How Kurt Vonnegut used Cape Cod to spirit away
He came here to reinvent himself, and became famous
“You are what you pretend to be,” Kurt Vonnegut once wrote.
He meant it as a caution, the central warning of his book “Mother Night,” the tale of a Nazi radio propagandist double agent secretly feeding info to the Allies -- only the gasoline of his words set so many racist fires blazing that maybe he caused more horror than he meant to stop.
Classic Vonnegut twist. But here’s the intriguing, real-life, application:
Kurt Vonnegut moved to Cape Cod, where his career took flight, as soon as his first piece of short fiction published. And by “esCaping,” you might say, Vonnegut in many ways was imitating the character he invented in that first story.
Kurt Vonnegut came to Cape Cod to become the man he had pretended into being -- Professor Arthur Barnhouse.
“Let me begin by saying that I don’t know any more about where Professor Arthur Barnhouse is hiding than anyone else does,” Vonnegut writes as the opening sentence of “Report on the Barnhouse Effect.”
Those words appeared in Collier’s Magazine in February, 1950. Vonnegut was married with two young children, living in Schenectady, New York. His work must have been numbing; he was handling p.r. (might that stand for propaganda as well as public relations?) for General Electric, which had a big power plant in the city. His horrific World War Two experiences, surviving firebombings, witnessing death and destruction, were behind him -- chronologically. But they must have added to his wonder about what the hell he was doing, writing ad copy for GE.
His short story for Collier’s, told in the first person, is the report of a research assistant to the now-vanished Professor Barnhouse, chronicling an “effect” which turns out to be a kind of mental focusing, “dynamopsychism.” The professor first discovered his gift by accident as an army private, shooting craps around the barracks:
He rolled lucky sevens 10 times in a row.
The more he mentally exercised, the stronger the dynamic became. Professor Barnhouse got to the point where he could make a tank’s gunbarrel droop, send faraway jet fighters crashing in flame and smoke. Needless to say, he became a source of intense interest to the military establishment – at which point he vanished.
“Gentlemen,” he wrote in a parting missive, “as the first superweapon with a conscience, I am removing myself from your national defense stockpile. Setting a new precedent in the behavior of ordnance, I have humane reasons for going off.”
Barnhouse set about systematically destroying the world’s armaments. “By my calculation,” his assistant put it, “the professor was about 55 times more powerful than a Nagasaki-type atomic bomb at the time he went into hiding.”
Vonnegut’s story ends with the research assistant noting that there had been much speculation about how long Barnhouse might last, how soon he might get captured by one of the many governments searching to neutralize or control him. That, presumably, would end this short era of world peace.
But the professor had sent his assistant a cryptic note, difficult to decipher:
“Last night,” the story ends, still in the voice of the assistant, “I tried once more to follow the oblique instructions on the scrap of paper. I took the professor’s dice, and then, with the last, nightmarish sentence flitting through my mind, I rolled 50 consecutive sevens.
“Good-by.”
Instead of nuclear proliferation, it was dynamopsychism proliferation. The assistant also vanished.
To vanish, to dedicate oneself to honing mental powers that affect people at great distance, is exactly what real-life Kurt Vonnegut set out to do.
As soon as “Report on the Barnhouse Effect” published, Vonnegut was gone from Schenectady and GE. He brought his family to Cape Cod in 1950, soon settling into Scudder Lane in Barnstable.
Vonnegut couldn’t disarm the world, but he could write disarming fiction.
Within two years of moving to the Cape his first novel published, “Player Piano,” followed by a string of work that included “Cat’s Cradle” and “Slaughterhouse Five,” about a peaceful man, Billy Pilgrim, unhinged in time, trapped in war’s horror but also elevated by the beauty of the cosmos.
Vonnegut’s fiction couldn’t create the overwhelming, peaceful impact of Professor Barnhouse, but in his wry, cynical way, that always was one of his aspirations. For millions of readers, he came closer than most.
He also turned his own warning into inspiration:
Had he stayed in Schenectady, he might well have become what he was pretending to be -- a p.r. flak. Instead, he imagined a way out, through dynamopsychism, and split to Cape Cod.
“Good-by.”
NEXT: THE CAPE COD SEA CAMP DRAMA CONTINUES — PUBLIC? PRIVATE? HYBRID?
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A wonderful friend since teenager days, Frank Stearns, just finished running the Falmouth Road Race and sent me an amazing note: Years ago he and his older brother Alan were in NYC, walking Central Park, and came upon a sidewalk bookseller. Frank saw a Vonnegut novel and plunked down 3 bucks for it. When he opened the inside flap, he saw his brother Alan's name with a date. Amazing or what! Alan attributed it to being part of a bunch of books taken by an old roommate in Brooklyn.
Vonnegut would have loved that story.