The cad and the Clintons

In another time and another place, Robert Olen Butler would surely have been chased from the club with his britches down. A Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of novels and short stories, the man is a cad.

Few people have heard of him, despite his prize, but that could change in May when his latest book is published. It is called Intercourse, with a cover of limbs entwined to catch the eye of the casual reader. The intercourse Butler describes in 50 very short stories is between real people, only imagined. Some are still living.

When Prince Charles deflowers Princess Di in the palace of King Carlos of Spain, Di lies back and thinks, if not of England, then of her childhood memories in England. Charles finds Di "chlorine and ammonia and antiseptic" and, after letting his thoughts stray to his mistress Camilla Parker Bowles opines that he "would cling to a horse who’s been ridden."

Only a cad would crawl into another man's bed, however metaphorically, and then mock him. "It's causing exactly the controversy I expected," says Butler. "And I welcome it!"

Perhaps his inspiration comes from his private life: at 61, he has been married and divorced four times. Before Intercourse, his best-known work was a tirade emailed around the campus of the University of Florida, where he teaches creative writing, when his fourth wife, novelist Elizabeth Dewberry, ran off with CNN media mogul Ted Turner (left, with Dewberry).

"Elizabeth has never been able to step out of the shadow of the Pulitzer," he boasted in the email. She had fallen for Turner because "it is very common for women to be drawn to men who remind them of their childhood abusers," and Elizabeth had "spoken openly... of the fact that she was molested by her grandfather from an early age." Indeed, Elizabeth "says I saved her life".

His wife, he wrote, "will not be Ted’s only girlfriend." As for him: "I get to keep my house. I will keep my dogs and cats. I will keep virtually everything." Rarely has a personality been revealed so thoroughly in so few words. Butler really is a cad.

Butler denies that projecting smutty thoughts onto public figures - Bill and Hillary Clinton (left), Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn among them - constitutes an invasion of privacy. "That's absurd," he says. "The scenes are fiction. I am a literary writer."

Thus he feels free to have Hillary Clinton fantasising: "One day we'll be fucking on the eagle [on the floor of the Oval Office] and there's a soft knock at the door and the secretary knows not to barge in and she says 'Madame President, the Soviet premier is on the phone'."

Butler admits: "That shit-storm with my wife did make me think, 'Hey, people in Hollywood make a living out of this'. And you could say it did colour some of the attitudes in the stories." ·