by Lee Hill
The professor sketched out an absurd situation of professors setting up a speculative program of research to keep the government grants coming in. The professor’s off-the-cuff tale of ivory tower follies reflected the very real increase in military spending on pure research fueled by Washington’s growing anticommunism. As the climate of opinion began to polarize with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s growing monopolization of public discourse, Southern’s thoughts about graduate work turned to the possibilities of studying abroad.
In the spring of 1948, Southern completed his English degree at Northwestern. Chicago had many attractions, but it was not enough. His literary tastes had become increasingly European. Postwar America was entering a stultifying period of fear, anti-intellectualism, and conformity.
After considering various graduate schools. Terry decided that the real thing—art, love, truth—was abroad. Many of his heroes, notably Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, had spent time in Europe. It seemed as if a few years spent outside the country would sharpen his talent. So he applied to the Sorbonne on the GI Bill.
Passed by Congress in 1944, the GI Bill of Rights was one of the last great initiatives of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, more than twenty million beneficiaries have taken advantage of funds allowing access to an astonishing range of educational opportunities. During the late forties and early fifties, an entire generation of young veterans, from modest upbringings, would gain access to some of America’s finest universities as well as institutions abroad. It was a significant political step in making America a freer and more egalitarian society.
The painter Larry Rivers, who would become one of Southern’s closest friends in later years, described the impact of the GI Bill on his and Southern’s generation: “The GI Bill of Rights was a World War II military award, governmental gratitude putting its money where its lip was. By offering veterans the advantage and ease of getting paid to learn, the GI Bill, like the WPA educational programs of the thirties, sent thousands of servicemen into the territory of the humanities, unintentionally creating a mass audience for artists and their efforts, and even more unintentionally producing more artists per hundred thousand civilians than ever before to seduce this mass of new lookers. It offered the possibilities of education to lower-class kids in whose hovels going to college was only possible if their parents worked their lives away for them or if they themselves worked all day long and studied at night.”
Southern chose the perfect time to leave the United States. The rise of McCarthyism was creating a cultural climate of anti-intellectualism, xenophobia, and conformity. He had seen some of the professors at Northwestern suffer the Cold War chill hastened by the HUAC hearings. By contrast, France seemed a more mature country, whose traditions enabled it to transcend the cold war tensions between the Left and Right.
Escaping American parochialism and expanding one’s cultural horizons were certainly important motivations for Southern. It was easy to explain to friends. Privately, Southern probably sensed he was on the verge of reinventing himself. Growing up in Texas, the war, going to college…momentous events to be sure, but it seemed like a rehearsal for something bigger and better. In Paris, the proverbial City of Light itself, things would really get cooking.
You’re Too Hip, Baby
…I return in my mind’s eye to Paris. Paris, the dividing line. Before Paris, experience could be savored for its own immediate satisfactions. It was total. Afterwards, I became cunning, a writer, somebody with a use for everything, even intimacies.
—Mordecai Richler, “A Sense of the Ridiculous”
Those were halcyon days and the little-mags were cooking,” Southern said with no small hint of nostalgia when recalling his formative years as a writer in Paris. “From ’48 to ’52, the cafés were such great places to hang out—you could smoke hash at the tables if you were fairly discreet. There was the expatriate crowd, which was more or less comprised of interesting people, creatively inclined. So we would fall out there at one of the cafés, sip Pernod until dinner, then afterwards go to a jazz club.”
Southern arrived in Paris in September 1948 to study at the Sorbonne’s Faculté des Lettres. There was little pressure on foreign students to actually complete a degree. Like the rest of France, the august institution was suffering from the effects of postwar austerity. The Sorbonne was quite eager to take on as many foreign students as possible and a special stream had been set up for American students called Le Cours de la Civilisation Française. Most of the students in the program would pick up only a smidgen of French and rarely socialized with non-Americans.
The specifics of Southern’s program were vague: “The way it worked at the Sorbonne was you enrolled for a doctorate, chose your thesis. Mine was ‘The Influence of Mallarmé on the English Novel Since 1940,’ which seemed to satisfy the powers that were, and left me free to go to jazz clubs by night and the Cinémathèque by day…in short, the stuff of emancipation by day and by night. Theoretically, you were researching your thesis in preparation of defending it at some time in the very indefinite future. Class attendance was not required and no exams were given.”
When Southern first arrived in Paris, he kept to himself. Traces of his Texas accent remained, but were hidden by his long silences and cryptic utterances. According to one of the many friends he would make in Paris, John Marquand Jr. (a.k.a. John Phillips, the son of the best-selling author of The Late George Apley), it was a little-known secret “that when Terry first arrived in Paris, he had been as callow as the rest of us. He had worn a necktie then, tied in a big Windsor knot, and a blue pinstripe suit with wide padded shoulders.”
Southern found cheap accommodation in the Hotel Verneuil, a one-star bedsit affair run by a benevolent Corsican family, where the novelist Herbert Gold also stayed. It was close to the Sorbonne, where Southern ate many of his meals in the university’s cafeteria, and the bohemian ferment of the Left Bank. Although Southern spent four years attending the Sorbonne, he never formally applied for his certificate. There was little official pressure on foreign students. Despite Southern’s casualness toward his studies, he did take advantage of sitting in on various guest lectures by the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau, and Marcel Raymond, the author of From Baudelaire to Surrealism. The latter book, along with T. S. Eliot’s The Sacred Wood, had a profound influence on Southern’s growing preference for conceptualism over autobiography.
Southern’s GI Bill allowance of seventy-five dollars a month only stretched so far. “I had to depend on getting money from my parents and on the kindness of strangers, as they say.” Southern’s laid-back attitude to money and work bordered on Zen-like indifference. As an only child, he was coddled by his parents. Aside from a few odd jobs, he had really known only two worlds—the Army and academe. While these experiences had matured him, they had given him little in the way of business skills. Whatever entrepreneurial zeal he possessed was directed toward his dream of becoming a great writer like Hemingway or Faulkner.
Outside the lecture halls of the Sorbonne, the earnest young veteran and college graduate quickly metamorphosed into a seasoned bohemian. The four years in Paris became a frenzy of experience. In various jazz clubs around town, Southern was able to see Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis at a time when bebop was becoming the fifties equivalent of acid rock or punk. At the Cinémathèque, run by Henri Langlois, he had access to classics of European art cinema such as Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants de Paradis, Jean Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un Poète, and Luis Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or. Bebop and the European art film were influences equally important as literature on Southern’s search for an aesthetic that was pure, spontaneous, and immediate.
Southern also managed to rub shoulders with Cocteau, Camus, and Sartre outside the lecture halls. The last two authors were the Lennon and McCartney of French existentiali
sm. They could be regularly spotted “performing” at the Café Flore and other trendy bistros in the rue Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Camus represented the dashing poetic and heroic side—one could be a great philosopher and look like Bogart, too. Sartre was the enigmatic mandarin, whose intense, almost rabbinical scrutiny of the nature of language, existence, and reality was complemented by a godfatherlike skill for literary politics. Cocteau was more of a homebody, but Southern managed to get invited to his informal salon on a number of occasions.
For Southern, existentialism simply made common sense. Whether God existed or not was beside the point. Even if an Almighty Being did exist, he/she/whatever was unavailable at the best of times. One’s sense of purpose shifted from moment to moment. Along with jazz, existentialism was a youthful passion that would become embedded in Southern’s worldview for the rest of his life. It was a personal philosophy that had little time for self-pity, second thoughts, guilt, or regret. Southern would stick stubbornly to it until the end of his life: “I’m of the existentialist persuasion…. What you do is what you do. Things that you want to do and don’t do don’t count for anything.”
Paris became a convenient base for exploring the rest of Europe. Southern would make spontaneous forays into Holland, Greece, Italy, and Spain usually with a buddy or a girlfriend for company. For Southern, the Old World was a new world, a place where one was “inescapably confronted with the dramatic contrasts of the human condition.” Just looking through the window of a bus or train was revelatory: “On a trip, say from Geneva to Seville, one sees a diversity of life which could not possibly be encountered elsewhere within a comparable radius of travel. Frequent crossing of frontiers will shake one’s beliefs to their very foundations.”
As it did for countless other ambitious young men and women who came to the City of Light from the United States, Canada, and Britain, Paris symbolized the great adventure of the expatriate experience to Southern. He reveled in the knowledge that he was walking in the footsteps of countless writers from Henry James and W. Somerset Maugham to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway. It was the place where Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud explored various kinds of sense-derangement without the usual moral restrictions. Here was the city where James Joyce wrote much of Ulysses. Here was where little magazines like transition and The Transatlantic Review were launched like Molotov cocktails at the bourgeoisie. One could still visit Sylvia Beach’s bookshop, where so much of recent literary history began.
The Lost Generation of the twenties exerted an especially strong pull on Southern and his fellow expatriates. In a slightly cynical Esquire piece on the Paris Review crowd, “Looking for Hemingway,” Gay Talese hinted that this new wave of expatriates were looking for a golden era that was no longer in existence. Fitzgerald was dead. Hemingway and Faulkner were now ossifying middlebrow favorites. Talese suggested that the post–World War II generation was trying to re-create an illustrious era that could never be repeated. But Talese’s thesis only goes so far in defining this second “lost generation.”
Hundreds of veterans came to Paris in the late forties and fifties because the GI Bill made it cheap and convenient to do so. Those that had served in the European theater were curious to experience a great culture rebuilding itself after the ravages of war. These veterans were neither lost nor cynical. Certainly many of these young men and women in their twenties had seen terrible things in the war, but they had not lost their essential optimism or desire for new experiences.
Many of the post–World War II expatriates were African Americans. Richard Wright, the best-selling author of Native Son, arrived in May 1946, seeking refuge from his sudden celebrity and persecution for his left-wing sympathies. James Baldwin moved into the Hotel Verneuil to finish his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. Chester Himes, an ex-con turned writer, began to move away from the realist novel to create a series of books about two Harlem detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. For many African Americans of ambition and talent, Europe was about as color-blind a place as they could hope for. Certainly there was discrimination, as many North African blacks could attest, but it did not possess the same magnitude as in the United States. Segregated drinking fountains, racist landlords and employers, and lynchings were all too common in the land of the free. Blacks, perhaps more than their white counterparts, really did experience “emancipation” in Europe. Not only were they allowed to pursue careers in the arts without facing various institutional barriers, but they were encouraged by the enthusiasm of the French. Jazz musicians in particular thrived in the large circuit of clubs throughout France and the rest of Europe.
If Hemingway and company still cast a long shadow, Southern’s generation was beginning to produce its first group of superstars. Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and Gore Vidal had also passed through Paris in 1947 and 1948. These three writers had become the literary heroes of the postwar period with their novels, The Naked and the Dead, Other Voices, Other Rooms, and Williwaw. Their celebrity was confirmed with healthy book sales, Life magazine spreads, and critical raves. Although Southern would meet and become friendly with all three men in the late fifties and sixties, he probably found their media canonization distasteful. One of the first rules of the emerging hipster ethos in Paris was that popular success was incompatible with genuine artistic achievement.
Toward the end of the decade, Irwin Shaw and James Jones, authors of the best-selling war novels The Young Lions and From Here to Eternity, moved to Paris and initiated a jet-set lifestyle. Both writers threw parties and dinners where struggling young writers could mingle and eyeball the rich and famous. They were not much older than Southern and the other young expatriates, but Shaw and Jones’s benevolence and generosity transformed them into father figures.
For the most part, the various social and intellectual attractions of Paris made it a congenial place to be young, broke, and unknown. As one of the primary beneficiaries of the Marshall Plan, inaugurated in 1947 by the U.S. government to aid Europe’s ravaged postwar economy, France was a cheap place to live. Southern’s meager funds stretched far. One could buy a simple dinner of fries, steak, and a glass or two of wine for a dollar. A private room in a hotel could be rented for fifteen dollars a month. The used bookstores and stalls yielded a bounty of easily afforded literary riches. If Parisians, with their preference for socialism of one brand or another, resented the American presence (YANKEE GO HOME would become as common a graffito as KILROY WAS HERE), they generally kept their grumbling to themselves.
The city’s rich literary history and all-pervasive bohemian atmosphere made it easier for Southern to pursue his vocation. He had been writing furiously since his Army days, but chose not to show much of this material to anyone. During his first year in Paris, he tried to maintain a diary. He later told Francis Wyndham that he discarded about three novels during this period. Little is known about this material and no samples of it appear to have survived. Southern was struggling to avoid fiction that was autobiographical or regional in the manner of Hemingway and Faulkner. Instead, he was trying to learn from the modernist experiments of Joyce and Céline without descending into parody or pastiche.
When he was not quietly trying to be a writer who could be as interesting to others as he was to himself, Southern was rapidly making friends. The world of English-speaking expatriates was small enough for kindred spirits to link up fairly quickly. One of the most important of these new acquaintances was Mason Hoffenberg.
If there was a model for the hipster perfection that Southern sought, this was it. A short wiry man with slightly bulging eyes, Hoffenberg was a Beat before the term had even entered the underground, let alone the mainstream. Born in New York in 1922, he was the son of a successful businessman who owned a shoe factory. As a teenager, Hoffenberg briefly attended the same military school as Anastasio Somoza, the future dictator of Nicaragua. He knew Diane Arbus in high school. He served in the U.S. Army and was part of the forces that liberated Paris. Hoffenbe
rg had spent the first few years after the war hanging around Greenwich Village. The San Remo bar became a regular haunt for the ur-slacker. Like Southern, he had also used the GI Bill to return to Paris. Because Hoffenberg spoke and understood French better than most expats, he was able to land a steady gig at Agence France-Presse as a copy editor.
Unlike Southern, Hoffenberg possessed a direct in-your-face attitude toward the world. Some found Hoffenberg’s contrary brand of self-confidence obnoxious, but to Southern, he was the real McCoy. His worldliness was confirmed by his marriage to an attractive, upper-class French woman, Couquitte, daughter of art historian Élie Faure. Hoffenberg, like several of Southern’s new hipster buddies in Paris, was also in the process of developing a lifelong heroin habit. He would go off and on heroin so often that he began to give his various habits women’s names, like hurricanes. William Burroughs would later say that Hoffenberg was one of those who liked the pain of withdrawal. For Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press, he wrote the “dbs” (dirty books) Sin for Breakfast (as Hamilton Drake) and Until She Screams (as Faustino Perez).
Quality Lit. Jazz. Café society. Pornography. Mainlining heroin. Hoffenberg was up for it all. He became the first of the many extreme and dynamic personalities that Southern would embrace, befriend, and try to stay loyal to throughout his life. Such relationships would lead to productive and exciting collaborations, but also to unresolved feelings of envy, resentment, betrayal, and various kinds of unhealthy psychological dependence for both parties. In the case of Hoffenberg, Southern found a buddy who shared his dark humor, flights of fancy, and willingness to go all out.