My Father, the Pornographer : A Memoir (9781501112485)

by Offutt, Chris

  When he began working full-time at home, the joyful nights after supper were fewer and fewer. As we got older and more mature, Dad remained the same. The humor slipped away from his limited repertoire of jokes. The deliberate naughtiness, such as a dice roll coming up six and calling it “sex,” produced tense silence instead of laughter. Dad missed his attentive audience, but the old ways no longer worked. To an extent, we’d outgrown him. One by one we did the worst thing possible—we ignored him. I believe this hurt him deeply, in a way he didn’t fully comprehend and we certainly could not fathom. In turn, he began ignoring us. Now that he was dead, I could give him the attention he always craved.

  I began with the goal of assembling a full bibliography of his work. He’d never done it himself, and I was curious about the extent of his output. Opening the boxes in Mississippi released the scent of decaying mouse dung, dust, and cigarette smoke. It was the smell of Dad’s office, my childhood, the house itself. I worked fourteen hours a day organizing thousands of letters and tens of thousands of novel pages.

  More than five hundred manuscripts made several uneven columns on a long dining room table, reminding me of architectural ruins. The older drafts were crumbling at the edges. Carbon copies typed on onionskin tore easily. Metal paper clips left rust marks on the pages. I separated them into categories of porn, science fiction, and fantasy, then subdivided those into published and unpublished, short story and novel. Dad didn’t date the first drafts, all of which were handwritten, their titles and character names shifting between revisions.

  I went through the material again, slowly seeking insight, acting as a kind of literary detective. My father’s earliest extant novel, written in college, was a three-hundred-page historical account of Rome called The Sword and the Cross. Completed in 1958, it included a preface declaring eleven years of research and writing begun as a teenager.

  Dad’s early output filled three metal filing cabinets comprising twenty-four feet of material. In the bottom drawer of the oldest cabinet, tucked in the very back, was a file that said “Paul.” It contained several hand-drawn maps of St. Paul’s journeys, Hippocrates’ views on epilepsy, a long glossary of Hebrew and Greek, and a forty-one-page opening.

  My father often said that Paul hated women, which motivated his founding of an anti-female, anti-sex cult that grew into Christianity. The proof was using the cross as a symbol. The Egyptian ankh symbolized sex and life—the lower portion being a man’s genitalia, the upper part an open oval that represented a woman’s vulva. According to Dad, the Christians took the ankh and closed the woman up to make the cross, representing the negative attitude toward sex in general and women especially.

  I read the fragment, which detailed young Saul’s childhood before he changed his name to Paul on the road to Damascus. In a long scene he watched his mother masturbate. Afterward, he suffered his first epileptic seizure, during which he condemned her sexual desire, focusing his anger on her breasts. The last page carried a handwritten comment from Dad’s friend Robert E. Margroff, a minor science fiction writer: “I’ll be most disappointed if the author is so inconsiderate as to die without finishing this!”

  Supreme irony notwithstanding, I spent an hour pondering the comment, wondering why Dad never completed his historical novel about the beginning of Christianity. He eventually left the Church, sending letters to his priest and the pope. Dad insisted he was resigning so as not to be considered a lapsed Catholic, a term he resented for its implication that, once inculcated into the Church, he’d always be a member. Maybe his resignation eliminated the need to write the book. Or, as I began to suspect from reading more of his unfinished work, something deeper was at play—a thwarting of his own ambition by abandoning the material he cared most deeply about.

  I asked my mother about the Paul book. She recalled Dad talking incessantly about it and doing enormous research. As to why he never finished it, she had this to say: “He was busy at work and didn’t have a lot of time. Then when he started writing the sex books, he really liked it. The money was good. He had to write what would sell, you know. You needed dental work.”

  Several files contained correspondence between Dad, Robert E. Margroff, and Piers Anthony, who became a well-known writer of science fiction and fantasy. These names were important to me as a child because they were writers, and I knew that my father was trying to be one. In 1965, when I was seven, Piers Anthony and his wife visited for a couple of days. My family rarely received visitors, and the presence of strangers in the house was momentous. Robert E. Margroff stayed a couple of nights, too.

  Ten months later, If magazine published “Mandroid,” a story all three worked on at our house. Dad continued to collaborate with Margroff, and they published two more stories together. Within a few years the collaborations dwindled and the phone calls ceased. By then I was accustomed to Dad having had a falling-out with someone. He and my mother used that term exclusively, a “falling-out,” code that meant Dad got mad and never spoke to that person again.

  Once during my teenage years, I was wandering the woods when the weather chilled abruptly as a harbinger of rain. I hurried home. Dad stood in the backyard, nailing an open book to a log. He retreated to the shelter of a tree as a thunderstorm blew in, turning the sky dark, dumping a fierce rain. After the storm passed, I examined the object of destruction. I don’t recall the book’s title, but the author was his first writer friend, Piers Anthony.

  Anthony maintains a website with an active blog, which included a post about Dad’s death from July 2013.

  Andy Offutt died, age 78. My awareness of him started faintly negatively, when he won a contest limited to college students that my college never was notified about. (The contest I entered didn’t have a winner.) But later we got in touch and were friendly. We exchanged manuscripts for critiquing, and collaborated on a published story. My wife and I visited at his home in Kentucky for a week in the 1960s.

  He got interested in the erotic market, so I went to a local store and bought some stuff and described what there was, helping him get started, and he became a successful erotic novelist. Later I got interested in that market myself, and asked his advice, and he was standoffish, implying that I was ignorant for asking. That was the problem with him; another writer described him as terminally shallow.

  Once he collaborated with another writer, but objected to a change the other had made, so bawled him out in pages of text, then cut the letter into pieces and pasted them on a blank sheet in scattered order and sent that to the collaborator; he sent me the straight diatribe, with the stricture that I not forward it to the object of it. Considering that the collaboration was on a story the other had started, and that the suggestion had been reasonable, I was bemused.

  So he was flawed, but basically he was a good guy and a good writer, and we were friends. And yes, his death makes me feel a chill wind down my spine, because we were so close in age.

  The other writer mentioned was undoubtedly Margroff, with whom Dad collaborated on several unpublished novels. This anecdote perfectly summed up the darker side of my father: a cruel lashing out against a friend, then reveling in it with a mutual friend. This socially hostile aspect of his personality impacted his professional career. He ran through several agents and editors, invariably leaving on bad terms. At the slightest offense, he would cut people out of his life as swift and sure as an ax chop. Perhaps his level of insecurity was so intense that he could not bear closeness, or narcissism rendered him unable to tolerate anyone who didn’t recognize his omnipotence. Dime-store psychology aside, the plain fact was that Dad got mad if he didn’t get his way or if people contradicted him.

  My mother told me he quit writing science fiction due to the constraints of physical reality. In fantasy he had greater freedom. His imagination could roam farther without restriction. Fantasy novels are only as successful as the underlying cohesive structure, and Dad devoted a great deal of effort to creating his worlds. Each manuscript contained detailed maps of imaginary
lands and extensive glossaries to an unknown language. For books that included the formal use of sorcery, he made charts explaining their precise mechanics. He fabricated complex religions and provided a hierarchy of gods with their individual histories, feuds, and romantic liaisons. These documents served as reference material for his books.

  My father didn’t work with characters in landscape but populations in complicated systems. His mind contained planets and continents. He was creator, cartographer, scribe, historian, priest, and scholar. Living with these overlapping roles in imaginary environments led him to shun the company of other people. His fabrications needed sufficient space to flourish inside the walls of his head.

  After organizing the manuscripts he had written, I divided his personal collection of pornography into the common forms: books, magazines, photographs, comic books, pamphlets, postcards, and calendars. The piles occupied three large tables. Needing more surface space, I set panels of plywood on sawhorses. A miscellaneous pile held two decks of nude playing cards, risqué cuff links, a pristine copy of The First X-rated Coloring Book, and an ink pen with a clear cylinder containing a plastic woman whose clothes fell off when the pen was turned upside down. Adult comic books narrated the sexual histories of Robin Hood and King Arthur. A retelling of fairy tales and nursery rhymes included Little Bo Peep finding a very friendly shepherd. Detailed illustrations explained how the Old Woman Who Lived in the Shoe came to have so many children. After climbing the beanstalk, Jack encountered the giant’s wife, who proceeded to use him as a human dildo. Snow White endured the predations of all seven dwarfs.

  There were so many overlapping batches that my initial system of organization became mired in subgenre. At first I saw myself as an archivist, but as the purview expanded, my role became that of a bureaucrat. I gave each item a designation and placed it among its own. Every time I thought I’d found an anomaly for a miscellaneous stack, another example would surface, compelling a fresh category. The Bitch of Buchenwald went with Slaves of the Swastika. Deserted island adventures formed their own group. Other subcategories included:

  farm porn

  cowboy porn

  Hollywood porn

  swapping and swinging

  rape and gang rape

  older woman/young man

  older man/young woman

  bestiality

  gay, straight, bisexual, and transgender

  incest

  anal and oral

  fem-dom: trampling, pegging, feminization

  satanism and witchcraft

  nuns and monks

  inquisition torture

  bondage: rope, leather, metal, rubber

  doctors and nurses

  teachers and students

  salesmen and housewives

  sex-crazed divorcées and naive coeds

  spanking, flagellation, caning, flogging, birching

  forced chastity

  pony training and slave training

  three-ways, four-ways, six-ways, and orgies

  Asian, African-American, and various interracial

  historic and modern

  nannies and maids

  urban and rural

  holiday porn: Santa Claus’s wife and the elves

  fake case histories written by psychiatrists

  The constant barrage of odd sexual content left me flailing with the knowledge of my father’s dedication. This was him—what he enjoyed, what he collected, what he wrote. I was thankful for the utter absence of kiddie porn. My father’s proclivities were not the worst. He only liked adult women. It was a cold comfort, like an executioner offering a condemned man an old rope so the bristles wouldn’t hurt his neck.

  Months passed during which I continued to work all day and into the evening seven days a week. When guests visited, I draped bedsheets over the tables to prevent accidental offense. What had begun as an attempt to assemble a bibliography of Dad’s work had transformed into a compulsion to organize his entire library, hoping for insight. His holdings of porn were incredibly vast and inclusive. Something had governed the accumulation and I sought the mind behind it, the curating principles. It occurred to me that I’d transformed to a version of my father—obsessed not with porn but with his preferences for porn.

  There is a part of me, one I despise, that insists upon comparing myself to my father. Perhaps my poor self-regard is an unwelcome gift of his legacy, a fragment transferred to me. Dad wrote more books. He stayed married to one wife. He maintained a single, unflinching focus on his rebellious obsessions despite the odds against him. He wanted me to be my own man, and I suppose I am. But we are similar in many ways, chillingly similar. We work hard. We never give up. We don’t suffer fools gladly. We prefer our time alone, away from people. We write and write and write.

  My son called, seeking advice about how to handle a situation at his job. We talked for nearly an hour, longer than I ever talked with my father on the phone. Dad never gave advice. He didn’t know how to offer counsel, only staunch opinions. The ones I remember are as follows:

  Picasso was a lousy artist and a put-on who conned the world.

  Elvis stinks.

  European movies stink.

  Marlon Brando stinks.

  Hemingway was a coward for his suicide.

  Jesus was a rabble-rouser who engineered his own destruction.

  Henry Miller changed the world.

  Artists and writers who become successful do so by fooling the world.

  Inferior people shouldn’t breed.

  Genetics is far more important than environment.

  B. F. Skinner was a genius.

  Hugh Hefner was a genius.

  So was Ayn Rand.

  Reincarnation is real.

  Respect is more important than love.

  Showing respect means offering fealty.

  Capital punishment is not painful enough for killers.

  Bad writers: Melville, Faulkner, Poe, Hawthorne, James, Lovecraft, Tolkien.

  Good writers: Vardis Fisher, Stendhal, Freud, Shaw, Ellis.

  De Sade’s poor reputation is undeserved.

  Eating fried chicken with one hand makes you look like a barbarian.

  Men should not wear T-shirts beneath their clothes.

  Women are inherently inferior to men.

  Caucasians are superior to the other races.

  Dad is superior to all Caucasian men.

  Asians possess wisdom.

  Sports are for physical freaks.

  Religion is for intellectual weaklings.

  Cleaning and cooking are women’s work.

  Women with large bosoms are attracted to powerful men.

  The principles of feminism are not in conflict with pornography.

  Women who were nursed as babies are bisexual.

  Cheating at board games is fine.

  Perverted is good.

  For years I shared many of these beliefs, a boy copying his father. When I began questioning his authority, I reversed each of these precepts and believed in its opposite. Over time I formed my own opinions. Mainly I stopped believing in absolutes. They were necessary to Dad, a way of shoring up drastic decisions and rationalizing his obsessions. Leaving the Catholic Church created a space inside him previously filled by its dogma. Dad invented his own harsh evaluations of the world, decreeing everything either good or bad. Such binary thinking is a means of social control preferred by politicians, preachers, bigots, and tyrants. In an individual case, as with my father, it allowed him to live his life without regard for others.

  Chapter Sixteen

  MY FATHER published all his science fiction under his own name. The early stories placed him in the new wave of young writers changing the field by exploring social concerns such as sexuality, psychology, politics, and environmentalism. They focused on “soft” as opposed to “hard” science and often wrote from a more literary sensibility than their predecessors. This group included Harlan Ellison, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, and J. G. Balla
rd. In 1967, If magazine published Dad’s story “Population Implosion.” Its inclusion in the anthology World’s Best Science Fiction led to an invitation to attend the World Science Fiction Convention of 1969.

  My parents packed the car, left my siblings and me in the care of college students, and drove to St. Louis. Dad clipped on a name tag proclaiming him a “Pro Writer.” In the elevator on the way to their hotel room, my parents met an older man wearing rumpled clothing: A. E. van Vogt, a writer Dad revered. Sincere and down-to-earth, he glanced at my father’s name tag and said he’d read “Population Implosion” and admired it a great deal. This was exhilarating for a deeply insecure man whose greatest fear was being recognized for what he was—a country boy come to town—a fear shared by all rural people, and one I know very well.

  In St. Louis strangers asked for his autograph. Women flirted openly. None of the men wore ties, and Dad left his in the hotel room. He met other writers with long hair and beards. Surrounded by the outrageous styles of the hippies, Mom no longer worried that the wives of doctors and professors might judge her clothing.

  My parents went to St. Louis with the confidence of people who were naive to their own naïveté, and returned astonished. They had never questioned the lives they led or the motivations for their decisions; they merely followed the patterns of the time. They hated Communists, loved JFK, and flew the flag on national holidays. A gigantic Douay-Rheims Bible sat on a dais in the dining room. The goal of life was to make money and children.

  A photograph from Worldcon 1969 shows my father in a gray pin-striped suit coat and a white turtleneck sweater. One arm is folded across his chest, the other propped before him, his empty hand posed as if holding an invisible object. His expression is unusual for its frowning discomfort, eyes staring upward. Dad’s hair is quite short and he is clean-shaven. My mother faces him in a sleeveless cocktail dress, her hair in a perm that puffs around her head. Both appear ill at ease.