Geoffrey Bent won’t tell just anyone how many novels he’s written. “If you tell people you’ve written one or two novels they’ll give you a friendly expression,” he says. “But anything beyond four novels, they start to think something is basically wrong with you. It’s one of those things like masturbation. Why are you doing this, they wonder. What is your problem?”
He sent each of his first three novels to at least 40 publishers, to no avail. Certain his fourth would suffer the same fate, he didn’t bother sending it to anyone. Instead, while the typewriter was still warm, he started a new book. Like this: “No one can say he has experienced the ultimate in sensual pleasure until he feels the exquisitely deliberate progress of a maggot crawling over the tip of his penis. It’s like a clitoris with a will of its own!”
Warren sees his odd pursuit as just another variation on normal human behavior: “People are forever treating the dead as the living. Necrophilia is just an extreme example of this. If you had spent as much time in cemeteries as I have, you’d know what I mean. All the silk-lined coffins and gardens of flowers are aimed at ideas as abstract as God. But there also exists a subtler form of necrophilia. A distant cousin, I admit, resembling the original not so much in practice as in direction. This generic brand embraces all the activities aimed at an unresponsive end, like a wet dream that’s all one sided and leaves you with nothing more substantial than messy pajamas. I’ve always referred to activities of this ilk as ‘corpse fucking,’ and take it from an expert, there’s a lot of it around.”
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Steinbrecher, who’d taught for decades in the City Colleges, had a doctorate from the University of Chicago and a specialty in Theodore Dreiser. For their first assignment, he asked his students to write essays introducing themselves.
His painting began to earn him some recognition. His basic, representational images, which have been displayed in 18 states, often read like punch lines, encouraging viewers to imagine their own setups: a Porta Potti in a jungle labeled EMPLOYEES ONLY, a middle-aged woman brandishing a pistol, the carcass of a raccoon lying in the street before a car dealership where each car sports an American flag on its antenna.
