The Petrified Ants - By Kurt Vonnegut Page 0,1

made the plastic propellers over the used car lot go frrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.” Twenty-eight rs by my count. How’s that for sound effects in prose that says it all, courtesy of Kurt Vonnegut!

One of the few stories with an unhappy ending, “The Nice Little People” provides a preview of the coming attractions of Kurt’s later career as a novelist. We are engaged by a reversal of the familiar image of larger than life space aliens: In Kurt’s tale, a platoon of sweet, tiny, insectlike folk descend in a spaceship the size and shape of a paper knife. They turn out to be frightened creatures whom Lowell Swift, a linoleum salesman, befriends. But on guard! The role the aliens play in the resolution of Swift’s deteriorating marriage is as harrowing as it is unpredictable. Unpredictable! Hmm. I should have suspected that! Especially with a hero named Swift and a hollow knife handle full of highly sensitive Lilliputian characters.

When I asked Kurt what he thought was the most important aspect of the craft of fiction that he taught his students during his years on the faculty of the University of Iowa’s graduate writing program, as well as Columbia and Harvard, he told me, “Development. Every scene, every dialogue should advance the narrative and then if possible there should be a surprise ending.” The element of surprise serves, too, to express the paradox of Kurt’s viewpoint. When all is said and written, the resolution, the surprise, turns the story around and gives it meaning.

Unpublished is not a word we identify with a Kurt Vonnegut short story. It may well be that these stories didn’t appear in print because for one reason or another they didn’t satisfy Kurt. He rewrote and rewrote, as his son, Mark, as well as agents and editors testify. Although Kurt’s style may seem casual and spontaneous, he was a master craftsman, demanding of himself perfection of the story, the sentence, the word. I remember the rolled up balls of paper in the wastebaskets of his workrooms in Bridgehampton and on East Forty-eighth Street.

The closest Kurt ever came to confessing an ambition for his writing was when he recited to me one of his rules for fictional composition: “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.”

To Kurt Vonnegut writing was kind of a spiritual mission, and these stories with all their humor seem most often to be inspired by his moral and political outrage. They are evidence, too, of the volume of Kurt’s prodigious imagination, a talent that enabled him, after World War II and into the fifties and early sixties, to help support his growing family by contributing short stories to the popular (“slick”) magazines.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s bylines appeared routinely in The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, Argosy. He later reminded his readers of the satisfactions of this association when he wrote in his introduction to Bagombo Snuff Box, “I was in such good company.… Hemingway had written for Esquire, F. Scott Fitzgerald for The Saturday Evening Post, William Faulkner for Collier’s, John Steinbeck for The Woman’s Home Companion!”

Hemingway! Fitzgerald! Faulkner! Steinbeck! Vonnegut! Their literary legacies survived the demise of so many of the magazines that provided them with generous fees, per word or per line, and introduced them to hundreds of thousands, even millions of readers.

Kurt’s stories selected for this collection are reminiscent of the entertainments of that era—so easy to read, so straightforward as to seem simplistic in narrative technique, until the reader thinks about what the author is saying. They are Kurt’s magic verbal lantern, the Confido that projects so relentlessly the vagaries and mysteries of human behavior, but with a leavening of humor and forgiveness.

The discovery of this sampling of vintage Vonnegut confirms the accessibility that is the trademark of his style and the durability of his talents, a gift to all of us—friends and readers who celebrate the enlightenments and fun of Kurt Vonnegut’s jujitsus and his art.

I

“This is quite a hole you have here,” said Josef Broznik enthusiastically, gripping the guard rail and peering into the echoing blackness below. He was panting from the long climb up the mountain slope, and his bald head glistened with perspiration.

“A remarkable hole,” said Josef’s twenty-five-year-old brother, Peter, his long, big-jointed frame uncomfortable in fog-dampened clothes. He searched his thoughts for a more profound comment, but found nothing. It was a perfectly amazing hole—no question about it. The officious mine supervisor, Borgorov, had said it