novels.” It is a modest and unnecessary disclaimer.