While Mortals Sleep_ Unpublished Short Fiction - Kurt Vonnegut [2]
And so, when you start a story in this collection, you know you are being set up. And you know what? It’s fun to be set up. This collection is full of relatively simple stories, about relatively simple problems. In one story, a husband plays with his model trains too much, neglecting his wife in the process. (A far cry from Cat’s Cradle.) In another, a newspaper editor who derides Christmas learns something about its true meaning when forced to judge a holiday lighting competition. A young woman inherits a fortune and finds the burden crushing and her new suitors untrustworthy. (Note just how many of these stories involve the pursuit of mid-century ideas of success—a quick fortune, a stretch limo, nice dividends on a stock portfolio; Vonnegut, working as a PR man, was no doubt struggling to get over a financial hump himself.)
In any case, no matter what the plot, you as the reader know that by the end of the story, you will get somewhere. That Vonnegut will tell you something with candor and clarity. That being a decent person is an achievable and desirable thing. That faith has value. That wealth solves few problems. Simple enough messages, sure, but there’s a reason to be reminded of such things, and relief in having them expressed artfully but with a certain lack of obfuscation.
These early-career stories are different from Vonnegut’s later novels, where the tone is darker, grimmer, more exasperated, where the nuances are many and the lessons more complex. Though while writing these stories, Vonnegut had already seen the decimation of Dresden, had tramped amid the charred bodies of thousands of civilians, had spent time in a German POW camp, the stories in While Mortals Sleep have the bright-eyed clarity of a young man just beginning to understand the workings of the world. You can almost imagine a kindly looking guy in a cardigan and penny loafers writing the stories in a malt shop, filling the juke box with quarters, typing happily away.
But of course he wasn’t that. He was a man with kids trying to support his family while edifying the readers of Ladies’ Home Journal. Later, of course, he’d be writing, repeatedly, about the end of the world. And sometimes incest, and often enough about the folly of war, and the greed and depravity of our industries and government. But for now, we have the eager young mousetrap maker, and we are his willing prey.
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword by Dave Eggers
Jenny
The Epizootic
Hundred-Dollar Kisses
Guardian of the Person
With His Hand on the Throttle
Girl Pool
Ruth
While Mortals Sleep
Out, Brief Candle
Tango
Bomar
The Man Without No Kiddleys
Mr. Z
$10,000 a Year, Easy
Money Talks
The Humbugs
Illustrations
About the Author
(illustration credit 3)
JENNY
George Castrow used to come back to the home works of the General Household Appliances Company just once a year—to install his equipment in the shell of the new model GHA refrigerator. And every time he got there he dropped a suggestion in the suggestion box. It was always the same suggestion: “Why not make next year’s refrigerator in the shape of a woman?” Then there would be a sketch of a refrigerator shaped like a woman, with arrows showing where the vegetable crisper and the butter conditioner and the ice cubes and all would go.
George called it the Food-O-Mama. Everybody thought the Food-O-Mama was an extra-good joke because George was out on the road all year long, dancing and talking and singing with a refrigerator shaped like a refrigerator. Its name was Jenny. George had designed and built Jenny back when he’d been a real comer in the GHA Research Laboratory.
George might as well have been married to Jenny. He lived with her in the back of a moving van that was mostly filled