by Lee Hill
In the Village, Southern found he was not alone in his distaste for America’s shift from wartime idealism and energy into postwar blandness and conformity. George Avakian’s most vivid memory of Terry in the mid-fifties is an image of him and his brother, Aram, hanging out with Southern and Hoffenberg in places like the Five Spot, San Remo, and Village Vanguard. The mood is one of conspiracy against the squares and a shared love for jazz, cutting-edge art and writing, and raucous conversation.
Occasionally, they acted on that sense of Us against Them. One night Terry, Hoffenberg, and Avakian became angered by McCarthy’s humiliation of Secretary of Defense Stevens on the stand during the Army–McCarthy hearings and the media’s response—the New York Daily News ran a headline MAC WHIPS ARMY. The trio went down to an Army recruiting office in the Wall Street area. They pasted the front page onto the side of the building and painted ONKLE JOE over it. Then they called up the News to tell them of this assault.
For Southern, Avakian, Hoffenberg, and others, New York, and especially the downtown epicenter of Greenwich Village, was becoming a twenty-four-hour combination of experimental theater, laboratory, proto-commune, and all-around fun place to be. Those who met Southern in this heady milieu of cultural flux were struck by his ability to fix on something seemingly trivial in a conversation and turn it into a routine. When it came to writing, this constant flood of ideas was a bit of a hindrance. He would start a story, abandon it, and pick up something else. Then weeks, months, maybe years later, he would return to an unfinished piece and complete it. There was method in this seemingly unfocused approach. It kept Southern from becoming obsessed with perfecting one work and then becoming intimidated by the possible failure to turn a first draft into something of quality. Keeping several things in a state of constant preparation prevented Southern from getting bored. This was the case with his first novel, Flash and Filigree, written primarily under the influence of Henry Green.
Southern recalls becoming obsessed with Green after reading an article by Philip Toynbee in the Partisan Review. Toynbee called Green a “terrorist of language,” a concept that must have appealed to Southern immensely.
“[Toynbee’s] piece about Henry Green in the Partisan Review was so intriguing that I got one of his novels, Loving, I believe, which was the first that came to attention in the United States. I read it and was knocked out. It was so good that I immediately started reading all of his books. They seemed so extraordinary that I wrote Green a fan letter. I just wanted to express my appreciation of his work. Surprisingly enough, he wrote back. So we got into a correspondence and through that developed a curious friendship.”
On the surface, Green and Southern seemed to be unlikely candidates for forming a mutual admiration society. Green, whose real name was Henry Vincent Yorke, was born far from the wilds of Texas in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, England, in 1905. He was born into an upper-class family who owned a beer-bottling business called Pontifex and Sons based in Birmingham. After graduating from Oxford, which he attended with the likes of Harold Acton, Anthony Powell, and Graham Greene, he married Mary Biddugh, whom he affectionately called “Dig,” in 1929. Until the early sixties, Green spent his working life as managing director of Pontifex.
Green’s Loving, the novel that first caught Southern’s attention, was published in 1945. Its subject matter is the upstairs-downstairs life of Anglo-Irish servants between the two world wars. As with all of Green’s books, it is the style that immediately grabs one’s attention—a kind of chiseled-down stream of consciousness akin to an all-seeing eye. Characters often speak at cross-purposes and utter nonsequiturs. Like Southern, Green was obsessed with the incongruities and misunderstandings found in daily speech. V. S. Pritchett says that Green brought a “spirit of poetry, fantasy and…often wild laughter” to his writing. The result is a vision of life where tragedy and comedy coexist, where human motives are murky, and even the simplest character, a semiliterate maid, for example, becomes as intriguing as the loftiest noble. Southern devoured Green’s other books, including Living (1929), Party Going (1950), Doting (1952), Caught (1943), Back (1946), and Concluding (1948).
Loving’s success in America led to a Life magazine profile, which described Green in unusually—by Time-Life standards—perceptive terms. The article argued that a Green novel is “not just a platter of realistic bare bones; it is a rich dish of human flesh and blood, fit for the most exacting cannibal. Moreover, it is subtly designed in such a way that Green himself, the creator of the dish, seems to be the one personality who has nothing to do with it. While other members of the tribe dance excitedly around the pot, the chef shyly looks the other way and pretends he has never heard of missionaries.”
Southern found the novels revelatory, the literary equivalent of the burning bush in the desert. Green’s balance of description, dialogue, and the handling of surrealism, social realism, and black comedy were not only unlike the American writers Southern admired, but distinct from British and European fiction of the period. Green was without a doubt sui generis.
Southern had been struggling with his various attempts at a novel prior to discovering Green. Before beginning his correspondence with Green, Southern had made a great deal of headway on Flash and Filigree (“Accident,” a fragment from Flash, appeared in the Paris Review around the same period). However, the final tone and structure of the novel clearly indicate that Green’s fiction had been absorbed into Southern’s bloodstream.
Flash and Filigree is set in a vision of Los Angeles that William Burroughs later described as a place where “censure or outrage is simply irrelevant.” At a chic Beverly Hills clinic, Dr. Frederick Eichner, a distinguished and urbane dermatologist, meets with a referral. The new patient, an intense well-dressed young man, one Felix Treevly (a.k.a. Ralph Edwards), describes his attempts to treat a lesion that has turned into a larger, perhaps cancerous growth. Eichner examines the young man and finds nothing but a barely visible scratch. Sensing he is part of some elaborate con, Eichner knocks the patient out as if affronted by this insult to his profession. Treevly wakes up in a nearby examining room, where one of the clinic’s nurses, the beautiful Babs Minter, tends to his wound. These three characters push the plot forward by their respective attempts to cover up, manipulate, and understand a series of chaotic happenings and situations. Aside from Treevly, who is determined to deflower comely nurse Babs, the motivations behind these characters’ actions are inexplicable and opaque.
However, Southern’s wry vision of Los Angeles is clear and precise. Instead of the hard-boiled pessimism of Raymond Chandler, the reader is placed in a cold and cruelly elegant world. Dr. Eichner, Babs Minter, the Head Nurse, Treevly, and detective Frost (a kind of ur-Columbo) are archetypes who continually confound our expectations of how they would behave in a traditional thriller. Flash was dismissed by some critics as merely a series of episodes strung together, but the novel is quite tightly plotted—even though plot is the least of its concerns.
Cutting back and forth between the clinic in Beverly Hills, the flesh-pots of Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood, and the civic offices of downtown L.A., Southern subtly creates a portrait of modern Los Angeles that is ahead of its time. In the fifties, most of Southern’s East Coast peers dismissed Los Angeles as a crass frontier metropolis whose only cultural legacy was the Hollywood movie. In Southern’s novel, the City of Angels is an ever-shifting landscape of light and shadow where anything can and does happen. A high-speed chase down a treacherous valley road, an elaborate seduction at a drive-in, the taping of a gruesome TV game show called What’s My Disease?, a courtroom trial whose key participants are clearly insane, etc. Murder, impersonation, lesbianism, drug dealing, and cheap thrills of all kinds are related in a calm and measured way that heightens the novel’s sheer strangeness.
The only American writer who had surpassed Southern in describing Los Angeles in this satirical fashion up to that point was Nathanael West. Flash and Filigree deals with the same kind of fringe players as The D
ay of the Locust, but its characters are not so much souls in disarray as comic types lost in a funhouse. Southern’s creation of a world akin to West’s is all the more remarkable considering he had yet to spend any significant time in California except for his hitchhiking adventure as a teenager at Sunset High. One can quite reasonably imagine Southern setting a challenge for himself by not only trying to write an homage to Green, but also to imagine himself as Green suddenly inspired to write a weird hybrid of the potboilers found in Black Mask or Argosy.
In spite of, and most likely because of, the novel’s assured handling of various kinds of parody, pastiche, satire, and allegory, the book was a difficult sell for American publishers. The prose evokes the elusive quality of a shimmering mirage on a sunbaked stretch of desert highway. One can imagine an editor at Viking or Random House wondering where all the feverish shifts in action were leading. Despite the excerpt in the Paris Review and referrals from friends, the book kept getting rejected in New York.
In addition to his transatlantic correspondence with Green, Southern began a friendship with another literary hero, William Faulkner, who was romantically involved with another Paris Review acquaintance, Jean Stein, the daughter of Jules Stein, the ophthalmologist who had turned a weekend hobby booking bands into the powerhouse agency MCA. Jean met Southern in Paris while studying at the Sorbonne. She started hanging out at the Paris Review offices and began proofing copy and performing other editorial functions. One fateful evening, December 29, 1953, she was introduced to Faulkner, who was passing through Paris. Faulkner was working with Howard Hawks on the screenplay for Land of the Pharaohs. Stein and Faulkner, who was twice her age, began a romance that lasted until his death in 1962.
Of all the great American writers of the twenties and thirties, Faulkner was Southern’s favorite. “Since college days and before I had regarded Faulkner as the most influential American writer of our time, and always came down vociferously on his side whenever one was obliged to choose between him and Hemingway.”
Southern, who would later describe As I Lay Dying as a “twenty-one-gun salute to the Absurd,” saw Faulkner as a sensitive and empathetic figure trying to restore humanity to a Southern culture damaged by racism and economic decline. Faulkner’s experiments with language and narrative also deeply impressed Southern.
In addition to working on the Hawks film, Faulkner was traveling back and forth from his home in Mississippi to New York during the winter of 1954. He was editing A Fable for publication in August 1954.
Ellen Adler, a friend of Stein and Southern, says that Faulkner was like Balzac to her generation: “Everybody was dazzled to meet William Faulkner. I mean, Faulkner was more than God…in the fifties, Faulkner was like Balzac …he was bigger than any movie star and he was remote, nobody met him and suddenly, Jean has him here. In the city and in restaurants!”
Stein invited Southern to join Faulkner and her for dinner. Anxious about meeting his hero, Southern recalled downing a few stiff drinks with Anatole Broyard in the Village before dinner. It became one of several meetings.
“[Terry] was one of the few people that Faulkner liked to spend time with,” recalls Stein. “He had respect for Terry, but not only respect. He really was fond of him. Terry, of course, has always been very courtly and there is something very Southern about him…they had that in common. That they were both from the South didn’t hurt. He just loved to be with him.
“My strongest memory of those early years is when we would hang out sometimes with Faulkner, how much Terry respected him and loved to hear his stories…. They probably both had had a lot to drink, too…. Faulkner was very fond of him and believed in him as a writer.”
Meeting Faulkner may have also prompted Terry to revisit his Texas roots via fiction. Faulkner was one of the standard-bearers, a writer who had stayed true to his art. Southern helped Jean when she interviewed Faulkner for the Paris Review’s Art of Fiction series. In the interview, Faulkner would maintain that a “writer needs 3 things: experience, observation, and imagination.” Left unspoken was the question of what to do with these estimable qualities. For Faulkner, devotion to one’s art had required reserves of quiet strength to endure misunderstanding, poverty, and self-doubt. On a spiritual level, Faulkner was superhuman. Neither Hollywood nor alcoholism had blunted his ability to write masterpieces like The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. A Fable was perhaps a lesser work, but no less ambitious and heartfelt than the landmark achievements of a younger man. In Faulkner, Southern could see that the writing life was as much a test of character as it was a test of one’s talent.
How Southern supported himself through much of the fifties was a mystery to those who knew him. Gadiot provided the primary source of income. Occasionally a check would arrive from his parents. Terry prided himself on not taking odd jobs. In 1954, he turned thirty. Many men of his generation with no clear career prospects would have been more than a little anxious, but Terry seemed happily indifferent to his marginal economic status.
One of his rare forays into the nine-to-five during this period was a gig David Burnett got him on Martha Foley’s Best American Short Stories of 1954. Terry received fifty dollars a week for a couple of months’ work. Burnett’s mother, Martha Foley, had cofounded Story in 1931 with her then husband, Whit Burnett. After their divorce, Foley inaugurated the yearly compendium of short stories culled from various magazines, quarterlies, and journals. Along with Whit Burnett, she helped kickstart the careers of Nelson Algren, James Thurber, Truman Capote, Joseph Heller, J. D. Salinger, James Agee, Flannery O’Connor, Philip Roth, Arthur Miller, and Sylvia Plath. Burnett and Southern helped Foley sift through the material and create a short list that eventually included stories by Ira Wolfert, B. Traven, Jean Stafford, and Ivan Gold.
It was during this period that Burnett and Southern conceived the idea of making a short film.
“David and I went for lunch on West Fourth Street across from an elementary school,” Southern recalled. “We would see these children come out at recess. We got the idea that the perfect crime would be to get a box of chocolates, put cyanide inside, replace the top, and artfully put the box of candy in the schoolyard. During the recess or lunch hour, the kids would see the box and eat the chocolates. It would be a perfect crime in the Leopold and Loeb mode.”
Southern and Burnett shot the film over a couple of weekends using an 8mm home movie camera. Martha Foley helped to convince her friends to allow two weirdo hipsters to use their children as the victims of poisoning. A lot of the film was taken up with the preparation of the candies. The children delighted in grimacing for the camera. But the results never added up to more than a nine-minute lark. The Kenneth Angers and Maya Derens of the world had nothing to worry about.
During Southern’s first year back in America, it was becoming clear that he and Gadiot were suffering from irreconcilable differences. Southern’s income was erratic at best and, in her eyes, he seemed to be more interested in making the scene than getting a steady job. Their relationship was, like so many things in Southern’s private life, a puzzle.
“At one point, he described [Gadiot] as being very hysterical about something,” said Carol Southern. “He did say he was responsible for keeping the apartment in order and she was the breadwinner and I don’t think that worked out very well. But this is all kind of conjecture and recollection…. I think that she probably wanted a regular life and that was probably the source of the conflict.”
By the middle of 1954, Southern and Gadiot agreed to a quick divorce. She moved to an apartment on East Thirty-sixth Street.
Although he was not one to spill his guts, Southern obviously needed a respite from the failure of his marriage. He and Hoffenberg planned a trip to Europe.
“I actually went at one point to be on a kibbutz. We went down to this ship run by a kibbutz for a couple of days of incredible work. Cleaning out the furnace of the smokestack, the worst possible work you could imagine, but it was very satisfying. It’s like an id
eal community, one of those Shangri-la-type concepts, and so that was great. But the next morning this guy comes in and says he’s been robbed. Forty dollars was missing from his footlocker, and so everybody’s freaking out saying ‘we gotta get locks on the footlockers’ and then half of the people say ‘no no no, that would defeat the whole notion of our unity. If that person took the money, he needed it.’ So there was this immediate schism, like a 50-50 split over this, and we left the ship.”
Eventually, Terry got a trip on another freighter headed toward Europe in late 1954–55. He spent most of his time in Paris, where he met and hung out with David Amram. Amram was playing with various combos and had a regular gig at the Hôtel des États-Unis. Southern purchased a jazz record Amram had recorded with Bobby Jasper. One of the compositions, “The Bird of Montparnasse,” was a favorite. “A groovin’ gas, mon vieux pot!” exclaimed Southern. Southern introduced Amram to Avakian and they spent time in cafés and listening to music. “After a gig, we would go out to eat,” recalls Amram. “Terry would create dramatic scenes out of what was going on around the café.”
It was a relatively short trip. After a month and half, Southern was back in New York.
Along with Green and Faulkner, Nelson Algren rounded out Southern’s troika of mentors. In the fall of 1955, Southern and Alston Anderson, a Paris buddy, interviewed Algren in the Village for the Paris Review. To many aspiring writers in the Village, Algren’s life and work were inspirational. In 1949, he became the first winner of the National Book Award for his novel The Man with the Golden Arm, an unromantic but perceptive study of a musician struggling with heroin addiction. The Chicago-born author had developed his craft the hard way—odd jobs as salesman and carny, a stint in a Texas jail for allegedly stealing a typewriter, working for the WPA gathering stats on venereal disease, countless one-night stands, hard drinking, and living in a succession of dreary tenements. In his writing, Algren had transformed this grim quotidian experience into a series of brilliant short stories and starkly poetic novels like Never Come Morning and A Walk on the Wild Side. Algren wanted to write about American life with the intensity and depth of Dostoyevsky. To a large extent, he succeeded at this, but he had turned into a reluctant celebrity. Hollywood came knocking. Like many writers before him, Algren felt he could take the money and keep his fiction pure. When Southern and Anderson interviewed Algren, they did not see that beneath Algren’s street-wise exterior was a conflicted soul struggling with an on-again, off-again relationship with Simone de Beauvoir, a bitter aftertaste from his recent screenwriting duties, and a deepening fear that he would never write fiction again. Sadly, Algren was right. Until his death, Algren’s output would consist mainly of magazine articles and nonfiction books built around travel themes.