My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir

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 and 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?”