by Lee Hill
As with Faulkner and Green, Southern and Algren warmed to each other. In the introduction to the interview, Southern and Anderson write: “to talk with Algren is to have a conversation brought very quickly to that rarefied level where values are actually declared.” Neither Southern nor Anderson, a Jamaican poet and jazz critic who had spent years in France and Spain, were fresh-faced rookies when it came to the life of the streets. Yet they listened to Algren’s school-of-hard-knocks reminiscences of petty crime, gambling, and poverty with reverent awe. In the midst of the stories were nuggets of advice. Algren said that if you want to write a war novel you have to do it while you’re in the war, otherwise it slips away. Unlike the European tradition, one became a writer in America “when there’s absolutely nothing else you can do.” When asked about whether his style was arrived at consciously or not, Algren said, “The only thing I’ve consciously tried to do was put myself in a position to hear the people I wanted to hear talk talk.”
For Southern, listening to Algren was not so much instructive or inspirational as it was a validation of the direction he was heading in. Throughout his life, Southern would often tell interviewers or students that one should write from the gut like Algren. It was odd advice considering that all of Southern’s heroes—Faulkner, Green, and Algren—were fastidious rewriters. In fact what Southern and his heroes do is stay with subjects and themes that engage them emotionally when logic or caution would suggest another course. Great writing thus becomes an act of faith as much as it is the result of skill and practice.
Algren and Southern stayed in touch after the interview. Algren became one of Southern’s earliest and most ardent champions. In 1964, when Southern hit the big time with Dr. Strangelove and Candy, he and William Styron paid Algren a memorable visit. In later years, when he began teaching creative writing, Algren would often use Southern as an example of a great short story writer.
By mid-1954 Southern was taken on by the Curtis Brown Agency on the basis of his short stories and his novel-in-progress, Flash and Filigree. During his time in the Village, he accumulated rejection slips that were for the most part quite encouraging, from an astonishing range of publications: Sight and Sound, Antioch Review, Cornell University (“This seems to lack point”), the London Magazine, Commentary, Esquire, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Nation, Atlantic Monthly, the Reporter, New Directions, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Perspectives USA, Argosy, Yale Review, the Sewanee Review, American Vanguard, New Mexico Quarterly, the Story Press, Playboy, Mademoiselle, New World Writing, Cosmopolitan, New Statesman, the New Republic, Maclean’s, and many others.
As the wide range of these submissions indicates, Southern was, despite his laconic, indifferent demeanor, quite deliberately trying to get published in as many places as possible. Consciously or not, he wanted his audience to be as wide and varied as possible…he didn’t want to pigeonhole himself or be pigeonholed. The submissions also indicated another quality that Southern tried to avoid broadcasting to others: his sheer industriousness. If asked point-blank, do you have any difficulty writing? Southern would reply, “Not at all.” But he did feel very reluctant to talk or discuss his work.
Curtis Brown placed “The Sun and the Still-born Stars” and “The Panthers” (which was later reprinted in Red Dirt Marijuana as “You Gotta Leave Your Mark”) in the same issue of Harper’s Bazaar. “The Panthers” dealt with a group of aspiring juvenile delinquents who kidnap an old man and lock him in the trunk of a car. Their plans for a big ransom go wrong when the man suffocates. Due to the sheer blind impulsiveness of this crime, the police are able to arrest the culprits quickly. Southern was paid $750 for both stories.
One night in October 1955, Southern went to a party thrown by Robert and Mary Frank to celebrate Robert’s Guggenheim grant. Southern approached a tall attractive woman with dark hair named Carol Kauffman, who originally hailed from Philadelphia. She had studied painting at Antioch College and was pursuing an M.A. in early childhood education.
“I had heard of Terry before,” Carol said. “My then boyfriend pointed him out on the street and said, ‘Terry Southern’s back from Europe. He has two stories out in Harper’s Bazaar.” I had also been introduced to Terry before. He was sitting on the circle in Washington Square Park with Mason Hoffenberg, whom I’d met as a waitress at Joe’s Dinette. Mason introduced me, but Terry was very cool, barely turned his head, and stared off into space as I chatted with Mason. So I was surprised when he came right up to me at the party and said, ‘Hell, I believe we’ve met. Mason speaks very highly of you.’ He made a date with me. We met at the Riviera Bar and his first words were ‘Do you Know the work of Henry Green?’ By the end of the evening I knew I would marry him.”
As romance quickly blossomed, Carol and Terry began staying at each other’s apartment regularly. Carol was surprised at the breadth of Terry’s knowledge of what was going on—not just in the Village, but in the city in general. He seemed to know everyone and was up to date on the latest cutting-edge books, plays, and movies.
On December 5, 1955, Charlie Parker died at the age of thirty-five while watching television. According to a story he told Darius James in the eighties, Southern attended the funeral. There was an odd couple of days between Parker’s death and his burial when the musician’s body disappeared. One of Parker’s widows had taken the body to a secret location. Finally after some hue and cry, the body was returned to the funeral home at five o’clock in the morning. The hearse was greeted by a lineup of horn players who began playing a dirge in the morning rain. Southern told James it was the most remarkable sound he had ever heard.
In the January 1956 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, “The Night the Bird Blew for Doctor Warner” was published. It was a cautionary tale about Dr. Ralph Warner, an urbane musicologist attempting to write the definitive text on jazz. Dr. Warner feels the only way this can be accomplished is by becoming a hipster. Confident with his initial forays exploring the dark clubs where jazz is played, Warner tries his luck scoring some heroin. He ends up getting mugged and killed. Not only was it possible to lose one’s sense of compassion if one tried too hard to be hip, it was also possible to lose one’s life.
The story was further proof of Southern’s ability to handle irony with unique skill. It was the kind of story that people used as an example of a writer’s great promise. There was something thrillingly subversive about having such a dark fable appear in pages normally devoted to fashion and grooming.
By late spring of 1956, Terry and Carol were living in a room on Charles Street. Terry had always intended to return to Europe and asked Carol to come with him. “Of course I said yes,” Carol said. “I was dying to go to Europe—I was madly in love with Terry—no way I would not go. But though I never told Terry about it, I was worried about my father’s reaction. A few months later when Terry said, ‘Perhaps we’re to be married,’ I was not only thrilled but glad that I did not have to fabricate a lot of lies.”
Meanwhile, Alexander Trocchi had arrived in New York from Paris. Despite their various addictions, neither Trocchi nor Hoffenberg bothered Carol. She had met lots of junkies working at Joe’s Dinette, a Village hangout where they tended to congregate. Trocchi managed to get a job with Trap Rock Corporation as a barge captain hauling huge boulders used for jetties from Poughkeepsie to Far Rockaway. The barge was an ideal place to write. Trocchi would complete Cain’s Book, his famous novel about heroin addiction, on the barge. Trocchi was able to get Southern and others writers jobs with the company.
Terry and Carol needed money for their move to Europe, and a few months on the barge seemed to be the answer. They married on July 14, 1956, in Tupper Lake, where they were houseguests of a painter friend of Terry’s, Madeline Bernard. After a few days at Tupper Lake, they came back to New York, packed their belongings, and went directly to the barge moored in Far Rockaway.
“We were barge captains, as they called themselves euphemistically, since it was a job so lowly th
at it was ordinarily held by guys who had been kicked out of the Longshoreman’s Union, old winos and the like, being replaced now by this new breed, the dope-head writer. But it was one of those classic writer’s jobs, like hotel clerk, night watchman, fire-tower guy, etc., with practically no duties (‘just keep her tied up and pumped out…’),” recalled Southern.
Carol’s recollection of life on the barge was more prosaic and romantic. “There was a little cabin at the end of the barge with a tiny deck in front,” she recalled. Conditions were elemental. A bucket for a john. A rain barrel for water. A primus stove to cook on. Terry fished. At night we would play scrabble by the light of the kerosene lamp. And it was lovely at dusk, sitting on the deck smoking Pall Malls, gliding along the Hudson.”
Over the months of July, August, and September, Carol and Terry fine-tuned their plans for their European adventure. After months of letter writing, Carol had secured a job teaching nursery school for the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. Neither Carol nor Terry knew what to expect to find in Switzerland, but it sounded like fun.
Candy Christian Meets Guy Grand
What do you think the rest of life is going to be like?
What? Oh grand surely.
—Terry Southern to Elaine Dundy, 1958
Rocky seas stretched Carol and Terry’s journey across the Atlantic into a twelve-day endurance test. Through Carol’s father, they were able to get second-class tickets on a Norwegian freighter, but the crossing seemed to take forever.
“It was very comfortable,” says Carol, “but we just got very tired of the food, a smorgasbord thing, and with eating with the captain who always got drunk. At dinner, there was just this other couple who we were sure were collaborators because they were so Teutonic. The man, a Dutchman, claimed to have done very well in the war. Soon we weren’t appearing for meals at all except for dinner, and then we raided the icebox at night.”
Terry and Carol arrived in Paris in late October 1956. Mason and Couquitte put them up in their apartment on rue Henri Barbusse for about six weeks until Carol’s United Nations job started in the beginning of December. While still in Paris, Southern became obsessed with a 1936 Citroën convertible with a running board. It struck him as the perfect vehicle to cruise and travel the roads of Europe. He began to leave notes on the windshields of any Citroën he saw asking if the owners wanted to sell. Just before they were about to leave for Switzerland, Southern lucked out and bought a thirties model for a modest price. Driving on to Geneva, Terry and Carol discovered the Citroën was prone to frequent breakdowns. However, this did not make Terry any less enamored of the vehicle.
Their initial Geneva lodgings belonged to the École des Enfants des Nations Unies, in a sixteenth-century manor house on 46, rue Schaub. Later, the couple would move a little farther from the school to 39, rue Cramer. Carol’s job would allow the newlyweds to take generous amounts of leave at Christmas, Easter, and the summer months. Aside from the savings from the barge job and whatever Southern could eke from his writing, her school wages were their primary source of income. Carol was paid $125 a month and her father sent her $50 as a stipend.
Still their apartments were spacious and centrally heated (a rarity in Europe at the time). Their modest finances did not prevent them from enjoying their newlywed years in Europe.
“We did everything we really wanted to do, but on a very tight budget,” said Carol. “At least a couple of times a month, we would just get in the car and drive to France and go have dinner and it was so nice along the lake. As soon as one crossed the border, the whole atmosphere was different.”
Carol thought Geneva was beautiful, but a little too perfect. She and Terry were struck by the regular number of news stories about an attempted bank heist or somebody trying to race for the border with huge stacks of currency.
Although used to wandering about the Village at all hours, Southern found Geneva a radical, but not entirely unpleasant, change of pace. Geneva, with its picturesque mountains and lake, was a town of early-to-bed-early-to-rise bankers, diplomats, and bureaucrats. There was little for Southern to do except go on long walks, sit in cafés, read the paper, and write. To his credit, and much to Carol’s delight, write he did. In Geneva, Southern would not only prepare Flash and Filigree for publication, but he would also write Candy, The Magic Christian, a television play, and several short stories.
For Southern, life in Geneva was “not unlike a situation in a Kafka novel. My room was by a window overlooking the courtyard, and I would watch the children playing. They were all children of diplomats so there was this spectrum of nationalities. It was unsettling to observe that their behavior was so absolutely stereotypical: the American children were willful and bullying, and so were the Germans; the English were snobbish; the French were effete, clever, and silly; the Orientals were very bright and ultrapolite. I got so fascinated watching the children that I stopped working on anything else. I took notes on their behavior just like a child psychologist. At one point, I went to a local costume shop and bought a bunch of animal masks—lion, fox, donkey, etc., then I persuaded my wife to hang them in the children’s cloakrooms. I could see which child would choose which mask. Interesting stuff. The Head Mistress, however, was a rather strict Meg Thatcher type, and she put an end to my experiments before they ever really got started.”
The kind of rest and recreation Southern normally relished was sought elsewhere, but there were still things about Geneva’s manic calm and order that brought a gleam to his eye. In addition to being fascinated by Carol’s charges, Southern became obsessed with the garbage-disposal chute on the third floor of their apartment. In tall-tale fashion, Southern claimed to have tested the durability of this fine example of Swiss craftsmanship by throwing items like bottles, tin cans, and cutlery down the chute. According to a story he later told Realist editor Paul Krassner, he came up with the ultimate test of the disposal unit’s might by chucking an old Royal portable typewriter down the chute. The chute made an indescribable sound of pain and Southern thought he was going to have to pay thousands of dollars in damages or find himself escorted by gendarmes to the local jail. Instead, “the machine was running again the next day, and there was a little note in the lobby that read something like, ‘Residents are requested not to overload the disposal unit.’ Overload! And they say the Swiss don’t have a sense of humor. Anyway, it was the smugness of the machine, Paul…I mean you can understand how a thing like that could, well, be disturbing?”
For Carol, these early years, from 1956 through 1959, with Terry were idyllic. This was the Southerns’ “Moveable Feast” period. In spite of their erratic cash flow, the American dollar went far in Europe. With most of their basic living expenses covered by Carol’s UNESCO gig, they managed to live out their own version of the Grand Tour. During Carol’s vacations, they would make various forays into Paris to visit Mason and Couquitte as well as Ginsberg and Burroughs, then living at the now legendary “Beat Hotel.” They would also spend time in London with Henry Green and his wife, Dig.
In early December, not long after settling in the new apartment, Southern traveled to Paris by train for a meeting with Maurice Girodias. As the publisher and editor in chief of the Olympia Press, Girodias was always eager to talk to cash-hungry writers who might pen a new “db”—dirty book—for his devoted clientele. Girodias offered Terry the equivalent of $1,000 payment for a novel he could add to his list. This pittance of an advance would be broken up in segments over the next year and a half. Southern took the train back to Geneva and hammered out an outline that Girodias received on December 10. Written in the form of a novella, the outline described the heroine as:
A sensitive, progressive-school humanist who comes from Wisconsin to New York’s lower East Side to be an art student, social worker, etc., and to find (unlike her father) “beauty in mean places.” She has an especially romantic idea about “minorities” and of course gets raped by Negroes, robbed by Jews, knocked up by Puerto-Ricans, etc.—though her fe
eling of “being needed” sustains her for quite a while, through a devouring gauntlet of freaks, faggots, psychiatrists and aesthetic cults.
Her name was Candy.
Girodias liked what he read and scheduled the book for his spring ’57 catalog. This was pure optimism on Girodias’s part. Southern’s initial enthusiasm for Candy waned, and he asked Hoffenberg if he would like to collaborate. With Southern in Geneva and Hoffenberg in Paris, the writing would proceed in fits and starts.