My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir

Chapter Nine

AS A child, I explored Dad’s office the first time while my parents attended a party in town. I waited until my siblings were in bed. The fewer who knew of my secret activities, the better, a way of thinking I’d certainly inherited from Dad. Before entering, I used a ruler to measure the distance between the edge of the door and the jamb, writing the number of inches on my wrist, reasoning that if the space was too large or small, Dad would know and I’d face his wrath.

Those early attempts at discerning insight into my father were little more than spelunking an unknown cave. I moved in quietly, able to see only what was illuminated by flashlight, my fear increased by the darkness and shadows. I found a stack of Playboy magazines. A surprising item was an embroidered patch, the kind people sewed on a dungaree jacket. Encased in a small frame, it sat on a shelf so as to be visible to Dad at his typewriter. It said: “You’re a fuckin’ genius.” The frame gave it an official quality. I thought it was an award from an unknown entity that recognized my father as a genius, and for many years I believed he was.

After his death, I began a more careful examination of his office. My general understanding was that Dad had occasionally written porn to supplement his income, a pattern followed by many writers. Now, I realized that wasn’t the case. For half his life my father passed as a science fiction writer while actually functioning as a professional pornographer. Dad’s first eleven books were porn. The extent of his output surprised me, since the secret will had implied a fraction of what I discovered.

Throughout his writing life, Dad remained staunchly emphatic that he himself did not use multiple pen names. His persona, John Cleve, had sixteen pseudonyms. John Cleve had his own wardrobe, stationery, and signature. Most important, my father liked being John Cleve. John Cleve wrote sex books, was a 1970s swinger, and had no kids. John Cleve was free.

By the time Dad died, he hadn’t worked in his office in a decade. Before that it was seldom cleaned beyond an occasional vacuuming and a light dusting as high as my mother could reach, which wasn’t far. A narrow path wound between precarious stacks of porn, an outmoded printer, a broken copy machine, and three computers. Dad steadfastly refused an online connection, saying he feared the government would be able to peek inside his computer and learn about his porn. I considered this evidence of his paranoia and lack of technological understanding. Two months after his death, the NSA admitted they’d spied on hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens via the Internet.

My father was more hoarder than collector, and I began by throwing away the obvious junk: rusted pocketknives, corroded flashlights, broken office equipment, a hockey puck, empty bottles of expensive beer, and dozens of tin boxes that once held fancy Scotch. The office decor reminded me of a college fraternity house with its implied pride in drinking and manliness. There was nothing personal or sentimental. His possessions consisted of gifts from fans at science fiction conventions, books, manuscripts, and thousands of letters. I learned to operate in a very specific way: examine each item, evaluate its importance, keep it or throw it away. The pressure of constant decision was relentless. I’d grown up terrified of this room and now I was in charge of it, like an inmate becoming a warden. I felt as if I were trespassing.

As a kid, I’d left his office quickly, giving a swift and nervous glance at the closet, which was always shut. Never seeing its contents gave the closet enormous clout; it was Pandora’s box with a doorknob. The wood casing had expanded from humidity and I had to jerk the door open. The loud sound alarmed me, as if Dad would hear it and I’d get in trouble. I glanced furtively about. Nothing was there but the dusty, smoke-smelling room. The closet contained a wall of deep shelves that were a wreck of papers, books, magazines, computer manuals, and manila envelopes containing manuscripts. Wadded into a musty ball was a John Cleve shirt, now mildewed and rotting. A trail of dried mouse droppings led to a large nest composed of tattered manuscript pages. Twined within the rodent’s home was the shed skin of a snake. I jumped back and slammed the door shut.

Throughout my childhood, the most familiar adult refrain was: “Watch for snakes.” Standard practice in the hills was to kill any snake without wasting time trying to figure out what it was. My seventh-grade teacher taught us that poisonous snakes had a vertical pupil, but getting close enough to see the eyes put you at risk. Everyone I knew feared snakes: tough men, brave boys, women who could slaughter livestock without qualm. After discovering the snakeskin in the closet, I went downstairs and drank a glass of water. No doubt the snake was a harmless constrictor that had traveled to the second floor, discovered the mouse nest, eaten its fill, rested, and sought the next meal. The snake was long gone, its shed skin the ghost of its passage.

I returned to Dad’s office and stood alert as a bandit, sweating and nervous. It ran through my mind that a case could be made for an adult facing childhood fears, both metaphoric and real, but none of that claptrap really applied. I was genuinely afraid of snakes. Under my father’s orders, I had to clear out the closet. I did so quickly.

Two tall columns of paperback porn occupied the top shelf. Mixed in was a copy of A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter, published in 1967. The cover proclaimed it a celebrated new underground classic, a feast for the sexual gourmet, and compared the writing to that of Henry Miller, one of my father’s early heroes. Dad’s insurance agency calling card marked page fifty. I held the book gingerly, astounded by its discovery, stashed away for forty-five years.

James Salter had been a guest teacher at Iowa during my years as a graduate student. So many people wanted to work with him that he screened us, reading sample work first, followed by a personal meeting. He was over sixty, charming and urbane on the surface, with a fierce steeliness lurking below. My interview didn’t go well. He demanded to know what I could learn from him, since my subject matter of Kentucky was unfathomably different from his — wealthy people on the East Coast. I became angry. Here was one more older man presenting himself as an obstacle. Outraged and irate, I told Salter that content didn’t matter, people were people, and I wanted to study with him because I admired his prose. I cut our meeting short and left, convinced that Iowa was a mistake. I’d never be a writer, and I only wanted to be one because of my father. The next day Salter posted a class list, with my name being one of the lucky twelve.

Many young writers believe in the myth of mentorship, but I’d never sought a role model. I’d known one writer in my life — Dad — and naively surmised they’d all be like him: controlling, pretentious, cruel, and overbearing. My attitude at Iowa was one of belligerence. Established writers were the enemy, and my job was to overthrow their stranglehold on the fortress of literature. Despite my resistance, Salter helped me learn to improve my work. He’d gone to college at West Point and behaved as if students were enlisted soldiers and he was an officer, one who’d roll up his sleeves and mingle with his young charges. We went hiking together, leaving the trail for the local woods I knew well. He was unflagging in his energy, both physical and mental. He remarked that seeing me in the woods was like watching me write stories.

I never saw my father in the woods. He didn’t walk them and remained oddly incurious about the landscape he’d chosen. It was enough for him to be surrounded by the heavy forest. The seclusion of the house matched the solitude within him, the immense isolation of his mind and its constant, rapid machinations.

After filling fifty garbage bags from his office, I could not see any difference other than a haze of disturbed dust hanging in the air. The room seemed more cluttered, with no space for organizing and packing. My eyes stung and I was developing a cough. Essentially I’d redistributed the contents into new piles. Based on approximately three hundred feet of bookshelf, I anticipated two days to pack the books. The allotted time period doubled immediately, then tripled. Every shelf held another row of books directly behind it — all pornography. I found several bottles of bourbon and dozens of recent manuscripts by Turk Winter, the persona who’d replaced John Cleve as my father’s primary persona in the mid-eighties.

For the next several days I ate little. I guzzled water and sweated through my clothes until they were stiff with salt. I moved in a somnolent daze. Twice I noticed my mother staring at me from the hall. She said she’d been startled, that I looked so much like Dad, she thought I was him. I hugged her silently and went back to work. Later she began referring to me as “John Cleve, Jr.,” a sobriquet that made me uncomfortable.

The project felt less like clearing a room and more like prospecting within his mind. The top layer was disorganized and heavy with porn. As I sorted like an archaeologist backward through time, I saw a remarkable mind at work, the gradual shifting from intellectual interest in literature, history, and psychology to an obsession with the darker elements of sex.

For decades he subscribed to magazines and kept them in stacks: Ramparts. Intellectual Digest. Psychology Today. New Times. Galaxy. If. Playboy. Omni. Geo. National Geographic. Smithsonian. He studied robotics, genetics, medicine, physics, and war before gunpowder. Two dozen books covered the history of ancient Greece and Rome. Mixed throughout was pornography in every form: magazines, photographs, drawings, pamphlets, a deck of cards, cartoons, books of erotic art from antiquity to the twenty-first century, calendars, pinups, postcards, collections of naughty jokes. A pile of dusty catalogs from Frederick’s of Hollywood ran back fifty years.

After a week I no longer considered the undertaking in terms of my father and me, or even as a writer going through another writer’s papers. My thinking shifted to a more formal role, that of an archivist faced with an enormous holding of raw material. I organized and collated and distributed. I stopped looking at pictures or reading, and simply made decisions in my head—this goes here, that goes over there, here’s a new one for a fresh pile. I could have been sorting marbles or Tupperware.

I packed everything in liquor boxes and taped them shut. The stacked cartons made a double-rowed wall that blocked four windows in the hall outside his office. A few weeks later I arranged for a moving company to transport my father’s papers to Mississippi. The movers charged by weight. Their estimate of Dad’s archive was eighteen hundred pounds. My inheritance.