There are no follow-up letters or copies of the booklets he wrote. Possibly his approach foundered with the suggestion that he was a better writer than those currently employed by the publisher.
Of the nearly twenty thousand letters I examined, many were Dad’s responses to fan mail. Every letter opened with the salutation “offutt to _____, peace,” an affectation borrowed from the counterculture. Dad wasn’t a hippie and certainly never sought peace. He was at war with himself. The battlefield was anyone handy, and fans were vulnerable. Below is an opening line typical of his responses to fan mail.
Never mind what others would not do; my own rules forbid me to respond to someone arrogant enough not to send me return postage for a reply. Obviously I have more empathy than sense, and make you this gift.
A very long fan letter came from a seventy-five-year-old man who’d assisted in his wife’s suicide rather than prolong her suffering from terminal cancer. His letter praised Dad’s porn and asked how to get more John Cleve books. A postscript pointed out a grammatical error in one of Dad’s novels. Dad responded thusly:
Yes, of course it is nitpicking to PS an otherwise nice letter, requesting time and money/effort from a writer—or any other human being, surely—with the quoting of a slip on p. 24 in which “less” appears rather than “fewer.”
Nitpicking and dumb, because it is designed to lose friends and intimidate people. Everything else is fascinating though, including the ghastliness of your wife’s dying.
A single file contained hundreds of letters seeking forgiveness for minor transgressions such as misspelling his name. Others were from people seeking clarity about the gross insult for which they’d endured his public admonishment. Many asked if he was angry about a recent interaction. Several apologized for the error of calling him Andy instead of Andrew. In one response Dad explained himself.
I remain a bit old-fashioned. That’s part of the reason I call you by your full name; I don’t haul off and first-name anyone, and indeed dislike having it done. On the other hand, I dislike “Mister.”
This letter remains my favorite for its exemplification of my father’s conflicted relationship with himself, played out on strangers. Identity is the central issue, and Dad thinks his way into a room with no exit. Calling him the diminutive Andy is far too intimate an act from a stranger, while using the formal Andrew is not sufficiently old-fashioned. He does not care for Mister Offutt. Technically, no name is left, making me wonder if John Cleve was writing as Dad instead of the other way around.
After reading several thousand letters, I visited my mother. I told her what I’d found and said it was almost like Dad was a crank. She looked at me with a bland expression and said, “You didn’t know?”
Chapter Twenty-five
THE COMMERCIAL popularity of American porn novels peaked during the 1970s, coinciding with my father’s most prolific and energetic period. In 1972 alone he published eighteen novels. Dad wrote pirate porn, ghost porn, science fiction porn, vampire porn, historical porn, time-travel porn, secret agent porn, thriller porn, zombie porn, and Atlantis porn. An unpublished Old West novel opens with sex in a barn, featuring a gunslinger named Quiet Smith, without doubt Dad’s greatest character name. By the end of the decade, Dad claimed to have single-handedly raised the quality of U.S. pornography. According to his private papers, he believed future scholars would refer to him as “King of XX Century Written Pornography.”
Many of the early publishers used a “house name,” a pseudonym shared by several writers. It concealed identity, which writers preferred, while allowing the publisher to give the illusion of a single author. This was an early attempt at branding, with proven success in other genres. Dad didn’t mind, but he was determined to separate himself from others.
His first published novel, before any science fiction, was Bondage Babes, released by Greenleaf under the name Alan Marshall in 1968. Payment was six hundred dollars. The plot was a clever conceit. Someone murdered a model for a photographic bondage shoot, and her sister was investigating the crime by posing as a model, which allowed for soft-core descriptions of restrained women. As Dad recalled in a letter:
The book was Different: it dared mention clitoris and that some women don’t just bop off into orgasm because some dude fills and drills them, and it had a bit of a plot.