At the time, pornography was still a taboo business. Paperbacks were sold in the back rooms of adult theaters, on hidden racks at newsstands, and at adult bookstores in cities. People in less-populated areas bought them through the mail. Within a few years of Crusader’s publication, Grove suffered further economic problems and the series was in danger of going out of print. Grove wanted to raise the price of Dad’s paperbacks one dollar and asked him to cut his royalty percentage in half. If my father didn’t agree, Grove couldn’t afford to order another printing. Dad got mad and refused, allowing his books to go out of print over the sum of $130 per year, the only professional decision he ever admitted regretting.
In the 1980s, John Cleve’s career culminated with a nineteen-book series for Playboy Press, the magazine’s first foray into book publishing. Spaceways allowed him to blend porn with old-time “space opera” reminiscent of the 1930s pulps, his favorite kind of science fiction. Dad’s contemporary twist included aliens who possessed the genitalia of both genders. Galactic crafts welcomed the species as crew, since they could service men and women with ease. The Spaceways series ended in 1985, coinciding with the widespread use of consumer VCRs. Men no longer needed “left-handed books” for stimulation when they could watch videotapes in their own homes. The golden era of written pornography was over.
That same year Dad sent D’Artagnan’s Son to Grove Press, but the pace at which he wrote had finally caught up with him. The prose became sloppy, characterization shrank, and story vanished. A letter of rejection from Grove says:
The problem appears to be that its superior sophistication removes it from the usual market, while its outspoken content might be something of a drawback with the literary crowd. Maybe one way of putting it is that it falls between two chairs.
In my twenty years of writing, I have received nearly six hundred rejections—by mail, phone, email, even text messages. Each one stings. The tendency is always to blame the editor, then oneself, and finally to inspect the language of the rejection letter for hidden meaning. The note my father received resists scrutiny. “Falling between two chairs” is not a conventional literary term or a discernible metaphor. A strict interpretation is that one chair is sophisticated and the other is pornographic, but I remain uncertain as to what lies between them. The editor was probably attempting a diplomatic tone, suggesting the book was too literary for porn and contained too much sex for literature.
The novel opens with a French marquis recalling the death of his first wife while secretly observing his current wife being pleasured by the maid with her “practically prehensile tongue.” The marquis’s wife is described as having:
. . . hectares of black hair, a volcanic vulva and great melonous breasts that shivered and slithered about on her chest, her entire belly a mass of maddeningly molten flesh. Sweat sheened it sleekly.
The maid leaves the room, encountering the marquis, who promptly takes up with her for several pages. In the meantime, the marquis’s wife realizes she has enough time for a liaison with the stable master. On her way, she detours past the kitchen, where the steward is standing on a footstool behind the naked German cook whose backside is in view:
. . . her fine big broad plush snowy buttocks standing well out above her sturdy snowy legs, with her also large and snowy breasts out of her bodice.
Literature has a strong precedent for repetition of words, but I’m not convinced that using “snowy” three times in a single sentence gains sufficient reward. As I read the manuscript, I began to wonder what metaphoric chair it could have landed on to ensure publication.
John Cleve retired in 1985. Dad insisted that he himself hadn’t quit, but John Cleve had. It was more retreat than retirement, a slipping back into the shadows, fading away like an old soldier. Cleve had done his duty—the house was paid off, the kids were gone, and the bank held a little savings. Dad was fifty-two. As Cleve, he’d published 130 novels in eighteen years.
Dad continued to write and publish short fiction under his own name, totalling thirty-eight stories between 1954 and 2004. A span of this length is unusual—most writers don’t stick with the form for fifty years. On the strength of these publications and his former service as president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, he continued to attend cons, limited to small regional events within driving distance. Ostensibly the reason was practical—Dad couldn’t fly due to mysterious pains in his leg—but the truth was far more personal.
In 1972 Harlan Ellison had asked my father to contribute a short story to the influential anthology Again, Dangerous Visions. Dad supplied “For Value Received,” about a girl who grows up in a hospital because her family can’t afford to pay the bill for her birth. Ellison wrote a respectful introduction to the story, complimenting not only the work but my father’s mind, and mentioning that he, Ellison, had entered the same 1954 college science fiction contest that Dad had won. The two men had much in common: They were the same age, from backwaters of Ohio and Kentucky, brilliant, opinionated, articulate, and angry.
In Dad’s own introduction to the story, he proclaimed: