A Series of Accidents is a chronological read-through of the books of Kurt Vonnegut. You can check out earlier articles in the series here.

Bagombo Snuff Box was one of two Vonnegut books released in 1999, neither of which was a novel. As Vonnegut aged he produced less and less fiction work, but public interest in Vonnegut remained high. Bagombo Snuff Box represents a further plundering of the author’s minor works for book-length collection, but is kind of a fascinating archival item in its own right.

The collection is made up of short stories that Vonnegut wrote for magazines during the 1950s. The stories from this era that were considered the best, including somewhat famous works like “Harrison Bergeron”, were already collected in Welcome to the Monkey-House decades earlier, so Bagombo Snuff Box is mostly the discards. To be a bit more charitable, it is largely realistic stories which were likely to be of less interest to fans of Vonnegut’s postmodern science fiction novels.

There are a few stories here which broadly fit into the science fiction genre. “Thanasphere”, which opens the story, is a rather nice, spooky story about the first man in space discovering that he can hear the dead. “2BR02B” tells the story of a world with old age eliminated and strict population control, in which new births require an accompanying suicide to prevent the overall population from increasing. It’s a fairly crude dystopian tale, and not even Vonnegut’s best short story about the horrors of an overpopulated world. However, it’s the only story to have much of a life outside this collection, being adapted into a short film in 2016 that was released to generally positive reviews.

Other stories fit more generally into Vonnegut’s concern with the growth of technology and its dehumanizing effect while retaining the trappings of realist literary fiction. “The Package” involves a rich man hosting an old college friend at an almost impossibly fancy mansion, causing him to comment “This house is science fiction.” “Custom-Made Bride” is a virtual Pygmalion story which involves a man crafting his wife into the alluring figure of “Falloleen” through beauty products and outfits, while “The Powder-Blue Dragon” sees an enterprising man led astray through his desire for a beautiful sports car. Technology almost always has a corrupting influence in these stories, leading humans away from their innate sense of righteousness.

Of course, these stories were written immediately after World War II and Vonnegut’s traumatic experience in Dresden, which probably shaped the general suspicion of the modern as well as his fiction dealing more explicitly with the war. “Der Arme Dolmetscher” is told from the perspective of a German interpreter during World War II, who imagines the conflict around him as an overwrought stage play complete with script, while “The Cruise of the Jolly Roger” features a career soldier who comes to realize how unglamorous his profession is after being injured in Korea and visiting the home of an already-forgotten WW2 casualty. “Souvenir” is a story about haggling over a World War II souvenir featuring a pawnbroker named JOE BANE, which also includes a pretty harrowing war story. The war is also referenced repeatedly elsewhere, casting a pall over the whole book, even as American society was desperate to put those unhappy memories behind them and head into the gleaming 1950s. Vonnegut describes the war in a distant way, but one that aims to present “war as it really was”, which is to say a complicated mess with few heroes.

Another through-line that connects these stories is the recurring character of Helmholtz, the teacher of a state-champion school marching band, who is the centrepiece of three stories. The Helmholtz stories largely seem to reflect on artistic talent and the impact of technology, as in the first one where a talentless but rich boy gets onto the squad by buying a giant bass drum for the band. Eventually, however, Helmholtz is revealed as something of a sociopath, bent on intramural success at the expense of his students’ own lives. The stories are overall a bit more John Cheever than Kurt Vonnegut, but they are probably the closest thing to a straight-ahead realist novels that Vonnegut wrote. (Some of his novels, like God Bless You Mr. Rosewater or Jailbird, had essentially realist events but were anything but straight-ahead.)

These stories were also largely written for women’s magazines, such as the Lady’s Home Journal, or for general-interest magazines whose readership was largely female, but women don’t come across all that well in them. Women appear as wives, long-lost girlfriends, givers of advice, shallow materialists, and objects of desire, but rarely as narrators or active protagonists. Women would occasionally be fairly major protagonists in Vonnegut, as in Cat’s Cradle or Galapagos, but their experience, and the relatively tectonic shifts in women’s status during Vonnegut’s life, never really seemed to interest the author, or the predominantly male editors of this era of literary fiction.

These stories may have been relatively charming in their initial publication, but when put together the repetition of plot elements and themes, the endless march of stock characters, and the general thinness of Vonnegut’s writing at this point in his career definitely grate. Almost every story is a bit too long and ends up in some sort of twist or ironic resolution: the seemingly worthless war souvenir has a priceless inscription by Hitler, the romantic young couple lose interest in each other when their romance is accepted by their parents, the rich husband finds more happiness upon being a simple mechanic.

The Vonnegut of 1999 appears at the beginning and end of the book to try to put these stories into some sort of context. He seems at least somewhat positive on them, but overall finds that they have strong premises but the “denouement is so asinine.” Still, Vonnegut writes fondly of the now mostly-dead periodical market, and of his experience teaching creative writing classes, which he sees as a “way to internalize what was inside” students and “a way to make one’s soul grow.” There is little affection for the stories, which are indeed probably best read by only Vonnegut completionists, but much nostalgia for the kind of world in which a man could make a living selling unremarkable short stories. How many modern authors’ development has been stunted or rushed by not having the same space for experimentation and mediocrity that Vonnegut did?

Join me next time out for one of Vonnegut’s strangest projects in the fiction/radio interview collection God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian. You may also be interested in my newly-launched Substack, which is mostly about old TV, but also touches on various weird cultural artifacts.