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.