The first few passages were fairly innocuous, the emphasis being on a style indentical to that of the work in question. Towards the end of Chapter Six, however, I really started cooking: “. . . wan, and wholly bereft, she steals away from the others, moving trancelike towards the darkened rear-compartment where the casket rests. She enters, and a whispery circle of light shrouds her bowed head as she closes the door behind her and leans against it. Slowly she raises her eyes and takes a solemn step forward. She gasps, and is literally slammed back against the door by the sheer impact of the outrageous horror confronting her: i.e., the hulking Texan silhouette at the casket, its lid half raised, and he hunching bestially, his coarse animal member thrusting into the casket, and indeed into the neck-wound itself.
“Great God,” she cries, “how heinous! It must be a case of . . . of . . . NECK-ROPHILIA!”
I finished at about ten, dexed, and made it to the office. I went directly into Fox’s cubicle (the “Lair” it was called).
“You know,” I began, lending the inflection a childlike candor, “I could be wrong but I think I’ve got it,” and I handled him the ms.
“Got what?” he countered dryly, “the clap?”
“You know, that Manchester thing we discussed at the last prelunch confab.” While he read, I paced about, flapped my arms in a gesture of uncertainty and humble doubt. “Oh, it may need a little tightening up, brightening up, granted, but I hope you’ll agree that the essence is there.”
For a while he didn’t speak, just sat with his head resting on one hand staring down at the last page. Finally he raised his eyes; his eyes were always somehow sad.
“You really are out of your nut, aren’t you?”
“Sorry, John,” I said. “Don’t follow.”
He looked back at the ms., moved his hands a little away from it as though it were a poisonous thing. Then he spoke with great seriousness:
“I think you ought to have your head examined.”
“My head is swell,” I said, and wished to elaborate, “my head . . .” but suddenly I felt very weary. I had evidently hit on a cow sacred even to the cynical Fox.
“Look,” he said, “I’m not a prude or anything like that, but this . . .”—he touched the ms. with a cough which seemed to stifle a retch— . . . “I mean, this is the most . . . grotesque . . . obscene . . . well, I’d rather not even discuss it. Frankly, I think you’re in very real need of psychiatric attention.”
“Do you think Hack will go for it?” I asked in perfect frankness.
Fox averted his eyes and began to drum his fingers on the desk.
“Look, uh, I’ve got quite a bit of work to do this morning, so, you know, if you don’t mind. . . .”
“Gone too far, have I, Fox? Is that it? Maybe you’re missing the point of the thing—ever consider that?”
“Listen,” said Fox stoutly, lips tightened, one finger raised in accusation, “you show this . . . this thing to anybody else, you’re liable to get a big smack in the kisser!” There was an unmistakable heat and resentment in his tone—a sort of controlled hysteria.
“How do you know I’m not from the C.I.A.?” I asked quietly. “How do you know this isn’t a test?” I gave him a shrewd narrow look of appraisal. “Isn’t it just possible, Fox, that this quasi-indignation of yours is, in point of fact, simply an act? A farce? A charade? An act, in short, to save your own skin!?!”
He had succeeded in putting me on the defensive. But now, steeped in Chink poet cunning, I had decided that an offense was the best defense, and so plunged ahead. “Isn’t it true, Fox, that in this parable you see certain underlying homosexual tendencies which you unhappily recognize in yourself? Tendencies, I say, which to confront would bring you to the very brink of, ‘fear and trembling,’ so to speak.” I was counting on the Kierkegaard allusion to bring him to his senses.
“You crazy son of a bitch,” he said flatly, rising behind his desk, hands clenching and unclenching. He actually seemed to be moving towards me in some weird menacing way. It was then I changed my tack. “Well listen,” I said, “what would you say if I told you that it wasn’t actually me who did that, but a Chinese poet? Probably a Commie . . . an insane Commie-fag-spade-Chinese poet. Then we could view it objectively, right?”
Fox, now crazed with his own righteous adrenalin, and somewhat encouraged by my lolling helplessly in the chair, played his indignation to the hilt.
“Okay, Buster,” he said, towering above me, “keep talking, but make it good.”
“Well, uh, let’s see now. . . .” So I begin to tell him about my experience with the red-split. And speaking in a slow, deliberate, very serious way, I managed to cool him. And then I told him about an insight I had gained into Viet Nam, Cassius Clay, Chessman, the Rosenbergs, and all sorts of interesting things. He couldn’t believe it. But, of course, no one ever really does—do they?
A Biography of Terry Southern
Terry Southern (1924–1995) was an American satirist, author, journalist, screenwriter, and educator and is considered one of the great literary minds of the second half of the twentieth century. His bestselling novels—Candy (1958), a spoof on pornography based on Voltaire’s Candide, and The Magic Christian (1959), a satire of the grossly rich also made into a movie starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr—established Southern as a literary and pop culture icon. Literary achievement evolved into a successful film career, with the Academy Award–nominated screenplays for Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), which he wrote with Stanley Kubrick and Peter George, and Easy Rider (1969), which he wrote with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper.
Born in Alvarado, Texas, Southern was educated at Southern Methodist University, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern, where he earned his bachelor’s degree. He served in the Army during World War II, and was part of the expatriate American café society of 1950s Paris, where he attended the Sorbonne on the GI Bill. In Paris, he befriended writers James Baldwin, James Jones, Mordecai Richler, and Christopher Logue, among others, and met the prominent French intellectuals Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. His short story “The Accident” was published in the inaugural issue of the Paris Review in 1953, and he became closely identified with the magazine’s founders, Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton, who became his lifelong friends. It was in Paris that Southern wrote his first novel, Flash and Filigree (1958), a satire of 1950s Los Angeles.
When he returned to the States, Southern moved to Greenwich Village, where he took an apartment with Aram Avakian (whom he’d met in Paris) and quickly became a major part of the artistic, literary, and music scene populated by Larry Rivers, David Amram, Bruce Conner, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Jack Kerouac, among others. After marrying Carol Kauffman in 1956, he settled in Geneva until 1959. There he wrote Candy with friend and poet Mason Hoffenberg, and The Magic Christian. Carol and Terry’s son, Nile, was born in 1960 after the couple moved to Connecticut, near the novelist William Styron, another lifelong friend.
Three years later, Southern was invited by Stanley Kubrick to work on his new film starring Peter Sellers, which became, Dr. Strangelove. Candy, initially banned in France and England, pushed all of America’s post-war puritanical buttons and became a bestseller. Southern’s short pieces have appeared in the Paris Review, Esquire, the Realist, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour, Argosy, Playboy, and the Nation, among others. His journalism for Esquire, particularly his 1962 piece “Twirling at Ole Miss,” was credited by Tom Wolfe for beginning the New Journalism style. In 1964 Southern was one of the most famous writers in the United States, with a successful career in journalism, his novel Candy at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and Dr. Strangelove a hit at the box office.
After his success with Strangelove, Southern worked on a series of films, including the hugely successful Easy Rider. Other film credits include The Loved One, The Cincinnati Kid, Barbarella, and The End of the Road. He achieved pop-culture i
mmortality when he was featured on the famous album cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. However, despite working with some of the biggest names in film, music, and television, and a period in which he was making quite a lot of money (1964–1969), by 1970, Southern was plagued by financial troubles.
He published two more books: Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes (1967), a collection of stories and other short pieces, and Blue Movie (1970), a bawdy satire of Hollywood. In the 1980s, Southern wrote for Saturday Night Live, and his final novel, Texas Summer, was published in 1992. In his final years, Southern lectured on screenwriting at New York University and Columbia University. He collapsed on his way to class at Columbia on October 25, 1995, and died four days later.
The Southern home in Alvarado, Texas, seen here in the 1880s.
A young Southern with a dog in Alvarado, his hometown, around 1929.
Terry Southern Sr. with his son in Dallas, around 1930.
Southern’s yearbook photo from his senior year at Sunset High in 1941.
Southern before World War II. He was able to use the GI Bill to spend four years studying in Paris.
Southern’s 1949 student ID card from the Sorbonne. While abroad, he met many of the people with whom he would collaborate, including Henry Green, Richard Seaver, Alex Trocchi, William Burroughs, Ted Kotcheff, George Plimpton, and Mason Hoffenberg, with whom he wrote Candy (1958).
The first ever issue of the Paris Review (Spring 1953), which included Southern’s short story “The Accident.”
Outside Gaudí’s Sagrada Família Church in Barcelona in 1954. (Photo by Pud Gadiot.)
Terry and Carol Southern in Paris in 1956.
A page from the original draft of Flash and Filigree written between 1952 and 1957.
Working on The Magic Christian galleys in Geneva in 1958.
Gore Vidal’s rave write-up of The Magic Christian (1959), written on the back of a starched shirt backing. Vidal writes, “Terry Southern is the most profoundly witty writer of our generation . . .”
The telegram that changed everything. This communiqué from Stanley Kubrick invited Southern to come to London to work on Kubrick’s new screenplay for the movie Dr. Strangelove (1964). Southern was instrumental in transforming the film from a political thriller into a satire.
Southern and his son, Nile, in Central Park in 1967. (Photo by Michael Cooper.)
From left to right: William S. Burroughs, Terry Southern, Allen Ginsberg, and Jean Genet, covering the National Democratic Convention for Esquire in Chicago, 1968. (Photo by Michael Cooper.)
Southern with his dog, Hunter, in Canaan, Connecticut, in the 1980s. (Photo by Nile Southern.)
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
“A Change of Style (originally entitled “Sea Change”), “The Road out of Axotle,” “I Am Mike Hammer,” “Recruiting for the Big Parade,” “Twirling at Ole Miss,” and “You’re Too Hip, Baby” were first published in Esquire magazine. “Put Down,” “Red-Dirt Marijuana,” and “The Blood of a Wig” were first published in Evergreen Review. “The Sun and the Still-born Stars,” “You Gotta Leave Your Mark” (originally entitled “The Panthers”), and “The Night the Bird Blew for Doctor Warner” were first published in Harper’s Bazaar. “Love Is a Many Splendored” was first published in Hasty Papers. “Apartment to Exchange” and “Razor Fight” were first published in Nugget Magazine. “A South Summer Idyll” was originally published in the Paris Review. “The Moon-shot Scandal,” Red Giant on Our Doorstep,” “Terry Southern Interviews a Faggot Male Nurse,” and “Scandale at The Dumpling Shop” were first published in the Realist.
copyright © 1955, 1956, 1959, 1960, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1967 by Terry Southern
cover design by Milan Bozic
978-1-4532-1745-0
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
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