My father, Andrew Jefferson Offutt V, grew up in a log cabin in Taylorsville, Ky. The house had 12-inch-thick walls with gun ports to defend against attackers: first Indians, then soldiers during the Civil War. At 12, Dad wrote a novel of the Old West. He taught himself to type with the Columbus method — find it and land on it — using one finger on his left hand and two fingers on his right. Dad typed swiftly and with great passion. In this fashion, he eventually wrote and published more than 400 books. Two were science fiction and 24 were fantasy, written under his own name; the rest were pornography, using 17 pseudonyms.
In the mid-1960s, Dad purchased several porn novels through the mail. My mother recalls him reading them with disgust — not because of the content, but because of how poorly they were written. He hurled a book across the room and told her he could do better. Mom suggested he do so. According to her, the tipping point for Dad’s full commitment to porn, five years later, was my orthodontic needs.
He 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.
When I was a kid, my teeth were a terrible mess: overlapping, crooked and protruding like fangs. Mom wanted to work part time and pay for braces. Dad suggested that if he quit his job as a salesman and she typed all his final drafts, they could finance my dental care. Over cocktails in the woods of eastern Kentucky, they formed a partnership to mass-produce porn.
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 prolific author. This was an early attempt at branding, with proven success in other genres: westerns, romance and mystery. Dad didn’t mind. He had experimented with a literary mask at the University of Louisville, using different names for articles in the school paper, as well as in his own short fiction. A pseudonym for pornography provided literary freedom while also protecting the family’s reputation in our conservative Appalachian community.
My father’s first published novel was “Bondage Babes,” released by Greenleaf under the name Alan Marshall in 1968. His pay was $600. The plot was a clever conceit. Someone had murdered a model for a bondage shoot, and the model’s sister was investigating the crime by posing as a model herself, which allowed for soft-core descriptions of restrained women. Greenleaf published his next novel, “Sex Toy,” a book Dad referred to as “sensitive,” under the name J. X. Williams, followed by three other books under three other names.
His primary pseudonym, John Cleve, first appeared on “Slave of the Sudan,” an imitation of Victorian pornography so precisely executed that the editor suspected my father of plagiarism. Dad found this extremely flattering. He concocted his pen name from John Cleland, author of “Fanny Hill,” considered the first erotic novel published in English. Over time, John Cleve evolved into more than a mere pseudonym. Dad regarded John Cleve as his alter ego, a separate entity, the persona who wrote porn. Dad was adamant that he did not have 17 pen names. Dad had John Cleve, to whom he referred in the third person. It was John Cleve who had 16 pseudonyms, in addition to his own wardrobe, stationery and signature.
Dad soon began publishing with Orpheus, which paid him $800 a book. He invented John Denis, based on his favorite Reds players, Johnny Bench and Denis Menke, and switched to Midwood for more money. After a falling out with an editor over a title change, he returned to Orpheus. Later, Orpheus became irritated with Dad and stopped buying his work. Curious about the changing market, he read a dozen recent Orpheus books. Dad believed he’d influenced the industry to the point where his style was consistently copied, the proof being that other authors had begun writing knowledgeably of the clitoris, which he believed he pioneered. This upset him to the point that he decided to trick the editor into buying his work.
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My father often told me that if not for pornography, he’d have become a serial killer. On two occasions he described the same story: One night in college he resolved to kill a woman, any woman. He carried a butcher knife beneath his coat and stalked the campus, seeking a target. It rained all night, and the only person walking around was him. He went home, soaked, miserable and alone, regretting the action. He began drawing a comic about stalking a woman.
Many years later he read a biography of a serial killer who owned bondage magazines at the time of his capture. According to Dad, the details of the killer’s childhood were “eerily, extremely similar” to his own, including three warning signs: bed-wetting, cruelty to animals and setting fires. This is known as the MacDonald Triad, named for the psychiatrist who studied a mere hundred patients at a mental hospital. Subsequent research has refuted these behaviors as causes of future violence. The traits have no predictive capacity. They are regarded as indicators of a distressed child with poor coping skills — one who might develop a personality disorder like narcissism or antisocial behavior — not as a recipe for a killer.
If my father was correct in thinking that porn prevented him from killing women, then I should be grateful for its continuing presence in his life. Far better to be the son of a pornographer than of a serial killer. But I don’t believe my father’s theory. The sight of blood, even his own, made him lightheaded enough to faint. He was not athletic or even strong and therefore incapable of overpowering most people. He was also a physical coward, having never been in a fistfight. His weapons were cruel words, the infliction of guilt and intimidation through rage. The idea that porn prevented him from killing women was a self-serving delusion that justified his impulse to write and draw portrayals of torture. He needed to believe in a greater purpose to continue his lifelong project. Admitting that he liked it was too much for him to bear.
After finishing the project, my feelings for Dad didn’t change as much as I anticipated. The more I delved, the more I discovered similarities between my father and me, a surprising result that at times left me dismayed. I didn’t like him more or love him less. I gained a greater respect for what he managed to do despite his limitations. His prodigious output is proof of commitment, discipline and endurance. Dad was among the last of the old-school American pulp writers, a journeyman for hire. In his office hung a hand-lettered sign that read “Writing Factory: Beware of Flying Participles.” Stacked beside his chair at his death were notes for a new book. My father was a workhorse in the field of written pornography. After five decades, he died in harness.
An earlier version of a summary for this article misspelled the surname of the author’s father. He is Andrew Offutt, not Offut.
Chris Offutt is the author of several books, including, most recently, “No Heroes.” This article is adapted from a forthcoming memoir about his father’s 50-year career in pornography.
A version of this article appears in print on February 8, 2015, on page MM38 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: My Dad, the Pornographer. Today’s Paper|Subscribe
