So he was flawed, but basically he was a good guy and a good writer, and we were friends. And yes, his death makes me feel a chill wind down my spine, because we were so close in age.
The other writer mentioned was undoubtedly Margroff, with whom Dad collaborated on several unpublished novels. This anecdote perfectly summed up the darker side of my father: a cruel lashing out against a friend, then reveling in it with a mutual friend. This socially hostile aspect of his personality impacted his professional career. He ran through several agents and editors, invariably leaving on bad terms. At the slightest offense, he would cut people out of his life as swift and sure as an ax chop. Perhaps his level of insecurity was so intense that he could not bear closeness, or narcissism rendered him unable to tolerate anyone who didn’t recognize his omnipotence. Dime-store psychology aside, the plain fact was that Dad got mad if he didn’t get his way or if people contradicted him.
My mother told me he quit writing science fiction due to the constraints of physical reality. In fantasy he had greater freedom. His imagination could roam farther without restriction. Fantasy novels are only as successful as the underlying cohesive structure, and Dad devoted a great deal of effort to creating his worlds. Each manuscript contained detailed maps of imaginary lands and extensive glossaries to an unknown language. For books that included the formal use of sorcery, he made charts explaining their precise mechanics. He fabricated complex religions and provided a hierarchy of gods with their individual histories, feuds, and romantic liaisons. These documents served as reference material for his books.
My father didn’t work with characters in landscape but populations in complicated systems. His mind contained planets and continents. He was creator, cartographer, scribe, historian, priest, and scholar. Living with these overlapping roles in imaginary environments led him to shun the company of other people. His fabrications needed sufficient space to flourish inside the walls of his head.
After organizing the manuscripts he had written, I divided his personal collection of pornography into the common forms: books, magazines, photographs, comic books, pamphlets, postcards, and calendars. The piles occupied three large tables. Needing more surface space, I set panels of plywood on sawhorses. A miscellaneous pile held two decks of nude playing cards, risqué cuff links, a pristine copy of The First X-rated Coloring Book, and an ink pen with a clear cylinder containing a plastic woman whose clothes fell off when the pen was turned upside down. Adult comic books narrated the sexual histories of Robin Hood and King Arthur. A retelling of fairy tales and nursery rhymes included Little Bo Peep finding a very friendly shepherd. Detailed illustrations explained how the Old Woman Who Lived in the Shoe came to have so many children. After climbing the beanstalk, Jack encountered the giant’s wife, who proceeded to use him as a human dildo. Snow White endured the predations of all seven dwarfs.
There were so many overlapping batches that my initial system of organization became mired in subgenre. At first I saw myself as an archivist, but as the purview expanded, my role became that of a bureaucrat. I gave each item a designation and placed it among its own. Every time I thought I’d found an anomaly for a miscellaneous stack, another example would surface, compelling a fresh category. The Bitch of Buchenwald went with Slaves of the Swastika. Deserted island adventures formed their own group. Other subcategories included: farm porn
cowboy porn
Hollywood porn
swapping and swinging
rape and gang rape
older woman/young man
older man/young woman
bestiality
gay, straight, bisexual, and transgender incest
anal and oral
fem-dom: trampling, pegging, feminization satanism and witchcraft
nuns and monks
inquisition torture
bondage: rope, leather, metal, rubber doctors and nurses
teachers and students
salesmen and housewives
sex-crazed divorcées and naive coeds spanking, flagellation, caning, flogging, birching forced chastity
pony training and slave training
three-ways, four-ways, six-ways, and orgies Asian, African-American, and various interracial historic and modern
nannies and maids
urban and rural