by Lee Hill
“Mason was a poet and just a very creative guy. Ultracreative. He could have been, God knows, a Nobel Prize–type poet,” said Southern. Southern and Hoffenberg became inseparable. Part of the attraction was Hoffenberg’s Jewishness, which Southern was endlessly fascinated by. The two also shared a love of wild, exaggerated humor often of the what-if variety. In the countless letters and postcards they exchanged through the fifties and sixties, they would address and sign off their correspondence with nicknames as varied as “David Selznick” and “Leslie.”
Beneath the sarcastic quips and joking was a mutual recognition of each other’s literary seriousness. They shared a voracious appetite for books, movies, jazz, various stimulants, long conversations, and women. Hoffenberg was more at ease socially. And while Hoffenberg, for Southern and many others in the expat crowd, was considered the better craftsman, it was Southern who was far more disciplined and active in realizing his potential as a writer.
Through Hoffenberg, Southern eventually met nineteen-year-old Mordecai Richler, a Jewish Canadian from Montreal. Richler had come to Paris to escape the provincialism of English Canada and the anti-Semitism of Montreal’s WASP ruling class. Like Southern and Hoffenberg, Richler also had a dark and sarcastic take on life. His novels The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and St. Urbain’s Horseman would successfully blend autobiography and satire. Unlike Southern and Hoffenberg, Richler proved to be more pragmatic and savvy about his career. His successes would not have the kind of cultural impact of Candy or Dr. Strangelove, but he wouldn’t end up with Southern’s monumental money problems or Hoffenberg’s enervating addictions to drugs and booze.
Recalling Southern and Hoffenberg from the comfort of a pub near his apartment in London’s chic Chelsea area more than forty years later, Richler remembers how young they all were more than anything.
“I thought Terry was very witty,” recalls Richler. “I didn’t know much about his actual writing then. He was interesting to be with…. Mason was small, lean, and wiry and had protruding eyes, while Terry was tall and had a hawklike visage. Mason always had a book in his pocket.
“Mason had a very tender, gentle side. I remember he and Couquitte had a flat in Paris they would lease. He said, he wasn’t going to rent it to any fucking writer because they would always screw him. He rented it to some business people and of course got screwed on the rent anyway.”
Richler was friends with another Canadian writer, Mavis Gallant, whom Southern got to know tangentially. As one of the few female writers in a community heavy on Hemingwayesque bravado, she kept to herself. In addition to making Paris her new home, she would also become one of the New Yorker’s favorite short story writers along with Alice Munro and John Updike.
Hoffenberg also introduced Southern and Richler to one of his San Remo drinking buddies, James Baldwin. Baldwin had left the United States because he was a triple threat—black, gay, and a writer. He seemed to be suffering from the “starving in a garret” syndrome more than most. His first year in Paris was bleak. Barely able to afford his modest rent, Baldwin didn’t eat regularly and became ill. Upon recovering from the flu, he was thrown into jail for allegedly taking a bedsheet from another hotel. Southern even saw him being led off in handcuffs. After several terrifying days of desolate imprisonment, Baldwin’s release was secured by a lawyer who was a friend of someone Baldwin had worked for in New York. Southern and Hoffenberg sneaked Baldwin into the Sorbonne’s student cafeteria several times for a free meal. Southern also met Baldwin’s great love, the Swiss artist Lucien Happersberger. The relationship would inspire much of Giovanni’s Room.
Baldwin, Richler, Southern, and Hoffenberg were drawn quickly to the New-Story crowd led by David Burnett, the son of Martha Foley and Whit Burnett. Among aspiring writers, Burnett’s parents were famous for creating Story magazine, which made it a point of publishing promising new work by young writers. Burnett hoped to create a more cutting-edge version of his parents’ publication, which would tap into the headier work the younger generation was creating. Burnett and Southern also became very close. Like Hoffenberg, Burnett was a heroin addict, who somehow managed to compartmentalize his life by juggling literary enterprise and a major drug habit. He created illustrations that went along with the work in the journal he christened New-Story and was also an avid film buff.
New-Story’s first issue appeared in March 1951. The underfunded journal managed to limp only along until 1953, but the few issues that did appear carried stories by Southern, Baldwin, Ray Bradbury, William Goyen, and Alison Lurie. Despite its brief life span, New-Story maintained a relatively high standard and its acceptance of two of Southern’s stories quickly conffirmed him as one of the expat crowd’s rising stars.
In the June 1951 issue of New-Story, “The Automatic Gate” appeared, and eventually Southern received fifty dollars for it. In this naturalistic vignette of Parisian working-class life, Monsieur Pommard, a ticket collector in the Paris Métro on the verge of retirement, dispenses banal wisdom to a bored coworker in his twenties. The older man is obsessed with the uncivil behavior of commuters who race through the automatic gate in order to catch the trains. The story ends with a cataclysmic flourish when a pregnant woman is badly injured by the gate.
As Southern would do in the opening of his first novel, Flash and Filigree, the story begins with a ridiculously elaborate description of how the automatic gate works. Pommard is determined to halt, or at least slow down, those individuals disrupting his fussy notions of order and decorum. What is remarkable about the story is the deceptive quality of description. Unlike many expatriates, Southern did not stand aloof from the life of the Parisians around him. If one did not know the author was an American, “The Automatic Gate” could be a short story by Camus or perhaps an unpublished extract from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea. The grimness of Pommard’s routine on the night shift is conveyed through sentences like “his uniform was shabby, and there was some dirt on the back of his hand” and “His eyes traced the track, low set between sweeps of clean concrete, all cast a sterile rose green from the overhung fluorescence.” Much of the story is taken up by Pommard’s almost hysterical indignation toward the commuters’ seemingly moblike disregard for civil behavior. Despite Pommard’s subway vigil, a horrible accident does occur because Pommard is so caught up in his role as a guardian that he has lost a significant part of his humanity.
So petty and monotonous are Pommard’s monologues that it becomes easy on first reading to wonder, What the hell is the story about anyway? Southern’s strange form of naturalism creates the sense of something odd and foreboding hidden on the periphery of the action. Chaos and disaster, in Southern’s early stories, lurk on the margins of the routine and everyday. For a young American writer in his mid-twenties, “The Automatic Gate” is also remarkable for its unobtrusive use of French colloquialisms. Where many of Southern’s contemporaries were under the sway of Hemingway, his work appears to have assimilated the existentialist viewpoint of the Europeans with little awkwardness.
In the November edition of New-Story, Southern contributed “The Butcher,” another glimpse into the inner life of working-class Parisians. The title character, Beauvais, is a middle-aged worker in an abattoir. His son, Gerard, has been wounded in action at the front and is convalescing at home. Gerard finds it difficult to watch newsreel footage of the war. Then Gerard sees a magazine pictorial about the war and launches into a long monologue about bayoneting another man. His father listens sympathetically to the traumatic recollection. The next day at work, a coworker draws the father’s attention to a local newspaper item celebrating his son’s bravery in the field of action. Beauvais cuts out the article and pins it to the wall of his workstation to show to his son. The remainder of the story is taken up with a detailed description of Beauvais killing cattle entering the slaughterhouse and preparing the meat for sale. By the end of their shift, Beauvais and his coworkers stand on a floor covered with blood waiting for another worker to mop up.
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nbsp; The contrast between the killing on the battlefield and the more socially acceptable slaughter of animals is handled with detachment. The story is an inquiry into how various forms of violence become invisible. The violence of war may be necessary (the son understands that at the front it is either kill or be killed), but is there a connection between it and the more casual, unthinking ability to kill an animal for food? The questions are left to linger in the reader’s mind to provoke and disturb. Whether they can be answered is not the point, but Southern, in a more understated way than his wild satiric novels, is already using irony to upset, provoke, and astonish his readers.
Southern also became friendly with the editors of Zero and Points. Zero was edited by two New Yorkers, Themoscles Hoetis and Albert Benveniste. The first issue in 1949 featured Christopher Isherwood and Kenneth Patchen. Sinbad Vail, the son of Peggy Guggenheim and Laurence Vail, started Points (subtitled “a Magazine for the Young Writer”) in 1948. Mordecai Richler’s first published short story, “Shades of Darkness,” appeared in it.
The feverish literary aspirations of Southern, Hoffenberg, et al. were kept hidden by a rapidly emerging hipster cool. “Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know” became Southern and Hoffenberg’s variation on Louis Armstrong’s definition of jazz: “if you have to ask, you’ll never know.” Careerism was meant to be discreetly acted on, but never voiced. According to Southern, actually getting published was a dubious achievement.
“It was sort of an embarrassment like you had sold out or something. If it was corny enough and square enough and bourgeois enough to get accepted by some of these asshole editors, how could it be worth anything?” he recalled. “So mostly [the literary scene] was all about reading and turning people on to things you had read like Mallarmé, Malaparte, and Canetti. He was a great one. Auto-da-fé. And then showing people stuff you had written and then there was some things where people would read aloud, which seemed a little suspect and too social to me.”
Southern was also fond of Franz Kafka and read everything by the neurasthenic Czech fabulist he could find. Kafka’s diaries and letters impressed Southern as much as the novels and short stories. He shared Kafka’s preference for “night-writing” and believed one’s best work emerged when one was least conscious of an audience. Like Poe, Kafka had a genius for making the fantastic seem terrifyingly real. And after all, Southern and his café chums reasoned, wasn’t this the problem with the traditional realist novel? The concentration camp and the bomb made simple naturalism seem almost obscene. In order for one’s writing to have any profound meaning or impact, one had to go beyond merely mastering accepted forms and conventions, simple homage, and liberal middle-class notions of good taste and appropriate subject matter.
The hundreds of cafés and bars in Paris offered the perfect low-pressure backdrop to discuss such matters as well as the progress of various works at hand. One could sit all day nursing a drink or coffee or play pinball. The cafés were also a great place to score drugs from hashish and Benzedrine to heroin. One of Southern and Hoffenberg’s regular contacts for such stimulants was a North African, Hadj, who would become one of the dedicatees of Candy. Southern was certainly fond of the various drugs available and experimented with most of them. Had not the great French symbolist poets Rimbaud and Verlaine championed the derangement of the senses as a way for the dedicated writer to get that visionary edge?
Southern’s strong sense of self-preservation made him fear heroin. Even though he hung out with addicts constantly, and would continue to do so when married to Carol, he was deeply scared of its pull. He watched others turn on, but declined to join in. More to his liking were alcohol, cigarettes, and hashish. The latter was an especially pleasant way to alter the surroundings without any of the nasty side effects of doing too many uppers or shooting up junk. Later in the sixties, Southern would develop a dependency on Dexamyl. Dexamyl’s speedlike effects gave him the seemingly limitless energy to stay up for days on end and complete screenplays. Of course, like all such drugs, long-term abuse outweighed the benefits and made Southern more susceptible to heart disease, strokes, and blood and respiratory problems.
The Old Navy, a distinctly down-market version of Le Dôme and La Coupole, was a favorite hangout for Southern, Hoffenberg, and Richler. Located on the boulevard Saint-Germain, across from the Odéon Métro station, the bar-tabac provided a mediocre, but cheap selection of coffee, beer, wine, and digestifs. A couple of battered pinball machines imported from the States before the war provided the hipster equivalent of a morning workout on a Nautilus.
Richler recalls that the general routine was to sit down at a table and gradually four or five people would gather, friends as well as strangers. The various circles—New-Story, Zero, Points—all overlapped. Since it was often painful to talk about work and many of them were broke, according to Richler, conversations tended to gravitate toward a running ironic commentary on what the squares were up to:
It would be nice, it would be tidy, to say with hindsight that we were a group, knit by political anger or a literary policy or even an aesthetic revulsion for all things American, but the truth was we recognized each other by no more than a shared sense of the ridiculous. And so we passed many a languorous, pot-filled afternoon on the terrace of the Dôme or the Selecte, improvising, not unlike jazz groups, on the hot news from America, where Truman was yielding to Eisenhower. We bounced an inanity to and fro until, magnified through bizarre extension, we had disposed of it as an absurdity. We invented obscene quiz shows for television, and ad-libbed sexual outrages that could be interpolated into a John Marquand novel, a Norman Rockwell Post cover, or a June Allyson movie.
Patti Dryden, a New York graphics designer and illustrator who befriended Hoffenberg in the seventies and eighties, says the dynamic between Southern and his future Candy coauthor was very much one of an older brother tutoring a younger brother. “Mason always tried to refer to Terry as a schmuck. Like a kid brother. ‘What does he know? He dresses like an idiot, blah, blah.’ That was Mason being affectionate. You have to understand he was a curmudgeon and I never heard him say he loved anybody…it just wasn’t his way. So when he was putting you down in that kind of caustic way, that was showing great affection. [Laughs] He remembered your name at least.”
Another source of tension between Hoffenberg and Southern was the simple fact that Hoffenberg had access to more money. His parents sent him checks regularly and Couquitte’s family helped with finances and baby-sitting. Hoffenberg was able to take off on skiing trips or run down to Spain with less hesitation than Southern.
While Hoffenberg liked to stir things up through argument and debate, Southern preferred to sit back, observe, and toss out the odd comment or one-liner. He only loosened up around those he knew well or with the aid of a few drinks. Around the same time he met Hoffenberg, Southern formed another alliance that would be less complicated and more enduring.
On an excursion to a little fishing village in the South of France, Villefranche-sur-Mer, Southern met Aram Avakian, a New Yorker of Armenian descent. “On a Sunday, about eleven in the morning, I was seated at this café near the waterfront. Behind was the village green and then the hotel. They had this French military band performing this musicale for the weekly Sunday performance. I looked around and saw this guy wearing shades with a beard walking out of the hotel towards the café where I was sitting. He walked through this whole military band formation. He looked really whacked out. He just kept coming and amazingly enough didn’t manage to bump into anyone or get arrested.”
Marveling at Avakian’s stoned grace, Southern struck up a conversation. He discovered they were both huge jazz fans. Avakian’s older brother, George, worked for Columbia Records overseeing the marketing of the international catalog of acts like Charles Aznavour and producing the likes of Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. Aram had known Jack Kerouac at his high school, Horace Mann.
Aram and Terry became fast friends and roommates. Their interests i
n books, movies, and jazz complemented each other without the kind of tense one-upmanship that existed with Hoffenberg.
For someone who seemed shy and embarrassed on first meeting, Southern had a gift for making friends. He was a good listener who projected a good-humored nonjudgmental face to the various students, writers, artists, musicians, and bohemian types who made up expatriate Paris. Many of Southern’s friends and casual acquaintances were the black musicians who found steady work in the clubs. He considered his conversations with them more revelatory than those he had with fellow writers.
“I don’t know how to be very articulate about [my kinship with blacks] or analytical about it, but I always seemed to come away from those relationships or an evening in their company with a new and more informed outlook than I had before. I always felt I was getting a valuable education and some insights into things I might have learned eventually but was learning more quickly and more gracefully than if I had to go through the hardships myself,” Southern recalled many years later.
One of Southern’s jazz buddies was the saxophone player Allen Eager. He accompanied Eager on a visit to Amsterdam. Upon arrival, Eager became obsessed with scoring heroin. After some frantic investigation on Eager’s part, an address of a dealer was obtained. While Southern waited back at the hotel, Eager made his rendezvous. “He comes out and gets busted and he thinks ohmigod because he’s got everything on him, needles, etc., and oh, he thinks, ‘this is it.’ They search him and they find all this stuff, you know, the dope, and the needle and everything and they still keep looking. And it turns out that they’re looking for diamonds, and so after they can’t find the diamonds, they give him a good smart salute and send him on his way. So I thought, what a good drug town Amsterdam is.”