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.