From The Vonnegut Statement, (Jerome Klinkowitz and John Somer, ed. New York: Delacort/Seymour Lawrence, 1973, 90-118.

Vonnegut on Technology & Cheesy Little Religions
Excerpt from 1973's Robert Scholes Interview

Robert Scholes: . . . You started out to be a chemical engineer. Does that account, do you think, for the interest in technology that seems to run through your work?

KV: Well, it accounts for my familiarity with technology somewhat, and through what seemed misfortunes to me at the time I have learned something about physics, chemistry, and math and the sorts of people that are successful in those areas, so I have been able to take off on them with a fair amount of expertness. After the war I went to the University of Chicago and studied anthropology for three years, and then went to work for General Electric as a public-relations man, and because of all this background in science that I had had, they made me a flak, a publicity man for the research laboratory there, which is an excellent industrial research laboratory.

RS: I see.

KV: So I saw these people at work and knew them quite well and went to their parties and so forth and proceeded to hurt their feelings in my first book which was ...

RS: Player Piano.

KV: Yes.

RS: Yes, I've wondered about Player Piano. In particular one of the things that interested me was this great summer festival that the technicians hold somewhere up in the North Woods. I wonder if there's a real background to that.

KV: Yes, there is. There was a. . . called Association Island and it was owned by the (let's see, what was it) ... there was some association of electric-light manufacturers in the early days of the electrical industry and they were friendly competitors and they met to discuss business on this island once a year and this became sort of a Boy Scout festival

RS: Uh-huh.

KV: What the competitors did not know for quite a while was that they were all owned by General Electric.

RS: Ha ha ha ha.. .

KV: And that no matter what happened to the competition, General Electric won.

RS: Marvelous.

KV: But this became in later years a morale-building operation for General Electric, and deserving young men were sent up there for a week and played golf and there were archery contests and baseball contests and swimming contests and plenty of free liquor, and so forth.

RS: So the bizarre events in Player Piano are pretty realistic after all, are they?

KV: Well, Player Piano when it came out was not a widely read book except in Schenectady, New York. The island was shut down after the book came out.

RS: No kidding.

KV: It no longer exists.

RS: I'll tell you something I read last summer that may interest you. I was talking to someone going out to the West Coast who had just been at a session out in the northern part of California which reminded me very much of the episode in Player Piano. Apparently some large organization out there invites up-and-coming young men in all professions, and old men, too, so that you find admirals and generals and businessmen and whatnot, and they seem to go through a ritual quite like the ritual described in Player Piano.

KV: Yes, it's fun to work. It's a cheesy little religion which is satisfactory for a week or so, and .. .

RS: Some last long and some last a little while.

KV: Yes. As most husbands coming back from one of these things won't tell their wives what happened there,and, you know, because it's so silly.

RS: Yeah. Not because there's anything really wrong.

KV: No! Oh, no! It's a very clean operation.

RS: Yeah, the Boy Scout atmosphere sounds very strong.

KV: I think the book would have sold a great deal better if I had intimated that there were party girls flown in and so forth, but there are not.

Excerpted from Robert Scholes' sprawling interview in The Vonnegut Statement, (Jerome Klinkowitz and John Somer, ed. New York: Delacort/Seymour Lawrence, 1973, 90-118.