by Lee Hill
Carrying the lion’s share of the actual writing, Southern didn’t enjoy working on Candy. Among his many other projects was the beginning of a children’s story, in the style of Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince,” which would eventually emerge in 1977 as The Donkey and the Darling, a limited-edition book/objet d’art in collaboration with Larry Rivers. Southern’s agent at Curtis Brown, Edith Haggard, advised him to use a pen name for Candy in order not to prejudice his chances of mainstream acceptance. Southern was more engaged with his other writing, particularly The Magic Christian.
Despite his meager offer, Girodias was the best bet in town—not just for Southern and Hoffenberg, but for the majority of expatriate scribes in the City of Light. Girodias had restructured Olympia as the publisher of “dbs,” sold mainly to a mailing list of readers “looking for something for the weekend.” In their gut, Hoffenberg and Southern sensed Girodias could not be trusted, but they were suckers for what Southern called his “boss charm.” It was a charm that had so far seduced the likes of Vladimir Nabokov and J. P. Donleavy.
Like Paris, London became a favorite stomping ground for the couple. England was beginning a slow but gradual rise from the grimness of postwar austerity into an era of expansion and change. New figures on the literary scene such as Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Alan Sillitoe, Anthony Burgess, Muriel Spark, and Colin MacInnes were taking an impassioned, realistic look at England’s postcolonial decline. The influx of “Commonwealth” writers such as V. S. Naipaul and Sam Selvon from Trinidad and Jamaica added a much-needed multicultural voice to the country’s all too Anglo-Saxon makeup. The theater was moving away from the well-made plays of Terence Rattigan and Noël Coward to the angry realism of John Osborne and the absurdism of Harold Pinter. Young people in England were hungry for the same kind of excitement that their American counterparts were experiencing as rock ’n’ roll introduced the whole notion of youth culture. Coffee bars were opening up all over the country. There was a small, but growing trade in import jazz and R&B recordings. Skiffle, epitomized by Lonnie Donegan’s “Rock Island Line,” emerged as the home-grown equivalent of Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock.” English art schools, once the dumping ground for adolescent misfits, were becoming hotbeds of innovation and revolution in the visual arts (not to mention countless rock groups that would take the world by storm in the sixties). The Suez Crisis of July 1956—kickstarted by Egyptian president Gamal Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal—embarrassed the country’s upper-class establishment, but liberated a dormant middle and working class. Instead of retreating into cynicism, the country’s best and brightest were taking advantage of the fact that the petrified traditions of the ruling elite were crumbling.
Mordecai Richler had decided to decamp to London from Montreal. Carol and Terry paid him and his then wife, Cathy, a visit at Christmastime. Through Richler, they were introduced to Charlie Sinclair, an East End fishmonger and hipster-in-the-making who was also a self-taught intellectual.
“Terry just adored Charlie, who had the use of an old car as part of his job. Terry called it his ‘company car,’” remembers Carol. “He was a cockney who was very bright and amusing. I remember he and his wife gave us a bread knife with the word ‘bread’ carved into it.”
While in London, Southern finally got to meet Henry Green in person at the latter’s flat in upper-middle-class Belgravia. To Southern’s relief and delight, they got along like a house a fire. Like Southern, Green was an essentially shy and ultrasensitive man who hid behind a mask of good cheer, hospitality, and exaggerated storytelling. Both men also liked nothing better than chatting away into the wee hours with generous amounts of port or brandy at close hand. Green had not yet succumbed to the desolate isolation of his final years and still entertained. He and Dig made sure the Southerns were introduced to such high-flying literati as Cyril Connolly, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, and T. S. Eliot at various cocktail parties they hosted.
Carol found Green fascinating, but sensed the pain beneath the bonhomie and good cheer: “He was a very urbane amusing upper-class Englishman who drank too much. Very attractive. His wife, Dig, was a delightful and slightly fey aristocratic Honorable Mrs. Henry Yorke. They were both so aristocratic and exotic to Terry and me. At the same time, such amusing and open people that we both fell in love with them. I think Terry understood Henry’s drinking certainly in a better way than I did and used to sit up talking with him way into the night and then put him over his shoulders and put him to bed.”
After enjoying their first Christmas in Europe, the Southerns received some bad news when they returned to Geneva. On January 17, 1957, Terry’s father died. Since Terry’s mother had died of cancer a few years before, Southern Sr. had grown increasingly morose. He left Dallas and embarked on one last drinking binge that ended at the Royalton Hotel in Miami. According to Robert O’Bremment, the manager of the Royalton, Mr. Southern’s left arm was heavily bandaged and there was a bruise on the right when he checked in. He appeared to have been drinking rather heavily. He ordered a bottle of whiskey that evening and a second one the next day. He was found in the room in the morning in a dazed condition. Police were contacted. An ambulance arrived in twenty minutes. Southern’s father died forty-five minutes after arrival. The Dade County coroner said his father had died from “acute and chronic alcoholism.”
According to a letter Southern received from one of his parents’ friends, Mrs. L. C. Matlock, a funeral was held in Cleburn, Texas, on Monday, January 21, and the body was buried in Alvarado. A doctor who treated Terry’s father a few days before his death said that Terrence appeared to have contracted a gangrene infection from a broken bottle or window in his hotel room.
The extent of Terry’s grief was hard to gauge. Carol found it difficult to pry details about his family from him at the best of times and the sad lonely death of his father deepened Southern’s stoicism whenever the subject was raised. Because of a lack of funds and the awareness that with the death of his father, he had no real family left in Texas, Terry decided not to return to the States for the funeral.
The desolating impact of his father’s death was alleviated by some good news from Mordecai Richler. On January 17, he wrote to Southern that Andre Deutsch was considering Terry’s book, Flash and Filigree. Deutsch had already published Richler’s first novel, The Acrobats, and his company was known as a congenial place for relatively unknown writers to sell their wares.
Deutsch was born in 1918 in Budapest. He was educated there and in Vienna. When the Anschluss occurred, he fled to Zurich and stayed with an uncle who helped him get to London. When war broke out, he was briefly confined as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man. One of his fellow internees was a publisher and their chats sparked an interest in the gentlemanly trade. Upon his release in 1942, Deutsch worked for Nicholson and Watson and then Ernest Benn, a publisher of technical books, in sales. He used his contacts to start his first company, Allan Wingate, in 1945, but was unceremoniously ousted by members of his board. Dusting himself off from this setback, he launched Andre Deutsch Ltd. with advice from Stanley Rubinstein, a solicitor with a solid background in publishing. The company published the von Papen memoirs, the diary of one of Hitler’s closest foreign policy advisers. The book was a controversial bestseller—the establishment felt Deutsch was cashing in on a morbid curiosity with the war. Deutsch used his “foreignness” to gain an edge in securing the English rights to several contemporary European writers. But it was his publication of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead that solidified the company’s status. The English may have had a xenophobic distaste for books by their continental neighbors, but they loved American writing, jazz, and movies as much as they would soon embrace rock ’n’ roll. Along with his chief editor, Diana Athill, Deutsch would acquire the U.K. rights to a variety of American and Commonwealth authors including Gore Vidal, V. S. Naipaul, Margaret Atwood, and John Updike. Although he was an innovator in the stuffy Old Boys network of English publishin
g in the fifties, his combination of cosmopolitanism and gut instinct would eventually let him down when the multinationalization of the industry began in earnest in the late seventies.
Richler made it clear to Southern that getting a novel published by Andre Deustch was an ultraprestige gig. Still the small advances Deutsch paid out to first-time novelists would last only a month or two. Richler had been scraping by on freelance reviewing for the likes of New Statesman and Encounter. But things were looking up for hungry scribes. In various letters that winter, Richler told Southern about the lucrative opportunities for scriptwriting in British television. After several years of public debate, Parliament passed legislation in 1954 allowing private investors to bid for a handful of independent TV franchises that would be allowed to compete with the BBC. Almost overnight, there was a desperate need for actors, writers, directors, producers, and other craftspersons to provide dramatic material for fourteen new regional broadcasting companies that would now compete with the state monopoly. Sydney Newman, a producer at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, was recruited by London’s Associated Television to create a weekly hour of live drama similar to Playhouse 90. Newman began to commission every available scribe in London to either adapt or write original scripts for the new show known as Armchair Theatre. One of Richler’s first gigs, a collaboration with American screenwriter Stanley Mann, put £100 in his pocket, which was then enough to live on for several months in relative comfort.
Richler’s entrée into television was assisted by his friendship with Ted Kotcheff, a recent emigré from Toronto. Kotcheff and Richler had known each other when the former was working as a stage manager for the CBC. Sydney Newman had recruited Kotcheff as a staff director on the new show. Kotcheff had flown over to London and began sharing a flat in Swiss Cottage with Richler.
The acceptance of Flash and Filigree was followed by a wire on March 9, 1957, from Richler saying that Andre Deutsch had accepted The Magic Christian based on an outline: YOU ARE NOW ENTITLED TO KNOW THE SECRET HANDSHAKE, THE STABLE CHEERS AND—SOON ENOUGH—YOU GET YR ANDRE DEUTSCH SWEATSHIRT TO WEAR.
Meanwhile, things were not going well for Henry Green at Pontifex and Sons. His drinking and diminishing interest in the business were creating a rift between him and his fellow executives. Green was feeling depressed and finding it harder to write. In the early spring of 1957, Green sent this pleading telegram to the Southerns: UTTERLY EXHAUSTED STOP CAN YOU PUT ME UP SEVEN DAYS REPLY BY TELEPHONE HENRY GREEN.
Southern got the impression Green badly needed a change of scenery and a sympathetic listener.
“I wired back ‘COME AT ONCE.’ During our correspondence, he said Switzerland always fascinated him because it is the one place where they inventory every stone in the country. We said you must visit, never dreaming that he would. It just seemed an appropriate thing to say when someone expresses an interest in where you live. Maybe some moment of stress in his scene in London or at his factory, Pontifex and Sons, in Leeds was behind his visit. I think he came over on a train. He spent about a week or two with us, then we decided to drive him to Paris in our Citroën.”
In anticipation of Green’s visit, Terry decided to repaint the study, where their guest would sleep, at the last minute. Carol didn’t think that was neccesary, but Terry wanted everything to be in “tip-top shape.” When Green arrived, he struck the two as being in a heightened state of emotional fragility. While Carol worked at school, Southern and Green hung out in various cafés. Green wanted to talk and Southern was an avid listener. When the subject of Green’s stint as a fire warden during the Blitz came up, Southern suggested he write about it.
Grateful for the Southerns’ company, Green returned to London and began lobbying various literati such as Terrence Kilmartin, literary editor of the Observer, about Southern’s talent upon his return to London.
In addition to talking up Southern among the London literati, Green continued to act as a nonjudgmental, unthreatening role model. In his letters and conversations with Green, Southern grew to appreciate that the refinement of “a writer’s style” was a delicate quest. For as soon as a writer became comfortable with his or her voice, the danger of self-indulgence and self-parody was not far around the corner. By the time Southern met Green, the latter was finding it increasingly difficult to write without the heavy burden of self-consciousness. Eventually it would become difficult for Green’s friends and family to determine whether the drinking was a reaction to an increasing sense of writer’s block or vice versa. As Surviving, the excellent collection of Green’s published and unpublished shorter pieces attests, by 1958, even a short book review for the radio became excruciating to complete.
Geneva was proving to be Southern’s clean, well-lighted place. In a state of almost perfect calm and solitude, he was able to read, contemplate, observe, and, most importantly, write. Several different projects occupied him at the same time. In addition to getting a good head start on The Magic Christian, he began to write several short stories.
One such story, “South’s Summer Idyll,” appeared in Paris Review no. 15, 1957. It dealt with a young boy playing with an air rifle on a Saturday afternoon. A small girl’s pet cat gets killed in the process, but this significant detail is held back until the end of the story. It’s just something that happens on a lazy weekend in Texas, when there is nothing else to do. Drawing on his childhood memories of Big Herb, the piece was a highly distilled form of autobiography. Amid the random violence and parochialism depicted by Southern, the story possessed an elusive sadness for a time and place that was increasingly alien to its author.
Terry also followed up on Richler’s suggestion about writing something that was TV-friendly. He refashioned “The Panthers,” with its then-popular subject of juvenile delinquency, and fired it off to Richler, who responded by saying “the half-hr is very good but needs to be expanded—too short—and also requires that the actual crime be shown (end of Act. 1). Suspense, man. Shock.” He suggested rewriting it for Southern. Richler would then try to sell it to the CBC in about a month’s time and they could split the fee.
Meanwhile, Green had so enjoyed his spring visit with the Southerns that he began to organize a summer gathering in Spain. On April 29, 1957, he wrote to describe his plans: “After a great deal of difficulty, [Dig and I] have hired a villa 20 miles from Barcelona, Spain, from July 1st to the 31st. Of course, I have not seen it, but the Agent who appears respectable, says it will take nine people easily. It has four bedrooms, bathroom, dining room, sitting room, kitchen, garage and studio upstairs with its own terrace and 120 yards from the sea. There is a servant but that won’t be much use as we have no Spanish.”
Throughout May and June, Green would send further details. He and Dig were renting a villa in the coastal town of Mataró, approximately twenty kilometers north of Barcelona. He seemed rejuvenated and talked about a play and the possibility of writing about his time as a fire warden during the Blitz. His loneliness barely disguised by his courtly letters, Green repeated his invitation to the Southerns: “Come as soon in July as you can. Make us your Base but stay as much as you can. Best love to Carol.”
In July 1957, the Southerns journeyed down to Green’s rented villa on the east coast of Spain. Another guest, the future novelist Emma Tennant, who was engaged to Green’s son, Sebastian, was fascinated by her father-in-law-to-be, but not oblivious to signs of his declining power and confidence as a writer.
Terry spent most of his time talking and drinking with Green. Carol and Tennant swam and sunbathed. The attractive Tennant brought out the flirt in Southern and Green. She confessed that she had a bit of a crush on Green Sr. Green and Southern’s mutual fondness for the grotesque and surreal fascinated and repelled her.
Before arriving in Spain, Southern had written to George Plimpton about doing an Art of Fiction interview with Green for the Paris Review. As with so many of the classic Art of Fiction pieces (Plimpton’s own interview with Hemingway comes to mind), the Q and A sessions be
tween Green and Southern evolved into a combination of metafiction, mythmaking, and old-fashioned literary table talk. The questions and answers were sculpted by the two via letter weeks after the Spanish revels had ended. The introduction suggested the interview had been conducted at Green’s Knightsbridge home one evening, but the truth was the initial work had been done in Spain with revisions and additions conducted by mail through the fall. One such letter demonstrates how much importance Green attached to the interview:
I feel now that we ought to put this interview in a frame, I am getting more and more nervous about not having it set in something. I suggest the front porch of the Torre in Spain on that terrible road with vespas rasping by. You could do a description of this waiting for me to come out and the important thing would be that I could not bear to leave the front door for fear of the burglary that was going to happen.
The last paragraph of the interview could end with my discovering that the time was 6:30 that the pubs in Knightsbridge, England, had been open for a hour and that through the pouring rain I should go off to the Spanish pub but ask you to stay on and keep guard for half an hour more until the guests come back.
The last sentence might be “and at this Mr. Green drifted off into the rain as sad as a grey dead starved pigeon wet in the ash can.”
Despite the spirit of mischief that informed this collaboration, the interview had a core of seriousness. Aside from talks on BBC Radio, Green detested publicity. The Paris Review interview became a common reference for Green scholars. Despite pieces of drollery where Green pretends to mishear the word “suttee,” a reference to the Hindu custom of cremating a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre, instead of “subtle” and sneaking in “cunty fingers” past Plimpton’s blue pencil, the interview was, in the end, a statement of literary values.
The stay in Spain with Green was followed by a sojourn to the South of France to visit Mordecai Richler in Tourettes-sur-Loup. The medieval village in the Antibes was known for its startling views of the mountains and the sea. Southern continued to collaborate with Hoffenberg on Candy via post. By this stage, they had received most of their $1,000 payment from Girodias. Richler also introduced Southern to Ted Kotcheff, although Carol Southern does not recall his presence during this visit.