by Lee Hill
“I didn’t know him very deeply then, but he always put you in a good mood no matter what it was and very often it was not necessarily good at nine o’clock in the morning after a late night. Within half an hour of sitting down with Terry chewing the fat, you felt better, you felt ‘what a pleasant half hour that was,’ that guy’s so full of beans, so full of life.”
Merlin was supported by Maurice Girodias, part dilettante, part impresario, and in no small part, con man and hustler. Girodias’s father was Jack Kahane, an Englishman who had founded Obelisk Press, which published the likes of Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell, D. H. Lawrence, and Frank Harris in the twenties and thirties. After the Liberation, Girodias restarted Obelisk and reissued Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in late 1945. After severe setbacks and battles with French legal authorities, Girodias formed Olympia Press and began to oversee its operations from 13, rue Jacob. He entered into an arrangement with Merlin to publish book-length versions of material that appeared in the journal. Richard Seaver became Olympia’s major translator and was paid between $500 and $1,000 for a manuscript. Although it should be added, as Seaver and many others under Girodias’s “patronage” discovered, the money tended to come in erratic dribs and drabs, and sometimes not at all.
Southern never published anything in Merlin, but Trocchi and Seaver became close friends. As with Hoffenberg, Southern’s friendship with Trocchi allowed him a safe vantage point from which to watch a certain strain of defiant self-destructiveness play itself out. Both Trocchi and Seaver would also deepen Southern’s appreciation of such disparate European writers as Malaparte, Beckett, and de Sade. Their shared passion for iconoclastic writing would later culminate in the editing of the Writers in Revolt anthology in 1962.
Although generally shy and reserved when meeting new people, Southern had no shortage of girlfriends in Paris. Richler describes him as a “dashing womanizer.” Tall, dark, and handsome, Southern was able to turn his shyness into a kind of mysterious reserve, a reserve that could be lifted to reveal an appealing brand of whimsy and courtliness. Women appreciated his gentle teasing, especially his habit of creating nicknames, usually abbreviations of first and last names.
Sometime during his last year in Paris, Southern settled into a relationship with Pud Gadiot. Gadiot was a tall, elegant woman, with the kind of classic beauty and natural style glimpsed only in fashion magazines. She had modeled for Irving Penn and Richard Avedon.
Southern and Gadiot traveled to Greece and Spain together. Gail Gerber says their marriage was partially one of social convenience. Being man and wife made it easier for them to share a compartment on the boat back to the U.S. This contradictory reasoning was typical of some young bohemians of the fifties caught between fading Victorian mores and the full-blown sexual revolution of the sixties. It was a time when divorce was still a source of shame and openly living together could be a hurdle in renting an apartment or getting a job. While Southern was clearly in love with Gadiot and vice versa, it seems unlikely they really knew each other as well as they should have when they married in 1953.
In late spring of 1953 Southern and Gadiot moved back to New York. The sentimental education in Paris had ended for the time being. The four years in Europe had consolidated the hip persona that his friends would come to know and love. Many of whom would never see anything other than the mask of the gentle hipster. Europe had taught Southern that his shyness, hesitation, and naïveté could be hidden behind an all-knowing silence or filtered through elaborate, amusing stories. From friends like Hoffenberg and Avakian, he learned the importance of humor as a way to put others and thus himself at ease. The warm acceptance of his short stories by the competitive Quality Lit crowd of the Paris Review, Merlin, and New-Story gave Southern the confidence to pursue his writing. Like many young writers who live outside their native land for a time, he found distance made it easier to write about America.
The emancipating influence of jazz in Paris cannot be overestimated in its impact on Southern’s style. Watching Bird or Dizzy in various hot clubs du jour, Southern adapted their gift for improvisation for his literary ends. Increasingly his various stories-in-progress would begin from a basic theme and work outward. Although Southern still held the original “Lost Generation” of Hemingway and Fitzgerald in high regard, he also strove to go beyond them stylistically. Still only in his mid-twenties, Southern had a keen sense of his development as a writer. He knew that the only way to achieve success as a writer was to discover what made writing enjoyable.
Where a more self-conscious young writer might second-guess his flights of fancy, Southern followed them. “The Sun and Still-born Stars,” for example, could have remained a vignette of rural life, but the introduction of a monster-man rising out of the Gulf of Mexico catapulted the story into the realm of the visionary. While he had come to Paris to follow in the footsteps of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Sherwood Anderson, Southern had discovered his own trail. He was still unknown and poor, but he had talent to burn and the stories proved it. What young writer could ask for more?
Flash and Filigree
What standard would you apply if you had to define hipness?
Well, in the strictest sense of the word, I’d say…a certain death of something, somewhere near the center.
How does this develop?
Obviously it begins with an awareness far beyond the ordinary kind of emotional hypersensitiveness, or empathy, so acute that it’s unbearably painful and has to be anesthetized—so what is left in the end is “iron in the soul”…awareness but total insulation from emotion. The big trick, of course—and I don’t know that it’s ever really been done—is to eliminate all negative emotion and retain positive. About the hippest anyone has gotten so far, I suppose, is to be permanently on the nod.
—“An Interview with Terry Southern,” Paul Krassner
And as in a dream a man availeth not to pursue one that fleeth before him—the one availeth not to flee, nor the other to pursue—even so Achilles availed not to overtake Hector his fleetness, neither Hector to escape. (The Iliad, xxii, 200–204)
—Original epigraph for Southern’s first novel, Flash and Filigree
After four years of expatriate freedom in Paris, the only logical destination for Southern was New York’s Greenwich Village. In an America that had all but officially embraced conformity and the idea of the organization man, Greenwich Village was an underground oasis of the cool, the hip, the engagé, the wild, strange, and, in some cases, crazy. For Southern, who wanted to devote his energy and passion to writing, the Village combined the best aspects of both America and Europe. There were lots of groovy new clubs, cafés, bars, galleries, and small bookstores. Rent was thirty to sixty dollars a month. African Americans, homosexuals, and women could move about with relative ease and comfort. In the words of Fred McDarrah, a longtime resident and photographer, “Greenwich Village was truly a ‘village’ a small town within the large city of New York.”
Upon arriving in New York in the spring of 1953, Southern and Gadiot found a cheap and cheerful walk-up apartment on Tenth Street and Sixth Avenue. Aram Avakian moved into the spare bedroom to help with the rent. Gadiot resumed her modeling career uptown. For a time, she achieved local notoriety for modeling a line of merry widow corsets with a mask on in an unusually risqué ad campaign.
Unlike Southern, Avakian found he had little patience for sitting alone in his room and writing. He was more interested in the possibilities of film. He began apprenticing with Gjon Mili, a Life photographer who had directed a jazz documentary. Mili was a film primitive who was full of great ideas and enthusiasm, but almost technically inept. In assisting Mili, Avakian taught himself how to use the equipment and fell in love with the Moviola editing table. Word got around quickly that Avakian had a knack for cutting film and he got a job on Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now documentary series as an assistant editor.
With wife and buddy away during the day, Southern stayed in the apartment and devot
ed himself to reading and writing. John Marquand, a frequent visitor to the apartment, noted that while Gadiot was busy going to fashion shoots Southern was left “to con his soul in solitude.” One of his favorite pastimes was to watch the TV with the volume turned off through the scrim of an illuminated tropical fish tank as the hi-fi played jazz.
Southern’s four years in Paris consolidated his identity as a writer. The genuine admiration of peers like Alexander Trocchi, Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton, and others for his modest published output did wonders for his self-esteem. However, their encouragement took second place to the influence of existentialism. Southern used the fierce and contrary independence of Sartre and Camus to reinforce his own ideas about writing, which could be summed up as follows: Writing was something done for its own sake—a spontaneous acting out of the imagination. Secondly, profiting from writing was a happy accident, but not something one should actively pursue.
In the Village, these purist notions would receive a further gloss as Southern embraced the emerging idea of Hip. Of course, to define Hip, as hipsters of all shapes and sizes liked to argue, was to destroy it. Still it was obvious a new attitude was emerging in the Village—a harder, more cynical version of the anarchist and bohemian ethos that had put the downtown community on the map in the twenties and thirties.
Like Paris, Greenwich Village was a hothouse of cultural ferment entering another period of exciting change. Earlier in the century, it had been the gathering place of fresh-faced, red-blooded American socialists like John Reed, Max Eastman, and Emma Goldman. Through the Depression and World War II, it remained a neighborhood where working-class Italian immigrants and downwardly mobile boho types coexisted uneasily, but coexisted nonetheless.
By 1953, the Village was, to use the parlance of the time, a crazy and happening scene. Julian Beck and Judith Malina were attracting a local following for their productions of new American and European plays at the Living Theatre. Norman Mailer and William Styron could be found dispensing advice to up-and-comers at the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street. Bebop, which had started as a series of informal jams between Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Kenny Clarke, Dizzy Gillespie, and Max Roach at Minton’s in 1941, had now blossomed into a powerful movement. In contrast to the Big Band style of Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington, bebop was loose, unpredictable, passionate, and spontaneous. Little magazines of all descriptions were flourishing with names like Neurotica, Kulchur, and Neon. At the Cedar Tavern, 24 University Place between Eighth and Ninth streets, a new generation of painters gathered nightly to talk, argue, fight, and get drunk. Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, also attracted writers such as Kerouac, Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, LeRoi Jones, and Frank O’Hara. Coffeehouses such as David’s on MacDougal, Figaro on Bleecker, or the Cafe Bizarre provided a safe refuge to nurse a cup of joe, listen to the latest mad genius read his or her poetry, and chat up the seemingly endless wave of hauntingly aloof waitresses dressed in black sweaters, skirts, and tights. It was a time when every weekend promised another rent party in someone’s apartment or loft.
From 1953 through 1956, Southern would float through these inter-locking scenes. Where Paris had been mainly about words, Village life was more interdisciplinary. Southern met visual artists like Robert Frank, Annie Truxell, and Larry Rivers. Rivers, whose figurative style was antithetical to those of painters like Pollock and Rauschenberg, would become a close friend in the latter part of the decade. Terry continued to spend most of his time with Paris friends who had returned to the States, including Hoffenberg, Aram Avakian, Iris Owens and Marilyn Meesky (both of whom also wrote for Girodias’s Olympia house), and David Burnett. Among new Village pals were the eccentric Milton Klonsky and Boris Grgurevich, a Russian American, and his two enigmatic, vaguely sinister companions, “Cookie” and “Shadow.”
The Village was also the stomping ground of many graduates of Black Mountain College. The experimental college founded in 1933 by John Rice in North Carolina achieved its peak influence in the years just after World War II before closing in 1956. In 1953, the Black Mountain Review was started. The journal published the early writing of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Gilbert Sorrentino, Louis Zukofky, and others. The Black Mountain philosophy tended toward the free-form, associative, spontaneous, and nonlinear. In addition to having an enormous impact on Canadian and American poetry in the fifties and sixties, the college inspired attendees as diverse as composer John Cage, director Arthur Penn, and Rauschenberg. By the mid-fifties, it seemed as if every second person one encountered in the Village had some connection to the college. (Even Carol Southern studied painting, pottery, and ceramics at Black Mountain one summer.)
Black Mountain College was one of many competing currents of influence that coursed through the Village in the mid-fifties. The liberating influence of bebop on many of the white veterans who gravitated to the Village cannot be overestimated. Friendships between blacks and whites—which either provoked violence, misunderstanding, or guilt in other parts of the country—evolved more naturally. The Village was also the place where the growing disenchantment with mainstream Cold War thinking—which was largely anti-intellectual, repressive, and reactionary as well as anticommunist—could be expressed openly.
During the time that Southern lived in the Village—1953 through 1956—the Beat world had yet to be circumscribed by media overkill and hype. William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac were still unknown bit players who moved in and out of the real-life movie that was the Village scene. John Clellon Holmes would claim that he came up with the term “Beat” in his 1952 novel Go. Yet when Southern was in the Village the classic works that defined that generation—On the Road, Howl, and Naked Lunch—were still works-in-progress no different from the feverish dreams of other scene makers. The mainstream’s perception of a literary underground (or any of the various Village movements) had yet to reach critical mass.
Through Mason Hoffenberg, Southern became friendly with Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso. Later, he would meet Burroughs in Paris at the Beat Hotel. Southern shared the same antiestablishment values as the Beats, but his own approach to writing was vastly different. He favored ideas over feelings, pure speculation over the autobiographical, and careful and deliberate rewriting over the free-form and spontaneous approach of his Beat friends. Not surprisingly, when the Beats became a media phenomenon, Southern became the “lost beat.”
Like many aspiring writers, Terry was a mass of contradictory impulses and desires. On one hand, he was shy, introspective, and serious about his craft. On the other, he was also gregarious, impulsive, and playful. In social situations, the latter qualities were taking precedence to form the genial, expansive mask of a grand guy. This alter ego would reach its fullest imaginative expression a few years later when Southern began writing his second novel, The Magic Christian. The novel’s central character, the ultrarich philanthropist and trickster, Guy Grand, would become a further extension and exploration of the expansive attitude and droll patter that Southern’s friends in Paris and the Village would come to love. Eventually it became almost impossible for them to view him as anything but Guy Grand in the flesh (sans cash, alas).
The Grand Guy persona was an elaborate mask hiding a great deal of insecurity and fear, but it was a front that put people at ease, invited others to share the joke, and above all, made people relax and laugh. Everyone was always happy to spend time with Terry if they hadn’t seen him in a while. In the Village, he developed a knack for appearing out of the blue as if he had a sixth sense for happenings or scenes that might prove intriguing, offbeat, or amusing. The personality traits and vocal mannerisms of friends and acquaintances would become raw material for Grand Guy Terry’s real-life novel. As the persona became refined, all traces of his Texan accent were hidden by a strange mid-Atlantic mock-noblesse-oblige bearing and speech. One of Southern’s Village acquaintances, the musician and composer David Amram, saw the accent as Terry’s
self-reflexive take on a certain kind of American Anglophilia. “Terry fancied himself as ‘the subterranean Texan,’” recalls Amram, “His voice was teasing in the manner of Lord Buckley, who was influenced by West Indian entertainers, who in turn were parodying English colonials.”
However, there was a strong vein of seriousness beneath the mock indignation and courtliness. In Paris, Terry had kept abreast of the American scene via the International Herald Tribune and lively café debates. There was much to anger and sicken one in postwar America. The last good war had produced a lot of bounty for Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch, but provincialism, conformity, and anti-intellectualism were still at the fore-front of mainstream American culture. Although chinks were beginning to appear in his redneck armor, Senator Joseph McCarthy still set the reactionary tone of public discourse. The Korean War had ended in the kind of stalemate worthy of an Ionesco play. The once-vigorous Left of the thirties and forties had been shell-shocked by the blacklisting and hysteria. The intelligentsia seemed to be in retreat. The pro-Soviet utopianism of the twenties and thirties had been stripped away by news of Stalin’s brutal collectivization schemes and show trials. The anticommunism at the Partisan Review often seemed a magic lantern show that took second place to the Bloomsbury-like domestic arrangements of Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy, and gang. Good taste and timidity reigned in such middlebrow churches as Time, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post.
Outside the Village, many of Southern’s fellow veterans seemed intent on embracing a soulless consumerist utopia of tract housing, shopping malls, drive-ins, and dumb-dumb diversions like Milton Berle and The Honeymooners. Grand Central Station was a sea of gray flannel as commuters poured into work in midtown offices. Many of them were working in sales and advertising. Their youthful energies were being harnessed to the building of a brave new world of TV dinners, infrared stoves, garage door openers, tranquilizers, book clubs. It was as if Southern’s generation had fought to make the world safe for homogeneity, not democracy. The complacent acceptance of a consumer culture fueled by Cold War xenophobia set Terry’s teeth on edge.