Welcome to the Monkey House: The Special Edition

by Kurt Vonnegut,Gregory D. Sumner

  “Yes,” said Bullard, rounding out the first hour of his lecture, “made and lost five fortunes in my time.”

  “So you said,” said the stranger, whose name Bullard had neglected to ask. “Easy, boy. No, no, no, boy,” he said to the dog, who was growing more aggressive toward his ankles.

  “Oh? Already told you that, did I?” said Bullard.

  “Twice.”

  “Two in real estate, one in scrap iron, and one in oil and one in trucking.”

  “So you said.”

  “I did? Yes, guess I did. Two in real estate, one in scrap iron, one in oil, and one in trucking. Wouldn’t take back a day of it.”

  “No, I suppose not,” said the stranger. “Pardon me, but do you suppose you could move your dog somewhere else? He keeps—”

  “Him?” said Bullard, heartily. “Friendliest dog in the world. Don’t need to be afraid of him.”

  “I’m not afraid of him. It’s just that he drives me crazy, sniffing at my ankles.”

  “Plastic,” said Bullard, chuckling.

  “What?”

  “Plastic. Must be something plastic on your garters. By golly, I’ll bet it’s those little buttons. Sure as we’re sitting here, those buttons must be plastic. That dog is nuts about plastic. Don’t know why that is, but he’ll sniff it out and find it if there’s a speck around. Must be a deficiency in his diet, though, by gosh, he eats better than I do. Once he chewed up a whole plastic humidor. Can you beat it? That’s the business I’d go into now, by glory, if the pill rollers hadn’t told me to let up, to give the old ticker a rest.”

  “You could tie the dog to that tree over there,” said the stranger.

  “I get so darn’ sore at all the youngsters these days!” said Bullard. “All of ’em mooning around about no frontiers any more. There never have been so many frontiers as there are today. You know what Horace Greeley would say today?”

  “His nose is wet,” said the stranger, and he pulled his ankles away, but the dog humped forward in patient pursuit. “Stop it, boy!”

  “His wet nose shows he’s healthy,” said Bullard. “ ‘Go plastic, young man!’ That’s what Greeley’d say. ‘Go atom, young man!’ ”

  The dog had definitely located the plastic buttons on the stranger’s garters and was cocking his head one way and another, thinking out ways of bringing his teeth to bear on those delicacies.

  “Scat!” said the stranger.

  “ ‘Go electronic, young man!’ ” said Bullard. “Don’t talk to me about no opportunity any more. Opportunity’s knocking down every door in the country, trying to get in. When I was young, a man had to go out and find opportunity and drag it home by the ears. Nowadays—”

  “Sorry,” said the stranger, evenly. He slammed his book shut, stood and jerked his ankle away from the dog. “I’ve got to be on my way. So good day, sir.”

  · · ·

  He stalked across the park, found another bench, sat down with a sigh and began to read. His respiration had just returned to normal, when he felt the wet sponge of the dog’s nose on his ankles again.

  “Oh—it’s you!” said Bullard, sitting down beside him. “He was tracking you. He was on the scent of something, and I just let him have his head. What’d I tell you about plastic?” He looked about contentedly. “Don’t blame you for moving on. It was stuffy back there. No shade to speak of and not a sign of a breeze.”

  “Would the dog go away if I bought him a humidor?” said the stranger.

  “Pretty good joke, pretty good joke,” said Bullard, amiably. Suddenly he clapped the stranger on his knee. “Sa-ay, you aren’t in plastics, are you? Here I’ve been blowing off about plastics, and for all I know that’s your line.”

  “My line?” said the stranger crisply, laying down his book. “Sorry—I’ve never had a line. I’ve been a drifter since the age of nine, since Edison set up his laboratory next to my home, and showed me the intelligence analyzer.”

  “Edison?” said Bullard. “Thomas Edison, the inventor?”

  “If you want to call him that, go ahead,” said the stranger.

  “If I want to call him that?”—Bullard guffawed—“I guess I just will! Father of the light bulb and I don’t know what all.”

  “If you want to think he invented the light bulb, go ahead. No harm in it.” The stranger resumed his reading.

  “Say, what is this?” said Bullard, suspiciously. “You pulling my leg? What’s this about an intelligence analyzer? I never heard of that.”

  “Of course you haven’t,” said the stranger. “Mr. Edison and I promised to keep it a secret. I’ve never told anyone. Mr. Edison broke his promise and told Henry Ford, but Ford made him promise not to tell anybody else—for the good of humanity.”

  Bullard was entranced. “Uh, this intelligence analyzer,” he said, “it analyzed intelligence, did it?”

  “It was an electric butter churn,” said the stranger.

  “Seriously now,” Bullard coaxed.

  “Maybe it would be better to talk it over with someone,” said the stranger. “It’s a terrible thing to keep bottled up inside me, year in and year out. But how can I be sure that it won’t go any further?”

  “My word as a gentleman,” Bullard assured him.

  “I don’t suppose I could find a stronger guarantee than that, could I?” said the stranger, judiciously.

  “There is no stronger guarantee,” said Bullard, proudly. “Cross my heart and hope to die!”

  “Very well.” The stranger leaned back and closed his eyes, seeming to travel backward through time. He was silent for a full minute, during which Bullard watched with respect.

  “It was back in the fall of eighteen seventy-nine,” said the stranger at last, softly “Back in the village of Menlo Park, New Jersey. I was a boy of nine. A young man we all thought was a wizard had set up a laboratory next door to my home, and there were flashes and crashes inside, and all sorts of scary goings on. The neighborhood children were warned to keep away, not to make any noise that would bother the wizard.

  “I didn’t get to know Edison right off, but his dog Sparky and I got to be steady pals. A dog a whole lot like yours, Sparky was, and we used to wrestle all over the neighborhood. Yes, sir, your dog is the image of Sparky.”

  “Is that so?” said Bullard, flattered.

  “Gospel,” replied the stranger. “Well, one day Sparky and I were wrestling around, and we wrestled right up to the door of Edison’s laboratory. The next thing I knew, Sparky had pushed me in through the door, and bam! I was sitting on the laboratory floor, looking up at Mr. Edison himself.”

  “Bet he was sore,” said Bullard, delighted.

  “You can bet I was scared,” said the stranger. “I thought I was face to face with Satan himself. Edison had wires hooked to his ears and running down to a little black box in his lap! I started to scoot, but he caught me by my collar and made me sit down.

  “ ‘Boy,’ said Edison, ‘it’s always darkest before the dawn. I want you to remember that.’

  “ ‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

  “ ‘For over a year, my boy,’ Edison said to me, ‘I’ve been trying to find a filament that will last in an incandescent lamp. Hair, string, splinters—nothing works. So while I was trying to think of something else to try, I started tinkering with another idea of mine, just letting off steam. I put this together,’ he said, showing me the little black box. ‘I thought maybe intelligence was just a certain kind of electricity, so I made this intelligence analyzer here. It works! You’re the first one to know about it, my boy. But I don’t know why you shouldn’t be. It will be your generation that will grow up in the glorious new era when people will be as easily graded as oranges.’ ”

  “I don’t believe it!” said Bullard.

  “May I be struck by lightning this very instant!” said the stranger. “And it did work, too. Edison had tried out the analyzer on the men in his shop, without telling them what he was up to. The smarter a man was, by gosh, the farther
the needle on the indicator in the little black box swung to the right. I let him try it on me, and the needle just lay where it was and trembled. But dumb as I was, then is when I made my one and only contribution to the world. As I say, I haven’t lifted a finger since.”

  “Whadja do?” said Bullard, eagerly.

  “I said, ‘Mr. Edison, sir, let’s try it on the dog.’ And I wish you could have seen the show that dog put on when I said it! Old Sparky barked and howled and scratched to get out. When he saw we meant business, that he wasn’t going to get out, he made a beeline right for the intelligence analyzer and knocked it out of Edison’s hands. But we cornered him, and Edison held him down while I touched the wires to his ears. And would you believe it, that needle sailed clear across the dial, way past a little red pencil mark on the dial face!”

  “The dog busted it,” said Bullard.

  “ ‘Mr. Edison, sir,’ I said, ‘what’s that red mark mean?’

  “ ‘My boy,’ said Edison, ‘it means that the instrument is broken, because that red mark is me.’ ”

  “I’ll say it was broken,” said Bullard.

  The stranger said gravely, “But it wasn’t broken. No, sir. Edison checked the whole thing, and it was in apple-pie order. When Edison told me that, it was then that Sparky, crazy to get out, gave himself away.”

  “How?” said Bullard, suspiciously.

  “We really had him locked in, see? There were three locks on the door—a hook and eye, a bolt, and a regular knob and latch. That dog stood up, unhooked the hook, pushed the bolt back and had the knob in his teeth when Edison stopped him.”

  “No!” said Bullard.

  “Yes!” said the stranger, his eyes shining. “And then is when Edison showed me what a great scientist he was. He was willing to face the truth, no matter how unpleasant it might be.

  “ ‘So!’ said Edison to Sparky. ‘Man’s best friend, huh? Dumb animal, huh?’

  “That Sparky was a caution. He pretended not to hear. He scratched himself and bit fleas and went around growling at ratholes—anything to get out of looking Edison in the eye.

  “ ‘Pretty soft, isn’t it, Sparky?’ said Edison. ‘Let somebody else worry about getting food, building shelters and keeping warm, while you sleep in front of a fire or go chasing after the girls or raise hell with the boys. No mortgages, no politics, no war, no work, no worry. Just wag the old tail or lick a hand, and you’re all taken care of.’

  “ ‘Mr. Edison,’ I said, ‘do you mean to tell me that dogs are smarter than people?’

  “ ‘Smarter?’ said Edison. ‘I’ll tell the world! And what have I been doing for the past year? Slaving to work out a light bulb so dogs can play at night!’

  “ ‘Look, Mr. Edison,’ said Sparky, ‘why not—’ ”

  “Hold on!” roared Bullard.

  “Silence!” shouted the stranger, triumphantly. “ ‘Look, Mr. Edison,’ said Sparky, ‘why not keep quiet about this? It’s been working out to everybody’s satisfaction for hundreds of thousands of years. Let sleeping dogs lie. You forget all about it, destroy the intelligence analyzer, and I’ll tell you what to use for a lamp filament.’ ”

  “Hogwash!” said Bullard, his face purple.

  The stranger stood. “You have my solemn word as a gentleman. That dog rewarded me for my silence with a stock-market tip that made me independently wealthy for the rest of my days. And the last words that Sparky ever spoke were to Thomas Edison. ‘Try a piece of carbonized cotton thread,’ he said. Later, he was torn to bits by a pack of dogs that had gathered outside the door, listening.”

  The stranger removed his garters and handed them to Bullard’s dog. “A small token of esteem, sir, for an ancestor of yours who talked himself to death. Good day.” He tucked his book under his arm and walked away.

  (1953)

  NEW DICTIONARY

  I WONDER NOW what Ernest Hemingway’s dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that everybody can spell and truly understand. Mr. Hotchner, was it a frazzled wreck? My own is a tossed salad of instant coffee and tobacco crumbs and India paper, and anybody seeing it might fairly conclude that I ransack it hourly for a vocabulary like Arnold J. Toynbee’s. The truth is that I have broken its spine looking up the difference between principle and principal, and how to spell cashmere. It is a dear leviathan left to me by my father, “Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language,” based on the “International Dictionary” of 1890 and 1900. It doesn’t have radar in it, or Wernher von Braun or sulfathiazole, but I know what they are. One time I actually took sulfathiazole.

  And now I have this enormous and beautiful new bomb from Random House. I don’t mean “bomb” in a pejorative sense, or in any dictionary sense, for that matter. I mean that the book is heavy and pregnant, and makes you think. One of the things it makes you think is that any gang of bright people with scads of money behind them can become appalling competitors in the American-unabridged-dictionary industry. They can make certain that they have all the words the other dictionaries have, then add words which have joined the language since the others were published, and then avoid mistakes that the others have caught particular hell for.

  Random House has thrown in a color atlas of the world, as well, and concise dictionaries of French, Spanish, German, and Italian. And would you look at the price? And, lawsy me, Christmas is coming.

  When Mario Pei reviewed the savagely-bopped third revised edition of the “Merriam-Webster” for The Times in 1961, he complained of the “residual prudishness” which still excluded certain four-letter words, “despite their copious appearance in numerous works of contemporary ‘literature’ as well as on restroom walls.” Random House has satisfied this complaint somewhat. They haven’t included enough of the words to allow a Pakistani to decode “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” or “Ulysses,” either—but they have made brave beginnings, dealing, wisely I think, with the alimentary canal. I found only one abrupt verb for sexually congressing a woman, and we surely have Edward Albee to thank for its currency, though he gets no credit for it. The verb is hump, as in “hump the hostess.”

  If my emphasis on dirty words so early in this review seems childish, I can only reply that I, as a child, would never have started going through unabridged dictionaries if I hadn’t suspected that there were dirty words hidden in there, where only grownups were supposed to find them. I always ended the searches feeling hot and stuffy inside, and looking at the queer illustrations—at the trammel wheel, the arbalest, and the dugong.

  Of course, one dictionary is as good as another to most people, who use them for spellers and bet-settlers and accessories to crossword puzzles and Scrabble games. But some people use them for more than that, or mean to. This was brought home to me only the other evening, whilst I was supping with the novelist and short-story writer Richard Yates, and Prof. Robert Scholes, the famous praiser of John Barth’s “Giles Goat-Boy.” Yates asked Scholes, anxiously it seemed to me, which unabridged dictionary he should buy. He had just received a gorgeous grant for creative writing from the Federal Gumment, and the first thing he was going to buy was his entire language between hard covers. He was afraid that he might get a clunker—a word, by the way, not in this Random House job.

  Scholes replied judiciously that Yates should get the second edition of the “Merriam-Webster,” which was prescriptive rather than descriptive. Prescriptive, as nearly as I could tell, was like an honest cop, and descriptive was like a boozed-up war buddy from Mobile, Ala. Yates said he would get the tough one; but, my goodness, he doesn’t need official instructions in English any more than he needs training wheels on his bicycle. As Scholes said later, Yates is the sort of man lexicographers read in order to discover what pretty new things the language is up to.

  · · ·

  To find out in a rush whether a dictionary is prescriptive or descriptive, you look up ain’t and like. I learned this trick of horseback logomachy from reviews of the “Merriam-Webster” third
edition. And here is the rundown on ain’t: the “Merriam-Webster” first edition says that it is colloquial or illiterate, the second says it is dialect or illiterate, and the third says that ain’t is, “though disapproved by many and more common in less educated speech, used orally … by many cultivated speakers esp. in the phrase ain’t I.” I submit that this nation is so uniformly populated by parvenus with the heebie-jeebies that the phrase ain’t I is heard about as frequently as the mating cry of the heath hen.

  Random House says this about ain’t: “Ain’t is so traditionally and widely regarded as a nonstandard form that it should be shunned by all who prefer to avoid being considered illiterate. Ain’t occurs occasionally in the informal speech of some educated users, especially in self-consciously [sic] or folksy or humorous contexts (Ain’t it the truth! She ain’t what she used to bel), but it is completely unacceptable in formal writing and speech. Although the expression ain’t I is perhaps defensible—and it is considered more logical than aren’t I? and more euphonious than amn’t I?—the well-advised person will avoid any use of ain’t.” How’s that for advice to parvenus?

  My mother isn’t mentioned, but what she taught me to say in place of ain’t I? or aren’t I? or amn’t I? was am I not? Speed isn’t everything. So I lose a micro-second here and there. The main thing is to be a graceful parvenu.

  As for the use of like as though it were interchangeable with as: “M-W-1” says, “The use of like as a conjunction meaning as (as, Do like I do), though occasionally found in good writers, is a provincialism and contrary to good usage.” “M-W-2” says that the same thing “is freely used only in illiterate speech and is now regarded as incorrect.” “M-W-3” issues no warnings whatsoever, and flaunts models of current, O.K. usage from the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Independent, “wore his clothes like he was … afraid of getting dirt on them,” and Art Linkletter, “impromptu programs where they ask questions much like I do on the air.” “M-W-3,” incidentally, came out during the dying days of the Eisenhower Administration, when simply everybody was talking like Art Linkletter.