Venus on the Half-Shell Read Free Page B

, 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 Her unpublished biography of her father was the main source of information for Ross Lockridge when he wrote Raintree County .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