Welcome to the Monkey House: The Special Edition

by Kurt Vonnegut,Gregory D. Sumner

  What those endeavors demanded in common was long hours of preparation and painstaking diligence, combined with an iron determination in the face of setbacks and detours and false starts—none of which should be visible when the piece was ready for public view. In his own case, if one was lucky, the unglamorous “showing up” at the workstation every day might result in a few intuitive leaps, the occasional wrinkle or departure that invited notice as original, special, maybe even something worthy of being called art.

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  The short story “Welcome to the Monkey House” was the fruit of such labors. It is a fascinating example of Vonnegut’s craft. Much of this is due to its timing, both within the arc of his career and against the backdrop of the seismic cultural and social changes, the assault on sacred cows and polite decorum, in which it emerged. First appearing in Playboy in January 1968, with its provocative language and its parody of drug laws, the “sexual revolution,” and the American Way of Death, it was custom-built to appeal to that magazine’s hip young male audience. This was a demographic worlds removed from both the underground sci-fi crowd who had stumbled upon Vonnegut’s early novels and the middlebrow consumers of The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and Ladies’ Home Journal who had long been his bread-and-butter constituency. It created such a sensation that later in 1968 he used it as the title selection for a paperback anthology of short stories, just as he was on the cusp of hitting it big. Vonnegut was emerging from cult “underground” status with pieces for The New York Times and Esquire, and, after a residency teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he had finally figured out how to tell his war story. The result would be a bestseller phenomenon the next year, Slaughterhouse-Five.

  In the excerpts of the multiple drafts presented here, we can observe this famous story taking shape and, at an intimate level, discover something about Vonnegut’s method. Especially with a subject as open about his process as he was, the opportunity to observe an author working in “real time” is rare and illuminating indeed.

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  In the near future of “Monkey House,” a police state has instituted measures to curb the explosion of the global population—which, extrapolating from the contemporary trends that produced alarmist books like The Population Bomb, Kurt Vonnegut imagines reaching seventeen billion. Sixty-three million people live in New York City alone, seven million despoil the villages and byways of Vonnegut’s beloved Cape. Something drastic had to be done. People find themselves “jammed together like drupelets,” the pulpy knobs on raspberries—a word only Vonnegut at his most whimsical would employ, and a thought perhaps inspired by close observation of the bumper-to-bumper summer traffic near his home.

  “Ethical Birth Control” laws require citizens to take pills to numb the lower body, removing the temptation of sex for pleasure. When medicated, women felt like “balsa wood,” and you could “kick a man in the balls while reciting the Gettysburg Address and he wouldn’t miss a syllable.” The pill is the invention of “J. Edgar Nation,” a prudish pharmacist from Grand Rapids offended by the quite natural carnal behavior his (large) family witnessed while walking past the monkey house of the local zoo one morning after Easter services. Vonnegut often commented on how small ideas can have big, unexpected consequences once they are in circulation. The classic example is in Cat’s Cradle, where Felix Hoenikker’s “last batch of brownies,” ice-nine, ends up destroying the world. In this story, the obscure pharmacist’s invention has been made mandatory for people everywhere. Those in the renegade underground who refuse to take them, who insist on keeping their full range of human feelings and appetites, are hunted down and prosecuted as a threat to public decency.

  A side effect of the pills is that they cause one to “piss blue”—a boon to those charged with separating criminals from the rest of the population. It also provides the author with the opportunity to play with some irreverent, earthy doggerel. Here is an example from one draft:

  I did not sow,

  I did not spin,

  And thanks to drugs

  I did not sin.

  I loved the crowds,

  The smog, the noise,

  And when I peed

  I peed turquoise.

  Throughout his career Vonnegut leavened his fiction with such digressions, graffiti and soldier’s limericks, intermixed with snippets of lyric poetry, biblical passages, and sonnets from Shakespeare. The vulgarities drove more genteel readers away, including, to his chagrin, some of his relatives back in Indiana, but they serve to keep things grounded, and they enhance the weight of the nobler sentiments.

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  The second population-control measure is a ubiquitous chain of roadside “Ethical Suicide Parlors.” They are recognizable by their festive purple roofs, twinned always with orange-roofed Howard Johnson’s restaurants. (Again, this may be an image drawn from the sprawl the author saw overtaking the picturesque towns near his home.) The horror of the juxtaposition is the black joke: customers have a choice of “28 flavors of ice cream, 8 flavors of death,” the two most popular being “butter-crunch and carbon monoxide.” At every parlor, also known as an Easy Go or a Sleep Shop, one is greeted by a member of a team of “hostesses” trained to be irresistible in their sexy pop-art costumes. (In some drafts, as we’ll see, it is a male “expediter” who works with the client.)

  The job is to seduce, to make the decision to go through with the final exit smooth and seamless for those who dare venture through the front door. In an era when war, disease, and old age have been abolished by science, death is for volunteers—a tiny sliver of freedom preserved in this totalitarian society. There is pressure on the hostesses to meet quotas and thus make the garish population thermometer in front of each establishment move, however infinitesimally, in the right direction. Vonnegut is as ever a sympathetic student of human pride: patrons routinely, poignantly overestimate the impact of their demise and are disappointed when informed of the statistical facts. “Every inch,” one client is told, “is 166,666,666 people.”

  In the final version of “Monkey House,” “Billy the Poet” is the reputedly fearsome messiah-leader of the “nothing-head” rebels (“bombed out of their skulls with the sex-madness that came from taking nothing”). He is the id of this cold and regimented world, and his wildly lewd guerrilla verses are just the provocation to heat things up. Outwitting the authorities, Billy appears in disguise at the Hyannis Port parlor and abducts one of its hostesses, Nancy. At the age of sixty-three (though she looks twenty-two, thanks to antiaging shots) she is, like all of her colleagues, a virgin. Nancy is boastfully belligerent beneath her false charm, practiced in the martial arts and spoiling for a fight. She is vaguely bored with life, finding it “pointless” with its absence of pleasure and warmth, but these misgivings are repressed as she goes about her job. Billy the Poet leads his hostage down a manhole and through an elaborate sewer system. In the darkness Nancy goes through the same disorientation in space and time that Billy Pilgrim and his fellow POWs will soon experience in the subterranean meat locker of Slaughterhouse-Five.

  Helped by the male and female members of his gang, Billy proceeds in his mission, initiating Nancy with clinical detachment into the world of sex. The deed is done on a sailboat anchored in Hyannis Port. Despite his braggadocio, Billy turns out to be less fearsome than advertised, a bespectacled, book-reading “shrimp” to Nancy’s Amazon warrior. She is a “nothing-head” herself now, alive and awakening, and one day she may be grateful for the chance to find real love on her own terms.

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  Walking though the multiple drafts of the manuscript, with their keystrokes and cross-outs and inserts, we enjoy the perspective over Vonnegut’s shoulder, our view obscured by smoke, the ashtrays at his elbows crammed with spent Pall Malls. “When he writes, he sits on a padded Danish easy chair,” one observer recalled after a visit to his study—the one his handyman neighbor had built. “With his long legs drawn up and his back hunched, he leans forward to
type on a machine set on a coffee table. Papers, folders and books are strewn about the table and the floor.” Vonnegut’s wife, Jane, often heard him talking to himself in his workroom as he acted out the dialogue and experimented with how different word combinations sounded. He tried to deny this playacting, without much luck. “I must be talking on the telephone,” he half-protested.

  Daughter Nanny recalled the raucous atmosphere that surrounded him during the family years on the Cape:

  How my father ever got any writing done at all in the years I lived with him, I’ll never understand.… The Vonnegut house was the most popular house in town. Friends and friends of friends were always there and never went home.… Intrusions … were constant: cherry bombs set off much too close to his study window, and the endless thwacking sound of Frisbees and whiffle balls hitting the outer walls of his studio.

  How he did it was by following routines, showing up, and letting the distractions of the world fall away. “My father kept standard, nine-to-five working hours,” Nanny also tells us. “In those hours he became a mumbling ghost to all of us.”

  The quality we notice above all in the draft pages is the sheer doggedness of approach, the enormous effort that went into even the most apparently offhanded language and “transparent” effects as the author honed them into shape. These are the ingredients of what John Updike admiringly called Vonnegut’s “come-as-you-are prose,” a way of writing much more difficult to pull off than readers imagine.

  In his Iowa classes Vonnegut divided his students into bashers and swoopers, according to how they went about their business, and the excerpts that follow reveal him to be firmly in the first camp. Fast execution, automatic writing with revisions left for later—this was in general not his way, as much as he might have preferred it to be. “You beat your head against a wall until you break through to page two and you break through to page three, and so on,” he once explained of his practice.

  Here we see the author starting and restarting the story—and restarting it again—in that quaint, pre-word-processing era that seems like another planet to us today. Vonnegut shuffles and reshuffles the deck, plays God, tries out new ideas and different points of view, adds and eliminates plot lines and characters, tweaks and discards turns of phrase, only to have them sometimes reappear later. Every “keeper” is hard won, and we know there are plenty of overflowing wastebaskets along the way. There must be at least forty start-overs in the drafts of what would become the story “Welcome to the Monkey House,” with multiple provisional titles, just one indication of how plastic the author viewed his materials. “If Sherman’s Horse Can Take It,” “Desire Under a Hot Tin Streetcar,” “Nancy Warren”—these and other experiments were run, lived for while, then ended up on the shoproom floor.

  The published version of “Welcome to the Monkey House”—the end product we all know—is a classic in the Vonnegut catalog. It functions as satire, with the author able to make his points (“I’ve always had to have an axe to grind to write”), and there are inimitable Vonnegut passages and jokes in abundance, enough to satisfy even the casual fan. The primary story template in all its iterations to finished work addresses some of the author’s pet concerns: an ambivalence about death, the question of free will versus determinism, the decidedly mixed blessings of automation. In Vonnegut’s imagined future, the mass of people have been relieved of work thanks to machines, and they are content to take their pills and learn the art of “consuming intelligently,” something they did by “watching television, which was the government.” Seen from the second decade of the twenty-first century, some might say, this has a prophetic ring to it.

  Other themes are raised, too, in the drafts of this wickedly dark, deceptively simple little narrative: Vonnegut’s sense of the Janus-faced nature of women and the weakness of men in their presence, the hypocrisy of the Religious Right and its dogmas of abstinence and opposition to euthanasia, the often catastrophic results of scientific inquiry and innovation. And there are wry references to the junk of our everyday landscape, including a museum dedicated to Cape Cod’s heavily marketed Kennedy dynasty. The fable also functions as Vonnegut’s commentary on the Pill, the warring positions of the Catholic Church and feminists on issues of reproductive freedom. It alerts us to the costs that come with suppressing our animal nature, and it urges us to accept and love ourselves as we are, to celebrate our capacity for pleasure and joy. Thus, “Welcome to the Monkey House.”

  For all of its cleverness, and its ultimately redemptive message, though, to my mind the published version has always felt more mechanical, its vulgarities more forced, than what we find in Vonnegut’s best work. What sets his novels and stories apart, I observed in my book on Vonnegut, Unstuck in Time, is the way we fall in love with each character. To borrow a phrase from Mark Twain, we “develop a warm personal interest in their fortunes.” Such was the author’s sympathy for the trials of the human condition that he had trouble creating truly unlikeable people, and when he tries, it doesn’t always come off. Here, Billy and Nancy are too harshly drawn for us to care about them. It is as though Vonnegut doesn’t quite know how to use the new license of expression opening up in the 1960s, hasn’t figured out yet how to navigate the collapse of old rules without resorting to the temptations of the sledgehammer. Like so many other artists in that tumultuous time, the writer in his liberation is still feeling his way.

  The most exciting thing I discovered in these drafts is a second story, in which, instead of the World Government/police state theme, we have something more in keeping with the kindly, world-weary side of Vonnegut’s genius. Here the lead character, with the strange name of “Greta Garball” (“Garbo” in some drafts), is a hustler, a streetwise businessman who (à la Dr. Kevorkian) saw a market for an affordable, dignified passage to death. Garball transforms a converted garage on Chicago’s South Side into an assisted suicide parlor with bare-bones equipment—a phone booth and a garden hose leading from the tail-pipe of his car. In one draft his sole employee, a dwarf named “Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,” testifies before Congress, in others he reminisces more conversationally about his deceased boss. In stature and surreality, “Kurt” reminds us of little Newt Hoenniker from Cat’s Cradle, and the use of his own name is a gesture toward the kind of authorial intrusion we would soon see in Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions. Even without advertising, Garball’s venture booms. Men and women want to make their final exit for all kinds of reasons, serious and trivial. “You would be surprised,” “Kurt” tells an inquisitive congressman, “how many people want to die because their baseball team isn’t doing well.” But Mr. Garball would be appalled if he could see how his little mom-and-pop corner store has evolved into a network of thousands of franchised locations whose only values are efficiency and the bottom line. These are death mills, plain and simple, disguising their purpose with a stage set of domestic trappings sure to push prospective clients over the edge—Barcalounger recliners, recorded music, the uplifting bromides of Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale. If the founder was around, “Kurt” insists, he would condemn the whole thing as a betrayal of his original intent, with none of the personal touches he cultivated. There is almost no space for agency in this slick production line, little or no room for reprieve.

  Things certainly were different when the old man was in charge. Despite an apparently morbid trade (and his very crusty exterior), Garball was a zealous champion of life, and we can’t help liking him for that. In this regard he is like the author, whose tragicomic stories are actually briefs in favor of the grace and beauty that make our hardships worth enduring. “In my own peculiar way, I’m proud of the merchandise,” Garball explains, defending the integrity of his trade.

  We’re told that in the old days Garball took time to sit down with customers. He had to get to know them as people, understand their complaints, have them appreciate the gravity of the step they were contemplating—he didn’t want them to be comfortable. With his cigar-chomping, hard-boiled g
ruffness (“What makes you think I want your lousy fifty bucks?”), Greta Garball was a tough gatekeeper, a kind of counselor-priest-social-worker. This curmudgeon did not make it into print in 1968, but he represents in utero the gallery of grouchy, no-nonsense humanists who would populate Vonnegut’s later novels. From here it is a direct line to the Kilgore Trout of Breakfast of Champions, Jailbird’s, Walter Starbuck, Bluebeard’s Rabo Karabekian, and Gene Hartke in Hocus Pocus.

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  In his preface to the Monkey House paperback collection, Vonnegut was (as usual) shy about its contents—produced strictly for the money, he insisted, “the fruits of Free Enterprise.” How would it all hold up under scrutiny, and what might it offer to those seeking guidance in the techniques of storycraft? “I have been a writer since 1949,” he cautioned. “I am self-taught. I have no theories about writing that might help others. When I write I simply become what I seemingly must become.”

  Theories, rules of thumb, advice on tricks of the trade—these all have their place, and Vonnegut was generous in sharing them in the course of his career. Much of his guidance concerns economy of expression, “cutting to the chase”—principles drawn from his background in the sciences and journalism and public relations. The overriding spirit is to be kind to the audience, to be helpful in their difficult job of getting imaginatively engaged with a story. “Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for” was one suggestion. “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water” was another. Also, “Be a sadist. Make awful things happen to your characters in order that we can see what they are made of.” And, of course, “start as close to the end as possible.” (Vonnegut perversely reminded students that the best writers abandoned the rules all the time, with brazen delight!)

  The raw materials that follow contain their own lessons, less succinct perhaps than a list of do’s and don’ts but just as indispensable. They are testimony from a self-described basher who showed up in front of his typewriter every day, stared down the blank paper in the carriage, and created a written legacy that has not only moved countless readers but inspired many influential artists, including Dave Eggers, George Saunders, and the Japanese master Haruki Murakami. “Reading Vonnegut, a sudden understanding of what ‘genius’ might mean, in our time, swept over me,” Saunders has observed. “He is, in my view, the great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century.”