Accidents in a Very Busy Place: Kurt Vonnegut in Schenectady

K. A. Laity

There’s always a risk in writing something and finding out it’s true. Kurt

Vonnegut doubtless knew this was so, despite often writing about the past and yet being

labeled as a kind of futuristic science fiction writer. I’m regretting my title because it

came to be true in the literal sense as I was involved in an accident in a very busy place

just the other day and I am not too happy about that. But I suppose I can’t blame

Vonnegut.

He was always ambivalent about that label: science fiction. [SLIDE] In A Man

without a Country, Vonnegut wrote, “I became a so-called science fiction writer when

someone decreed that I was a science fiction writer. I did not want to be classified as one,

so I wondered in what way I'd offended that I would not get credit for being a serious

writer.” All the way back in 1974, he described himself as a ‘soreheaded’ occupant of

that drawer because so many so-called critics thought so low of that label. We can see the

recent attempts by mainstream writers—everyone from Margaret Atwood to Kazuo

Ishiguro—to distance themselves from the various labels that suggest they might write

any kind of speculative fiction in the same vein. The secret seems to be sticking around

long enough to have people get past that label. It worked for Shakespeare and Mary

Shelley, and it seems to be working for Vonnegut now too, though I think he’d laugh and

say it helps to be dead already. Humans are sentimental that way: we like to help when

it’s too late.

Besides, Vonnegut always believed in the power of laughter. [SLIDE] I took my

title today from the novel Slapstick, or more specifically from the prologue to the novel.

Vonnegut wrote that “This is the closest I will ever come to writing an autobiography. I

have called it ‘Slapstick’ because it is grotesque, situational poetry—like the slapstick

film comedies, especially those of Laurel and Hardy, of long ago.” In the prologue, he

writes of his family, especially his brother and his sister. He tells a little anecdote about

his brother Bernard who worked for the research laboratory at General Electric in

Schenectady. Bernard worked with silver iodide to make clouds rain or snow. The result

was a space where “a clumsy stranger could die in a thousand different ways” (4) When

he got balled out by the GE security officer for creating such a dangerous mess, Bernard

responded in an unlikely way, tapping his forehead and saying, “If you think this

laboratory is bad, you should see what it’s like in here.” [SLIDE] Their brains worked in

similar ways whether it was DIY projects or science.

But the prologue is mostly about death and change and how they adjusted to it.

They were born in Indianapolis to German-American parents but shortly before Kurt was

born the Great War exploded and suddenly German wasn’t such a hot thing to be. Unlike

the generations before them who learned German language and literature and music, they

were cut off from that heritage. It severed the ties to Europe, but Vonnegut says it also

cut them off from a sense of belonging to the place of their birth. [SLIDE] He and his

siblings drifted away from Indianapolis, though oddly enough both he and his brother

landed in Schenectady after the war.

Vonnegut reminisces about attending his uncle Alex’s funeral in Indianapolis,

flying from New York to the city of their birth with one seat between them. [SLIDE]

Their sister Alice had died long before the day of the funeral, her body eat away by

cancer, her posture that of a “question mark” as her brother described it. [SLIDE]

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Apparently the cosmic joke wasn’t quite slapstick enough yet though, because while she

was wasting away in the hospital, her completely healthy husband who was preparing

himself for life with their sons alone, died in a freak train accident, the only train in

American history to go off a drawbridge. [SLIDE] Though the brothers tried to conceal

the news from her, Alice discovered the truth when someone handed her a newspaper

with the headline—and a list of the dead. As Vonnegut writes: [SLIDE]

Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a

blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but

accidents in a very busy place.

Good for her.

He understands her sweet acceptance and perplexed despair. He raised her three oldest

sons and as the boys demanded, their dogs, too. He owed her that as a brother, but he

makes plain that he owed her a lot more too. [SLIDE] Vonnegut wrote for his sister: she

was his “audience of one” he hoped to please. Most directly in Slapstick which features

love, death, plague, war and the Church of Jesus Christ the Kidnapped; but also in all his

other books and it seems to be the source of his amused sadness, a sort of slapstick

absurdity that nonetheless longs for something better because he can’t quite give up on

the human race.

I guess that link matters most to me because at least some of the time, Kurt

Vonnegut has been my audience of one. When he died and I thought there’d be no more

sad, funny books from him, I started writing a novel that I thought he might enjoy, one

that mashed up space aliens, wretched bureaucrats literally chained to their desks, a

Monsanto-blighted ecology and a dead cat, in a road trip that began in the capital region.

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It’s called Owl Stretching and if you get that obscure reference, you will undoubtedly

enjoy that book.

Many of Vonnegut’s books also sprang from the capital region not only because

his brother Bernard work as a research scientist for the company, but also because they

later employed Kurt Vonnegut, too, [SLIDE] as a publicist for General Electric, a fact

they seem to be proud of now, though in the 1950s things were a little different.

Vonnegut’s biographer Charles J. Shield writes that GE’s aim was “to get some real

journalists on board to hunt for stories at the Schenectady Works and keep a steady

drumbeat of good news issuing from the plant.” [SLIDE] So after attending the

University of Chicago and working as a journalist in that city, Vonnegut was called up in

1947 to join the team at GE and moved to Schenectady.

The move and the position at GE inspired a lot of his first fictional works quite

directly. His PR work required him to talk with scientists like his brother, to find out what

they were up to and to write accessible stories about the ‘good news’ at GE (and that

gospel connection is important: technology was the new post-war religion). At the heart

of all Vonnegut’s writing there is a fascination with and ambivalence about technology

and how we use it. He has the knowledgeable appreciation for the wonders of science,

but also the war veteran’s experience with how lethally it can be used.

[SLIDE] Vonnegut’s first novel Player Piano took this issue on directly and it’s

probably his most Schenectady-centric work, though Cat’s Cradle and some of the

stories in Welcome to the Monkey House also dip into that well of inspiration and Billy

Pilgrim, the hero of Slaughterhouse-5 gives Ilium as his hometown. I show here my old

Dell paperbacks that I’ve managed to hold onto since I first read them, most of which

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came from the used book store in my hometown library. You can see that they mean a lot

to me. You can also guess that they smell rather musty as they have been in and out of

storage while I traipsed from Michigan to California to Connecticut to Texas and finally

here in New York, and then off to Ireland and at last Scotland, where I now spend half

the year. I have paid for ebook versions of my favourites because I figure old books like

this deserve to relax a little and not always be on the run with me.

Player Piano opens up with the verse from the book of Matthew about the lilies

of the field who toil not and neither do they spin, and a dedication to his then-wife Jane

with the comment “God bless her”; if you’re familiar with the story, you’ll assume that’s

a wise thing to do as the central wife is not a very likable character. [SLIDE] The

Foreword puts us in the right frame of mind, the world of 1952 where “managers and

engineers” rule our lives and freedom with their “skill and imagination and courage”

which he prayed would help keep us alive and free. The story, however, examines what

happens if they don’t. As “Shields writes…after Vonnegut submitted the first draft, Kurt

asked his editor a favor and refrain from touting the book, which deals with a dystopian

world run by machines, ‘as a satire of one of the world’s largest corporations,’ or

Bernard’s career ‘might suffer through guilt by association.’” It’s one thing to use your

former work place as an inspiration for ‘good news’ and quite another to show a world

where inequality is rife and where attempts to address it turn out to be even more

disastrous.

Ilium, the stand-in for Schenectady, is “divided into three parts” as the first line of

the novel tells it, that correspond to Schenectady, Scotia and Niskayuna. “In the

northwest are the managers and engineers and civil servants and a few professional

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people; in the northeast are the machines; and in the south, across the Iroquois River, is

the area known locally as Homestead, where almost all of the people live” (9). Of course

he’s swapped the Mohawk’s name for another northeastern tribe. As a good PR man of

GE would say, in post-war Ilium “it was know-how that won the war” (9) and more

specifically, the machines that could take over repetitive tasks.

Although Ilium is the name the Romans gave to ancient Troy, it’s quite clearly

Schenectady. The Ilium Works, nerve center of the machine revolution, is in the same

location in the fictional city as the General Electric plant is in Schenectady. Vonnegut

apparently also worked as a volunteer firefighter at the Alplaus Fire Department in

Glenville. According to a story in the Free George, “Vonnegut gained the respect of his

fellow firefighters such that, upon his death in 2007, the department gave him a fire

fighter’s memorial service, lowering the flag to half mast, hanging the funeral shroud,

and ringing the 5-5-5 alarm, traditionally used to honor fallen brothers.” He lived across

the road from the fire house where he wrote this dystopian novel.

His main character in Player Piano, Doctor Paul Proteus, is positioned like his

brother Bernard, a research scientist at the Ilium works. However, his personality seems

much more like Kurt’s. [SLIDE] In the opening scene he is trying to rescue a cat that has

wandered nearby. Although Vonnegut has spoken at length about his love for dogs, we

might guess that his feelings about cats might be a little more ambivalent. Proteus wants

to have the cat be a mouser in the factory because mice have been eating through the

wiring. The cat’s also a device to show us the Works as Proteus shows them to the cat.

He tries to get the cat to look out on the vista glimpsed from the floor-to-ceiling window

that looks out on the plant. It’s a chance to share a little local history. “Here, in the basin

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of the river bend, the Mohawks had overpowered the Algonquins, the Dutch the

Mohawks, the British the Dutch, the Americans the British” (11). Now the Ilium Works

pumped out the “fruits of peace” mostly without the help of human beings. We see the set

up of the Works, its security and cavernous isolation while we also get what amounts to a

précis of the plot, as the sentimental attachment Proteus forms for the cat ends tragically.

Spooked by a mechanical sweeper, the cat bolts out of the building and into the yard,

where it desperately attempts to climb the electrified fence—with predictable results.

[SLIDE] A disheartened Proteus asks that it be taken to his office, much to the confusion

of the security guard.

It tells us a lot about Proteus and his equivocations. He feels better when he goes

to ‘Building 58’ the carefully preserved original workshop set up by Edison, that “took

the edge off Paul’s periods of depression” (14). Though he attempts to keep an upbeat

façade, Proteus is not happy. “Objectively, Paul tried to tell himself, things really were

better than ever” (14) but his list of all the things to be grateful for that machines had

brought end up sounding hollow. He glories in the old workshop where people had

carved their initials in the wooden rafters, just as the author carved his into the desk in his

little apartment opposite the fire house. He speaks with excitement of the time when he

first arrived at the plant with his cohorts Finnerty and Shepherd to figure out technical

problems and prove the efficiency of machines.

He’s in the midst of preparing a talk on the “Second Industrial Revolution” for a

business dinner when his secretary, impressed by his knowledge asks him about the shape

of the third revolution. Nonplussed for a moment, Proteus finally says that the third wave

will likely come when the big computers finally “devaluate human thinking” (22). He

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mentions the giant computer EPICAC which fills Carlsbad Caverns—our tiny computers

make a mockery of that image of computers growing ever larger with ‘brain’ capacity. A

whole subplot of the book follows a State Department diplomat conveying a foreign

dignitary around the country with the aim of highlighting technological advantages by

visiting EPICAC. I’m sure it’s no accident that the supercomputer had a name remarkable

similar to Ipecac, a well-known compound used since the 18th century to induce vomiting

(and since 2010, no longer manufactured due to its harmful side effects and use by

bulimics). The chapters that deal with Doctor Halyard as he shepherds the “Shah of

Bratpuhr” around technological wonders function mostly as opportunities to show the

downsides of the 2nd revolution. Despite the sometimes cringe-worthy indelicacy of

typical mid-20th century racism, the Shah provides an outsider perspective. There’s a

clearly a cultural difference that makes him unconcerned about calling citizens ‘slaves’

but it’s also a running subtext that shows up the real effect of the 2nd revolution—and the

problem that Proteus has not been able to articulate—that people do not have purpose and

usefulness in their lives.

Proteus’ life begins to change when he visits a bar on the ‘wrong side’ of town

over the bridge. While the leaders present the 2nd revolution as freeing everyone, it’s

quickly clear that there is an elite north of the river who live with purpose and decision

making opportunities. [SLIDE] Vonnegut sees the ability to choose and make mistakes as

an essential element of humanity. The rest of society live well enough in the material

sense with houses full of televisions and consumer goods, all created at the exact rate to

meet demand, but they lack gainful employment and a creative use of skills. Most are

employed either by the peace-time army or by the Reconstruction and Reclamation

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Corps, known tellingly as the ‘Reeks and Wrecks’ because they’ve been displaced by

machines. As he tries to get the attention of the bartender to buy a bottle of Irish whiskey

for his visiting friend Finnerty, Proteus leans on a player piano. He returns again and

again to the bar and to the player piano. At one point his friend Finnerty, whose

disenchantment with the revolution is more palpable, attempts to play the piano, offering

a poignant image of a human trying to recover his creativity at a machine that had

usurped the human role.

Proteus’ first real crisis—unless we count the cat—is running into the machinist

Rudy Hertz in that bar, who’s there with his old, blind dog. The young engineers had

recorded his movements to transfer to the machine that had replaced him (34). [SLIDE]

He’s proud of the memory, but the other men around him, Proteus begins to realise, were

not so happy to know Doctor Proteus was among them as he was part of what they had

rioted against. Rudy’s cry to drink to old times echoes the nostalgia that Proteus had been

savouring, but with other people around, he’s conscious that the old times have a

different meaning for the displaced men.

Brain power has become the only measure of prestige: well, a very specific kind

of brain power. The IQ tests have become mandated to sort people into jobs at the age of

18. They are implacably final. Though people try to game the system with cramming

sessions and memorization, the results are binding and often traumatic. Once the results

are in EPICAC, your fate is sealed. It overlooks other capabilities. Proteus’ colleague

Bud Calhoun comes up with ingenious machines because he has “the restless, erratic

insight and imagination of a gadgeteer” that the engineer defines as the power that has

integrated “almost all of American industry…into one stupendous [SLIDE] Rube

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Goldberg machine” (12). That description relays Proteus’ ambivalence about the

industrial revolution he has helped bring to the world. While ingenious, Goldberg’s

machines are usually hilariously complex for the task required. But that association

softens the effects of the 2nd revolution, too.

Once your scores are in the cards—[SLIDE] literally as Vonnegut was writing in

the punch card era—it’s impossible to deny or change them. Your fate has been decided,

and nothing will change that short of outright deception, which it turns out the State

Department diplomat Halyard has committed. One phys ed course short of completing his

doctorate, the implacable cards catch up with him eventually. He’s given the benefit of

the doubt that it was error and the option of going back to Cornell to take the final exam.

Having attacked the football coach who also acts as head of phys ed in a letter to the

college president, Halyard discovers that not only is he much too far from undergraduate

physical condition but there is absolutely no way that he will be passing the fifteen

minute exam. The few opportunities to circumvent the computers are relished by those

who stumble upon them.

Proteus stumbles both from his encounters with the people on the other side of the

bridge and from the grim cynicism of his friend Finnerty, who has seen through the

problems of the new world order more quickly because he has not much enjoyed the

perks of elite life. He’s sickened by the classist jokes the engineers and managers make at

their annual dinner, familiar tropes of sneering that the people in Homestead ‘breed like

rabbits’ and are overly given to vice, divorce, addiction and suicide (58). His open

rebellion sends Proteus’ wife Anita into defensive mode. She is ever vigilant because she

was about to be fired from the Works after the war due to her sub-genius scores when he

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married her. Simultaneously grateful and resentful, Anita pushes the ambivalent engineer

always forward, providing enough ambition for both of them to mask her fear of not

measuring up intellectually.

Finnerty is pushed over the edge by the Checkers Charlie incident at the country

club. Proteus has long been known as the checkers champion and takes great pride in his

ability. When faced with a challenge from young engineers, he’s nonplussed to discover

that the real challenger is a machine designed to play checkers perfectly. It’s clear that he

has met his match, but Proteus is saved from this first defeat by a mechanical malfunction

in the machine. He’s chagrined, the young men are furious, and Finnerty is both

triumphant that the machine has lost and profoundly depressed that this is the fate that

lies ahead for the engineers, too, when the computers they design out-think them.

Let me be clear: Vonnegut is not completely anti-technology. Although the novel

hurtles inevitably toward a general insurrection, there’s room for exploring the poetry of

technology, too. Quite literally so in the short story “EPICAC” in Welcome to the Monkey

House, which explores the same giant computer (presumably in an alternative universe)

where a programmer, unable to convince his crush that she should marry him, turns to the

computer. It demands an explanation of love and the woman and poetry. In return for the

data, the computer produces a poem [SLIDE] that reduces Pat, the woman in question, to

tears and presumably, love. The narrator is grateful and next explores ‘kiss’ and finally

‘proposal’. When he tells the machine that Pat loves him and wants to get married,

EPICAC is all ready for the union. When he explains that he, not the computer, will be

marrying Pat, EPICAC is broken hearted. Explaining guiltily that “Women can’t love

machines, and that’s that” (282) the narrator departs for the night. EPICAC, in despair,

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commits suicide, burning its circuits out, but not before leaving behind 500 years worth

of anniversary poems for Pat.

It’s a useful reminder that it’s not really the machines that make life after the 2nd

revolution unbearable, it’s the men (and they are mostly men) who manage them. This

comes across very clearly at the retreat on the island. [SLIDE] Later this month, my

colleague Lisa Kannenberg will be talking about the real GE Thousand Islands retreats.

They were legendary. Before attending the retreat to the ‘Meadows’ as it’s called in the

novel, Proteus has already made an escape plan, buying a pre-war farm that he hopes to

persuade his wife to retire to with him and work the land. He’s distracted by the intense

preparation for the event, which divides the managers into arbitrary teams with team

songs and instant rivalries that the others tend to take very seriously. And he’s crestfallen

when his wife distains to have anything to do with his dream of the farm.

There’s a sort of passion play the first night that raises the doubts some of the

engineers have only to lull them back into complacency with the approved answers. A

‘Sky Manager’ considers taking down the star that represents the machine revolution

when a young engineer steps forward to fight with a ‘radical’ in a sort of kangaroo court.

John Averageman is called as witness and at first he complains about all the engineers

have done to him, taking away his lifestyle. But the young engineer wins the case by

showing that Averageman has become richer than Caesar or Napoleon, then emotionally

reassuring him that the managers of the Works think about him unceasingly as the Battle

Hymn of the Republic plays to a crescendo over statistics about increased wealth and

possessions. At the end the audience is exhorted to keep that star shining brightly.

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Vonnegut knows the power of narrative; giving people a story to explain their

superior position in society as not only deserved but morally right strengthens their

investment in the status quo. It’s at that point that he has Proteus finally decide to quit

and join the bubbling revolution, but in a twist, he discovers that the powers over him

have decided to harness his apparent ambivalence by sending him to act as an undercover

agent among the revolutionaries that very night. In the midst of the chaos caused by

another disgruntled employee attacking the giant oak that has come to represent their

history, no one hears Proteus declare that he has quit and he is so efficiently whisked

away from the island that he can hardly protest the truth. He’s accepted by the

revolutionaries despite his position after being drugged and questioned, then held as a

figurehead, imprisoned for his own safety.

Not surprisingly, Vonnegut himself is ambivalent about the revolution: he sees the

need for it, yet also sees the opposition as problematic. He’s excited by the sheer thrill of

gadgetry but worried about the people whose lives are robbed of purpose without useful

employment. People need to create even if they don’t have the particular kind of intellect

that builds computers and robotics. He makes an effort to show how he’d fare in the new

regime, too, with a Halyard digression about a writer, or as the official designation might

be, Fiction Journeyman or a W-255, which Halyard recognizes as ‘public relations’

(231). When asked by his visitor what that means he replies with the [SLIDE] official

description from the Manual. I don’t know if that was the law laid down for the young

fiction journeyman when he joined GE, but it seems plausible.

Even more distressing for writers is the description of the automated fiction

market run by the National Council of Arts and Letters and the twelve book clubs that

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feed the twelve types of readers, though as Halyard notes, there has been discussion of

two additional categories. A lot of current writers will recognize a world that sounds

rather similar to the ebook market, where a “book costs less than seven packs of chewing

gum” and “culture’s so cheap” that it’s more economical to insulate a house with books

and art than with the usual materials. Art is strictly reproductions of masters and research

has determined what kinds of books get published so they’re formulated “right down to

the color of the jacket” (232). The writer in question, whose book was rejected for not

only being twenty-seven pages too long but for having an antimachine theme, is “ordered

into public-relations duty” (233). He refuses. His wife, who’s considering a move into

prostitution to support them, defends his refusal by declaring that he is one of the few

people left with any integrity.

Surely Vonnegut is having a bit of a poke at his employers and the position he had

taken up, writing positively about the work of an industry that he had at most an

ambivalent respect for—which may have had more to do with his brother than anything

else. Bernard eventually moved to academia, taking a position at SUNY Albany. But

there was some lingering fondness for the place or at least the people. He used Bernard’s

boss, Dr. Irving Langmuir as the model for the scientist who invents Ice-9 in [SLIDE]

Cat’s Cradle. Ice-9 is an ice that will stay solid at room temperature. Langmuir had come

up with the idea to entertain the visiting writer H. G. Wells. Wells never used it;

Langmuir never used it either, and as Vonnegut told George Plimpton in a Paris Review

interview, “Finders, keepers.”

Of course, that substance brings about the destruction of the planet eventually, but

along the way there are a lot of funny laughs. As he contemplates the end of the world—

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an end which comes with the narrator being frozen in Ice-9 forever, giving his finger to

whatever god may be looking down from the heavens—Vonnegut works out his own

fictional religion. Like most fictions, it has an awful lot of truth. The first sentence in the

Books of Bokonon is “All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies”

(14). It’s an interesting development that grows from his publicity roots and told in the

style of his journalistic mode, but it’s pure Vonnegut, hidden of course behind the sayings

of Bokonon. The central image of the cat’s cradle which the scientist tries to demonstrate

to his son on the day the bomb he’d helped develop was dropped on Hiroshima. He

frightens his son because he’d never done such a thing before. “People weren’t his

specialty” (21). The image offers a kind of presence through absence: there’s no there

there. “See the cat? See the cradle?”

[SLIDE] I’m always conscious of Vonnegut’s presence despite absence. I keep

writing things that I think might amuse him. Not long ago I wrote an essay for a volume

celebrating his work called So It Goes. My piece was called ‘How to Succeed in

Academia’ and it’s based on the fact that I’ve become a tenured English professor

without ever being an English major which I think is very Bokononist or Vonnegutish or

something like that. I can’t really account for how I came to be standing here in

Schenectady or Rotterdam Junction talking about Kurt Vonnegut. I never would have

guessed such a day would come back when my friend Emfinger pressed Slaugherhouse-

Five into my hands in high school and demanded that I read it. However, as the man

would say, ‘Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God,’ so I can only

assume that I have been divinely summoned here today.

At the very least, it has been devilishly fun. Thank you.

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