Dad often told me that a writer’s earliest work was his best because he put his entire life into it. All subsequent writing contained the accumulation of a few years at best. With that in mind I sat down to read “Population Implosion,” the 1967 short story that brought him attention in the science fiction field. Reflected on the pages was my father’s personality as I remembered it from my childhood—energetic, funny, concerned, serious, and original. At the end I began to cry. Each time my sobs faded, the emotion forced its way out again. I finally subsided, gasping for breath, drained and clearheaded. I’d kept my grief tightly stowed for months and now felt relieved. I understood that I was mourning my father but not his death. I wept for the talent he had as a young man, the great writer he might have become.
My father’s best work was from 1966 to 1972, before the pace at which he wrote began to affect quality. On some level he knew this was true. Aside from Mongol!, two other early novels received his positive evaluation, both written in the late sixties. In his notes he wrote: “Captives in the Chateau de Sade is the one I assume will be a classic, to be reprinted in the next century and the next, over or under the counter depending upon the politics and mood of the time.” The book has many literary allusions, extremely rare in porn, including Stendhal, Freud, and de Sade. The protagonist instructs his followers in the treatment of their sexual prisoners:
Remember this: it is caprice and lack of emotion that defeats them. When you show them emotion, of any kind, they feel a burst of accomplishment and pride.
Dad gave me his other favorite during my early twenties, saying Bruise was his concept of an intellectual look at S&M. The novel is set in my family home in the woods and features a protagonist who thinks and talks like my father. Bruise is a realistic depiction of two couples who kidnap five young people and sexually torture them to death. The pace is slow and deliberate, allowing a psychological depth missing from his other novels. The ending is an equally significant departure, never again seen in his work: regret for having murdered innocent people.
Dad’s unpublished novels surpass twenty-five, more than most authors can claim for their life’s output. In the late 1960s, my father wrote his finest book, the never-published Autobiography of a Sex Criminal. It is Dad’s only novel that includes the point of view of a child—the narrator’s early years as he evolves into a sexual serial killer. The protagonist is smart, educated, and able to function in society. He plans ahead and preys on vulnerable hitchhikers. Sexual satisfaction is linked to homicide and postmortem mutilation. He often rearranges the victims’ clothes afterward. These are standard tropes of television and movies today, but at the time Dad wrote, the FBI hadn’t started its Behavioral Science Unit. The term “serial killer” hadn’t been invented yet. My father imagined his way into all of it—childhood deprivation and obsession, followed by initial bloodletting, a crime of opportunity, then more careful planning, stalking, and ritualized homicide.
Dad’s papers held a brief note saying: “Unbought because it is ugly, and tries to Say Something.” The “something” was his belief that the penal system was too lenient and criminals were getting smarter. I think editors rejected it because it didn’t accomplish the essential task of fetish porn—sufficiently titillating the reader’s desire to masturbate. It is too well written and the sex scenes are too brutal.
Another unpublished manuscript is my father’s earliest story and the sole work intended to be literary. It has two separate title pages. One says “The Other Side of the Story” by Andy Offutt. The second one, used on the final manuscript, is “Requite Me, Baby” by Morris Kenniston. Dad was twenty when he wrote it, just prior to graduating from the University of Louisville.
In the past fifteen years, I’ve taught creative writing at a number of universities, colleges, and conferences. If I’d come across this story in my teaching, I would have considered it among the most promising works I’d seen. A remarkable intelligence operates behind the prose. The subject of Dad’s story is a couple’s breakup, but the man can’t bring himself to end the relationship. He doesn’t want to hurt his girlfriend. Instead, he mentally harangues himself as a coward for being trapped by social expectation. Dad experiments with style by dropping every single comma and using capitalization to indicate the protagonist’s thoughts. The voice is reminiscent of contemporary writers at the time, a combination of Salinger and Hemingway.
One strong note is his handling of time. The entire story occurs in approximately fifteen seconds, during which two characters utter seven short lines of dialogue. The rest of the story consists of the man’s thoughts. In that brevity, an entire world is created, a conflict arises within the well-defined protagonist, and the midcentury era is fully evoked.
If I were a teacher conferring with the twenty-year-old who wrote it, I’d be extremely supportive. I’d affirm that he was a good writer, that he’d obviously spent an inordinate amount of time reading and writing. Keep on experimenting, I’d say, but focus on structure and character instead of punctuation. You’re a good writer, I’d tell him, you could be a great writer. Don’t squander your talent. Don’t let it trickle away.
Chapter Twenty-four