In the past fifteen years, I’ve taught creative writing at a number of universities, colleges, and conferences. If I’d come across this story in my teaching, I would have considered it among the most promising works I’d seen. A remarkable intelligence operates behind the prose. The subject of Dad’s story is a couple’s breakup, but the man can’t bring himself to end the relationship. He doesn’t want to hurt his girlfriend. Instead, he mentally harangues himself as a coward for being trapped by social expectation. Dad experiments with style by dropping every single comma and using capitalization to indicate the protagonist’s thoughts. The voice is reminiscent of contemporary writers at the time, a combination of Salinger and Hemingway.
One strong note is his handling of time. The entire story occurs in approximately fifteen seconds, during which two characters utter seven short lines of dialogue. The rest of the story consists of the man’s thoughts. In that brevity, an entire world is created, a conflict arises within the well-defined protagonist, and the midcentury era is fully evoked.
If I were a teacher conferring with the twenty-year-old who wrote it, I’d be extremely supportive. I’d affirm that he was a good writer, that he’d obviously spent an inordinate amount of time reading and writing. Keep on experimenting, I’d say, but focus on structure and character instead of punctuation. You’re a good writer, I’d tell him, you could be a great writer. Don’t squander your talent. Don’t let it trickle away.
Chapter Twenty-four
MY FATHER had a compulsive need to express every opinion he ever had. All were judgments and most were negative. I once saw him hurt his fingers while opening a can of fruit in the kitchen. Enraged, he flung the metal can opener, claiming that the manufacturer had deliberately made it in such a way to attack him personally. The designer should be shot! I nodded dutifully.
An inveterate writer of letters, he sent out weekly missives of complaint. For serious issues, he used carbon paper and saved the letter on translucent sheets of onionskin. Among the earliest was to Newsweek magazine, dated July 8, 1964, a week after my youngest sister was born. The letter was his reply to a recent article by Monsignor Kelly of New York, who’d denounced the widespread use of birth control pills.
Dad begins his letter by referring to himself as a fertile Catholic with three unplanned children, proving the ineffectiveness of the rhythm method. He quotes the monsignor’s statement that “The sex organs were made by God to reproduce the human race.” Dad responds:
It follows that not using the sex organs to reproduce the race is a man-made sin. It therefore follows that Msgr Kelly is guilty of a great and deliberate sin; he is not using his.
He goes on to excoriate the editors of Newsweek for running a one-sided article. Unsurprisingly, those same editors refrained from printing the letter, which irked Dad for years.
Subsequent letters went to bankers, lawyers, corporate executives, religious leaders, two presidents, three governors, several senators, newspapers, magazines, radio stations, hospitals, TV networks, the U.S. postmaster general, the local high school principal, and university administrators. Most of those letters were lost. Dad saved the responses, and therein lie the reactions of citizens caught in his crosshairs. The head of a medical center apologized profusely for making him wait an hour to see a doctor. A potato chip company sent him a case of products after Dad complained about the ratio of air to chips in the bag. President Reagan thanked him for supporting the invasion of Grenada. A radio announcer for local Little League baseball changed his repertoire of descriptive terms based on a list supplied by Dad. Staffs of governors and senators replied. A letter to President Lyndon Johnson complaining about the IRS received a series of responses from the attorney general of the United States, the state director of the IRS, and the regional office in Ashland.
The sheer number of responses reminded me of a dog that barks at passing cars. The cars continue by, confirming to the dog that he has successfully chased the vehicle away, a reward that leads to barking at the next car. Trainers teach dogs to halt this habit through the technique of leash popping, but my father remained unleashed throughout his life. His only tether was the limit of his outrage.
As I read his correspondence, I saw a pattern begin to emerge. He opened with bullying, then followed by announcing his qualifications, at times invented, always enhanced. Here is the opening paragraph to an editor, dated 1982, on the subject of a proposed title change for a novel.
Without having met, we seem to have gained the wrong idea about each other. I am neither a beginner, a coolie, nor a piece of dough for your rolling pin. I am a relatively human being with a few university degrees, over thirty novels, and even some class. Not since 1971 has any treated me so callously as you have done.
I also found more than fifty letters to copy editors. Dad believed that criticizing in advance would allow him to get his way. The following is a excerpt.
Over the course of a lot of years I have come to think of myself as a professional. My degrees are in English, psychology, and linguistics. I have not misspelled a word—unless intentionally—in thirty years. Nor do I make mistakes in punctuation.
I suspect that his ongoing combat with copy editors was a self-perpetuating cycle. Dad insulted them and they disobeyed his orders, which refreshed his anger.
Occasionally I found a copy of a letter Dad sent seeking work, in one case to an editor of fetish booklets that featured photographs and text:
Enclosed is the third draft of a very unusual manuscript. I am a writer, and know my way around the areas of erotica, sadism, and masochism—if they can ever be separated.
My chief gripe when I’ve received books from you is that I’ve wondered why in heck the stories and pictures couldn’t match. So—I did it. Not only is it a story that looks as if the pictures were specifically taken to go with it, but it’s better written than yours.
I can do this with any adequate set of pictures, in any 7-day period or less. How far in advance do you work? The idea fascinates me.
Terms?
There are no follow-up letters or copies of the booklets he wrote. Possibly his approach foundered with the suggestion that he was a better writer than those currently employed by the publisher.
Of the nearly twenty thousand letters I examined, many were Dad’s responses to fan mail. Every letter opened with the salutation “offutt to _____, peace,” an affectation borrowed from the counterculture. Dad wasn’t a hippie and certainly never sought peace. He was at war with himself. The battlefield was anyone handy, and fans were vulnerable. Below is an opening line typical of his responses to fan mail.
Never mind what others would not do; my own rules forbid me to respond to someone arrogant enough not to send me return postage for a reply. Obviously I have more empathy than sense, and make you this gift.
A very long fan letter came from a seventy-five-year-old man who’d assisted in his wife’s suicide rather than prolong her suffering from terminal cancer. His letter praised Dad’s porn and asked how to get more John Cleve books. A postscript pointed out a grammatical error in one of Dad’s novels. Dad responded thusly:
Yes, of course it is nitpicking to PS an otherwise nice letter, requesting time and money/effort from a writer—or any other human being, surely—with the quoting of a slip on p. 24 in which “less” appears rather than “fewer.”
Nitpicking and dumb, because it is designed to lose friends and intimidate people. Everything else is fascinating though, including the ghastliness of your wife’s dying.
A single file contained hundreds of letters seeking forgiveness for minor transgressions such as misspelling his name. Others were from people seeking clarity about the gross insult for which they’d endured his public admonishment. Many asked if he was angry about a recent interaction. Several apologized for the error of calling him Andy instead of Andrew. In one response Dad explained himself.
I remain a bit old-fashioned. That’s part of the reason I call you by your full name; I don’t haul off a
nd first-name anyone, and indeed dislike having it done. On the other hand, I dislike “Mister.”
This letter remains my favorite for its exemplification of my father’s conflicted relationship with himself, played out on strangers. Identity is the central issue, and Dad thinks his way into a room with no exit. Calling him the diminutive Andy is far too intimate an act from a stranger, while using the formal Andrew is not sufficiently old-fashioned. He does not care for Mister Offutt. Technically, no name is left, making me wonder if John Cleve was writing as Dad instead of the other way around.
After reading several thousand letters, I visited my mother. I told her what I’d found and said it was almost like Dad was a crank. She looked at me with a bland expression and said, “You didn’t know?”
Chapter Twenty-five
THE COMMERCIAL popularity of American porn novels peaked during the 1970s, coinciding with my father’s most prolific and energetic period. In 1972 alone he published eighteen novels. Dad wrote pirate porn, ghost porn, science fiction porn, vampire porn, historical porn, time-travel porn, secret agent porn, thriller porn, zombie porn, and Atlantis porn. An unpublished Old West novel opens with sex in a barn, featuring a gunslinger named Quiet Smith, without doubt Dad’s greatest character name. By the end of the decade, Dad claimed to have single-handedly raised the quality of U.S. pornography. According to his private papers, he believed future scholars would refer to him as “King of XX Century Written Pornography.”
Many of the early publishers used a “house name,” a pseudonym shared by several writers. It concealed identity, which writers preferred, while allowing the publisher to give the illusion of a single author. This was an early attempt at branding, with proven success in other genres. Dad didn’t mind, but he was determined to separate himself from others.
His first published novel, before any science fiction, was Bondage Babes, released by Greenleaf under the name Alan Marshall in 1968. Payment was six hundred dollars. The plot was a clever conceit. Someone murdered a model for a photographic bondage shoot, and her sister was investigating the crime by posing as a model, which allowed for soft-core descriptions of restrained women. As Dad recalled in a letter:
The book was Different: it dared mention clitoris and that some women don’t just bop off into orgasm because some dude fills and drills them, and it had a bit of a plot.
The name John Cleve first appeared on Slave of the Sudan, published by Brandon House in 1969, an imitation of Victorian pornography so precisely executed that the editor suspected my father of plagiarism. Dad found this extremely flattering. He published four more novels with Brandon House until it folded.
Dad moved to Orpheus Books, which paid thirteen hundred dollars per book. He used three pseudonyms to conceal his prolificity. Two years later, he switched to Midwood for more money. He invented another pen name, John Denis, based on his favorite Reds players, Johnny Bench and Denis Menke. He published fourteen books with Midwood. After a falling-out with an editor over a title change, he returned to Orpheus. The new editor soon became irritated with Dad and stopped buying his work. Desperate for income, my father invented another pseudonym, Opal Andrews, who specialized in “lightweight incest,” and sold eight books to Surrey House.
Curious about the changing market, Dad read a dozen recent Orpheus books, concluding that all were watered-down versions of his own work, his style overtly copied by lesser writers. To him the proof was clear—they’d begun writing about the clitoris. Dad believed he was responsible for the widespread knowledge of its existence in porn, but he couldn’t place a book with Orpheus. Outraged, he devised a plan to prove the editor wrong.
To get a different font, he bought a new ball for his Selectric typewriter. He changed his usual margins, used cheaper paper, and rapidly wrote two books as Jeff Morehead. He asked a friend in another part of the country to submit the manuscripts to Orpheus. The editor bought both. Dad called the editor, told him he was Jeff Morehead, and suggested they get back in business. The editor concurred, and Dad stayed with Orpheus throughout the 1970s.
Over the course of his career, he used a total of seventeen pseudonyms:
John Cleve
Turk Winter
Jeff Morehead
Jay Andrews
Opal Andrews
Drew Fowler
J. X. Williams
Jack Cory
Jeremy Crebb
John Denis
Alan Marshall
Jeff Woodson
Joe Brown
Jeff Douglas
Roscoe Hamlin
Camille Colben
Anonymous
Two are female names and six are variations of his own. Three share the initials of J.C., the same as Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ. Dad never quite clarified how he invented the name John Cleve. It first appeared as a character’s name in a 1967 manuscript for Clansman of Andor. Publicly, Dad claimed John Cleve was a variation of John Cleland, author of Fanny Hill, the first pornographic novel printed in English.
In 1973 Grove Press published his novel The Palace of Venus under the Zebra imprint. Dad sent them a new novel, Vendetta, set during the reign of Pope Innocent III, whom my father characterized as “history’s most misnamed monster.” The editorial staff didn’t want to publish it, and Vendetta never saw print, because according to Dad, “It is a class historical and Class is gone.” Nevertheless, the strength of the manuscript resulted in a phone call from New York. Barney Rosset, Grove’s publisher, wanted a pornographic historical series about a single character during the Crusades. Dad was initially resistant, writing in a letter:
I do not know if this is or could be my thing or not. I have difficulty with series. Like, I get bored and want to go back to creating. It is most difficult for me to write as if cranking the arm of a copy-machine. I am an artist, whether these series books will be “art” or not.
He was equally uncertain about traveling to meet Rosset in New York, a city he called Babylon-on-the-Hudson. Grove offered to cover all expenses and Dad made the trip. He returned to Kentucky with a cash advance, a contract for an unwritten book, and more autonomy than he’d ever had from a publisher. My father had bought Grove books for fifteen years and revered the courage of Rosset for fighting the U.S. government on obscenity charges—and winning. The seventies were financially difficult for Grove, which barely staved off bankruptcy. Dad regarded his new contract as a mission to save Grove Press. The four-book Crusader series sold well, and for the first time in his career, Dad earned royalites.
At the time, pornography was still a taboo business. Paperbacks were sold in the back rooms of adult theaters, on hidden racks at newsstands, and at adult bookstores in cities. People in less-populated areas bought them through the mail. Within a few years of Crusader’s publication, Grove suffered further economic problems and the series was in danger of going out of print. Grove wanted to raise the price of Dad’s paperbacks one dollar and asked him to cut his royalty percentage in half. If my father didn’t agree, Grove couldn’t afford to order another printing. Dad got mad and refused, allowing his books to go out of print over the sum of $130 per year, the only professional decision he ever admitted regretting.
In the 1980s, John Cleve’s career culminated with a nineteen-book series for Playboy Press, the magazine’s first foray into book publishing. Spaceways allowed him to blend porn with old-time “space opera” reminiscent of the 1930s pulps, his favorite kind of science fiction. Dad’s contemporary twist included aliens who possessed the genitalia of both genders. Galactic crafts welcomed the species as crew, since they could service men and women with ease. The Spaceways series ended in 1985, coinciding with the widespread use of consumer VCRs. Men no longer needed “left-handed books” for stimulation when they could watch videotapes in their own homes. The golden era of written pornography was over.
That same year Dad sent D’Artagnan’s Son to Grove Press, but the pace at which he wrote had finally caught up with him. The prose became sloppy, characteri
zation shrank, and story vanished. A letter of rejection from Grove says:
The problem appears to be that its superior sophistication removes it from the usual market, while its outspoken content might be something of a drawback with the literary crowd. Maybe one way of putting it is that it falls between two chairs.
In my twenty years of writing, I have received nearly six hundred rejections—by mail, phone, email, even text messages. Each one stings. The tendency is always to blame the editor, then oneself, and finally to inspect the language of the rejection letter for hidden meaning. The note my father received resists scrutiny. “Falling between two chairs” is not a conventional literary term or a discernible metaphor. A strict interpretation is that one chair is sophisticated and the other is pornographic, but I remain uncertain as to what lies between them. The editor was probably attempting a diplomatic tone, suggesting the book was too literary for porn and contained too much sex for literature.
The novel opens with a French marquis recalling the death of his first wife while secretly observing his current wife being pleasured by the maid with her “practically prehensile tongue.” The marquis’s wife is described as having:
. . . hectares of black hair, a volcanic vulva and great melonous breasts that shivered and slithered about on her chest, her entire belly a mass of maddeningly molten flesh. Sweat sheened it sleekly.
The maid leaves the room, encountering the marquis, who promptly takes up with her for several pages. In the meantime, the marquis’s wife realizes she has enough time for a liaison with the stable master. On her way, she detours past the kitchen, where the steward is standing on a footstool behind the naked German cook whose backside is in view:
My Father, the Pornographer : A Memoir (9781501112485) Page 15
