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Just in Time for Christmas: 2025 Gene Wolfe Almanac

2025 Gene Wolfe Almanac: 26 Pieces


So I've assembled a new book.

Readers of this blog will be familiar with twenty-four of the pieces, since they appeared here first. The other two, much more polished, appeared at the online site Ultan's Library.

Ten of the pieces are on The Fifth Head of Cerberus, amounting to 37% of the page count. The Urth Cycle is the subject of seven pieces, for 25% of the page count. There are three pieces on the Short Sun, and one piece each related to Peace, the Soldier Series, and The Devil in a Forest.

The collection is rounded out with three "general" articles, one on the content of an early anthology that shaped Wolfe as a child; another on Wolfe's use of two different versions of Pinocchio; and a third working toward an index of Wolfe's writings in a trade magazine, his day-job for a decade.

Also included are corrections for three other works from Sirius Fiction: Gene Wolfe's First Four Novels: A Chapter Guide errata; Gate of Horn, Book of Silk errata; and Lexicon Urthus (Second Edition, revised) errata.

Video "The Book of the New Sun" Experts Answer the Big Questions

On YouTube today, a video of 1 hour and 48 minutes from content provider Media Death Cult, features experts, including your humble lexicographer, answering questions:

The Book of the New Sun--Experts Answer the Big Questions

Video "The Book of the New Sun--The Ultimate Guide"

On YouTube a couple months back, a video of 2 hours and 14 minutes from content provider Media Death Cult, features a few minutes of interview with your humble lexicographer:

The Book of the New Sun--The Ultimate Guide

Addendum to "A Chapter Guide About the King in Yellow"

The other day I was reading Alfred de Musset's 1842 short story, “The Story of a White Blackbird.” It is the autobiography of a rare white blackbird, a whimsical piece.

The parent birds are disturbed at his coloring, and the father casts blame on the mother, at which point the hero defends her, saying,

"Is it her fault that I have not your fine yellow beak and your handsome French−looking black coat, which makes you look like a church warden swallowing an omelette?"

This sounded familiar to me.

A little searching helped me find it in “The Street of Our Lady of the Fields”:

"That's a blackbird," observed Miss Byng; "see him there on the bush with pink blossoms. He's all black except his bill, and that looks as if it had been dipped in an omelet, as some Frenchman says—"

I was not aware of this reference. Hite's notes in The Annotated King in Yellow gives no notice of it.

5HC: A Nabokov too far? (spoilers)

Related to the prisoner in “V.R.T.” and his powerful vision of a dream woman, an episode I have argued marks a shift in the character from misogyny to sexual attraction to sexual congress, I now turn to Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

This is a book about a poem “Pale Fire” by “Shade” and notes on the poem by “Kinbote.” In notes to the poem’s lines 433–34, Kinbote describes how the escaped king of Zembla, a promiscuous homosexual, tells his long-suffering Queen Disa that he does not love her, and he subsequently dreams of her repeatedly for an extended sequence of several pages, summarized in this manner:

The gist, rather than the actual plot of the dream, was a constant refutation of his not loving her. His dream-love for her exceeded in emotional tone, in spiritual passion and depth, anything he had experienced in his surface existence.

The dream sequence stands out as something different in the text (rubbing shoulders with the trace ghost story in that type of difference), but it does not lead to the king’s happy reunion with his queen or anything like that. So I am wondering if Wolfe took that bit and made it more crucial, and gave it a resolution.

Is this something, or is it a Nabokov too far?

For calibration purposes, is it greater than or less than the commonplace observation about the “white fountain” mention in the poem (lines 707; 716; 758; 802) and how this relates to the white fountain in the Urth Cycle?

Another possible angle regarding 5HC is how critical work on Pale Fire shows clues that Kinbote is probably being influenced by text he is encountering or remembering in real time, for example, Brian Boyd suggests that Kinbote, in exploring the closets of the Goldsworth girls (in the Foreword, written at the beginning), is reminded of Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, an association which starts his own Eastern European phantasmagoria about “Zembla” in the rambling pages that follow. My point here with regard to 5HC is to note that texts, given within the text of 5HC, are being worked and warped, all before our very eyes.

It is not I who am crazy...

Errata update for "Gene Wolfe's First Four Novels: A Chapter Guide"

Gene Wolfe’s First Four Novels: A Chapter Guide (errata)
update: August 26, 2024

[These changes have been made to “first edition 2020, corrected 2024,” except for the Peace detail on Plant Engineering, which remains ambiguous.]

The Fifth Head of Cerberus
"The Fifth Head of Cerberus"
p. 13, chapter 1.05, Euripides subsection, before “at a moment,” add: [as from “Hercules Distracted” (line 611) in Wodhull’s The Nineteen Tragedies and Fragments of Euripides (1809). The line comes at a moment . . . ]


p. 19, “‘A STORY’ BY JOHN. V. MARSCH” remove period after John

p. 41, Appendix VRT2: Outside Details

“Second: tape excerpt (197)” change to “Second (Constant): tape excerpt (197–207)”

“Fifth: (193)” change to “Fifth (Constant, satire verse): (194–97); prison notes (228–30) cover more after break, i.e., murder of Number Four”

“Seventeenth, Third Reel: tape excerpt (194–209); prison notes version (240)” change to “Seventeenth, Third Reel (Jabez): tape excerpt (139–40); prison notes (231–32) give name of Jabez, repeat photocopy bit”

THUS
• Second (Constant): tape excerpt (197–207).
• Fifth (Constant, satire verse): excerpt ends with tape breaking (194–97); prison notes (228–30) cover more after break, i.e., murder of Number Four.
• Seventeenth, Third Reel (Jabez): tape excerpt (139–40); prison notes (231–32) give name of Jabez, repeat photocopy bit.

p. 42, Appendix VRT3: Aid to Prison Notes

Cell 143 (first section)
“3.10: Second Interrogation (197); Fifth Interrogation (195)” remove line

Underground Cell 143 (second section)
Insert between 3.23 and 3.25: “3.24: Notes on Fifth Interrogation, the satiric verse, prisoner learns about death of Number Four (228–30), the last item presumably after the break in the tape (197), likely on the stray bit tossed out (244)”

Peace
p. 90, Plant Engineering subsection. “Gene Wolfe worked as an editor from 1972 to 1986” change the date range to “1972 to 1984.” [But there is ambiguity, as Plant Engineering claims he was there to 1986 (https://www.plantengineering.com/arti...) ]

The Devil in a Forest

p. 116, Fifteen “Jocellen” change to “Josellen”
p. 116, Seventeen “Jocellen” change to “Josellen”

p. 117, Twenty-Two, second to last sentence “Jocellen” change to “Josellen”

p. 119, “Jocellen” change to “Josellen”

New Publishing: A Chapter Guide About The King In Yellow

A Chapter Guide About The King In Yellow
Goodreads giveaway for US residents to begin on 24 AUG 2024, ending on 8 SEP 2024.

It is a story by story guide to the bewitching, bewildering book by Robert W. Chambers, augmented with: a set of Timelines; a List of Characters; a Trope List; a section on Ambrose Bierce stories; a section on a Poe story; a quick guide to Chambers's 1894 novel In the Quarter; notes on the Further Adventures of Clifford and Elliott; reprints of two earlier articles (with updates); a section on Theory; and a section on Mathoms.

5HC: Three Authors of V.R.T. (spoilers)

Regarding The Fifth Head of Cerberus: Three Novellas . . .

While it is obvious that Marsch wrote part of “V.R.T.”, and V.R.T. wrote part, I assert the mysterious author of the frame tale is Number Five.

Moving backward from this, “A Story” was written by V.R.T., based on writings by Marsch.

And back to the beginning, “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” was written by Number Five, who borrowed bits from Marsh and V.R.T.

This arrangement suggests that the novellas are presented in reverse chronological order, which a close reading had already partially suggested: “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” is given as being written twelve years after the initial arrest of Number Five and John V. Marsch; “A Story” can be seen as the artifact of “complete cooperation” (5HC, p. 243) that allowed John V. Marsch to be released from prison, perhaps only three years after his arrest; in “V.R.T.” the officer is reading the files one year after the arrest of Number Five and John V. Marsch.

This arrangement has consequences.

Let us go through the reading sequence of what is, in effect, five stories: “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” is a Vernean tale that twists into “Heart of Darkness”; “A Story” is an anthropological fiction that refreshingly inverts the Noble Savage; “V.R.T.” presents a Darkness at Noon situation that twists into a murder mystery, complete with detective. But “V.R.T.” casts shadows back through the other novellas, such that “A Story” is flipped into I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (psychological phantasmagoria) that also draws in Number Five as an “evil twin” Judas (that is, J.V.M. starts the whole twin theme; but note that the label of “Judas” is an erroneous villainization in the sense that while Number Five certainly called out J.V.M. as an abo in a closed room, he did not call the authorities on J.V.M.: while technically erroneous, it is psychologically satisfying); and Number Five responds to the charge of being labeled an evil twin Judas by engaging in plagiarism, salting his own memoir with coded elements from the other two novellas (in essence, the pattern for contamination among the texts has been solved: “trumpet vines” come from Number Five; most other elements originate with J.V.M.). So where initially “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” had the highest degree of validity, due to being presented first, it likely has the least validity.

Taking “A Story” as the “complete cooperation” allows the resolution of certain complexities. Granted that the tale is based upon events in the life of John V. Marsch, events covered in both “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” and “V.R.T.,” presumably there is freedom to present events in non-chronological order to form a more fitting fiction. In my recent wonderings (“5HC: Happy Ending for 1984”), I mapped “A Story” to most of John V. Marsch’s life, except for the final scenes of “The Miracle (the sky unveiled),” “The Murder (of Lastvoice),” and “The Switch (among the twins),” which seemed to me to be a black box condition of events yet to happen at the time of writing. But if “A Story” is re-ordering events in the life of John V. Marsch, then clearly “Eastwind” is Number Five, “Lastvoice” is Number Four, and “Sandwalker” is the hybrid V.R.T./Marsch (all as many have said, long time passing). Thus, the twins being involved in the execution of Lastvoice in “A Story” at “The Murder” matches the tableau in “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” where the presence of V.R.T./Marsch delays Number Five’s killing of Number Four. Likewise, non-chronological reordering allows the Cave and Priest of “A Story” to be not only the cave and grave of “V.R.T.” but also the Cave at 666 and Dr. Veil in “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” (as many have said, long time passing).

So then, a revision of a table from “Happy Ending for 1984” to map this anachronistic reading.

=A Story: V.R.T. [“5HC”]=

Quest to become a man: expedition starts (find abos/mother)

+The Cave/Priest: cave/grave [666/Veil]

Become a shadow friend: Marsch as patron

The girlfriend (Seven Girls Waiting): the cat/abo girlfriend

Vision of mother in danger: clue in Roncevaux

Trip by river: starcrosser to Ste. Croix

The trap (capture by marshmen): arrest by trio

The prison: #143

The family reunion in prison: the incoherent neighbor as mother

The girlfriend in prison: Celestine Etienne

The miracle: [called out as an abo by Number Five; end of the world]

The execution of Last Voice: [killing of Number Four by Number Five who will take his place]

The switch: the subduing of the internal twin via tryst with Celestine

5HC: A Tale of Two Twists (spoilers)

The Fifth Head of Cerberus is famous for having a major twist of identity, but it seems that there is a second twist, perhaps one not identified.

The first twist: the smoking gun

You must excuse my writing in this entry, and I suppose some of the subsequent entries as well. An absurd accident has occurred . . . . I suppose I should have been badly mauled, but I got nothing more than a few scratches from the thorns . . .
The officer laid down the canvas-bound journal and rummaged for the tattered school composition book with the note about the shrike. When he found the book he glanced at the first few pages, nodded to himself, and picked up the journal again. (5HC, p. 233-34)

Following the officer’s lead, we turn back to the composition book passage that we had read over his shoulder earlier, written by V.R.T. as a child: “Birds I have seen today. I saw two birds today. One was a skull-shrike, and the other was a bird that the shrike had [. . .]” (p. 138). Thus, the officer has compared the two handwriting samples and found them to be the same.
As John Clute puts it,

By dint of attempting to read close up to the words, I came to the conclusion that there was simply no reasonable doubt about what had happened to the anthropologist . . . even the exact page — page 233 of the American first edition — where VRT assumes the dead human’s identity seemed to be marked incontrovertibly. (Strokes, p. 159)

The second twist: the third time’s the charm
The first twist is widely celebrated, and it is so clear cut that once you see it, you cannot unsee it. It is helped by this in the fact that the officer sees it and acts as a pointing hound for the hunting reader. The second twist is more obscure, and the officer gives no sign of having seen it.

It amounts to the very different ways a given person reacts to the same stimulus. In “V.R.T.,” the prisoner considers Celestine in three different cases with very different attitudes: misogynistic dismissal; dream re-appraisal; and physical attraction.

Celestine Etienne is introduced in the text when the prisoner writes about the episode of his arrest. In prelude to the action, he notes that the boarding house was unusually quiet that night:

And thus there was no snoring, no one stumbling down the corridor to the lavatory, no muffled sighs of passion from Mlle. Etienne’s room while she entertained herself with the fruits of imagination and a tallow candle. (5HC, p. 168)

This brutal, crude statement shows the misogyny noted by the interrogator in the second interrogation: “It is an obsession of yours that physicians serve merely to keep ugly women alive—you referred to it only a moment ago. And in your notebook you give us a Dr. Hagsmith [an obvious pseudonym by a sneering misogynist]” (p. 206–7). Near the end of the arrest episode, Celestine is brought into the room and the prisoner appraises her physique in disparaging terms: “a very tall girl of twenty-seven or -eight” (p. 173),

[S]he was, as I have said, exceedingly tall, her legs stiltlike in their elongation, rising on thin, straight bones to hips broader than seemed consonant with the remainder of her physique, after which her body contracted again abruptly to a small waist, small breasts, and narrow shoulders. (p. 173)

However, many weeks later, after the prisoner has been broken down in the harsher part of the prison, he considers Celestine in a second way. On this occasion he has awakened from the dream of a woman which sets him to musing on female types which boil down to a single type: “all the things we [men] consider beautiful in a woman are merely criteria for her own survival and thus the survival of the children we shall father in her” (p. 210–11); “And so we seek long-legged girls, because a long-legged girl is swift to fly danger. . . . But a girl too tall will run clumsily” (p. 211). Stirred by the dream woman, his musings can be seen to reflect on measurements that he had used on Celestine the night of his arrest, even though he never mentions her name.

The third case comes on an occasion when the prisoner is taken from his cell in the night and he expects to be executed, but instead he is thrust into a bedroom with Celestine Etienne. She wears “a pink dress without sleeves, white gloves, and a hat. I know I used to think her tall as a stork, but the truth is that she looked a pretty creature there, with her big, frightened, blue-violet eyes” (p. 232). The two engage in carnal relations (p. 233).

This might be taken as a simple case of a broken prisoner finding as attractive a woman he previously sneered at, but there are clues in the text that the anthropologist is a misogynistic homosexual, which simplifies things by assigning misogyny to Marsch. Thus, the prisoner’s initial rude remarks about Celestine are from the Marsch persona; the dream woman and musings are more nebulous; and the third way the prisoner sees Celestine is from the V.R.T. persona.

This sequence is equivalent to the moment when the handwriting changes, but it goes in the other direction: V.R.T. has shed his Marsch persona.

5HC: Encrypted Autobiography [spoiler]

An examination of the encrypted autobiographical layer to The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972).

In 1985, John Clute was first to note that Number Five’s hidden name is “Gene Wolfe” (Clute, Strokes, p. 155). This lens of encrypted autobiographic detail might be extended further to different elements, beginning with that signature moment when Aunt Jeanine shows Number Five a photo of his mother: “It showed a girl of twenty-five or so, thin and as nearly as I could judge rather tall, standing beside a stocky young man on a paved walkway and holding a baby” (5HC, p. 24–25). Using the aforementioned lens, we take this photo as being of Gene Wolfe’s mother and father, holding him before a line of rowhouses in Brooklyn. Following the prompting of Aunt Jeanine as well as his own confusion regarding his paternity (at this stage Number Five thinks Maitre is his father), he focuses on the image of his mother, ignoring that of his father. “The girl had large features and a brilliant smile which held a suggestion of that rarely seen charm which is at once careless, poetic, and sly” (p. 25). Guessing at her ethnicity, he first considers “Gypsy” before settling on “Celtic,” which he further refines in terms of geographical locations: “Wales. Or Scotland. Or Ireland” (p. 25). So: around twenty-five; rather tall; thin; sly; and Celtic.

Following this, we compile biographical notes on the mother of Gene Wolfe, beginning with her name: Wolfe gives his mother’s name as “Mary ‘Fannie’ Olivia Ayers Wolfe” in the dedication to his autobiographical Letters Home (1990). “Fannie” is assumed to be her lifelong pet name; “Ayers” is a Scottish surname, which seems a link to the “Celtic” quality Number Five detects in the photo. The online “FamilySearch” record for “Mary Olivia Ayers (1901–1977)” states that Roy Wolfe married Fannie in 1921; “Wolfe” is a Germanic surname, for which we cite Wolfe’s quote: “My own [name] means a Wolf Is Born. If you know me . . . you won’t be able to see the barbarian [Germanic] armies streaming toward Rome when you read that, but they are there” (Plan[e]t Engineering, p. xvi). Gene was born in 1931, and by this reckoning he was a Germano-Celtic hybrid. According to her obituary (Athens Messenger, Dec 30, 1977) Fannie died in Logan, Ohio, in 1977 at seventy-six years old (meaning she was around thirty when Gene was born).

A key detail emerges in Voices of Barrington (2002): “His mother, Mary Olivia Ayers Wolfe, easily sported a boyish figure much admired by flappers of the twenties” (p. 95). So it seems that Fannie was a flapper, with all that implies (at the least it covers tall, thin, and sly). We clearly see the inspiration for the memorable character “Aunt Olivia” in Wolfe’s novel Peace (1975) as something more than just the name; but I argue that “Aunt Olivia” still owes more to Patrick Dennis’s novel Auntie Mame (1954).

In an interview with Peter Wright, Wolfe states that his mother Fannie “was a strikingly beautiful woman and could have been the model for Maxfield Parrish’s ‘The Lute Players.’ Red-haired, blue eyed, marvellous profile, marvellous face, very slender because she had an ulcer” (Wright, Shadows of the New Sun, p. 147).

Putting all these together, Fannie is tall and thin, around twenty-eight years old when she gave birth, ethnically Celtic (with red hair and blue eyes), with both a hidden tree name (“Olivia”), and a hidden “Mary” in her name.

With these clues in mind, we sift through the text of 5HC. There are notable passages discussing female types: the scientist in prison considering the natural ideal; the prostitutes on Ste. Croix exhibiting a certain ideal; the females of the hillmen on Ste. Anne embody a nomadic ideal; and Miss Celestine Etienne on Ste. Croix, the “girl next door.”

In “V.R.T.,” the eponymous prisoner in his prison cell muses on female types which boil down to a single type: “all the things we [men] consider beautiful in a woman are merely criteria for her own survival and thus the survival of the children we shall father in her” (5HC, p. 210–11); “And so we seek long-legged girls, because a long-legged girl is swift to fly danger. . . . But a girl too tall will run clumsily” (p. 211).

V.R.T.’s model seems skewed toward the nomadic woman rather than the sedentary woman, revealing a preference for a boyish “Artemis” or an athletic “Ishtar” rather than a slow-moving mother goddess like “Venus of Willendorf.” This logic points to a flapper.

Returning to “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” the prostitutes of Ste. Croix either possess nymph-like qualities or mimic them: “the girls, my father’s employees, in costumes that . . . gave them the appearance of great height” (p. 19); the prostitute attending Dr. Marsch has “high-heeled platform shoes and grotesquely long legs” (p. 64). Additional details in terms of bushes and trees apply, making them more technically dryads: Number Five watches a patron and his “nymphe du bois” (p. 19) meaning “wood nymph”; “Two of my father’s demimondaines . . . stately as Lombardy poplars” (p. 24). So the women are flappers with hidden tree aspects, just like Fannie Olivia.

In “A Story,” the mother of the twins has a tree name: “Cedar Branches Waving.” It is implied that all abo girls are named Mary through the baby “Mary Pink Butterflies.” Curiously, the “runner girl” ideal of “V.R.T.” also matches up with the nomadic hillmen, so the flapper traits might map to the females of the hillmen, adding to the “tree name” and the “Mary.”

In “V.R.T.,” Miss Celestine Etienne, the girl next door, is “a very tall girl of twenty-seven or -eight” (p. 173), which is a good match for Fannie’s height and age in the photo. Celestine is a clone; by her appearance she looks related to the three secret policemen who are Wolfe-clones. Her name means “starry garland,” the latter term giving a “trees and bushes” touch to it. She has “blue-violet eyes” (p. 232).

Beyond the females of the text, we must add “Twelvewalker” the quasi-abo beggar, who is also known as “R.T.” and “R. Trenchard.” Dr. Marsch, sifting through the beggar’s claims to be one thing or another, writes,

In my opinion his actual descent is Irish, very probably through one of those Irish adventurers who left their island for France at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. At any rate, his culture seems clearly French, his face certainly Irish—the red hair, blue eyes, and long upper lip are unmistakable. (5HC, p. 178)

R. Trenchard is Celtic with his red hair and blue eyes, and by this he represents the bloodline of Fannie Ayers. (But just to mix things up, that bit about the Napoleonic Wars probably refers to Theobald Wolfe Tone and his son William Theobald Wolfe Tone.)

While the text of 5HC seems active with allusions to Wolfe’s mother Fannie, it seems silent with regard to Wolfe’s father, Roy. (Some have guessed that R. Trenchard is based on Roy Wolfe, but I have traced how R.T. seems solidly on the Celtic side.) In studying the photo, Number Five ignores the man except to note he is “a stocky young man.” Roy Wolfe (Emerson Leroy Wolfe) was a restauranter, and he is suspected to show up in Wolfe’s fiction in roles similar to that, most notably in the overweight restauranter at the Inn of Lost Loves in The Shadow of the Torturer.

If the hillmen map onto “Celtic,” perhaps the marshmen map onto “Germanic.” Searching for details that separate hillmen from marshmen, the marshmen seem to undergo ritualistic head searing upon reaching maturity. Lastvoice, their spiritual leader, has the scarring (5HC, p. 81) such that his hair grows in a mohawk (p. 82). When Sandwalker is captured by marshmen, they are “big, scarred men” (p. 108). After Lastvoice’s death, Eastwind’s head must be burned so he can take his place (p. 132). Not a word about hair color or any other distinction marking the marshmen as “wolves,” but in “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” head scarring was a sign of a person being a clone (of a Wolfe); and maybe that is enough, since Wolfe is Germanic.

The marshmen females do not appear in the text, so we do not know if they are the same as the hillmen females or quite different, perhaps like sedentary women.

The strongest Germanic sign shows up in the marshmen’s locations “the Eye” and “the Other Eye.” The Eye is a living wood henge, showing the sophistication of the marshmen. At the center of “the Eye” there is a “pupil,” the floating student Eastwind, who reports what he sees to Lastvoice, his Teacher. In contrast, the Other Eye is a sand crater; a prison; an empty socket. This pair of eyes recalls the face of the Norse god Odin, who sacrificed one of his eyes for wisdom.

Joan Gordon in 1986 convincingly traced Wolfe’s repeated motif of the solitary child to Wolfe’s condition as an only child: “An only child who spent the first years of his life moving around the country, he often writes of isolated children and uprooted adults” (Gordon, Gene Wolfe, p. 4). Elsewhere, Gordon interviewed Wolfe on this topic, and he answered, “Yes, I was an only child. It’s a wonderful and terrible thing—terrible because one ends up being the last of the tribe, the only one who remembers the customs and teachings of the now-sunken land of home” (Wright, Shadows, p. 25–26). But later information reveals the source of Wolfe’s feeling to be larger than his status as an only child: both of his grandfathers were difficult in different ways.

Regarding his paternal grandfather, Wolfe tersely tells Peter Wright, “My father’s parents were divorced when he was very young” (Wright, Shadows, p.146). So Roy grew up without his father; all the details about Grandmother Wolfe clipping the Buck Rogers comic strips for Gene, et cetera, should be seen in the new context of her having been a single mother.

Wolfe was more forthcoming to McCaffery on discussing his maternal grandfather:

My grandfather was an absolutely incredible man who made a tremendous impression on me—he was one of those types of guys who was a Scottish seaman as a kid, jumped ship in Texas, fought Mexican bandits as a US cavalryman in the 1880s, became a circus performer, and wound up as an old man with a wooden leg, a pitbull, and a lot of corn whiskey which he’d drink out of a jug. (Wright, Shadows, p. 97)

Wolfe told Voices of Barrington (2002) a darker version of Fannie’s father:

He was a cruel man who beat his wife and children regularly, but he spared my mother for some reason. Once, when my mother and I went by train to visit him, he never spoke to me and threatened me with his cane when I came too close to him. Men like that leave lasting impressions on a small boy. (p. 95)

That Wolfe saw his grandfather only the one time is poignant, but this cruelty and favoritism noted for the maternal grandfather had a further effect later, as he told Peter Wright:

My mother had been virtually rejected, cut off, from her family. She was the favorite child of a tyrannical father whom the rest of the family hated. He was the kind of man who came home drunk and beat up his wife and beat his children, except for his favourite child, [Fannie] . . . When he died, the rest of the family wanted nothing more to do with [Fannie] because she had been the favourite. (Wright, Shadows, p. 146–47)

This familial abandonment of Fannie finds a strong parallel in “A Story” with Seven Girls Waiting being ditched by her family group. The link is so strong that it recasts “Sandwalker” as being based on Roy Wolfe rather than Gene Wolfe; which is furthered by the fact that Roy Wolfe did not know his father, just as Sandwalker did not know his father (since the hillmen do not recognize paternity).

Here we are, then: kits, cats, sacks, wives. I have traced the hidden autobiographical layer to The Fifth Head of Cerberus, finding Fannie as the female type of two worlds, revealing Roy as an unexpected model for Sandwalker, seeing the Celtic/hillman connection as well as the Germanic/marshman connection, all reinforcing Wolfe’s sentiment of being the last of his tribe. It is rather like the ending to the movie The Wizard of Oz (1939), where characters are revealed to be based upon relatives.

And it would not be the last time for Wolfe to craft a culture’s naming system patterned after his wife’s name and his own, in the partially implied “all abos are named Mary or John,” where Wolfe’s wife Rosemary has “Mary” in her name, and taking a translation of “Gene” into French “Jean” into English “John.”

Bibliography
“Athens Messenger Newspaper Archives, Dec 30, 1977, p. 7”
Clute, John. Strokes. (1988).
“FamilySearch” record for “Mary Olivia Ayers (1901–1977)”
Gordon, Joan. Gene Wolfe. (1986).
Kostick, Diane P. Voices of Barrington. (2002).
Wolfe, Gene. The Fifth Head of Cerberus: Three Novellas. First edition, hc. (1972).
———. Plan[e]t Engineering. (1984).
———. Letters Home. (1990).
Wright, Peter (editor). Shadows of the New Sun: Wolfe on Writing/Writers on Wolfe. (2007).
———. Shadows of the New Sun. Interview by Joan Gordon p. 24–35.
———. Shadows of the New Sun. Interview by Larry McCaffery p. 79–100.
———. Shadows of the New Sun. Interview by Peter Wright, p. 139–166.