Basic Training

Written to be sold under the pseudonym of “Mark Harvey”, this 20,000 word novella was never published in Vonnegut’s lifetime. It appears (from the address which appears on the manuscript, a suburb of Schenectady, New York and from the style and slant) to have been written in the late 1940s. Vonnegut was working in public relations for General Electric and used pseudonyms to protect himself from the charge of moonlighting. Vonnegut was trying to sell to the so-called slick magazines of the time like The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s while resisting the lure of science fiction--a tension throughout his professional career.

Basic Training is a bitter, profoundly disenchanted story which satirizes the military, authoritarianism, gender relationships, parenthood and most of the assumed mid-century myths of the family. Haley Brandon, the adolescent protagonist, comes to the farm of his relative, the old crazy who insists upon being called The General, to learn to be a straight-shooting American. Haley’s only means of survival will lead him to unflagging defiance of the General’s deranged (but oh so American, oh so military) values. This story and its thirtyish author were no friends of the milieu to which the slick magazines’ advertisers were pitching their products.

Another unexpected writer’s influence underlies this story: J.D. Salinger. Throughout the 40’s and before his move to New York, Salinger had produced short stories whose confused or slightly deranged young protagonists (most of them around the age of Haley Brandon) stumbled through pre- and postwar Manhattan and military service, experiencing mild disaffection, alienation and then terrible anger. All of them came to learn that the people who ran the show were as crazy and dangerous as those nominally on the other side. Shortly after these semi-whimsical social portraits were published, Salinger like Vonnegut was drafted, shipped into combat and involved in the Battle of the Bulge.

In this novella, published here for the first time, exist not only Vonnegut’s influences and what later became his voice but Vonnegut’s grand themes: trust no one, trust nothing; the only constants are absurdity and resignation, which themselves cannot protect us from the void but might divert.