Venus on the Half-Shell (32 page)

Jonathan Herowit stayed with Somers for six months after his release from Bellevue. (Somers has empathy for the mentally disadvantaged, too.) Eric Lindsay, an Aussie fan, stopped off during his motorcycle tour of the States after the Torcon. And there have been many others.

Somers’ fans will be interested in his current project.

“I plan to write a novel outside the Clayter and Wau Wau canons. It’ll take place almost a trillion years from now. It’ll be titled either
Hour of Supreme Vision
or
Earth’s Dread Hour.
Both titles are quotes from the
Spoon River Anthology.
The latter is from that fictitious epitaph Edgar Lee Masters wrote for my father, poor guy!”

“You don’t have many years of writing left,” I said.

He looked puzzled, then he smiled. “Ah, you mean Trout’s prediction that I’ll die in 1982.” He laughed. “That rascal put me in his novel just long enough to kill me off. Had a boy riding a bicycle ram into me. Well, that could happen. This town is hilly, and the kids do come down the steep streets with their brakes off. I did it myself before I got sick. But the way I feel right now, I’ll live to be eighty, anyway.”

I drove away that night feeling he was right. His yellow hair has turned white, and his beard is grizzled. But he looks muscular and hairy-chested, like Hemingway when he was healthy. His gusto and delight in life and literature seem to ensure his durability. His readers can look forward to many more adventures of John Clayter and Ralph von Wau Wau and perhaps a host of other characters.

Somers’ old mansion is only a few blocks from the corner of 8th and Jackson Street, where Masters’ boyhood house still stands. A sign in front says:
Masters Home, Open 1-5
P.M.
Daily Except Monday.
I wonder if someday a similar sign will stand before Jonathan Swift Somers’ home. I wouldn’t be surprised if this does happen. But I hope it’ll be a long time from now.

Philip José Farmer was meta before meta was cool. Before it was even warm. He was the Christopher Columbus of science fiction in the use of such techniques as metafiction, recursive fiction, parody, pastiche, fictional biographies, real-person fiction, “true” accounts of fictional events and everything between. Or was he the Leif Ericsson of those things, bearing in mind that the Vikings discovered America centuries before Columbus did? Or was he the Saint Brendan of those things, who crossed the Atlantic five hundred years before the Vikings? Or was he even Xog of the Yellow Snow tribe, the first man to walk over the Bering Strait land bridge thousands of years before the Irish existed, of those things; the things I listed above, chiefly metafiction, recursive fiction, parody, pastiche, recursive fiction... Did I mention recursive fiction?

But this is just nitpicking. Xog was infested with nits and picked them all, or most of them, probably. And I am not he. The point is that Farmer was a pioneer, an explorer, an authentic original. He was a serious trickster who liked to juggle with mirrors and sometimes jump through them; and the images in those mirrors were often other mirrors full of other tricksters juggling mirrors or leaping through them. And every time he jumped through a mirror, he always emerged unscathed on the other side, and so did his reflections.

I should know, I, Jonathan Swift Somers III, being myself a fictional author who is a parody of another fictional author, created as a character in a book that supposedly didn’t exist. Right. So, who better than me to give you a brief overview of Farmer’s blatant disregard, if not downright manipulation, of reality?

My story begins, oddly enough, with writer’s block. The best way to deal with writer’s block is to tackle it head on. That’s where the expression “block and tackle” comes from. And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything. Nonetheless it’s true. If you have writer’s block, tackle it!

Farmer did exactly that. He was under pressure from publishers and readers (and let it be noted that these are different kinds of pressure) to write the next book in his renowned Riverworld series (which is fiction about real historical people in an imaginary afterlife), or the next book in his World of Tiers series (which contains characters named from William Blake’s mythology as well as a character with the same initials, P.J.F., as Farmer himself), or the next volume about Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban (pastiches of Tarzan and Doc Savage). Even though all of these novels borrowed playfully from other works in one way or another, Farmer realised that he was stuck and needed a new toy to play with.

At this point I’d like to mention something that Harlan Ellison once said, which is that there are in fact two different kinds of writer’s block. The first kind is the famous kind, where the writer simply has no ideas; but the second kind is worse than that, even though it’s rarely discussed or written about. The second kind is when the writer is full of ideas, bursting with them, has so much choice that he’s paralyzed. He simply doesn’t have the energy to—

Excuse me. I seemed to run out of steam for some reason... But to return to what I was saying earlier... Farmer was stuck.

Enter Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., a science fiction writer with mainstream success, or a mainstream writer who used science fiction tropes—it all depends on whom you ask, and how stuffy that person’s contemporary American literature professor was, or how keenly you want to go along with Vonnegut’s own interpretation of events. I’m happy to go along with anyone when it’s easier. In many of Vonnegut’s novels, various things crop up more than once. Firestorms, for example. A bird that goes “poo-tee-weet,” for another. Who knows why? Maybe Vonnegut did.

But anyway... one of the many things that crop up more than once is a character who is himself a science fiction writer; always down on his luck and trod upon, the all-but-forgotten genius Kilgore Trout. More often than not, Trout doesn’t appear in Vonnegut’s novels in person, so to speak, but is instead cited as the author of a wild science fiction story that is then described. Because of Trout’s crooked agent, most of his stories ended up as filler in cheap porn magazines instead of being sold to science fiction markets where Trout might have gained the recognition and wealth he deserved. Mind you, talking about wealth, at the end of
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,
he is given $50,000 by the Rosewater Foundation, so maybe he wasn’t that unlucky after all. But let’s not nitpick... Me not Xog.

In name, if not circumstance, Trout was based on the real-life writer Theodore Sturgeon, whom nobody seems to have a bad word to say about. But Farmer felt that he himself also had much in common with Trout, to the point that he easily identified with this fictional author. In fact, he identified with him so strongly, he decided to
become
Trout. At least in name, at least for a while. And let’s remember what Vonnegut claimed the moral of his novel
Mother Night
was, namely that we are who we pretend to be, so we should be careful who we pretend to be.

Rather impertinently at this point, I would like to inject here the observation that if Kilgore Trout had ever met the writer Greg Bear the stage would have been set for a symbolic wilderness scene of paw fishing that couldn’t ever really happen. Bears do fish for trout, don’t they? Or is it just salmon? Don’t mind me, I’m eccentric.

Anyway, Farmer’s idea was simple, but it was also bold, ingenious and daring. It was this: take one of the novels that the fictional Trout is described as having written and actually write it. Hey presto! Although Vonnegut’s paperback publisher, Dell, loved the idea, gaining permission from Vonnegut was a bit harder. It was almost as hard as escaping from the interior of the planet Mercury in a flying saucer, or traveling the entire length of the universe just to deliver the message, “Greetings!”

After sending many letters to Vonnegut
in the days before email
but never receiving a reply, Farmer finally got him on the phone. After a long conversation, Vonnegut reluctantly (and presumably curtly or even Kurtly) agreed to let Farmer borrow his creation. Lending creations is always fraught with danger! Will you get them back dog-eared and battered? Or spruced up and bettered? That’s the gamble!

Before we see what happens next, assuming you haven’t already skipped this paragraph like an impatient rascal, let’s back up just a bit. How much? This much, no more, no less. Mind out, paragraph reversing! Oops, crushed a pedestrian in the margins. His mind really is out right now. Anyway, long before Farmer decided to go all out and write a novel pretending to be Trout, he studied the fictional science fiction writer as intently as it’s possible to study a nonexistent personage. He read every novel by Vonnegut, apart from the ones that hadn’t yet been written, and compiled a comprehensive dossier on Trout. Then, filling in the missing data with his own invented “research,” Farmer wrote “The Obscure Life and Hard Times of Kilgore Trout: A Skirmish in Biography”
(Moebius Trip,
December 1971).

Short term, the result of Vonnegut’s agreement was the immediate obliteration of Farmer’s writer’s block. Farmer knocked out the novel
Venus on the Half-Shell
in six weeks, but that’s just a figure of speech, because nobody has ever really “knocked out” a prose work of any length, have they? And even if it were possible, why would you want to punch a novel before it was published? Anyway, Farmer had a wonderful time writing the book; laughter could be heard howling up from his basement office, drowning out the sound of the typewriter keys banging away. And a drowned sound isn’t a pretty sight, bloats up bad and bursts... Only joking. Long term, the results were much farther reaching. And if you’re a non-rascal look away now... So you thought you’d skip the last paragraph, did you? Wiseguy, huh?

Talking about “typewriter keys banging away,” did I mention that Farmer was the greatest ever master of Bangsian Fantasy? We’ll return to this later...

Venus on the Half-Shell
was touted (trouted?) as the publishing event of the year, the year in which it appeared, naturally.
Locus
magazine ran an announcement in its April 6, 1973 issue which stated that
Venus on the Half-Shell
would be written by “(a well-known SF author—not Vonnegut)
((Sturgeon??)).”
The April 29 issue contained a follow-up reporting that, “Theodore Sturgeon has denied being ‘Kilgore Trout.’” This was followed by the May 11 issue that contained a letter from David Harris, an editor at Dell, who claimed to have a letter from Trout. This in part said, “As far as that item about me goes, I’m not at all surprised—there are times when I doubt my own reality...”

There was also speculation that Isaac Asimov might be the mysterious “real” author of the book, or perhaps it was John Sladek, another trickster, who had already conceived I-Click-as-I-Move, a robot version of Asimov, who was pretending to be Asimov pretending to be Trout. My own view is that T.J. Bass should have been nominated too and it’s fishy that he wasn’t.

Things settled down until the August 11 issue of
Locus
where they reported a rumor that Philip José Farmer was Kilgore Trout. This was followed by notices in the September 12 issue where Farmer denied being Trout and another letter by Trout appeared where he said he was flattered that all of these authors were rumored to be him, but that “there must be some way to assert my existence as a real person.” He couldn’t think of a way, though, and neither can I, offhand, and that’s because he wasn’t a real person. So really he was being duplicitous. Or rather, Farmer was being duplicitous on his behalf, which was generous of him really, if you stop to think about it.

But this was just the beginning of the japery. Farmer was an expert trickster at the center of his warm heart, and he couldn’t wait until the publication of the novel to begin having some serious fun. The November 1974 issue of the
SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) Forum
contained a long and very badly written, badly sppellled, and even worsely punct-uated letter from Kilgore Trout asking for an application so he might join, and also saying that he was looking for a place to live. The letter concluded, “...if you need character references write david harris of dell. dont write to mr vonnegut. he never answers his mail.”

Shortly afterwards, an incident occurred that almost stopped the project before it began. On December 1, 1974 well-known literary critic Leslie Fiedler was on the PBS television program
Firing Line,
hosted by William F. Buckley. They were speaking of science fiction and both Kurt Vonnegut and Kilgore Trout’s names came up. Fiedler, who was a friend of Farmer’s and knew all about
Venus on the Half-Shell,
said, without naming Farmer: “What he did is he just wrote a book by Kilgore Trout... Vonnegut didn’t want him to do it, but he said, ‘I’ll go to court and get my name officially changed to Kilgore Trout, and you can’t stop me.’” Vonnegut was angered and withdrew permission for Farmer to write any more novels “by” Kilgore Trout.

Prior to the novel’s publication in paperback, it was abridged and serialized over two issues of
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
(December 1974 and January 1975). It was the feature story of the December issue, getting not just top billing, but cover art as well. So it can be rightly said that this was the place and circumstance of
my
birth, where the world first discovered that Simon Wagstaff—the protagonist of Kilgore Trout’s first work to be published outside of a nudie magazine— had a favorite science fiction author. Me.

Excuse me while I stop for a moment to catch my breath. It always fills me with a strange feeling when I stop to consider that I’m not a living human being, that my father was an author and my mother a magazine. Well, perhaps some of
your
fathers were authors too, but I bet they didn’t
write
you into existence, did they? I bet they created you some other way. OK, I’m fine now. Let’s move on.

In the same way that Vonnegut would have his characters describe stories written by Kilgore Trout, Trout, I mean Farmer, did the same with me. Simon Wagstaff, the protagonist of the novel, would tell his companions about stories I had written. And let’s face it, telling readers about fictional stories that haven’t really been written is a shortcut method of laying claim to the ideas in those stories without having to go through the exhausting process of actually writing them. So Trout saved himself a lot of valuable time, and the saving was passed on to Farmer. And we have no choice but to assume Trout passed
all
that saved time on.