"Haley Brandon arranged his three white shirts in one corner of a deep bureau drawer, and nodded absently at the end of each of Annie's sentences. He was tired after a fitful night aboard a railroad coach, and glad that Annie was content to talk on and on without calling upon him to contribute to the conversation. She was a complete stranger to him, and not a very interesting-looking one at that."
From that second paragraph on the first page of the late Kurt Vonnegut's
Basic Training, one can see that the author's signature attention to detail was already developed in this previously unpublished novella, released about 60 years after it was written. According to publisher RosettaBooks, "Basic Training" was a work rejected by the Saturday Evening Post in the late 1940's, long before the late author had become famous through works such as his absurdist 1969 classic
Slaughterhouse-Five and his 1963 satirical science fiction favorite
Cat's Cradle.
Haley Brandon, the teenage protagonist, ventures from New York City to the Midwest farm of his relative, retired Brigadier General William Cooley, an old loon who insists upon being called "The General." Haley wants to go to Chicago to resume his music studies; The General promises to be the enabler, though he's "as tone deaf as a sparrow." Haley is there to do earn his way, with some "good, old-fashioned work," to learn to be a good straight-shooting American under the tutelage of his older, somewhat unstable relative. He moves into the farm with Anne Cooley, his cousin in her mid-twenties, along with her younger sisters, Kitty and Hope. And there's Mr. Banghart, the farm hand in his thirties, a courtly man with vocal capabilities and with a face "shaved and scrubbed to the luster of wax apples." We have the colorful Roy Flemming, who is Kitty's suitor and wants to take her away on his "nuptial motorcycle."
The descriptions of the settings and characters will not disappoint Vonnegut fans, as they're going to be familiar, from Hope, who "walked turtle-slow to the foot of the stairs," to Mr. Banghart, whose "lungs swelled like blacksmiths' bellows" as he began to sing. This novella is filled with such rich images. But as the story move on, like a rich descriptive tapestry being woven, it becomes clear that The General's promises may not what they appear to be. Haley's only method of survival will lead him to tenacious defiance of The General's increasingly delusional and authoritarian principles. There are surprises and there are secrets, and some of those are dark.
Vonnegut's "Basic Training" is a fascinating yet intensely disheartened story, one that derides authoritarianism, military values, relationships, parental rules and most of the expected traditions of the family from that era. The late author was good at that, and one can see from this early work that he had already honed his skills of which fans or his work are familiar.
As the book description noted, this work was penned to be sold under the author's alias of Mark Harvey yet it was never published in Vonnegut's lifetime. A little online research reveals that in the late 1940s, the author was working at GE in Schenectady, New York, and he was freelancing short stories to various popular magazines of that time, such as Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post. He was using the pseudonyms of David Harris and Mark Harvey to keep from being caught moonlighting.
Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007, and a good number of his unpublished works remained in Indiana, where he was born. RosettaBooks picked this novella from hundreds of other works that this author's literary executor had made available, and fans can only hope that they will soon release more of them.
2/23/2012
