Chris Offutt's Book, My Father, The Pornographer: A Book Review by Todd B. Vick

My Father, The Pornographer: A Memoir
by Chris Offutt
Atria Books 2016

(Because this review discusses two Offutts, when necessary I use first names to distinguish between father and son, this is not intended to be disrespectful, just a means of distinction.)

If you grew up in the 70s or 80s and were a fan of fantasy fiction, there is a good chance you either heard about or read Andrew J. Offutt’s work. Offutt was a prolific science fiction and fantasy author. Fans of Robert E. Howard and his characters Conan and Cormac Mac Art, have likely run into Offutt’s popular pastiches for both these characters. In fact, Offutt was admittedly an ardent fan of the pulp magazine Weird Tales, and an unabashed fan of Robert E. Howard’s stories. When Offutt was not writing pastiches, he busied himself with writing his own fantasy novels, predominantly sword & sorcery, but also science fiction. His output was noteworthy, he published 30 works in the genre. However, Offutt’s sci-fi/fantasy work is grossly paled by his work in the erotica publishing industry.

Andrew J. Offutt died April 30, 2013, at the age of 78. His eldest son, Chris, inherited his father’s desk, rifle, and, according to Chris, eighteen hundred pounds of pornographic fiction. When his father died, Chris was left by himself to sort through the remaining vestiges of his father’s life. Chris’ siblings made it quite clear they wanted nothing to do with their father’s business, stories, or his legacy. That being the case, Chris spent the following year, with a little help from his mother, poring through his father’s belongings, sorting and organizing what remained. He details what unfolded during that time, nostalgically and emotionally, in a 2016 memoir titled My Father, The Pornographer, which quickly became a New York Times Bestseller. Despite the title, Chris spends more time in this memoir trying to come to terms with his father’s verbally abusive and unloving behavior than he does discussing his father’s pornographic/erotic work. As Chris sorts through what remains of his father’s life, he slowly discovers and discusses why he thought his father was incapable of having meaningful relationships, with anyone.

It was not an industry secret that Andrew J. Offutt wrote erotica and porn. Other writers in the science fiction and fantasy publishing industry were doing the same, all to make more money. Often the two genres would cross over. Andrew was known for mixing erotica with science fiction (e.g. Spaceways). In fact, his Conan pastiches are, in many ways, more sensual than the other writers in that arena. Be that as it may, regarding his father’s work, Chris maintained a steady focus within each specific genre as he discussed them, only mentioning the crossover works when he details various “personas” or nom de plumes his father used. And, according to Chris, those various personas revealed an aspect about his father he never fully understood until after his father’s death.

Andrew began writing porn when his son, Chris, was a child. He finished reading an erotica novel, tossed it on the coffee table, and loudly complained that the author did not know how to write. He boasted that he could do a much better job. Seeing his frustration, his wife challenged him to sit down and do just that. Andrew took the challenge personally, and, in the words of his son, “the rest is pornography.” Chris points out that he was constantly reminded that his father began writing porn to pay for his kid's needs, but this reminder was too often accompanied by a declaration of how Andrew wished his own kids had never been born. Something Chris spent years trying to come to terms with. Chris also details how he pored through boxes of his father’s manuscripts, categorizing them by genres and then specific topics. His method was meticulous and well thought out, based on genre, subgenre, and works that were something of an anomaly. He was careful to highlight that his father’s writing, and personal collection was utterly void of “kiddie porn,” something for which he felt great relief. The idea he might run across some while sorting through the collection had apparently been in the back of his mind.

While delving into his father’s pornographic/erotic works, Chris never declares that the porn was responsible for his father being an overbearing verbally abusive husband and father. He does, however, reveal how the porn might have been an extension of his father’s deeply troubled psyche, especially his jaded and disturbed attitude toward women. As the memoir unfolds the reader discovers Andrew’s hidden life and how, on several occasions, he confided with Chris that the porn kept him from becoming a serial killer. On the surface this sounds absurd, but Chris ponders whether the porn his father wrote did, in fact, kept those so-called demons at bay, or did his father merely say that to justify the works? It is not until the end of the memoir that Chris reveals the truth of his father’s claim and the psychological torment Andrew was apparently suffering. At that point, the question is answered when Chris reveals a hidden box he discovered among his father’s belongings, buried behind the desk. A box that Andrew declared was his “great secret.” It had always been hidden from his family. Even Mrs. Offutt, who knew more about her husband’s “secret life” than anyone, had no idea this box existed. What Chris reveals about this secret of secrets is both painful and insightful, bringing to light a few answers to aid him in his own struggle to understand his father. It also uncovered the degree of anguish and torment his own father might have endured.

The book is not solely about abuse, pain, and anguish. On a much lighter note, Chris spends several chapters discussing his father’s writing career in the sci-fi/fantasy publishing industry. It is here that Chris reveals some of his favorite memories. As a child, he recalled reading through his father’s collection of adventure stories from authors such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Alexandre Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Daniel Defoe. Chris also recalled the science fiction/fantasy conventions his family attended and the various personas his father would portray at each convention. There are interesting stories about his father’s relationship with other popular sci-fi/fantasy writers, such as Piers Anthony. And, Chris reveals an embarrassing moment at the Hugo Awards where Andrew usurped the introduction he was supposed to give for the guest of honor by rambling on about himself.

Throughout the book, stories are divulged about Andrew’s idiosyncratic behavior toward insignificant things that would set his temper aflame. Things such as the ratio of air to chip content in a certain potato chip company’s bags. To appease his anger regarding what he interpreted as the company slighting their consumers, Andrew wrote a letter to the company arguing his case and expressing his disgust. In response, they sent him a case of potato chips. Overall, the book is written with concise and emotionally moving prose. Chris has a way of peeling back his father’s veneer and dissecting his behavior in a delicate and poignant fashion. This certainly draws his reader into the narrative. Because of this, I found myself loosing track of time, often unable to put the book down.

Conan and E’ch-Pi-El: Robert E. Howard in the Biographies of H. P. Lovecraft by Bobby Derie

It is fair to say that the study of the life and art of Robert E. Howard owes a debt to the study of H. P. Lovecraft. The six-year friendship of the two pulpsters represents a substantial exchange of letters for both men, the moreso for Howard as his letters to Lovecraft constitute the bulk of his surviving correspondence; they influenced each other’s work, most notably in the shared setting of the Cthulhu Mythos; and they had many friends and associates in common, including Farnsworth Wright, E. Hoffmann Price, Clark Ashton Smith, Henry S. Whitehead, Wilfred Blanch Talman, C. L. Moore, and August Derleth.

Howardiana was published alongside Lovecraftiana in fanzines like The Acolyte and The Ghost, and Arkham House, founded to publish the works of Lovecraft, put out two collections of Howard’s fiction and poetry: Skull-Face and Others (1946), Always Comes Evening (1957) and The Dark Man and Others (1963). Arkham House would also publish parts of Lovecraft’s letters to Howard in the Selected Letters (1965-1976), which some years later would inspire the publication of the Selected Letters of Robert E. Howard (1989/1991, Necronomicon Press). The “Howard boom” in the 1960s also coincided with a surge in interest in Lovecraft’s fiction.

For all of their association, however, Robert E. Howard was almost nonexistent in the early biographies and memoirs about H. P. Lovecraft. Most of the Lovecraft’s autobiographies predate their correspondence; F. Lee Baldwin’s “H. P. Lovecraft: A Biographical Sketch” (Fantasy Magazine Apr 1935) lists Howard as one of Lovecraft’ many correspondents; W. Paul Cook makes no mention in “In Memoriam: H. P. Lovecraft” (1941), nor Winfield Townley Scott in “His Own Finest Creation: H. P. Lovecraft” (1944); Howard appears in August Derleth’s H. P. L.: A Memoir (1945) only as one of Lovecraft’s correspondents (Derleth 61), the creation of Unaussprechlichen Kulten and von Junzt (Derleth 72), and part of a lengthy quote from one of Lovecraft’s letters:

Our distinguished fellow weirdist Two-Gun Bob has succumbed to this fashion to the extent of hashing up his own middle name (Ervin—distinguished in Southern history for 200 years) and signing himself ‘Robert Eiarbihan Howard.’ (Derleth 54)

The lack of reference to Howard in memoirs of Lovecraft is understandable, most were written by friends who had never met or corresponded with Howard, and possibly never heard of him. Those who did not already know of the Lovecraft-Howard connection would learn little of it from the Lovecraft side of things, and that would focus strongly on Howard’s contributions to the shared Mythos—Lin Carter’s focus in Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos (1972).

1975 was a seminal year in Lovecraft studies, with the publication of L. Sprague de Camp’s H. P. Lovecraft: A Biography, Frank Belknap Long’s Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Night Side, and Willis Conover’s Lovecraft at Last. These three books published more biographical material on Lovecraft than had been readily available in any half-a-dozen Arkham House volumes—and at the same time opened a window on his relationship with, and comparisons to, Robert E. Howard. In the preface, de Camp wrote:

I learned about Lovecraft little by little. I also learned about other members of the Lovecraft-Weird Tales circle, especially Robert E. Howard. While I enjoyed Lovecraft’s fiction, Howard’s stories came closer to the kind of swashbuckling adventure-fantasy that I most enjoy reading and writing. Later, I became involved in completing, rewriting, and editing a number of Howard’s unpublished tales; but that is another story. (de Camp xi)

De Camp had been associated with the science fiction fan scene and a pulpster since the 1940s; in the 1950s he became associated with the Robert E. Howard properties, re-writing stories in the Gnome Press volumes The Coming of Conan (1953), King Conan (1953), Tales of Conan (1955), and co-authoring The Return of Conan (1957) with Björn Nyberg. In 1966, de Camp and Lin Carter began editing and writing the Conan series in paperback from Lancer, the beginning of the Howard Boom of the ‘60s. Robert E. Howard ‘zine Amra (1959) was already a focal point for Howard Studies, and de Camp’s articles from Amra were reprinted by Mirage Press in The Conan Reader (1968); de Camp and George Scrithers went on to edit two further collections of Howard-related articles by de Camp and others: The Conan Swordbook (1969) and The Conan Grimoire (1972). This familiarity with Robert E. Howard is a significant part of what de Camp brought to his approach to Lovecraft.

De Camp gave the standard note Howard was one of Lovecraft’s correspondents (de Camp 114, 301, 376), even paraphrasing notes from Howard’s letters to Lovecraft:

The Weather is Good but the Beer is Lousy by Todd B. Vick

In the middle of June 1935, Robert E. Howard and his friend Truett Vinson took a trip to New Mexico, visiting the historic town of Lincoln, New Mexico. While on this trip, Howard sent two post cards two postcards to Novalyne Price.

At the time, Howard and Price had dated one another for a little over a year. However, by June of 1935, Howard and Price were on the verge of a falling out, and Price began dating other men: Pat Allen of Cross Plains, and Truett Vinson of Brownwood. It is most likely that Howard knew Price and Vinson were dating while Howard and Vinson traveled to New Mexico. If Howard knew, he was not letting on that he knew.

While on the trip, Howard purchased two postcards to send to Price. The first is postdated June 19, 1935.

Here is the front of that postcard:

The back (top left) of the card details the front's picture:

"The 'Horno,' or firing kiln used in connection with the production of the farmers Greta ware of Tonola, Mexico. This process results in a highly glazed surface retaining all brilliancy of the colors in the original decoration." (The above and below cards are not the actual postcards REH sent to Price, just a copy of the same postcard).

Howard wrote a brief message on the back of this postcard:

"Dear Novalyne; Roswell. 

The weather is good but the beer is lousy. Hoping you are the same.  

Bob."

Price details in her book, One Who Walked Alone (OWWA), that she got a kick out of this postcard, especially what Howard wrote. She stated, "I laughed like everything when I got it. It was so typical of Bob's trying to make a funny joke—his kind of humor. I liked it too." (228)

The second postcard Howard sent Price was postmarked June 20th:

The back (top left) of the card details the front's picture:

"This picture is an actual scene of one of the tragedies of the great Southwest. It is from an actual photograph by a Franciscan Priest who happened upon the snake making his breakfast."

The only thing Howard wrote on this card was:

Sante Fe, N.M.

19/6/35

Dear Novalyne;

Cordially,

Bob.

About the second postcard, Novalyne reports (in OWWA), "The next day, I got another card. The picture on that one was gruesome, and I would have liked to hit Bob hard when I saw it. It was an actual photograph of a rattlesnake swallowing a rabbit. He had done that to horrify me. And it did. There was no message on the card . . . Just "hello" and "goodbye." (229)

There is no definitive proof where Howard purchased these cards. However, it is possible he bought them from the La Paloma Bar (Saloon) from Roman Maes in Lincoln, NM, where Howard purchased several other postcards (See my article A Writer, A Saloon, and A Famous Town: Robert E. Howard in Lincoln, NM)

The La Paloma Bar/Saloon

There's likely no motive for sending these cards if Howard knew that Price and Vinson were dating (maybe). He and Price were still on good terms, and continued dating in a friendly fashion until she moved to Louisiana in May of 1936.

Conan and Sappho: Robert E. Howard on Lesbians Part 2 by Bobby Derie

 Howard’s “Lesbians”

The first and one of the most brazen of Howard’s “lesbians” is Queen Nakari in “The Moon of Skulls” (WT Jun-Jul 1930):

Nakari halted by the couch, stood looking down upon her captive for a moment, then with an enigmatic smile, bent and shook her. Marylin opened her eyes, sat up, then slipped from her couch and knelt before her savage mistress—an act which caused Kane to curse beneath his breath. The queen laughed and, seating herself upon the couch, motioned the girl to rise, and then put an arm about her waist and drew her upon her lap. Kane watched, puzzled, while Nakari caressed the girl in a lazy, amused manner. This might be affection, but to Kane it seemed more like a sated leopard teasing its victim. There was an air of mockery and studied cruelty about the whole affair.

"You are very soft and pretty, Mara," Nakari murmured lazily, "much prettier than the other girls who serve me.[“] (SK 129)

Later on in the story, Nakari claims: “[...] she shall be punished as I have punished her before—hung up by her wrists, naked, and whipped until she swoons!” (SK 137) Marilyn later confirms: “And in spite of my pleas she took me across her knees and whipped me until I swooned.” (SK 165) In “The Slithering Shadow” (WT Sep 1933, also published as “Xuthal of the Dust”) the Stygian Thalis who has lived in the decadent city of Xuthal and is attracted to Conan, dishes out punishment to her prospective rival Natala:

Seizing her by the hair, Thalis dragged her down the corridor a short distance, to the edge of the circle of light. A metal ring showed in the wall, above the level of a man’s head. From it depended a silken cord. As in a nightmare Natala felt her tunic being stripped from her, and the next instant Thalis had jerked up her wrists and bound them to the ring, where she hung, naked as the day she was born, her feet barely touching the floor. Twisting her head, Natala saw Thalis unhook a jewel-handled whip from where it hung on the wall, near the ring. The lashes consisted of seven round silk ords, harder yet more pliant than leather things.

            With a hiss of vindictive gratification, Thalis drew back her arm, and Natala shrieked as the cords curled across her loins. The tortured girl writhed, twisted and tore agonizedly at the thongs which imprisoned her wrists. She had forgotten the lurking menace her cries might summon, and so apparently had Thalis. Every stroke evoked screams of anguish. The whippings Natala had received in the Shemite slave-markets paled to insignificance before this. She had never guessed the punishing power of hard-woven silk cords. Their caress was more exquisitely painful than any birch twigs or leather thongs. (COC 237)

This scene was depicted on the cover by Brundage, lovingly described by one critic:

[...] a bound woman leans back away from her captor, the retreating body language serving only to emphasize her pointed, bare breasts and her naked legs. Her captor, another woman, wears a kind of skirt, but her torso is almost entirely naked as well. And she holds a whip, which she clearly intends to use on the other woman. (Elliot 57)

Margaret Brundage recalled in a 1973 interview:

We had one issue that sold out! It was the story of a very vicious female, getting a-hold of the heroine and tying her up and beating her. Well, the public apparently thought it was flagellation, and the entire issue sold out. They could have used a couple thousand extra. [...] Having read the story, the thought of flagellation never entered my head. I don’t think it had theirs, either. But it turned out that way. (Korshack & Spurlock 29)

It is worth noting that “The Slithering Shadow” with Brundage’s cover appeared in the September 1933 Weird Tales. One month later would see the debut of Dime Mystery, the first of the “weird menace” or “shudder pulps” which would focus largely on torture, sadism, Grand Guignol-style grue and contes cruels, where stories of women, nude or near-nude, being threatened would be much more common. While there are many proto-weird menace stories in the pulps, “The Slithering Shadow” may have been a marker that there was an audience for this new pulp genre.

Also in 1933, Howard wrote “The Vale of Lost Women,” although it was never published during Howard’s lifetime. (COC 451) The beginning of the story includes an unnamed female character whose actions toward the slave Livia are at best ambiguous:

Conan and Sappho: Robert E. Howard on Lesbians Part 1 by Bobby Derie

In another alteration of the basic captivity theme, Marylin is held not by a dark-skinned man, but by a dark-skinned woman. The sexual threat is not eliminated, however, as Howard implies a sadistic lesbian relationship, something of a recurring theme in his work. (Trout 75)

Cross Plains, Texas

In 1926 Cross Plains, Texas was in an oil boom, and Robert E. Howard was working odd jobs, seven nights a week, with little time to write. His letters to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith are filled with verse, and on occasion, sex. Growing up mainly in a small Texas town, their sexual education would not have been in any way formal. They picked things up through conversation, practical experience, and in many cases reading. These exchanges would have a formative influence on how Howard understood female homosexuality, and how that conception featured in his fiction. Over time, this would form the recurring theme noted by Trout.

Sapphism & Psychology

According to George Sylvester Viereck; “Love in its spiritual aspect he (Swinburne) knows not. His amorous fancy feeds upon the esoteric, things ‘monstrous and fruitless’. The ordinary relation between sexes engages him only when it is sadistic.” And again, quoting Viereck; “Modern science has divested perversion of its evil glamor. Freud has taught us that perversity is an essential phase in the evolution of childhood…occurring at all times in a fairly constant percentage of human beings. Swinburne adds a new complexity. He does not turn toward his own sex. His passion goes out to woman, but he loves woman, not with the passion of a man for a maid, but with the hectic craving of Lesbian woman for her own sex.”

—Robert E. Howard to Tevis Clyde Smith, 23 Jun 1926, CL1.106

Howard quotes from Viereck’s introduction to Algernon Charles Swineburne’s Poems and Ballads, published as Little Blue Book #791. It is the first mention in his letters of lesbians, and part of his earliest discussion of homosexuality and bisexuality in general. In the same letter, Howard relates to Smith:

Thus it would seem that a pervert is a man or woman who gets little or no pleasure out of intercourse, but must seek some other method to stimulate the senses or the imagination. Opium smokers revel in sexual debauches which are purely imaginary but from which they doubtless obtain more pleasure than from actual deeds. The smoking of opium does not produce the effect of seeming intercourse, but vague thoughts, fantasies, float through the being dimly arousing all the hidden lust. A pervert may be born that way, or may be a worn-out libertine who has lost his ordinary lust through indulgence. They are usually more or less bisexual, naturally.

That is my theory and much of it is probably erroneous. Perversion is a mark of decadence. It flourishes in all fading nations. Men’s virility dwindle and fade; they feel the need of sexual desire, which has always been taught as necessary, but they lack the basic lust. So they turn to more obscene ways. (CL1.104)

Homosexuality began to come to academic attention in the 19th century, with works like Kraft-Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1896), Havelock Ellis’ Sexual Inversion (1897), Alfred Eulenberg’s Algolagnia: The Psychology, Neurology and Physiology of Sadistic Love and Masochism (trans. 1934) and psychosexual studies continued in the 20th century by psychologists such as Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. Howard’s views in his 1926 letter characterize “perversion” as a deviation from heterosexual practices. Although this leaves open what exactly counts as “perversion,” it explicitly includes homosexual acts. This would have been the common view of most laymen and professionals during the 1920s, as when Freud wrote:

By the Phoenix on This Sword I Rule! By Karen Joan Kohoutek

“If I could but come to grips with something tangible, that I could cleave with my sword!”

           

When Robert E. Howard revised an unsold tale about King Kull, the gloomy ruler of Valusia, he replaced that character with Conan, a barbarian king in a similar position, who would later be fleshed out with a wide-ranging history, and a multiplicity of formative experiences. Along the way, the character turned from an Atlantean to a Cimmerian, and his eye color from gray to blue. His personality also changes in some significant ways, from the original “By This Axe I Rule!” to the available early draft of “The Phoenix on the Sword,” and again to the version of that story published in Weird Tales in December 1932.

            As Patrice Louinet says in his appendix to the collected Kull stories, “by writing the first Conan tale on the ashes of an unsold Kull story, Howard was telling us that he now envisioned the Kull series a prehistoric one, which paved the way for the Conan stories” (289).

            The Conan who becomes the canonical version deals with court intrigue and attempts to usurp his power, in ways that are similar to the situation in “Axe.” There is a critical difference, in that Conan never declares “I am king!,” because he doesn’t have to. A line about his suffering from the tedious “matters of statecraft” line is taken almost word for word from the Kull story (11, 161), but Conan starts the story with a confidence that Kull had lacked. In “Axe,” Kull, already the king in name, comes into his full authority, an intriguing pivotal moment in a ruler’s career. Unlike Kull, Conan developed his full personal authority before he was in a position of recognized leadership, and even when other characters in the story reject his rule, it’s because of their own personal desire for power.

           

Kull of Atlantis
(art by Justin Sweet)

 This isn’t a criticism of Kull’s character, but a reflection on the different, if related, themes their stories explore. The situation in “By This Axe” is, despite the presence of an Atlantean, fairly realistic, and something not often explored: a turning point in which a ruler comes into true confidence as a leader. The themes of the Kull story are still embedded in the Conan story  when does someone with authority in name really take on authority as a true leader? — but are expanded upon, dealing more with the longer-term consequences of taking on the crown, and the process by which a ruler’s authority becomes fully accepted by his subjects.

            In each story, the hero takes from the wall “an ancient battle-axe” (“ax” in the Conan version) which had hung there “for possibly a hundred years” (Kull 173), or at least “half a century” (Conan 21). The connotations of the axe, especially given the emphasis on its age, link it to the barbarian nature of the main characters. When Kull takes up the titular axe, he claims a personal authority that comes out of his past: who he is and where he came from. Since it belongs to Valusia’s history, the axe is associated with Kull’s formal authority, embedded in the royal structure and government, but it also reflects his primal essence, which he uses to cut through hierarchical, bureaucratic tangles. This satisfying moment hearkens back to a time before the society had become so complex, with a confusing maze of laws and traditions built up over the generations, some of them useful, but some of them unjust and no longer worth following.

A 2018 Howard Days Highlight: T-Shirts by Todd B. Vick

Every year I attend Howard Days, seeing the Howard House and Museum is a highlight, especially if the shop at the back of the house has new items for sale. This year was no exception. Among the items that were for sale in the museum shop this year were t-shirts with new designs. It's not easy finding REH themed t-shirts, so getting new designs at the REH House and Museum is a nice plus.

I'm a t-shirt and shorts wearing kind of person. In fact, if I were 'allowed' to wear nothing but, that's what I'd wear all the time. In years past, I've bought at least a dozen different t-shirts at the Howard House museum. About 5 or 6 years ago, the museum shop had a t-shirt with a cool design by Michael L. Peters, and I've bought several of those over the years. A couple of years ago there was a minimalist t-shirt that had a single emblem, the REH House & Museum, on the upper left area of the shirt. But this year, the museum shop had two new t-shirt designs for sale, and as soon as I saw them, I snatched them up.

The first design has REH's signature across the top and "Museum, Cross Plains, Texas" across the bottom. There is also a picture of REH in the middle going through his signature, and on either side of the middle pic, two other pictures of REH, with Bill Cavalier's grave-site-foot-stone penciling at the bottom. Pretty cool, at least I thought so.



The second design, which sold out (I think in all the sizes), was a drawing by James Carter. This t-shirt design was a sword going through the words Robert E. Howard Days, with a banner that read 2018 at the bottom, and had a bit of a Virgil Finlay look and feel to it. Cool looking design, and I can see why it sold out.

If you were unable to attend Howard Days but still have an interest in buying one of these t-shirts (they have various sizes), then I am fairly certain that the museum is likely still selling them. You can always call this number, (254) 725-6562, and order one.