Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
New York: Atria Books 2016; $26.00 hc; 272 pages
Good Grief, It’s Daddy!
SF and porn have always been brothers. They are both low-rent pop genres, traditionally (and erroneously) assumed to be for men. Even the names are similarly open to question with a certain amount of evaluation smuggled into the terminology: “Speculative fiction” makes literary claims, “sci-fi” is more populist, and “sf” is somewhat neutral. There are even more terms, most of them even more evaluative, for the sexually oriented stuff, and “porn” may be the closest to a neutral one. We read erotic realism; you read porn; they read filth. There is even a two-letter abbreviation: DBs (Dirty Books).
Theodore Sturgeon’s complaint that the genre is judged by its worst examples is at least as true for porn as it is for sf, and the problem has been even worse on Robert Conquest’s famous quatrain about the good examples being disqualified because they are good. Indeed, that approach was legally mandated for porn, with defense counsel required to provide expert opinion that the book on trial was really mainstream lit until the 1960s, when the Supreme Court extended the protection of the First Amendment to a DB with the unpromising title of The Sex Life of a Cop, for which no straight-faced claim of genre transcendence could be offered. (It also wasn’t all that sexy by today’s standards.) Shortly after that decision, Professor Steven Marcus’s The Other Victorians, a study of My Secret Life, The Pearl, and other Victorian DBs that were finally being sold over the counter, noted that porn, like sf, takes place in an alternate reality, which he called Pornotopia, in which “All men ... are always and infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or juice or both. Everyone is always ready for everything.” The similarities make it unsurprising that there is a cultural overlap. For instance, the most successful DB of this century, E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, comes out of the sf subculture of fanfiction. Many writers have worked in both categories; perhaps the most prolific (at least that we know about) was Andrew J. Offutt, and we now have a memoir of him, by his son Chris.
Offutt’s first (and in some ways best) sf novel, which bore the unfortunate title of EVIL Is LIVE Spelled Backwards, appeared in 1970. It was a descendant of Robert A. Heinlein’s Revolt in 2100 with charms of its own. There is a brutal, sexually repressive theocracy led by a dictator known as the Pastor. (At that time, Sen. John Pastore [D-RI] was leading a crusade to protect the nation from televised improprieties.) There is an Underground, which sends out its subversive messages with a slogan adapted from another work of speculative fiction: “Who is John Cleland?” There is a relatively inexplicit orgy scene when the Underground lets loose an aphrodisiac spray in the headquarters of the theocrats and the Pastor alone stands aloof, weeping bitterly, because he was the only one who was serious about all that antisex stuff. Not a major work, but highly enjoyable.
In 1972, Offutt appeared in Again, Dangerous Visions with a pleasant if not overly sfnal tale called “For Value Received.” In the introductory matter, he revealed that he wrote porn under the name of John Cleve. This announcement may have shocked a few of the more shockable readers (this was around the time that George R.R. Martin inspired a number of publicly announced cancellations of subscriptions to Analog by bringing overt heterosexuality to its hitherto unsullied pages with “A Song for Lya”), but it offered some of us a guidepost to the uncharted wilds of the brother genre.
After EVIL, Offutt published a near-future dystopia, The Castle Keeps, and a space opera or two and then moved over to the neighboring category of sword & sorcery, writing a few barbarian books and participating in the Thieves’ World series. He became known in the sf community but suffered a reversal in 1974.
The wit and verbal skill obvious in his better books won him the coveted Toastmaster spot at the 1974 Worldcon, held in Washington. As such, his main task was to amuse the crowd at the Hugo Award ceremony before the rocketships were given out. The circumstances were not ideal. The room was hot and overcrowded, and any presentation before the awards are announced is twice as long as it would be otherwise. As they say, it was a bad situation, and he proved himself equal to it.
He went on and on, in an excruciating flop-sweat performance reminiscent of Lenny Bruce’s bit about the American comedian at the London Palladium except that it didn’t end with a riot. Instead, Harlan Ellison came up to the podium and gently suggested that he STFU, which he then did. Offutt came to believe that he had thereby won Ellison’s undying enmity, but his son asked, and Ellison told him that he didn’t feel that way. (It is generally agreed that Ellison is not shy about mentioning those who have won his undying enmity, and I do not recall ever seeing Offutt’s name in that context.) After that embarrassment, Offutt’s personal presence in fandom slowly lessened. His sf production dwindled to nothing, and many of us wondered what he was doing. It turns out he was drinking himself to death, a task he completed in 2013.
Meanwhile, his alter ego, John Cleve, had continued to produce. In the ’70s, he averaged about a dozen DBs a year, some under other names. The bio notes that he industrialized the process, keeping voluminous files of descriptions of the parts and acts so that he would not too obviously repeat himself.
One could get the impression from this account that the books were all the same, and from the titles (The Domination of Camille, A Degraded Heroine, Delicious Discipline) that they were all male dominance, sort of Gor without the f/sf trappings, but the work is more interesting and varied than that. I am nowhere near to claiming the heroic accomplishment of having waded through all of Cleve’s massive, throbbing oeuvre, but I can recall a few enjoyable ones:
The Great 24-Hour Thing was perhaps the only book that a porn publisher attributed to Andrew J. Offutt. It is a fantasy in which imps grant men’s wishes for one day. There is a certain amount of delicious discipline, but there’s also much pleasurable vanilla sex, and there are many laughs, not all of them sexual.
Conversely, Holly Would was a John Cleve book from a mainstream paperback publisher. Berkley Books was doing a series of Porn Lite books with more sexual explicitness than had previously been allowed but less than was offered by the serious smut and an emphasis on humor. Cleve gave us a skilled satirical tale of a man becoming rich and famous by acting rich and famous.
Forced into Incest was an effort to expand the boundaries of the genre by merging it with the then-popular vigilante subcategory. Two families (parents, teens) are captured by a gang out of Deliverance. Instead of buggering the men, however, the thugs force their victims into intrafamily relations. Because this is porn, they enjoy it. They then contrive to trap and kill their attackers. When they tell the sheriff that the bad guys killed each other, the sheriff sees through their story but allows them to get away with it because them sumbitches had it coming to them.
Taken as a whole, John Cleve’s oeuvre could have been a lot worse. (Perhaps this is a failing, but for me Funny is a source of redeeming social importance, and anyone who does it on purpose belongs above the lowest echelons. I feel that way about the much-maligned verse of Robert W. Service.) Along with most of the field, his books eschewed sex with animals or prepubertal children. There was a lot of male domination (and I would not be surprised if, like the Gor books, those attracted a number of women who would beat the crap out of anyone who tried to take their smut away), but there was also a lot of joyously consensual activity. Cleve also prided himself on being way ahead of the porn curve on female sexual anatomy, perhaps not a major accomplishment but a worthy one.
In porn, as in so many other genres, text was supplanted by visual media, and by the ’80s there was no more place in it for the writings of John Cleve. Whereupon he underwent a transformation and emerged as Turk Winter. It began as a collaboration with a visual artist named Eric Stanton, a series of graphic graphic novels rich in fetishism, torture, and bondage. With Stanton, then alone when Stanton died, Turk Winter ran a privately distributed porn business, eventually selling individually customized tales of the same sort and developing friendly correspondence relationships with a number of his readers.
When Andy Offutt died, he left his belongings to Chris with explicit instructions to look at the porn. There Chris learned, perhaps unsurprisingly, that his father was not only in it for the money. Along with the paying work, Chris found The Saga of Valkyria Barbosa, a 4000-page work, illustrated by Offutt himself (who traced because he could draw; Chris notes the parallel to Henry Darger), which he continued for most of his lifetime, set on a world of women who can scarlessly heal any wounds, regrow their hymens, and make their breasts as large as anyone could wish. Now that’s Pornotopia, and poor Valkyria wound up suffering enough tortures and degradations to make the Marquis de Sade’s Justine look like a ribbon clerk. Apparently, he never showed it to anyone.
We learn not to ascribe personal wonderfulness to the creators of the work we enjoy. I assume that the great pleasure I have derived from the novels of Evelyn Waugh and the poems of Philip Larkin was enhanced by never having to meet them, and this look into some of the more repellent thought patterns of an often enjoyable writer brings that lesson to mind.
Somewhere along the line, Andrew J. Offutt learned to channel those aggressive impulses the Ev Psych people say we all have into a series of fantasies about hurting women. (There’s a lot of that going around.) He told Chris that if he didn’t write and draw that stuff, he would have become a serial killer, and he added that many of his customers said that they were likewise sublimating. Chris thinks that’s self-serving, that his father lacked the courage and skills to succeed in that line of endeavor. Maybe. It’s still almost certainly better that he didn’t actually try it.
In the end, Andrew J. Offutt comes across as a severely flawed human being but not a monster except in the depths of his own mind. He didn’t beat Chris (though Chris’s teachers did), and if we accept the statistic that 96% of families are dysfunctional, his was probably somewhere near the middle.
This book is of course a tale of its author, as well as of its subject. Chris Offutt has survived being an Adult Child of an Alcoholic and an Adult Child of a Writer, belonging to perhaps the only family in his Kentucky town that engaged in book-larnin’, and becoming a novelist and screenwriter, and he tells the story well. 
Arthur D. Hlavaty lives in Yonkers, New York.
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