“There was an overlap,” I said. “Your kids. We were the overlap.”
She nodded, then told me her own objection. She didn’t think too many people in Morehead would actually read my book, but they’d know about it from the Lexington paper and naively confuse pornography with smut or dirty books. This surprised me, and I asked what porn was if it wasn’t smut or dirty books.
“Sex guides,” she said. “For couples.”
“Most people wouldn’t see a difference,” I said.
“Your father did.”
I didn’t say anything because the language sounded more like Dad’s than hers. Finally she gave me the real reason—she was afraid the women in her Weight Watchers group would hear about the porn and ask her to leave the meetings. She’d lost fifteen pounds and felt good about herself. I didn’t say anything. I was trying to comprehend Mom’s situation. It wasn’t about her weight, it was her fear of social rejection. She had lived most of her life with a difficult man. Mom was like a trusty in a prison, unable to leave but receiving special privileges for service and good behavior. Her kids could escape but not her. Out of deference to my mother, I set the project aside.
Recently over lunch in Mississippi, she mentioned that Dad had given his own mother a copy of Mongol!, his twelfth book. I expressed surprise, since it was a John Cleve novel. Mom explained that Dad used index cards and rubber bands to block off the sex chapters and prevent his mother from reading them. I nodded, remembering Dad telling me that the loincloth worn by primitive people simultaneously protected the genitals and called attention to them. Partitioning the porn was a way of pointing it out.
Dad often said that Mongol! was John Cleve’s best book. I had never read it, never even seen a copy, but I remembered his excitement about the research. I was nine when he explained that the invention of the stirrup revolutionized war, allowing men to fight efficiently on horseback. My father stood with his legs spread wide as if astride a horse, bouncing on his toes to demonstrate how mounted archers used their knees as shock absorbers against the jolting gait of their mounts. Genghis Khan’s men hated to leave the saddle. If a horse was exhausted from a hard ride, the soldier cut a vein in its neck, drank its blood until the horse faltered, then lithely switched to another steed mid-gallop. Under Dad’s enthusiastic tutelage, I considered Genghis Khan a romantic and mythical hero on a par with King Arthur and Robin Hood. Years later I learned that approximately sixteen billion humans carry DNA from Genghis Khan due to his custom of raping women.
After the conversation with my mother, I went home and located a copy of Mongol! in one of the many cardboard boxes. Published by Brandon House in 1970, its olive-green cover depicted a prancing satyr beneath the title, large white letters in a quasi-Asian design.
John Cleve’s
MONGOL!
I admired the emphasis on the author’s name, as if John Cleve were a known entity and the reading public anxiously awaited his next offering. At 246 pages, Mongol! ran very long for a pornographic paperback, which averaged 170 pages at the time. The retrospective narrator is Chepi Noyan, son of a lowly blacksmith who rises to the rank of general under Genghis Khan. The book begins with direct address, which creates a closeness, a sense of trust, as Chepi draws the reader into his perceptions.
The story I have to tell you is not of love, nor of peace and tranquility. Such was not my destiny, and there was none such while my lord Jenghis lived.
At its best, Mongol! is a young man’s adventure tale. Chepi is a laconic warrior, a man of swift action, and the book has little dialogue. Prolonged scenes of battle depict the brilliant tactics of lofting arrows between lines of cavalry. Communication is carried out by colored flags and blasts from a horn. After battle comes the glory, always sexual.
The longest chapter portrays an arranged marriage that begins with a fake sword fight between Chepi and the bride’s father, followed by her “escape.” Encountering her fierce resistance, Chepi realizes that she wants the full ritual carried out in the ancient fashion. She wants to be raped. This is emblematic of much of my father’s work—a woman who desires forceful sex—but in Mongol!, Dad relies on cultural precedent to write a two-page rape scene, including tips on how to deflower a virgin.