By David Fortier
Kurt Vonnegut Complete Stories, Collected and Introduced by Jerome Klinkowitz & Dan Wakefield, Foreword by Dave Eggers, is a treasure for writers like me, and I am hoping, for writers who one day will submit to Lefora. I will get to my reasoning in a moment. For the time being, I confess I would not have gotten to it myself if it hadn’t been for my Fiction Masters class at the high school where I teach English. This honors-level English class features Shelley’s Frankenstein, Voltaire’s Candide, James’s Turn of the Screw, and most recently Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.
Taught in the spring of their senior year, the course is a gift both to me and to my students. In many ways, it liberates both of us from the high school thing. They are heading out into the world—which means new horizons on a college campus of their choice; I get to send them off by giving them a taste of what being in a college classroom might be like. For this semester, together—the students, Vonnegut, and I managed to keep the infamous and mind-numbing senioritis at bay.
It helped that a good handful of the students are curious. Curiosity about the world among young people appears to have been kept at a distance from them. This curiosity spilled over to the book—one has read it and would love to read it again, but without the typical and cumbersome high-school treatment that would ruin it for him.
This high-school treatment thing is something that I have been trying to get my head around for the past 15 years or so: why is it that kids come to high school hating to read, and, no, it is not because they hate to read, period; it is because they hate to read for school.
As it turned out, I had two large classes of seniors, but not enough copies of the book to go around. Rather than tossing in the towel, I visited several branches of my local library where I found four copies of Slaughterhouse waiting for me on fiction shelf.
Alongside the books was this 911-page tome of Vonnegut’s short stories. I opened the table of contents. I recognized a few titles. I could not say that I was familiar with many of them. I saw Dave Eggers, a favorite of mine, provided a preface. Despite having little to no time, to get through the book, I managed to talk myself into taking the book with me, so that I could read what Eggers had to say. Maybe, I just might get to a few of the stories.
When I did get to the book, it was already overdue. Eggers had some nice things to say about Vonnegut. I read a few of the stories. What turned out to be the biggest surprise, though, was Wakefield’s short essay, “How Vonnegut Learned to Write Short Stories.” The Vonnegut we know today, Wakefield contends, is not the early Vonnegut who labored over his stories while working full time. It is this subject, Vonnegut as apprentice, that is most helpful to those of us who aspire for publication to begin to understand and experience.
If it weren’t for having to teach Vonnegut to some seniors on the verge of senioritis, I would not have stumbled across this helpful material.