A Grand Guy: The Art and Life of Terry Southern

by Lee Hill

  Southern’s firsthand observations of the jazz subculture were documented in a short story, “Thriving on a Riff,” which appeared in the short-lived Janus, edited by Daniel Maroc. Southern reworked the story over the next few years until it became known as “You’re Too Hip, Baby.”

  “You’re Too Hip, Baby” was eventually published in the August 1963 issue of Esquire. Through an economical mix of character study, autobiography, and social satire, Southern constructs a subtle critique of the hipster ethos of the expatriates. That critique seems more profound and complex when one considers that Southern is ultimately questioning a worldview that he would become the embodiment of.

  Bebop’s spontaneity was reflected in Southern’s confident and seamless ability to craft dialogue. Maintaining that spontaneity in his writing became Southern’s obsession—and a value he would try to pass on to students in his screenwriting classes several decades later. He tried to avoid second-guessing his initial imaginative impulses when writing a first draft. If one allowed the idea to reach its natural conclusion, rewriting could only make it better. It was like a jazz musician who found it easier to record multiple performances in the studio than to labor over one recording.

  In “You’re Too Hip, Baby,” Murray, an American studying at the Sorbonne, becomes friendly with Buddy Talbott, a black jazz pianist, and his wife, Jackie. To other expatriates, Murray appears in “possession of a secret knowledge.” He is envied for his ability to move through disparate social scenes with a relaxed yet enigmatic charm.

  As his friendship with Buddy and Jackie develops, Murray introduces them to the best and cheapest places to eat, where to score hash, art films at the Cinémathèque, galleries, and even lectures at the Sorbonne. Initially Buddy and Jackie are grateful. Murray is generous, friendly, and digs the music. They want to reciprocate in some way. When Buddy has to play a gig, Jackie and Murray stay in and listen to records. Jackie attempts to seduce Murray, but he politely waves her off. A few days later, Buddy and Murray drive out to the country for a picnic. After their meal, they lie on the ground and doze. Buddy makes an inquiring pass that Murray, as he had done with Jackie, rebuffs. More days pass. Murray spots his friends dining at an unfamiliar café and stops to say hello. After some awkward banter, Buddy asks Murray “just what have we got that interests you?” Rather unsatisfactorily, Murray replies, “I dig the scene. That’s all. I dig the scene and the sounds.” In response to which Buddy delivers the devastating put-down of the title.

  In trying too hard to be cool and hip, Murray has run away from himself. By contrast, Buddy and Jackie know what they want—the freedom just to be. For Buddy and Jackie, Paris is a place where they can get away not only from America’s racism, but also from the patronizing and ineffectual attitudes of white liberals. Murray takes the freedom of his color for granted and gropes around for something elusive and out of reach. In his noble effort to reinvent himself through the pursuit of Hip, he denies that he may be prompted by such crude motives as lust, loneliness, snobbery, and a kind of reverse racism—the idea that Buddy and Jackie must be hip simply because they are black.

  “You’re Too Hip, Baby” is classic Terry Southern: it astonishes the reader with a mature, concise treatment of the elusive and diffuse philosophy of Hip and blasts the smugness of those who take Hip too seriously.

  Aside from drugs, cheap cafés, and great music, Paris offered a wide range of erotic possibility that the Kinsey Report only hinted at. For the average American abroad, guilt-free sex was a big plus. Unlike the down and gritty whorehouses in Central Tracks, the brothels in Paris were abundant enough to accommodate most budgets and tastes. When coeds doing their junior year abroad proved too coy, one could always get a buddy or two to get together to make an “investigative” trip to a local brothel. Southern embellished these accounts in later stories. In 1984, when asked to contribute to a salute to Kurt Vonnegut, Southern responded with a baroque reminiscence about visiting the House of Tongue, where Southern and his other Paris Review cronies were ministered to by lascivious and attentive nymphets.

  While Southern responded to Paris’s many diversions with enthusiasm, he was also productive. He wrote for a few hours every day. In addition to circulating his stories among the little magazines, he shipped off copies of his new work to publications in the States. His work found a less understanding audience there. Vance Bourjailly, for example, rejected two submissions to Discovery magazine, “Put Down” (which later surfaced in the Evergreen Review) and “Child Psychology,” which is now lost. Despite these disappointments, Southern was excited by a new magazine that was being planned by George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, and H. L. “Doc” Humes. The three men represented the Ivy League wing of the expatriate invasion. Unlike Southern, Hoffenberg, Richler, and Baldwin, they had more money and a sense of entitlement that gave them the confidence and the chutzpah to see Paris as a blank canvas.

  The Paris Review crowd, with which Southern would become closely identified, was just starting to form in 1952. One of the first arrivals among this privileged group was Matthiessen, who had spent his junior year at Yale in Paris and returned upon graduation in 1950. He and his stunning blond wife, Patsy Southgate, lived on the rue de Chazelles. Their apartment became an informal gathering place for other Americans in Paris. Matthiessen and Southgate were friends with “Doc” Humes, who was trying to breathe life into an ailing entertainment guide he had started called the Paris News Post.

  “Doc” Humes was in some respects the Neal Cassady of the Paris Review crowd. Like Cassady, he was a charismatic center of energy, whose enthusiasm spurred more cautious souls into action. Born in Arizona, he served in the Navy during the war and then studied at MIT and Harvard. Like so many expatriates, he was putting in time at the Sorbonne while trying to be a writer. Humes was fond of taking on big projects. The Paris News Post was one of them.

  The idea for a different type of little magazine had evolved one day over coffee at Le Dôme in Montparnasse in the spring of 1951. Humes thought a fictional component would give the Paris News Post a new lease on life. He offered Matthiessen the job of fiction editor, an opening that was not exactly attracting droves of overqualified applicants. Matthiessen accepted and began to put the word out that he was looking for short stories to publish.

  Somehow Matthiessen came into the possession of a manuscript called “The Sun and the Still-born Stars” by Terry Southern. It was the best thing he had seen in the slush pile that was building up. He told Humes that this was the kind of story the Post needed to publish.

  “The Sun and the Still-born Stars” was eventually published in Paris Review No. 4 in the winter of 1953. It begins with an understated description of the routine life of Sid Peckham, a young World War II veteran who, along with his dutiful wife, lives on a farm just outside Corpus Christi. Aside from Army service in Europe, Peckham has never left Texas. Peckham and his wife toil on their small farm without comment or complaint. On the weekends, they go to the movies. Yet the Technicolor fantasies of the big screen make little impact on their routine. They drift through their chores in zombielike silence. Finally, as if the possibilities of life can no longer be sublimated through movies, something fantastic occurs. One night a strange sea creature emerges from the kelp Sid uses to fertilize his crops. Peckham and the creature engage in a fight, which ends with Peckham being dragged into the sea. The story’s coda is equally bizarre. The wife returns to the movie theater to catch the regular matinee. Has she simply gone mad and retreated into routine after her husband’s bizarre death? Does she hope to see her husband on the big screen? Did she even know the difference between the routine of farm life and the dreamworld of the movies?

  “The Sun and the Still-born Stars” is visionary in its simplicity. Southern describes, but never explains. The reader is left with a disturbing but poetic sense of enigma. Much less celebrated, this story is as good as Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” in its mix of the real and the fantastic.

  To Matthi
essen and others in the Paris Review crowd, “The Sun and the Still-born Stars” was ample evidence a genuine and original talent was in their midst. It would become one of Southern’s most reprinted and anthologized stories. Like much of Southern’s best work, it has a deceptively naturalistic surface that belies the strange blend of nightmare and fantasy beneath. This eerie mixture owed much to Southern’s childhood love of Poe. Yet the story is no mere pastiche and traces much of its vividness to Southern’s experience of farm life in Texas. As with much of Southern’s short fiction, an autobiographical core becomes the launching pad for an original, wondrous, and heartbreaking modern fable. Like “The Automatic Gate” and “The Butcher,” the story manages to penetrate the inner life of very ordinary working-class characters without being sentimental or patronizing. It is the kind of story that makes one whistle with awe and ask, “Where does this guy get his ideas?”

  Matthiessen slowly got to know Southern, whom he found “rather cryptic, with very long gaps and pauses in his utterances, attributable to ingested substances—he would sort of “lean” back into the conversation—and if he was able to link up what he said to where he had trailed off minutes before, it was always interesting and/or very funny.

  “[Terry] rarely spoke of Texas (and never memorably in my hearing), which suggested there was not much in his early life that he cared to remember or had not left behind—there seemed to be something missing in his story or hidden or at least enigmatic, and this intrigued people. But certainly he mentioned Texas, since for a while I called him ‘Tex’ to nettle him.”

  Matthiessen began to take a more proactive approach as the fiction editor of the Post. He persuaded Humes that the listings magazine should be put out of its misery and they should begin raising funds for something new, exciting, and more relevant to their own ambitions and the community of budding scribes. Humes agreed and then sold the rights to the Post for six hundred dollars to a rich college girl who managed to publish one more issue. He contacted another friend, George Ames Plimpton, the son of a prominent New York lawyer, who was studying at Kings College, Cambridge. Plimpton was also searching for various forms of inspiration in Paris. It does not appear he ever needed much encouragement because a spirit of adventure and enterprise came to him naturally.

  Over the next year and a half Matthiessen, Humes, and Plimpton gathered a team of supporters to discuss the editorial mandate of the new magazine with the unassuming title the Paris Review. One thousand dollars, a princely sum in austere postwar Paris, was scraped together to pay for the printing of the first issue. William Pène duBois, son of the painter Guy Pène duBois, already established as an award-winning author and illustrator of children’s books, became the art director. He designed the Review’s famous helmeted bird logo.

  A dingy one-room office on 8, rue Garancière was located as the base of operations. Young women from Smith and Radcliffe colleges known as “Apeteckers” for some mysterious reason, began to float in and out over the Review’s early years as unpaid interns, including a very young Jane Fonda. The Café de Tournon, in front of the Palais de Luxembourg, was the real headquarters of the Review crowd. And regardless of the weather, the likes of Thomas Guinzburg, John Train, William Pène duBois, John Marquand Jr., Jane Lougee, and other well-turned-out Ivy Leaguers could be found. They became known as a crowd that gave off—whether they intended it or not—an aura of old money and privilege. William Styron, who had recently published Lie Down In Darkness, wrote a letter of encouragement to the editors that was published as a kind of quasi-manifesto for the debut issue.

  “I didn’t have a lot to do with them, but they had a lot of money,” Mordecai Richler recalls. “They used to congregate at the café on the rue de Tourneau. Richard Wright was sometimes there. And Terry.”

  Like Richler, Terry preferred the less chic Old Navy, but his ability to fit in with seemingly disparate social groups was rapidly becoming another characteristic of Southern’s slowly evolving hipster persona. As embryonic as that persona was, many in the Paris Review crowd regarded Southern, Avakian, and Hoffenberg as ultracool vets on the expatriate scene. Marquand found them intimidating. Southern seemed a “silent, inscrutable presence” to Marquand often seen in an attitude of enigmatic conspiracy with Aram Avakian, who also frequented the Old Navy. At the Hotel Bar American in Pigalle one night, Southern told Marquand it was bad form to buy a girl a drink: “You ruin it for the rest of us if you pay for her beer.”

  Despite Southern’s hauteur, Marquand became close friends with the mysterious Texan, as did Plimpton, who often ran into him at the Métro. For Plimpton, his clearest memory of Southern in Paris was the latter’s anger when “The Accident,” a fragment of what became Chapters 3 and 4 of Flash and Filigree, appeared in the first issue of the Paris Review in the spring of 1953.

  “There’s this policeman in it who looks into the window of this guy who’s been speeding and says, ‘don’t get your shit hot.’…We had terrible problems with censors in those times…and it was shipped over to the U.S. and there was a [post office censor] on Varick Street called Mr. Dempsey who read every single word in the Paris Review, if you can believe it, and I had the feeling that might not get by. You can’t believe how repressive the times were. We took the word out and it became the rather anemic ‘don’t get hot.’ Terry had a fit and came around to the office, practically picketed it with signs and was furious about it in his way. According to Peter Matthiessen, he went and sulked in his room for quite a while.”

  Matthiessen remembers Southern dispatching a fifteen-page J’accuse concerning the edit that he wanted the Review to publish in the next issue. Matthiessen boiled this down to the following:

  IN ERRATUM—Terry Southern is most anxious that the Paris Review point out the absence of two words from his story The Accident (issue one): The sentence “Don’t get hot” should have read “Don’t get your crap hot,” an omission for which we apologize to all concerned.

  Art Buchwald found the incident so amusing he mentioned the contretemps in a piece for The New York Herald-Tribune, but he was also forced to find a euphemism for “shit hot.”

  The tempest over the “editing slash censorship” of “The Accident” might have ended Southern’s relationship with the Review, but he continued to send stories and ideas to Plimpton and Matthiessen. Southern’s fifteen-page rant, was an early exercise in mock-indignation, a hobby Southern made a speciality of in letters to appreciative friends, bemused editors, and puzzled strangers in years to come. Deep down, Southern probably knew the Review couldn’t fight every skirmish in the battle for free expression, but by making a loud hue and cry about “don’t get your shit hot,” he kept the Review from becoming too pleased with itself.

  While the Paris Review was determined to make sure that as many people as possible read (or at least heard) of their venture through various marketing stunts (such as a flying squad of cyclists who put posters up in every arrondisement in Paris), Merlin, launched May 15, 1952, by Alexander Trocchi and Jane Lougee, was more defiantly avant-garde and elitist in its approach. The emphasis was on European literature that broke new boundaries in literary expression. Samuel Beckett, whose play Waiting for Godot would receive its Paris premiere the following year, published excerpts from his Molloy trilogy in Merlin.

  Trocchi had been in Paris only a few months before Merlin was launched, but the charismatic Glasgow-born, Cambridge-educated six-footer quickly exerted a pull on others. Lougee was a petite American woman who resembled Audrey Hepburn. Still only in their mid-twenties, they exuded an enviable sophistication and worldliness. They promoted their brand of nihilism with unusual confidence and style. Trocchi, who could have become an influential professor at Oxford or Cambridge, embraced heroin addiction, sexual experimentation, and the then-esoteric situationist ideas of Guy Debord, the author of The Society of the Spectacle. For almost a decade, Trocchi mesmerized his fellow expatriates, including Southern, with his extremism (eventually the heroin and accompanying ennui wo
uld sap a constitution and energy that Southern described as “Wagnerian”). He would be forgiven flirting with other men’s wives and girlfriends, never paying back loans, and a general arrogance and impatience toward those who did not recognize his “genius.” Despite innumerable character flaws, Trocchi had a gift for inspiring enthusiasm in those around him.

  One of those he inspired was Richard Seaver, who was one of the few expatriates with a deep love and knowledge of French language and culture. After a few drinks with Trocchi and Lougee, he came on board as a coeditor and translator for the new magazine. Trocchi also struck up a cordial relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre and ran English translations of work from Sartre’s magazine, Les Temps modernes.

  The various magazines represented different literary directions. Still the individuals behind them were all relatively new to Paris. They found kinship in the basic fact they were all English-speaking expatriates in a city indifferent to their presence.

  “Terry from the start was a star,” remembers Richard Seaver. “We didn’t know much about Terry’s background. I probably didn’t see him more than half a dozen times in Paris. We used to have drinks together and talk a lot. He had already this sense of humor that he never wavered from through the course of his life. He was just a very funny guy in the way he talked and his take on life. We all thought that Terry was going to be a writer from the start. I think in a way we knew more than he did. He wasn’t quite sure if he wanted to be a writer. I think he was still hoping and searching for what he wanted to be and what he had to say and finding his voice. Although when you go back and see those early pieces, his voice was already there, but he was a great raconteur.