My Father, the Pornographer : A Memoir (9781501112485)

by Offutt, Chris

  At its best, Mongol! is a young man’s adventure tale. Chepi is a laconic warrior, a man of swift action, and the book has little dialogue. Prolonged scenes of battle depict the brilliant tactics of lofting arrows between lines of cavalry. Communication is carried out by colored flags and blasts from a horn. After battle comes the glory, always sexual.

  The longest chapter portrays an arranged marriage that begins with a fake sword fight between Chepi and the bride’s father, followed by her “escape.” Encountering her fierce resistance, Chepi realizes that she wants the full ritual carried out in the ancient fashion. She wants to be raped. This is emblematic of much of my father’s work—a woman who desires forceful sex—but in Mongol!, Dad relies on cultural precedent to write a two-page rape scene, including tips on how to deflower a virgin.

  The language of sex in American English is relegated to medical terminology or the gutter. It’s a kind of dialect that everyone knows. Today it is stereotypical, but in 1970 my father was at the vanguard of creating an idiom destined to become comical cliché. Each noun and verb received the gift of a modifier. A penis was always an anxious shaft, a turgid member, a throbbing rod, or an aching lance. A vagina was a welcoming sheath, a swollen cleft, a humid channel. The verbs shifted by gender. Men’s actions were variations of thrust, lunge, plunge, or impale, whereas women tended to writhe, moan, quiver, shiver, and quake.

  Dad often told me that he was the top in his field, the most prolific, the classiest operator, the highest-paid. I’ve since learned that other people wrote more, and some were better. His actual legacy may be the rare exclamatory title, a device he used far more than any other pornographer. Mongol! was his first, followed by:

  Asking for It!

  Begging for It!

  Brother, Darling!

  Disciplined!

  Jonuta Rising!

  MANLIB!

  Peggy Wants It!

  Pleasure Us!

  Snatch Me!

  The 8-Way Orgy!

  Initially I considered it a standard trope of marketing; however, most of these books came from different publishers. A random sampling was necessary, and Dad’s personal collection of six hundred porn novels served my purpose. Not a single one offered an exclamation point.

  I reread Mongol!, skipping the sex scenes to focus on the story. What emerged was a detailed and dramatic narrative of military conquest, related by a lonely man. Chepi often sits in his tent, drinking liquor and ruminating about the past. He is perpetually at war with the world, living in self-imposed solitude. His only sources of comfort are alcohol, cruelty, and sex—as if predicting my father’s future life.

  Chepi cannot make a woman pregnant, a source of personal anguish. He repeatedly laments his “empty quiver.” Without sex, the book becomes a tragic portrait of a warrior bereaved by the absence of what he most wants—a son to ride after him, to carry on—in a very real sense, to do what I did with my own work.

  My second reading of Mongol! furthered the deterioration of the brittle yellow pages. The cover tore away from the dried glue of the spine, and I discovered the following inscription on the title page:

  For Helen Offutt, perennial fan.

  [signed] John 9/1970

  Astonished, I mentally traced the book’s provenance—this was the very copy Dad had given his mother. He’d recovered it after her death and kept it until he died, whereupon it came to me. Like the DNA of Genghis Khan, Dad’s novel had passed through generations. I tried to imagine my grandmother sitting on her veranda with a glass of sweet tea, reading Mongol! Perhaps she heeded his warning and remained cloistered behind the barricade of index cards blocking the sex scenes. But I doubt it. How could she, or anyone, not be tempted to peek?

  Later that day I visited Mom and asked why Dad had sent Mongol! to his mother. Mom speculated that he’d spoken with her about his research: “Like you talk to me,” she said, “for the book about your father.”

  I told her I was worried she might not like what I was writing, that she loved Dad in a certain way, was in love with him, but my relationship was different. I was interested in him as a writer and father, not as a husband. She asked if I wanted her to read it. I shook my head and she seemed disappointed. I realized she was simply offering to do what she’d always done for Dad—read the material before publication. Mom wanted to be useful.

  “You know,” I said, “Dad was the most interesting character I’ve ever met.”

  “Yes, he was. A mass of contradictions.”

  “Do you think he was lonely?”

  “Funny you mention that,” she said. “I asked him the same thing once. He got very intense. You know how he did that with his eyes and his voice. And he said, ‘Not anymore.’ It was about the nicest compliment he ever gave me.”

  We looked at each other silently; our conversations often contain quiet periods of private thought followed by jokes and laughter. My mother and I share a sense of humor. She is a good companion in any situation, flexible and adaptive, always cheerful.

  A car trundled by outside. A dog barked. I was tired. I stood to go and my mother stood, as well. She approached the bookshelf where she kept a few of Dad’s novels, my books, my wife’s poetry, and the textbooks my aunt and brother wrote. Mom pulled my first published book off the shelf, then put it back.

  “No,” she said, “that one was for your father and me.”

  She found another copy of Kentucky Straight.

  “This one’s mine,” she said. “You gave it to me when I taught at the prison. Do you remember doing that?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “And you worry about my memory,” she said. “Maybe yours isn’t as good as you think.”

  “Maybe not.”

  She opened the book to the flyleaf and read it silently. “Every time I look at it,” she said, “it makes me smile.”

  She showed me the inscription.

  To Mom,

  There’s nobody I’d rather see than you.

  [signed] Chris Offutt, 11/93

  I told her it was still true. I hugged her and said goodbye. She waved from the doorway as I backed out into the street. I drove home thinking about two different books, two different mothers, and two different sons. Giving Mom her own copy of Kentucky Straight was an effort to seek approval. I also wanted her to read about the world in which she’d raised me, an environment she didn’t understand, harsher than she knew. Maybe my father had a similar impulse. He wanted his mother to know she’d raised a son who wrote dirty books.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  DESPITE LIFELONG difficulties with my father, I lived for his attention. The only behavior that earned it was writing, which I began at age seven, eventually completing forty short stories before leaving home a decade later. I gave all the manuscripts to Dad, and he returned them with corrections. The lessons were mainly grammatical, but notes on structure and characterization were often embedded within his comments. Very occasionally I found lines of praise, which thrilled me for days. I transformed these slim kudos into proof that my father loved me as much as I loved him.

  In 1985 Dad was under severe pressure from his publisher to produce books in his Spaceways series, a blend of pornography and science fiction. Despite his ability to write fast, he was falling behind on a deadline of a book per month. His solution was to find collaborators who’d write a novel to be published under Dad’s pseudonym of John Cleve. He would pay a few thousand dollars, edit their manuscripts, and take full copyright. He sent me a letter asking if I’d write one. His offer pleased me with its implied recognition of my skills as a writer, and I spent a lot of time composing my response. I couldn’t tell him the truth—I absolutely did not want to begin my career ghostwriting my father’s porn.

  From Dad’s perspective, he was offering to help his son, the struggling writer who could use the money. He and Mom had expressed concern about my choice of employment. I was a twenty-five-year-old dishwasher in Salem, Massachusetts, working fifteen hours a week for minim
um wage, supplemented by all the food I could eat. I had no phone or car, rode my bicycle in all weather, and lived in an extremely cheap apartment. On the wall of my room I fastened a mirror directly above my typewriter. Surrounding the mirror were photographs of writers whose work I admired. My only hope of joining their company was sitting at the typewriter. If I didn’t write, the mirror was empty. It was a powerful inducement to work.

  My roommates were a visual artist and a physicist. We were good friends and got along well. The physicist spent fifteen hours a week commuting to and from work—the same amount of time I worked—but at the end of the month he always ran out of money. I took great pleasure in lending him cash. We were young men in our twenties, prone to elaborate pranks and an occasional drunken food fight. At times we got on one another’s nerves.

  I wrote to Dad, referring in a casual way to this dynamic. The bulk of the letter was a polite refusal of his offer to write under his pseudonym. As diplomatically as I could, I explained that I was working on a book of my own and wanted to concentrate on finishing it. Dad quickly responded with a letter that didn’t mention the Spaceways series but focused on my shortcomings as a person who shared living quarters.

  It seems to me that it’s up to me, after all these years, to tell you this. Two words will do it, Chris: You lurch.

  Maybe “You lunge” is closer. It is both a physical and emotional trait, often known as response to a tap on the knee, shortened to kneejerk. I would not care to try to read in a room with you; hell, even to live in a house with you without a soundproof retreat.

  I touch my cat nicely & see her kneejerk mind: “Touch/love/stroke/warm/belly/food” & she lunges to rush to her bowl. Single-minded & inconsiderate (“I’m being nice to you, asshole; what makes you think I wish to inspect your rapidly receding anus?!”)

  You are upstairs, & wish to be down. You start but tarry because something catches your attention. You inspect/peruse it. Och! I wished to be downstairs, you suddenly think. You lurch, lunge, race. Your shoes are angry hammers, attacking each step as an enemy. All others within the house are disrupted: that neither occurs to nor concerns you. Got-To-Get-Downstairs.

  Food. The thought hits. You lurch, lunge to the refrigerator with considerable noise. You lurch-jerk open the door. In lunges a hand to thrust things around. A vocal sound. Another. Ah. You jerk it out. Bang it down. That which you have jerked out & banged down has a lid. With a vocal sound you wrench it off, drop it. Lurch, feet slapping, legs churning in an un-ignorable palpable breeze & corner-of -the-eye-visible blur of lurching movement, to the [stove/sink/counter/table].

  You “decide” abruptly (the knee does) to sing or whistle. At volume. Single-minded & inconsiderate.

  Scenario:

  two or 3 people are in a room talking (variant 1)

  one person is in a room (variant 2) reading/listening to a piece of music/news/voice/sound

  (sub-variant 2)

  or

  thinking out a story/idea/thought/painting/good or bad/idea

  (sub-variant 3)

  and

  You enter the room, very rapidly, talking. Single-minded, inconsiderate, & lurchy. From thought to thought; from dream to dream; from plan to “plan”; from stillness to movement to stillness. (Stillness—usually with from one to three bodily parts in movement, catching the peripheral vision, maddeningly, of anyone around.)

  Like, man, you distract alla time, man. It’s impossible to be around (near; in the same stadium with) you & not be aware of you. No talk of moodiness; no use of the o’erused adjective mercurial; it’s the inability to be alone and have private space, even for the eyes.

  I’ll hand this to your mama tomorrow; if she considers it too strong, I’ll send it anyhow.

  I have never been able to resist: I have never met anyone I cared about whom I didn’t try to change.

  [signed]

  —Himself

  The letter devastated me for days. Wondering if anything in it was true, I showed the pages to my roommates. They had problems with their own fathers, but nothing of this magnitude, and were shocked by the contents. One roommate suggested I burn the letter on the beach. The other roommate assured me none of it was valid. His only complaint about me was that I stayed in my room too much, writing. They treated me with a rough sympathy, but sadness had settled into me. I felt helpless, despising myself for being so vulnerable to Dad eight years after leaving home.

  By then I had the habit of preserving anything I received from my father, and I slipped the letter into a file folder and tucked it away. Rereading the pages now, I can see that it was motivated by my refusal to write a Spaceways book for him. Turning down his offer implied personal rejection. Faced with such imagined evaluation, he attacked.

  Over the years I continued to try to connect with my father, but the letter lay between us, never remarked upon. Mom acted as go-between, telling me that the tension bothered Dad. I knew that no conversation with her was private, that he expected a detailed report of any communication. My response was painful to both Mom and me—I stopped talking to her about anything meaningful. I never showed her the letter or confronted Dad about it. Doing so would further difficulties that became known in the family as “the trouble.”

  When my siblings called home, Dad complained about me, placing them in an uncomfortable position. They were performing their duty as he demanded, only to hear his grievances toward me instead of interest in their lives. He cast himself as the long-suffering victim of what he called my “professional rebellion.” Dad blamed me for our distance and tried for years to recruit my siblings to his side.

  After he died, we all became closer. For the first time in fortythree years, the family enthusiastically gathered in Mississippi for a Thanksgiving meal.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  IN OXFORD, Mom fainted a couple of times and began wearing a heart monitor. I called more often, feeling a twinge of anxiety if she didn’t answer. One day I called twice in an hour and it went to voicemail. I was driving to her house when she called me back and apologized.

  “I was on the phone,” she said. “I’m ordering something from Victoria’s Secret.”

  “Okay, Mom.”

  “What do you think of that?”

  “Uh, no comment.”

  She laughed. “I have to go now,” she said. “I’m watching the Reds. It’s tied in the ninth.”

  “Would you like me to come watch with you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “No. It’s over. That rat bastard got a hit. Goodbye.”

  I returned home and began sifting through my father’s work once more. At the time of his careful filing, he wouldn’t have known that a son would search it for clues and information. The essential DNA of my father lay arrayed on pages before me. This undertaking hasn’t brought me closer to him. If anything, it’s a constant reminder that no matter who I think I am, I will always be my father’s son. I don’t know if I’m a writer because of him or in spite of him. If my life has been motivated by rebellion against my father, what have I gained through the liberty of his demise? A newfound sense of life? No. The intrinsic joy in little things? No.

  I don’t miss my father, but without his shackles to strain against, the world is terrifying and vast. I have lost a kind of purpose, a reason to prove myself.

  In an article written for Trumpet, a science fiction fanzine from the early sixties, my father declared his credentials as a suitable columnist—he’d read every word of Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud, and the Marquis de Sade. A subsequent letter to the editor criticized Dad for bragging, and implied that he had lied. I located the books in question. They spanned fourteen inches of shelf space, tall books with hundreds of thin pages. Dad had annotated them heavily, writing comments in response like a form of Midrash. He argued with Freud but not Ellis. The books by de Sade held fewer comments but had more sections marked by brackets and exclamation points. Passages that validated sexual domination were consistently marked. Though he may have begun in an
earnest quest for knowledge, his marginalia indicated that he wound up finding confirmation of his own ideas, like a zealot with a sacred text. My father sought formal evidence that his sexual fascism was normal and everyone else had it wrong.

  Dad’s sense of cruelty and judgment came from an antiquated mode of Catholicism. He constructed a cross of porn and kept himself tightly affixed to it, suffering for his own obsessions. He exchanged heaven and hell for reincarnation, but the abyss of his shame was pure Roman Catholic. Sex was filthy. Expiation was necessary. The outlet of writing porn was a relief from the guilt brought on by writing porn, a kind of Mobius strip—never-ending and self-perpetuating.

  Growing up in a house with sexuality simmering beneath the surface—books, pamphlets, art on the walls, and Dad’s regular comments—instilled in me a yearning to be a ladies’ man. In high school I never had a girlfriend, and I’d had only one during college. My experience with the fatman left me passive, unwilling to try to seduce women. I didn’t want to place a female in a similar situation—uncertain and scared, unable to halt the proceedings, utterly disengaged emotionally. If I liked a woman, which was rare, since most people bored me, I spent enough time with her until she finally made the first move.

  Many years later in Salem, Massachusetts, my roommate tried to teach me how to pick up women in bars, an effort I never adequately mastered. It appeared to be a complex and false rigmarole, as if those involved were seeking sexual partners while trying to pretend they weren’t. My roommate offered many tips but was aghast at my inability to read basic signals. I never knew if a woman found me attractive, and simply assumed she didn’t.

  In the manner of Cyrano, my roommate attempted assistance. At a local corner tavern called In a Pig’s Eye, a woman asked me what I did. It was a straightforward question, common in banal conversation, but I had no idea how to answer. The truth was I did nothing but read books, ride my bicycle, and try to write. At the time I wasn’t even sure what she meant—what does anyone do? We mark time until we die.