Writing, in recent years, has become a kind of self-defeating ritual for me, a trade whose craft is as important, as integral to my life, as anything else, but whose actual practice has become weighted with anxiety, stalled momentum, and (at the risk of overstating things) a kind of personal doom. Part of this stems from the quicksand that my day job's become (the need for a paycheck and health insurance trumping any “groaning in the spirit” that the tedium, mental antagonism, and office-politics bullshit induces in me; and, hey, I'm not so wrapped up in my own experience to not realize that, in many ways, I'm one of the fortunate ones: i.e., I actually have a job and paycheck; I actually have access to healthcare).
But even this awareness doesn't do much to shake the feeling that I'm not only spending my life doing something that is, ultimately, meaningless, but that I'm spending my life doing something that most certainly wasn't meant for me. I've tried (and mostly failed) to form small writing communities, writing relationships with like-minded folks—to foster support, enthusiasm, an environment that bolsters new work and skill. I've tried to form “social networks,” to seek out and support places that could become a home for my work.
And whether it's because, at heart, I'm an inveterately antisocial person—or because I've not managed to be discerning enough in seeking this kind of fellowship—any success I've had as a writer (whether alone or in a community) has been modest at best.
That sense of isolation (also a general loss of enthusiasm for endlessly submitting work to unresponsive parties) was one of the reasons I started this blog last year. I simply wanted a space to write about whatever I wanted to write about, regardless of readership, oblivious of monetization, no longer giving too many shits about what particular niche my writing supposedly fit.
I say all that to say that my conception of writing—and any opportunity one might have to do it for a living—has shifted dramatically in the past 10 months or so. The shift became more tectonic when I rediscovered my love for pulp paperbacks earlier this year (well-documented in the Spillane and Pulp Art Idea Mill posts of late), and began picking up some of the discarded ideas of my writing past, for use in possible new work.
In the midst of this pulp rediscovery, I ran across Chris Offutt's “My Dad, the Pornographer”. A memoir-ish article detailing Offutt's recovery work in charting, sorting, and cataloging the porn fiction prodigiously written by his father (also some of the accompanying, incredible covers):
“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.”The least interesting thing about the article (imo) is when the story being told exists mostly in relation to its author, “the Pornographer's” son. Far more interesting is its descriptions of trade-craft; of the ways that Andrew Jefferson Offutt V (and his 17 pen names) fashioned a system that allowed him to write and publish “more than 400 books”. Including novels whose plots sound straight out of Giallo lore:
“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.”Or when the son takes the time to provide a kind of genealogy for his father's peculiar sense of authorship:
“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.”Or when Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset asked “Cleve” to write a “pornographic historical series about a single character during the Crusades”. His response, in letter form, carries with it both an “outsider art” kind of authenticity and a clear understanding of the dilemma faced by every “serious writer”:
“‘I do not know if this is or could be my thing or not. I have difficulty with series. Like, I get bored and want to go back to creating. It is most difficult for me to write as if cranking the arm of a copy machine.’ He continued: ‘Let us not bandy terms. I am an artist, whether these series books will be “art” or not.’”So I've started writing fiction again, and submitting. To what end I have no idea.
Leonard Jacobs
May, 2015
