3 Notes
While Mortals Sleep
Since Kurt Vonnegut’s death, there have been three volumes of previously unpublished Vonnegut short fiction. I didn’t bother with them initially, because I don’t gravitate to short stories to begin with, and on top of that I figured the posthumously published leftovers probably weren’t the cream of the crop.
But recently it struck me that we won’t be getting any more genuinely new Vonnegut material ever (not the first time that realization has come to me as if it were a new discovery), so when I saw a hardcover edition of While Mortals Sleep in my local bookstore, I picked it up.
While Mortals Sleep is the third and latest of these attempts to scrounge any more material out of the Vonnegut name, so it is essentially the leftovers of the leftovers.
As David Eggers explains in a foreword that is itself a worthwhile read, the material is drawn from early in Vonnegut’s career, before he came to real acclaim (though stories aren’t individually dated). It is surprisingly blunt—nearly every piece wraps up with a neat lesson, often a reproach of unrestrained capitalistic greed, an exaltation of individualism, or a reminder of the value of compassion and companionship.
Vonnegut never bothered to disguise his worldview. But while his great novels were always moral, they were rarely had a moral like these stories do. In that sense, reading through this collection was instructive. Before Vonnegut really became the Vonnegut we know, before he could weave his ideals into his structure-defying, often sci-fi-tinged and dystopian works, he hammered them out in these brief allegories. (Only one story, “Jenny,” about a feminine robot built into a refrigerator—yes—really shares the sci-fi-abusing tendencies of many of Vonnegut’s novels.)
There’s plenty of his characteristic easy prose, the unfussy eloquence that defines Vonnegut’s style throughout his career. And this early work gives a wonderful perspective on what followed. Unfortunately, while several of the stories are great, the majority of them are essentially simple morality plays, and at times I found it difficult to feel any real sense of real edification. As Eggers points out, Vonnegut was really writing for the 1950s magazine editors he hoped would accept his submissions, so the tone is understandable, even if it can’t stand the test of time like his great works.
The standout exception for me in that regard—the monumental, wonderful exception—is the final inclusion, “The Humbugs.” It tells the story of two working artists whose studios face each other across the street.
One is an aging and commercially successful painter of lush but soulless pastoral landscapes, an impressive literary prediction of Thomas Kinkade; he receives no recognition from the critical community, and he holds a secret contempt for his own creative bankruptcy.
The other is a young, dynamic abstractionist, whose paintings the public finds uncomfortable and alienating, who is on the constant brink of financial ruin despite critical adoration of his work’s emotional breadth; he harbors a deep insecurity about his inability to depict the world the way the human eye perceives it.
A confrontation ensues between the two, making for one of the most wonderful portrayals of creative self-doubt and triumph I have encountered. It was a daring move to require readers to get through an entire book’s worth of material before reaching what is clearly the strongest piece, but what an ending.
(Before publishing this post I did a quick Google search for “While Mortals Sleep” and discovered that Amazon has nonsensically categorized the book as “Science Fiction & Fantasy”—a label Vonnegut spent a lifetime trying to escape. The guy just can’t catch a break.)
