My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir

Chapter Twenty

MOM HAD lived her entire life in two counties of Kentucky. She’d never lived alone. Three months after Dad’s death, the movers transported her possessions to her new home in Mississippi, a few blocks from the Oxford square. For the first time in her life, she was autonomous. Mom promptly bought a new bed and hung her favorite pictures. I’d never seen her so happy. She could sleep as late as she wanted, eat a roast beef sandwich for breakfast, and read in bed. The only rules were hers. She applied for a passport. In the ensuing year, she traveled to Germany, Spain, London, Paris, Prague, California, Texas, and Virginia.

My own house was seven miles away, in the country. After thirty-five years, our situations had reversed: Mom lived in town and I had returned to a rural environment. I saw her at least once a week, usually for a meal or a local literary event. Mom was socially adventurous, liked to laugh, and preferred her cocktails promptly at six P.M. As her young neighbors said: “Miss Jodie’s cool.” We looked forward to our time together. Our conversations were very open and honest. Now that Dad was dead and Mom no longer lived in Rowan County, she felt comfortable discussing pornography.

At times I worried about her reaction to my writing a book about Dad and my childhood. Ten years before, Dad had called me with express orders not to write about his career as a pornographer, a project he’d learned I was working on from a magazine. I explained that porn didn’t have the same negative connotation that it once had. He didn’t believe me and I appealed to his vanity, suggesting I interview John Cleve for the book. Dad’s voice took on a slightly mournful tone. “That won’t work,” he said. “Ol’ John’s clothes don’t fit anymore. He’s gone, son. He’s gone.”

A week later Mom made a rare visit to my house and asked me to abandon the book I’d begun. Surprised and irritated, I pointed out that since she and Dad had mass-produced porn without consulting their kids, I should have the same literary freedom as an adult. Mom said they’d been very careful to keep their lives separate — the wild excesses of fandom and the more sedate life in Haldeman.

“There was no overlap,” she said.

“There was an overlap,” I said. “Your kids. We were the overlap.”

She nodded, then told me her own objection. She didn’t think too many people in Morehead would actually read my book, but they’d know about it from the Lexington paper and naively confuse pornography with smut or dirty books. This surprised me, and I asked what porn was if it wasn’t smut or dirty books.

“Sex guides,” she said. “For couples.”

“Most people wouldn’t see a difference,” I said.

“Your father did.”

I didn’t say anything because the language sounded more like Dad’s than hers. Finally she gave me the real reason — she was afraid the women in her Weight Watchers group would hear about the porn and ask her to leave the meetings. She’d lost fifteen pounds and felt good about herself. I didn’t say anything. I was trying to comprehend Mom’s situation. It wasn’t about her weight, it was her fear of social rejection. She had lived most of her life with a difficult man. Mom was like a trusty in a prison, unable to leave but receiving special privileges for service and good behavior. Her kids could escape but not her. Out of deference to my mother, I set the project aside.

Recently over lunch in Mississippi, she mentioned that Dad had given his own mother a copy of Mongol! his twelfth book. I expressed surprise, since it was a John Cleve novel. Mom explained that Dad used index cards and rubber bands to block off the sex chapters and prevent his mother from reading them. I nodded, remembering Dad telling me that the loincloth worn by primitive people simultaneously protected the genitals and called attention to them. Partitioning the porn was a way of pointing it out.

Dad often said that Mongol! was John Cleve’s best book. I had never read it, never even seen a copy, but I remembered his excitement about the research. I was nine when he explained that the invention of the stirrup revolutionized war, allowing men to fight efficiently on horseback. My father stood with his legs spread wide as if astride a horse, bouncing on his toes to demonstrate how mounted archers used their knees as shock absorbers against the jolting gait of their mounts. Genghis Khan’s men hated to leave the saddle. If a horse was exhausted from a hard ride, the soldier cut a vein in its neck, drank its blood until the horse faltered, then lithely switched to another steed mid-gallop. Under Dad’s enthusiastic tutelage, I considered Genghis Khan a romantic and mythical hero on a par with King Arthur and Robin Hood. Years later I learned that approximately sixteen billion humans carry DNA from Genghis Khan due to his custom of raping women.

After the conversation with my mother, I went home and located a copy of Mongol! in one of the many cardboard boxes. Published by Brandon House in 1970, its olive-green cover depicted a prancing satyr beneath the title, large white letters in a quasi-Asian design.

John Cleve’s

MONGOL!

I admired the emphasis on the author’s name, as if John Cleve were a known entity and the reading public anxiously awaited his next offering. At 246 pages, Mongol! ran very long for a pornographic paperback, which averaged 170 pages at the time. The retrospective narrator is Chepi Noyan, son of a lowly blacksmith who rises to the rank of general under Genghis Khan. The book begins with direct address, which creates a closeness, a sense of trust, as Chepi draws the reader into his perceptions.

The story I have to tell you is not of love, nor of peace and tranquility. Such was not my destiny, and there was none such while my lord Jenghis lived.

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.