by Lee Hill
Southern’s graduation from Sunset High in June 1941 was marked by tragedy, when A.B., the brother of Bill Ord, one of Terry’s best friends, was killed in a hunting accident. Southern was one of the pallbearers at the funeral. The death of A.B. reminded Southern of when he had almost drowned in a culvert used as a swimming hole a few years earlier.
In the fall, Southern briefly attended North Texas Agricultural College, but the narrow curriculum bored him. In September 1942, he transferred to Southern Methodist University in Dallas and enrolled in the premed stream. Despite its connections to the Methodist Church, SMU was an independent, nonsectarian campus that had opened on September 22, 1915, with 706 students. SMU grew steadily through the twenties and thirties and quickly built up a reputable faculty and curriculum.
One of Southern’s instructors was Julien Lon Tinkle, a popular young professor of English who became one of the state’s most celebrated teachers. Tinkle had graduated with a bachelor’s degree from SMU in 1927 followed by a master’s in 1932. He then went on to postgraduate work at the Sorbonne and Columbia University. Tinkle’s wanderings beyond the Lone Star State made the Dallas native homesick. He decided to return and help build up SMU’s academic reputation. From 1942 until his death in 1980 Tinkle was, in addition to his duties at SMU, the book editor and critic for the Dallas Morning News. He would write and edit several books, including Thirteen Days of Glory: The Siege of the Alamo, The Cowboy Reader, The Story of Oklahoma, and Nobel: An Anthology of French Nobel Prize Winners. Tinkle held memberships in the Philosophical Society of Texas and the Texas Institute of Letters. In 1960 Tinkle, as the chief book reviewer for the Dallas Morning News, would give a glowing review to The Magic Christian (perhaps thinking, without envy, of a path he himself might have taken).
Tinkle’s career demonstrated to Southern that one could leave Texas. He found the professor friendly, enthusiastic, intelligent, and sympathetic. Tinkle wore his learning and cosmopolitanism lightly. It was an attitude Southern would adopt himself decades later when he taught screenwriting.
Apart from Tinkle’s encouragement, premed at SMU left Southern cold: “It was very inhuman and abstract—not the friendly country doctor kind of thing. It was just chemistry and biology, without girls.”
Underscoring his dissatisfaction with SMU and Dallas was Terry’s dream of becoming a great writer. Throughout his teens, reading continued to grow into a strong, quiet passion. Graduating from pulp magazines like Argosy and Black Mask, Southern became enamored of the names appearing in such slicks as Collier’s, Esquire, and the Saturday Evening Post. Novelists were the rock stars of Southern’s generation. James T. Farrell, John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and, number one with a bullet, Ernest Hemingway topped the charts of the young thinking-person’s imagination. These writers had thrown themselves into the events of their time—war, Europe, the dust bowl, sports, high society. They turned raw experience into consciousness-shifting novels that captured and commented on the American century. Their literary success opened other doors—politics, journalism, Hollywood, globe-trotting, and the promise of fantastic sex. Being a writer was the way to escape routine, transcend family expectations, and achieve fame and wealth through one’s artistry and talent. Southern, with his impulse toward reimagining his life in mythic terms, found few other occupations that suited his quietly curious temperament.
Dreams of literary glory took a distinct second place as the shock of Pearl Harbor pushed the U.S. into World War II and kick-started recruitment. Prior to 1941 isolationism and pacifism were de rigueur, but now it was America’s duty to help Europe and Asia fight the fascist tyranny of Germany, Italy, and Japan. Able-bodied young men were encouraged to enlist. Southern had continued his ROTC involvement at SMU (which consisted primarily of marching drills) and was entitled to a deferment if he wished to continue his studies. However, he was deeply bored at college. In addition to patriotism and civic duty, he was driven to enlist by a yearning for the kind of life-experience war could give him.
On March 25, 1943, Southern showed up at the induction center in Dallas and enlisted in the Army. His mother gave him an inscribed Bible as a parting gift and good-luck charm. He commenced active service on April 1. Over the next two and a half years, he served in England and continental Europe with the 435th Quartermaster Platoon. Stationed in Reading, a town thirty minutes west of London, he received training as a demolitions technician.
His war experiences shaped his repulsion by and fascination with individual and societal violence, but unlike many of his contemporaries, Southern remained frustratingly tight-lipped about the war. “I want to save it for my fiction,” he told me in 1993. Sadly Southern never wrote a book about World War II. Nor can any fragments of war-related fiction be found in his papers. Perhaps Southern’s deep admiration for Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five held him back. Instead Dr. Strangelove became Southern’s antiwar “novel.”
When pressed to talk about his years in the Army, Southern would reply almost like the nostalgic hero of Neil Simon’s play Biloxi Blues. “The main effect of the war on me was the opportunity to travel. There were some tedious times and some scary times, but all the negative stuff was outweighed by the emancipating experience of seeing the world.”
Most of his service was spent in Reading, with generous amounts of leave allowing him to visit London on a regular basis. After D-Day, Southern’s regiment participated in the Battle of the Bulge. Like many of the soldiers in the brutal winter offensive of 1944–45, Southern spent his time trying to stay warm in flimsy campsites chipped out of the frozen soil of the Ardennes.
One of Southern’s “scary times,” according to Gail Gerber, included seeing a soldier in his platoon get killed: “At one point his buddy stood up in the foxhole—there was a certain fear there—and his buddy said, ‘Oh no, I’m not going to die’ and was beside Terry and then got blown away that minute. So that gave Terry a certain amount of pause.”
According to his discharge form, he received no wounds. His good service earned him a Bronze Star, a Good Conduct Medal, and victory ribbon, as well as three overseas bars. He acquired a German infantryman’s helmet. In 1956, living in Geneva with Carol, Terry bought a used Luger, which he had always longed for, and restored it. The gun floated among hispossessions for decades. One day in the mid-sixties, the playwright Arthur Kopit, who was house-sitting at Terry’s Connecticut home, found the Luger in a desk. He took it out into the field for some target practice. Not thinking it was loaded, he examined the gun. Suddenly, it went off, almost blowing a hole through Kopit’s skull. Apparently the gun had never been properly cleaned.
Most Americans stationed in England couldn’t wait to come back home. The damp weather, mediocre food, snobbishness, and lack of the modern conveniences (what the natives called “all mod cons”) that made the U.S. of A. great were alleviated only by the ardor of fair-haired English roses. However, Southern found the British fascinating. Growing up in Texas, he was sensitive to regional dialects. England, a country barely half the size of his home state, boasted countless accents, from East End cockney, with its almost scatological blurring of vowels and syllables, to the clear, elegant precision of the Home Counties (which was then the only acceptable accent for anyone in broadcasting), and the odd slow singsong of Midlands and other “up north” accents. Lurking beneath the seeming repressed English facade, Southern discovered intriguing currents of eccentricity and fantasy along with an innate love of irony, dry wit, and wordplay.
The English mass media, unlike America’s commercial radio and Hollywood, used its technological resources to edify the public and raise standards of education and knowledge. As one of the bastions of English culture, BBC Radio aired talks on literature, high art, and classical music along with readings and plays. Southern discovered that regardless of class and education there was a newspaper or magazine to suit almost everyone. The working class and left could choose from the Daily Mail or the Manchester Guardian.
While the middle and upper classes could enjoy fashion and society coverage in the Tatler, commentary in the New Statesman and the Spectator, humor in Punch, and a high level of journalism in the Times and Daily Telegraph. Novels, plays, and poetry were constant subjects of discussion on the radio and in magazines and newspapers. In England, Southern discovered to his relish, reading was as common as breathing.
All in all, Southern spent two years, seven months, and nine days in the Army in the European theater from October 27, 1943, through August 26, 1945. He spent a lot of his leave in London. A photograph from December 1943, shows Terry in a long army coat with a friend walking through the West End. It could be an image out of any Hollywood war movie of the period.
As he did in Texas, Southern seemed to fit in well with others, but he also discovered another group of outsiders in the Army. According to Ellen Adler, one of Southern’s many close women friends, “Terry used to say he had never met a Jew before he went into the Army and then he met these Jews and he thought they were the grooviest people he’d ever met.”
To Southern, the Jews were witty, intelligent, and colorful and managed to deal with the negative aspects of the era’s all-pervasive anti-Semitism with dignity and humor. They wore their personalities on their sleeves and projected a blend of confidence, irony, and insight that Southern aspired to.
During his Army service, the daily influx of new influences along with the sensory overload of battle began to shape the avuncular Grand Guy persona that Southern would eventually present to the world in his novel The Magical Christian. Southern realized he had survived because of luck and chance. It could have been he who stood up in the foxhole and got killed. The war taught him about existentialism and the randomness of fate years before he was able to eavesdrop on Jean-Paul Sartre on the Left Bank.
Although the armed forces were still segregated as far as race was concerned, Southern met a wide range of fellow Americans in the Army. Young men in close quarters struggling with Army regulations and routine (and the barely articulated fear of death) learned to project a face to the world to protect and hide the messy confusion inside. Observing the various fronts his fellow soldiers projected, from tight-lipped silence to constant kidding, Southern was struck by the fluidity of human personality. How one spoke and behaved was very much determined by where one was at any given moment in space and time.
Terry embraced the understated elegance and irony of Evelyn Waugh and T. S. Eliot. He began to employ certain English phrases and mannerisms in his speech for ironic or humorous effect. He wasn’t becoming a phony mid-Atlantic man. Something else was happening to the young Texan. He was developing a persona that simultaneously embraced and mocked a certain English way of looking at the world. It was the attitude of an independently wealthy Oxford don without the snobbishness or affectation. It was the persona of someone who felt courtesy and hospitality were all-important. One should not burden one’s friends with angst, but make them feel comfortable. Gentle teasing and nicknames were encouraged. Personal information should be conveyed through droll and amusing anecdotes, not raw and intimate confession. It was important to keep up appearances by dressing with decorum and subtlety.
These changes were the attempts by a slightly battle-scarred, but hardly embittered young man to bring another component to his development as a writer other than just sheer perseverance and ambition. Whereas American writers generally pursued some variant of naturalism, the English placed considerable importance on finding the right style to tell a story. Texans have also appreciated those who can relate tall tales, legends, and local history with the appropriate balance of gusto and modesty. The defeat at the Alamo, for example, is often retold as the quintessential story of Texan individualism. On the surface, it may seem strange for a Southern boy to gravitate to the mandarin style of English writers like Waugh, Stephen Spender, Anthony Powell, and Cyril Connolly, but the more one looks at the storytelling traditions in Terry’s home state, the less wide seems the gap. By becoming an Anglophile, Southern was able to stay true to his roots and simultaneously move toward a unique, nonregional voice as a writer.
After being discharged, Southern returned to Texas and hung out with his friend Big Herb, who was now in the Dallas police. Big Herb was another CK figure, according to Southern, who was also an ardent jazz fan. Accompanying Big Herb on his rounds through Central Tracks, he witnessed a few fights and scrapes that provided the basic inspiration for the story “Razor Fight.”
While it was pleasant, in a sentimental-journey kind of way, to hang out with Big Herb and some of his other high school buddies, Southern dreaded staying in Dallas.
“I think anybody with any sensitivity would not want to stay in Texas at that time. It was not just parochial, but the racism was rampant,” says Carol. “Terry told me when he got back from the war…he said [the idea of fun] was just making ‘trouble for niggers.’ Terry was revolted. He didn’t say he was. I think that the whole scene was repellent to him…the fact that he changed his accent.”
By making a decision to leave Texas, Southern became part of a great state tradition. Other famous Texan emigrés would include novelist Patricia Highsmith, film director and screenwriter Robert Benton, novelist Larry McMurtry, newsman Dan Rather, choreographer Tommy Tune, film critic Rex Reed, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, musicians and songwriters such as Janis Joplin, Kinky Friedman, Ornette Coleman, and Kris Kristofferson, and pop artist Robert Rauschenberg. In later years, Southern would become friends with some of these fellow Texas expatriates and others like actor Rip Torn and saxophonist Bobby Keyes. Southern shared their combination of restlessness, creative energy, ambition, and an innate and specific set of talents that were as wild and distinct as Texas at its primal best. Like Southern, these other exiles sought to become cosmopolitan, but on their terms.
Studying for an English degree seemed the most convenient way for Southern to take advantage of the GI Bill and pursue a writerly vocation. In the fall of 1946, he enrolled in the Great Books program, inaugurated by the then-dean Robert Maynard Hutchins at the University of Chicago. The university was beginning to burst at the seams with young veterans. Many of them lived in barrack-style prefab dormitories erected to deal with overcrowding. The university had a solid academic reputation thanks to Hutchins’s reforms, which included exams that could exempt applicants from prerequisite courses if their marks were high enough. Other writers who attended the university in the immediate postwar period included Philip Roth and George Steiner.
At the midpoint between the West and East Coasts, the gateway to the Great Plains, Chicago was a bustling metropolis with enough energy to rival Los Angeles or New York. It was also a center for jazz and the blues, the Democratic Party, two of America’s finest universities, a great newspaper town. More than L.A. or New York, whose denizens acted like inhabitants of a royal principality, Chicago was urban America at full speed. Skyscrapers, crowded streets, big cars, a modern subway. In a few years, it would become the birthplace of the Compass and Second City, which helped breed a whole school of American comedy. Chicago was also the city that inspired such diverse contemporaries as Saul Bellow, Studs Terkel, and Nelson Algren. Algren, author of The Man with the Golden Arm, which would win the first National Book Award in 1950, would have a profound influence on Southern in the coming years.
Like many young veterans going back to school, Southern was wiser and more serious than the students who had been a little young to sign up. Fraternities with their absurd initiation rites and drinking parties seemed ridiculous, if not obscene, wastes of time. Few veterans needed to prove their manhood on campus. Southern chose instead to explore the city whenever he could afford to. For the most part, he took his studies seriously. However, his decision to transfer to Northwestern was not based solely on its academic reputation. “One day I visited the campus of Northwestern and saw all these beautiful blue-eyed blondes in their yellow convertibles, or taking the sun by the lake, and I transferred to that school pronto.”
At Northwestern, Southern recalls being impressed by an English professor, Bergen Evans, and a philosophy professor, Archie Schlipp. He shared their irreverence and skepticism toward received ideas. Southern also rented an apartment with an exchange student from Calcutta, Nandan Kgal, who “turned me on to these extraordinary vindaloo dishes of eye-watering piquancy—which were too hot for most [non-Indian tastes], but delightful by Tex-Mex standards.”
Southern’s course work was shaped by the Great Books core curriculum, which meant an immersion in Plato, Aristotle, and other classical thinkers. Literary studies were heavily influenced by the New Criticism of the period as espoused by John Crowe Ransom. Much attention was paid to sticking strictly to the text for analysis and keeping biography out of the discussion. If Southern eventually became disenchanted with the New Criticism’s prissy brand of elitism, he did embrace the idea of letting the work stand apart from its creator and the concept of art for art’s sake.
Campus life at the University of Chicago and at Northwestern was largely one of quiet contemplation, an apolitical postwar idyll of literary study for its own sake. Yet Southern was not oblivious to the way the ideological climate in America was beginning to harden. He sat up at attention during one of his lectures when a professor began to explain how America’s military-industrial complex established its priorities. The professor related a story about one of his colleagues in the mathematics department: “Some congressmen came to visit him at the university and asked, ‘What’s the stage of this research [into nuclear fission]?’ ‘Well,’ the professor replied, ‘we’ve come to an impasse here. Our vector mathematics can only deal with things that have a conventional relationship to space and time, which is precluded by the phenomena of the atom being split and at the same time new particles existing.’ The congressmen said, ‘You’ve got to get someone on that right away.’ Heh-heh. So this guy whose research was in part militarily financed, called up his colleague at Princeton and told him what the situation was. ‘Put your best man on this!’ But in reality they had absolutely no idea what they were talking about or looking for.”