Venus on the Half-Shell
Page 2
As Trout, I filled out the data-forms she had sent and mailed them to her through my agent. I explained that all my novels had been originally published by disreputable fly-by-night publishers who had not paid me any royalties and had not even paid a fee to register my books with the Library of Congress. I never checked the 1976 issue, but I doubt that the editor included the Trout item.
However, as time went on, I became worried about Vonnegut’s displeasure at the idea that people might think he was the author of Venus. At the same time, it was beyond me why he should be displeased that people might think he wrote Venus and yet not be distressed because people knew he was the author of Breakfast of Champions, Slapstick, Jailbird, and Deadeye Dick.
To spread the word around that I, not Vonnegut, was the author of Venus, I revealed the truth at every chance to do so and did my best when I was speaking at conventions and conferences to bring up the subject. I did the same when I was being interviewed on radio and TV. Just how well the science fiction grapevine has worked, I do not know. By now, it does not seem to matter. Time has cleared this problem away. In the past few years, when I spoke at universities and colleges, I found that only about four or five in audiences of 500 to 800 recognized the name of Trout or Vonnegut. And I was told by a fan who questioned Vonnegut about Venus after a lecture that Vonnegut had difficulty remembering anything about it, including my name. So, whatever he felt at the time regarding Venus has passed.
I wish to thank Mr. Vonnegut for his generosity in permitting me to publish Venus as by Trout. I am sorry that it may have caused him any perturbation. I am even sorrier that he could not understand that Venus was my tribute to him and my repayment for all the delight his pre-1975 works gave me.
For several years, I’ve been trying to get Venus published under my own name. Finally, it has come about.
But, for a brief though glorious period, I was Kilgore Trout.
Philip José Farmer, 1988
PREFACE
THE OBSCURE LIFE AND HARD TIMES OF KILGORE TROUT
A SKIRMISH IN BIOGRAPHY
BY PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER
This is another specimen of the “biographical.” It originally appeared in a fanzine, Moebius Trip, December 1971 issue, edited and published by Ed Connor of Peoria, Illinois. Later on, I suggested to the editor of Esquire that he might want to publish this “life.” Regretfully, he rejected the idea. He did not think that Kilgore Trout was as well known as Tarzan. This is true, but the majority of Esquire’s readers are probably readers of Kurt Vonnegut’s works and would be acquainted with Trout. So it goes.
I identify strongly with Trout.
The editor and readers of Moebius Trip thought that the letter from Trout and the letter describing Trout’s interview in the Peoria Journal Star were made up by me. No such thing. These letters actually appeared in the letter section of the editorial page of Peoria’s only local newspaper, and I can prove it.
Since I wrote this, I have been fortunate enough to read the galleys of Vonnegut’s novel Breakfast of Champions. It contains many new facts which have enabled me to amplify and to correct the original article. Even so, some things are still in doubt because of contradictions in the three books in which Trout figures. Mr. Vonnegut evidently regards consistency as the hobgoblin of small writers.
Internal evidence in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the first book about Trout, implies that Trout was born in 1890 or 1898. Slaughterhouse-Five, the second, implies that he was born in 1902. But Breakfast of Champions makes it clear that he was born in 1907.
There are other discrepancies. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater says that no two of Trout’s books ever had the same publisher. In Breakfast of Champions the World Classics Library publishers have issued many of his books.
Rosewater states that Trout’s works can only be found in disreputable bookstores dealing in pornography. Yet the same book has Eliot Rosewater picking up a Trout novel from a book rack in an airport.
Trout’s novels are supposed to be extremely difficult to find. Rosewater is an avid collector of Trout (in fact, the only one), and he has only forty-one novels and sixty-three short stories. Yet the crooked lawyer, Mushari, goes into a Washington, D.C. smut dealer’s and finds every one of Trout’s eighty-seven novels.
Breakfast of Champions says that until Trout met a truck driver in 1972 he had never talked with anybody who’d read one of his stories. But Eliot Rosewater and Billy Pilgrim had read his stories and had met him some years before.
Trout’s sole fan letter (from Rosewater) reached him in Cohoes, New York, according to Breakfast. But Rosewater says that Trout was living in Hyannis, Massachusetts, when he got the letter.
The description of the extraterrestrial Tralfamadorians in The Sirens of Titan differs considerably from that in Slaughterhouse-Five.
And so it goes.
* * *
Who is the greatest living science fiction author?
Some say he is Isaac Asimov. Many swear he’s Robert A. Heinlein. Others nominate Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Brian Aldiss, or Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Franz Rottensteiner, Austrian critic and editor, proclaims the Pole, Stanislaw Lem, as the champion. Mr. Rottensteiner may be biased, however, since he is also Lem’s literary agent.
None of the above can equal Kilgore Trout—if we can believe Eliot Rosewater, Indiana multimillionaire, war hero, philanthropist, fireman extraordinaire, and science fiction connoisseur. According to Rosewater, Trout is not only the greatest science fiction writer alive, he is the world’s greatest writer. He ranks Trout above Dostoevski, Tolstoi, Balzac, Fielding, and Melville. Rosewater believes that Trout should be president of Earth. He alone would have the imagination, ingenuity, and perception to solve the problems of this planet.
Rosewater, drunk as usual, once burst into a science fiction writers’ convention at Milford, Pennsylvania. He had come to meet his idol, but he found, to his sorrow and amazement, that Trout was not there. Lesser men could attend it, but Trout was too poor to leave Hyannis, Massachusetts, where he was a stock clerk in a trading-stamp redemption center.
Who is this Kilgore Trout, this poverty-stricken and neglected genius?
To begin with, Kilgore Trout is not a nom de plume of Theodore Sturgeon. Let us dispose of that base rumor at once. It is only coincidence that the final syllables of the first names of these two authors end in ore or that their last names are those of fish. The author of the classical and beautifully written More Than Human and The Saucer of Loneliness could not possibly be the man whom even his greatest admirer admitted couldn’t write for sour apples.
Trout was born in 1907, but the exact day is unknown. Until a definite date is supplied by an authoritative source, I’ll postulate the midnight of February 19th, 1907, as the day on which society’s “greatest prophet” was born. Trout’s character indicates that he is an Aquarian and so was born between January 20th and February 19th. There is, however, so much of the Piscean in him that he was probably born on the cusp of Aquarius and Pisces, that is, near midnight of February 19th.
Trout first saw the light of day on the British island of Bermuda. His parents were citizens of the United States of America. (Trout has depicted them in his novel, Now It Can Be Told.) His father, Leo Trout, had taken a position as birdwatcher for the Royal Ornithological Society in Bermuda. His chief duty was to guard the very rare Bermudian ern, a green sea eagle. Despite his vigilance, the ern became extinct, and Leo took his family back to the States. Kilgore attended a Bermudian grammar school and then entered Thomas Jefferson High School in Dayton, Ohio. He graduated from this in 1924.
Though Trout was born in Bermuda, he was probably conceived in Indiana. His character smells strongly of certain Hoosier elements, and it is in Indianapolis, Indiana, that we first meet him. This state has produced many writers: Edward Eggleston (The Hoosier Schoolmaster), George Ade (Fables in Slang), Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy, The Genius), George Barr McCutcheon (Graustark, Brewster’s M
illions), Gene Stratton Porter (A Girl of the Limberlost), William Vaughn Moody (The Great Divide), Booth Tarkington (Penrod, The Magnificent Ambersons), Lew Wallace (Ben Hur), James Whitcomb Riley (The Old Swimmin’ Hole, When the Frost is on the Punkin’), Ross Lockridge (Raintree County), Leo Queequeg Tincrowdor (Osiris on Crutches, The Vaccinators from Vega), Rex Stout (author of the Nero Wolfe mysteries), and, last but far from least, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, The Sirens of Titan, “Welcome to the Monkey House,” Mother Night, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions).
Mr. Vonnegut is the primary source of our information about Kilgore Trout. We should all be grateful to him for bringing Trout’s life and works to our attention. Unfortunately, Vonnegut refers to him only in the latter three books, and these are popularly believed to be fictional. They are to some extent, but Kilgore Trout is a real-life person, and anybody who doubts this is free to look up his birth record in Bermuda.
Vonnegut has brought Trout out of obscurity and has given us much of his immediate life. He has not, however, given us the background of Trout’s parents, and so I have conducted my own investigations into Trout’s pedigree. The full name of Kilgore’s father was Leo Cabell Trout, and he was born circa 1881 in Roanoke, Virginia. Trouts have lived for generations in this city and its neighbor, Salem. Leo’s mother was a Cabell and related to that family which has produced the famous author, James Branch Cabell (Figures of Earth, The Silver Stallion, Jurgen) and a novelist well known in the nineteenth century, Princess Amelie Troubetzkoy. The princess was the granddaughter of William Cabell Rives, a U.S. Senator and minister to France. Her first novel, The Quick or the Dead?, was a sensation in 1888.
Trout inherited a talent for writing from his mother’s side also. She was Eva Alice Shawnessy (1880-1926), author of the Little Eva series, popular children’s books around the turn of the century. She wrote these under the nom de plume of Eva Westward and received only a fraction of the royalties they earned. Her publisher ran off with his firm’s profits to Brazil after inducing her to sink her money into the firm’s stock. Her unpublished biography of her father was the main source of information for Ross Lockridge when he wrote Raintree County.
Her father was John Wickliff Shawnessy (1839-1941), a Civil War veteran, country schoolteacher, and a frustrated dramatist and poet. Johnny spent much of his life thinking about and seeking the legended Golden Raintree, an arboreal Holy Grail, hidden somewhere in the Great Swamp of Raintree County. Johnny never finished his epic, Sphinx Recumbent, but a great-grandson has taken this and rewritten it as a science fiction novel. Leo Queequeg Tincrowdor (born 1918) is the son of Allegra Shawnessy (born 1898), daughter of Wesley Shawnessy (18791939), eldest son of John Wickliff Shawnessy. Kilgore’s cousin, Leo, is primarily a painter, but he has written some science fiction stories which have been favorably compared to Kilgore’s.
Johnny’s father was Thomas Duff Shawnessy (died 1879), farmer, lay preacher, herbalist, and composer of county-famous, but awful, doggerel. He was born in the village of Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, Scotland, and was the illegitimate son of Eliza Shawnessy, a farmer’s daughter. Thomas Duff revealed to his son Johnny that his, Thomas’, father had been the great Scots essayist and historian, Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). Eliza (1774-1830) had taken Thomas Duff when he was a boy to the state of Delaware. After his mother died, Thomas Duff Shawnessy and his nineteen-year-old bride, Ellen, had settled in the newly opened state of Indiana. Thomas Duff thought that his father’s writing genius might spring anew in his grandson, Johnny. Surely the genes responsible for such great books as Sartor Resartus, The French Revolution, and On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History would not die.
There is, however, strong doubt that Thomas Carlyle was T. D. Shawnessy’s father. Eliza Shawnessy would have been twenty-one years old in 1795, the year Carlyle was born. Even if she had seduced Carlyle when he was only twelve, Thomas Duff would have been born in 1807. This would make him thirteen years old when he married the nineteen-year-old Ellen. This is possible but highly improbable.
It seems likely that Eliza Shawnessy lied to her son. She wanted him to think that, though he was a bastard, his father was a great man. Probably, Thomas Duff’s father was actually James Carlyle, stonemason, farmer, a fanatical Calvinist, and father of Thomas Carlyle. The truth seems to be that Thomas Duff Shawnessy was the half-brother of Thomas Carlyle. Thomas Duff should have been able to figure this out, but he never bothered to look up the date of his supposed father’s birth.
Johnny’s mother, Ellen, was a cousin of Andrew Johnson (1808-1875), the seventeenth president of the United States.
Johnny’s second wife, Esther Root (born 1852), was of English stock with a dash of American Indian blood (from the Miami tribe, probably).
With so many writers in his pedigree, it would seem that Kilgore Trout was almost destined to become a famous author. However, his talents were marred by his personality, which had been soured and depressed by an unhappy childhood. His father was a ne’er-do-well, and his mother was embittered by her husband’s drunkenness and infidelity, and by the theft of her royalties. Trout was prevented from going on to college by his parents’ long and expensive illnesses, resulting in their deaths a few years after he graduated from high school.
Trout had three great fears that rode him all his life: a fear of cancer, of rats, and of Doberman pinschers. The first came from watching his parents suffer in their terminal stages. The second came from living in so many basements and tenement houses. The third resulted from several attacks by Doberman pinschers during his vagabondish life. Once, out of a job and starving, he tried to steal a chicken from a farmer’s henhouse but was caught by the watchdog. Another time, he was bitten while delivering circulars.
Trout’s pessimism and distrust of human beings ensured that he would have no friends and that his three wives would divorce him. It drove his only child, Leo, to run away from home at the age of fourteen. Leo lied about his age and became a U.S. Marine. While in boot camp he wrote his father a denunciatory letter. After that, there was a total lack of word about Leo until two FBI agents visited Kilgore. His son, they told him, had deserted and joined the Viet Cong.
Trout moved around the States, working at low-paying and menial jobs and writing his science fiction stories in his spare time. After his final divorce, his only companion was a parakeet named Bill. Kilgore talked a lot to Bill. And for forty years Kilgore carried around with him an old steamer trunk. This contained many curious items, including toys from his childhood, the bones of a Bermudian ern, and a mildewed tuxedo he had worn to the senior dance just before graduating.
Sometime during his lonely odysseys, he fell into the habit of calling mirrors “leaks.” Mirrors were weak points through which leaked visions of universes parallel to ours. Through these four-dimensional windows he could see cosmos occupying the same space as ours. This delusion, if it was a delusion, probably originated from his rejection of our universe. This was, to him, the worst of all possible worlds.
Our planet was a cement mixer in which Trout had been whirled, tossed, beaten, and ground. By the mid-1960s, his face and body bore all the scars and traumas of his never-ending battle against the most abject poverty, of his unceasing labors in writing his many works, of a neglect by the literary world and, worse, by a neglect from the readers of the genre in which he specialized, science fiction, and of an incessant screwing by his fly-by-night publishers.
Fred Rosewater, in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, picks up a book by Trout. It is Venus on the Half-Shell, and on its paper back is a photograph of Trout. He’s an old man with a bushy black beard, and his face is that of a scarred Jesus who’s been spared the cross but must instead spend the rest of his life in prison.
Eliot Rosewater, coming out of a mental fog in a sanitarium, sees Trout for the first time. He looks to him like a kindly country undertaker. Trout no longer has a beard; he’s shaved it off so he can get a job.
In 1972, according to Breakfast of Champions, Trout is snaggletoothed and has long, tangled, uncombed white hair. He hasn’t used a toothbrush for years. His legs are pale, skinny, hairless, and studded with varicose veins. He has sensitive artist’s feet, blue from bad circulation. He doesn’t wash very often. Vonnegut gives a number of physical statistics about Trout, including the fact that his penis, when erect, is seven inches long but only one and one-fourth of an inch in diameter. Just how he found this out, Vonnegut does not say.
In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Mushari, a sinister lawyer (or is the adjective a redundancy?), investigates Trout. He is not interested in him as a literary phenomenon. Trout is Rosewater’s favorite author, and Mushari is checking out Trout’s works for his dossier on Rosewater. He hopes to prove that Rosewater is mentally incompetent and unable to administrate the millions of the Rosewater Foundation. No reputable bookseller has ever heard of Trout. But he does locate all of Trout’s eighty-seven novels, in a tattered secondhand condition, in a hole-in-the-wall which sells the hardest of hardcore pornography. Trout’s 2BR02B, which Eliot thought was his greatest work, was published at twenty-five cents a copy. Now it costs five dollars.