© The Washington Post, March 2, 1975. 1

Fishing for Trout
by Chris Dickey

Kilgore Trout might have lived out his uneventful life undiscovered in Ilium, New York, if it were not for Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Trout published over 2,000 stories and more than 100 novels, but nobody – not his fabulously wealthy fan, Eliot Rosewater, nor Vonnegut, nor the curator of the Library of Congress’s pornography collection, not even Trout himself – has a collection of his complete works.

Through the synopses offered in several of Vonnegut’s best-selling books we may glean some notion of Trout’s past accomplishments. Basically, he is a satirical science-fiction writer with metaphysical pretensions. His novels string together brief chapters built around grotesque caricatures, enthralling improbabilities, easy ironies, and cheap-shot philosophy. He quotes frequently from the execrable verse of nonexistent poets, ad is known, at the slightest opportunity, to throw in a contrived parable from the work of an imagined sci-fi author, a cripple.

Vonnegut, whose body is whole but whose work runs to sci-fi, has admired Trout for a long time. Science fiction writers, as Eliot Rosewater once put it:

the only ones who’ll talk about the really terrific changes going on . . . who really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big simple ideas do to us . . . the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distance without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell.

Maybe so. In ant case, these seem to be the preoccupations of Kilgore Trout, and Vonnegut, too. And really, Trout has had a profound influence on Vonnegut’s work. Yet while the latter’s books have made him affluent by roundly damning an affluent society, Trout has been virtually unknown. He has lived in upper lower-class squalor, his work published by a pornography house, the World Classics Library, where his text was only used as filler between grainy photographs of copulation, spanking, donkeys – whatever. So it goes.

Now, at long last, one of Trout’s major works, Venus on the Half-Shell, has appeared in general circulation, ''for the first time without lurid covers!'' the lurid jacket reminds us.

It is the story of the immortal Space Wanderer, Simon Wagstaff, who, accompanied by his dog, his owl, and his beautiful robot lover, wander through space asking sages on sundry planets, primarily, ''Why are we created only to suffer and die?''

I enjoyed this novel. The story rolls right along from one escapade to another, and the philosophy is so thin and sill it never gets in the way. At one point, having received something less than a satisfactory answer to his query from a cannibalistic wise man, Wagstaff explodes: ''You have the same philosophy as a college sophomore’s!'' Trout knows his audience, anyway.

As I read the book, a great many words beginning with ''r'' sprang into my mind. These were the words: ribald, risqué, revolutionary, revolting, raunchy, rowdy, raucous, randy, Rabelaisan. . .

If it had started with an ''r'' I might also have though ''Voltairean,'' for there is a certain Candide quality to the work. The ineffectual, not especially intelligent hero wanders from one allegorical, satirical situation into another. But Trout is no Voltaire, and there is nothing so profound it provokes serious thought; nothing you can sink your teeth into. It's more like cotton Candide.

After all it is the originality of a satirist's vision, rather than the object of his satire that makes his work endure; his powers of invention rather than his philosophical perspective that makes him memorable. We remember Candide and Pangloss, not the ideas of Leibniz they were meant to parody. Lilliput, Brobdingnag, and the Yahoos, though their relationship to 18th-century politics may be utterly lost to us.

Trout recognizes this. his philosophy is only a flimsy pretext for adventure; the Space Wanderer's question-and-answer only a device to keep him moving round from planet to planet. Vonnegut, on the other hand, seems to take himself seriously. He is best when he is like Trout, inventive and right on the edge of silliness, when his fantasy takes over and he writes of Tralfamadore and the chronosynclastic infundibulum. When he writes of war and death and Dresden he is occasionally profound, but more often embarrassing.

Vonnegut once claimed that 'Kilgore Trout's unpopularity was deserved. ''His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good.'' And in the synopses he gave, he seemed to back up that statement. But Venus on the Half-Shell does not. Trout's prose is at least as good as Vonnegut's. It is strange (''clouds as black as rotten spot on a banana . . . the horizon had been as broken as a fake genealogy''), but it is lively and inventive and goes by faster than a holiday weekend. Some of the incidents -- obsessed as they are with sex and excrement -- are a little hard to stomach, but the next reissue of Trout, perhaps Oh Say Can You Smell? of 2BR02B is something I'm definitely looking forward to.

Thanks Kurt.

© The Washington Post