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.