by Lee Hill
Kotcheff recalls Hoffenberg and Southern trying to finish up a bunch of pages so they could join a poker game. But the book was still far from done. According to Carol Southern, Terry had grown weary of the collaboration.
“I think the idea of Candy initially amused Terry a lot, but he got bored with the execution. He would write longhand and I would type. He set himself a quota of two pages of typed script a day. When he would give me the longhand, sometimes it wasn’t enough and he would have to write more. He really was forcing it out. That’s why he asked Mason to help him finish it. Mason was involved in the inception of the idea.”
Part of that weariness was due to Hoffenberg’s erratic participation. Charismatic and talkative, Hoffenberg was a Roman candle of ideas, but he had little stamina for the day-in, day-out regimen of writing. Hoffenberg helped introduce characters such as Dr. Krankheit, the author of the Wilhelm Reich–like manifesto, Masturbation Now, who is hampered in his research by his overpossessive mother disguised as a hospital cleaning lady. Hoffenberg also supplied inspired repartee for Terry’s characters, like Aunt Livia, a suburban swinger with a genius for transforming the most innocuous conversation into a minefield of innuendo and fantasy. According to Carol Southern, much of the inspiration for Candy’s home life in Racine, Wisconsin, was a wild expansion and exaggeration of his encounters with Carol’s father and stepmother and aunts. As the summer adventures drew to a close, Southern returned to Geneva with some more pages with the hope that Candy was almost finished. He had other fish to fry.
In addition to Candy and the interview with Green, Southern had been shopping a bunch of short stories around with varying degrees of success. In June, Harper’s Bazaar (U.K.) rejected “The Arab and the Inspector,” a mystery pastiche, saying, “the Inspector talks more like a stage Englishman than a real one.” Another story, “Child Psychology,” which has since disappeared from the Southern archives, was turned down by several American journals.
However, Barney Rosset bought “Put-Down,” a part of The Hipsters, for $200, for the Evergreen Review. “Put-Down,” like “South’s Summer Idyll,” transformed Southern’s direct experience—the easy access to cheap marijuana in the Latin Quarter—into something disturbingly poetic. A group of jaded expatriates stoned on hashish become mesmerized by a ball of mercury pushed around the floor of their Left Bank digs. Although little more than a vignette in length, the story is packed with insinuating menace. The title speaks to the fragile sense of camaraderie that exists among those who try too hard to be cool and with it.
In November, Esquire bought “Sea Change” (later collected as “A Change of Style” in Red Dirt Marijuana) for $350. The brief story follows a Los Angeles woman of a certain age getting her hair done to appease her lover. This is not one of Southern’s best stories, relying mainly on description and the awkward twist of having the woman walk in on her husband and his mistress.
Rust Hills at Esquire somewhat inexplicably liked “Sea Change” more than “The Road out of Axotle,” a classic Southern story and in some ways his reply to Kerouac’s On the Road. “The Road out of Axotle” was submitted to Esquire on September 13, 1957, and went the rounds for several years before it was published. Editors were puzzled by the story. One wondered if “this reefer-and-a-gang-of-gin story [is] really for us?”
As work on Candy drew to a close, Southern described his idea of bliss in an undated letter to Mason Hoffenberg: “My idea of pure sloth would be to weigh so much (say about 5,000 pounds) that one couldn’t move and also to have sleeping sickness.” He tells Mason that his routine consists of him getting up at 4:00 P.M., eating milk and raw eggs, reading the Herald-Tribune, writing, and then going to sleep with a few amytals.
Of course looking as if one were not trying too hard was all part of being a hipster. In reality, Southern was trying to apply his talents to whatever work was available. This search for extra cash led to Southern’s first-ever credit writing for the screen.
Ted Kotcheff was eager to get Southern some work as a regular writer for Armchair Theatre. Terry suggested adapting Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones with the view to making it reflect the continuing impasse in the American South regarding civil rights for black Americans. Southern himself said in a typically laconic fashion: “I already knew Kotcheff through Mordecai. Kotcheff said they want me to do Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones. So I did the script for that. We did it with this guy Kenneth Spencer, a lot like James Earl Jones. That was an interesting production. I got to use Billie Holiday music in the background.”
Kotcheff had been hired by Dennis Vance, the executive producer of Armchair Theatre for the first two seasons. Most of the scripts consisted of adaptations, but the quality of that material—short stories, plays, novels, etc.—was very high. The first real show was “Tears in the Wind,” broadcast on September 16, 1956, an adaptation of André Gide’s Symphonie Pastorale.
In London Kotcheff did most of his work out of the ABC production offices on Wardour Street. Correspondence between Southern, then living at 46, rue Schaub, Geneva, and Kotcheff indicates a keen interest on the latter’s part to give Southern work that would be creatively as well as financially rewarding. In a letter dated January 13, 1958, Kotcheff mentions The Green Pastures and Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, but adds, “…like I told you before you left, if there is anything you are interested in or excited about which you would like to adapt, or better still, if you have some ideas for an original, let me know.”
Three days later, Kotcheff replied to Southern’s brief reference to The Emperor Jones. Kotcheff had already planned to do the play, but hadn’t begun work on the adaptation or hired a writer. By January 28, Southern was given a £75 commission from Kotcheff, who said, “Hope that is enough because that is the top fee they pay here.” He concurred with Southern’s ideas that the language needed to be “revamped and contemporized completely.” Kotcheff already had very fixed ideas about the witch doctor sequence: “I’ve a huge crocodile idol, half crocodile, half female, surrounded by ancient totem. I’ve got a real witch doctor, fire-eaters and dancers. I visualize the whole thing ending up in the primeval ooze.” Kotcheff, no slouch in the Quality Lit department himself, asked Southern to look up the poems “Heritage” by Countee Cullen and “I Have Known Rivers” by Langston Hughes and see if he could work them into the adaptation.
On February 3, Southern received a letter from Verity Lambert, a British film and TV producer who was then working as Kothceff’s assistant. She explained the prickly question of why Southern wouldn’t be getting his £75 right away: “I’m afraid the money won’t actually happen until after the play has been transmitted. The money paid to you comes out of my budget and nothing is paid on the budget until after transmission.”
By February 25, Southern had delivered his play and was asked by Kotcheff about the somewhat jumpy shift from Act II to Act III. Kotcheff was also worried the script was a little short and asked Southern to restore two vignettes in the jungle scenes about Jones’s childhood and witnessing a lynching.
The routine for the Armchair Theatre broadcasts was pretty basic. Sets were constructed in Manchester and erected in Didsbury Theatre. The cast did read-throughs and basic rehearsals in London and then traveled on the 5:55 Friday train from London’s Euston Station to Manchester for final studio rehearsals at Didsbury. Playwright Clive Exton, an Armchair Theatre regular, described the rehearsals and broadcast period as “a perpetual screaming match between Newman and Kotcheff.”
In the case of The Emperor Jones, Kotcheff cast Harry Corbett, who appared in a number of Armchair Theatre episodes, as Smithers. Corbett hadn’t yet been typecast as the nervous cockney dreamer in Steptoe and Son, the hit british comedy of the sixties that would be remodeled by Norman Lear as Sanford and Son. Kenneth Spencer, a black American actor with a commanding physical and vocal presence, had made a significant impact in Vincente Minnelli’s Cabin in the Sky, a contentious but rare Hollywood showcase for black American talent, as the
General, but aside from a thankless role in the World War II melodrama Bataan, he found it difficult to get meaningful work in the United States. He spent most of the postwar period and the rest of his life in Europe, mainly Germany, appearing in theater, opera, and film productions. Kotcheff saw him perform in an opera in Germany and was sufficiently impressed to give him the lead.
The play was scheduled to air in February, but was pushed back to April. Kotcheff did some extra “writing” on Southern’s script during the dress rehearsal, but whether this meant anything significant is debatable.
On Sunday, March 20, The Emperor Jones was broadcast from Manchester’s Didsbury Theatre at 9:30 P.M. Southern was in Geneva.
Variety’s London stringer wrote that the production was “hardly the type of program to command and hold a mass audience. At the best of times it would not be an easy-going play, but the adaptation by Terry Southern and the addition of ballet sequences to illustrate the nightmare of the haunted man hardly eased the way.
“The dramatic highlight of the production was the performance by Kenneth Spencer in the title role. A man whose stature measured up to the character, he had an authority and presence which enriched the role and gave it depth and meaning.”
The reviewer generally felt that the production “strained viewers’ loyalty when it entered the realm of fantasy, although that does not imply an unjust criticism of the Boscoe Holder Dancers. Their team work was fine; it just didn’t fit into the scheme of things.”
The English papers were much kinder. ABC’s producers thought the viewing figures were quite good considering the difficulty of O’Neill. Despite the relative success of the Jones adaptation, considering its intimidating reputation in the theater, Kotcheff was unable to get Southern another gig on Armchair Theatre, although they did discuss Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts.
In addition to Southern’s screenwriting debut, March was also the month Flash and Filigree was published. It had taken almost almost half a decade for the book to land a publisher. Diana Athill said she took on the book “because I was crazy about it, and as far as I can remember it required no editing…. I do very clearly remember being amused at Henry Green’s delight in the book because Terry’s style was so amazingly like his own. I think Terry was a great fan of his, and may well have felt strongly enough that they were kindred spirits to risk approaching him direct.”
Athill says neither Flash and Filigree nor The Magic Christian was a big earner for Andre Deutsch, but the books began to have an odd popularity among those who wanted to be on the cutting edge. Green called Flash the novel of the year in the Observer. Many of the journals of commentary such as the Spectator and the Listener commented on the debut novel favorably. The book continued to resonate through the spring and summer of 1958. Anthony Quinton in London Magazine singled out Flash and Filigree from a group of new novels such as The Return of Ansel Gibbs by Frederick Buechner, Home from the Hill by William Humphrey, a Faulkner-like drama set in smalltown Texas, and On the Road by Jack Kerouac: “It is a work of unclassifiable or indefinable intention, a pure literary artifice, carried out with admirable dexterity and control…. This is a very funny and beautifully written book, a series of acute perceptions of human peculiarity. It has no paraphrasable content, the only thing to do with it is to read. It has more in common with Through the Looking-Glass than with any of the other books reviewed here. It is impossible to imagine what Terry Southern will do next, but whatever it is it ought to be good.”
While the English enthused over Southern’s work, many American editors were still cool to Southern’s approach. Roger Angell, the fiction editor at the New Yorker rejected “Janus” on March 5, 1958. He wrote back to Southern saying the writer was “trying to give his characters an ultra-sophisticated cast, and to make them needlessly complicated.” Angell said he would like to see more work, but Southern must have been puzzled by the rejection. “Janus,” which remains unpublished, is a story about a young American couple driving through Italy. Their car breaks down and the husband goes for help. Much of the story is concerned with the husband’s impatience with his wife, his frustrating attempts at pidgin Italian, and a mistrust bordering on fear of the locals who come to his aid. In many ways, it was the kind of sympathetic study of grace under pressure, with discreet touches of the gothic, that the New Yorker loved. Perhaps the real reason for the story’s rejection was that it indicated Southern was trying too hard to write a New Yorker story.
Despite the rejection by the big guns at the New Yorker, Southern could content himself with his first celebrity-type interview in the August 1958 issue of the U.K. edition of Harper’s Bazaar. His interviewer, Elaine Dundy, was more than sympathetic. The vivacious American wife of the Observer drama critic Kenneth Tynan was also the sister of underground filmmaker and dancer Shirley Clarke. Southern had met the Tynans at Christmastime. Tynan shared Southern’s impish sense of humor. According to Kathleen Tynan’s biography of her husband, Dundy and Southern had a brief affair. And while it was true that the marriage of Kenneth and Elaine was ripe material for a Kinsey case study, one also wonders where Terry and Elaine found the time or place. It seems just as likely it was an affair of the mind.
Dundy conducted the Harper’s Bazaar interview through the mail. In the final piece, Southern appears alongside J. P. Donleavy and Don Stewart—new kids on the transatlantic scene waxing philosophic about the expatriate experience. Southern’s responses to Dundy’s questions are surprisingly direct and serious: “I believe I live abroad because I’m looking for isolation…the kind I mean that comes with an immunity to overhearing clichés, because a language you didn’t hear as a child never necessarily intrudes the way it would at home, in the subway, or the drugstore. A phrase that you catch over here by chance just because you haven’t heard it for the ten millionth time, is apt to seem fresh and interesting.”
Southern also used the interview as an opportunity to speculate on why he was having some difficulty gaining recognition in his home country:
I think my book [Flash and Filigree] was first published in England rather than America because I think most American publishers’ tastes are on the level of the comic-strip. They’ve become just ordinary businessmen. They don’t have time to read; they’re too busy hustling. Consequently they never develop any personal tastes. The way they work, they examine a manuscript for awhile and then they may say, ‘Oh yes, this is like Look Homeward, Angel’ and then they look up the sales figures of Look Homeward, Angel, and if that’s all right they’ll take it. But if the manuscript happens to be just a bit original, you can save yourself the postage…unless it’s five or six hundred pages, of course, then they’re rather apt to take it, anything; they got that idea from big cars—you know, ‘What’s good for General Motors…By Cracky!’ They’re the first real automatons trained quite simply to spot imitations of previous imitations. But then you take a situation like in England where there’s a kind of noblesse oblige to be reasonably intelligent—well, then you get a few people who, however outlandish otherwise, do have highly developed individual tastes, and so there’s a chance that a manuscript will appeal directly to them, and moreover, a chance they’ll have enough security and self-respect to respond properly when it does. Would I say American publishing is behind the times? Behind the Eight-ball is what I’d say. Yes, in books and cars, we’re terribly behind; we’re still on a “big and hollow” kick.
By the time Dundy’s article appeared, Carol and Terry were on holiday in Italy. Despite the heat and their lack of finances, they had a great time.
“We were staying in fourth-class hotels all the way. It was very, very hot,” she recalls. “When we were in Crete, there was one boat every three days to Athens or Piraeus. On the day we were to leave, they notified all the hotel guests in Irákilon, except us, that the boat was not sailing because of rough seas. They didn’t think any tourist would be staying in the run-down hotel we were at. We stayed in really cheap places and made our own coffee on our pr
imus stove.”
The couple also traveled to Venice and more touristy sites, such as the Tower of Pisa.
That summer, work on Candy was drawing to a close. Despite a growing level of mutual resentment, Hoffenberg told Southern that he was glad they had worked together:
“…I consider it an honor to have worked with you on this job—I can’t anser [sic] for you of course, but for me, these have been a very fruitful two years and I know I shall often look back on them as a happy two years come what may.
“I know we haven’t always seen eye to eye on this thing, that you don’t agree with some of my methods of running the hospital and so forth, but nonetheless we have stuck together on this thing, getting the job done through teamwork and—often’s the time—through sheer nerve and inertia.”
Candy finally appeared in October 1958 as number 64 in the Traveller’s Companion Series of Olympia Press under the joint pseudonym Maxwell Kenton. Much to everyone’s surprise, the Paris vice squad banned it. Girodias simply reissued it as Lollipop in December.
While less ambitious and formally challenging than Lolita or Naked Lunch, and less autobiographical than The Ginger Man, Candy was no simple “db.” The blithely innocent and precocious girl-next-door of the title was a flower-child-in-waiting. Born on Valentine’s Day no less, Candy Christian searches for true love and beauty in the depths of suburban Racine, Wisconsin. Like so many pilgrims, she yearns for a mentor who will guide her journey toward sweetness and light. Sadly, so many of the possible candidates seem (at least in the Matthew Arnold sense) wanting. Her English professor, Mephesto; the Mexican gardener, Emmanuel; her boyfriend and her uncle Jack and aunt Livia are revealed as base, hypocritical, pretentious, or damaged in some way. To her credit, Candy does not condemn them for the in base lusts and desires, but strives to understand and even comfort them. Her seemingly bottomless compassion and forgiveness lead her from the Midwest to Greenwich Village to a utopian community established by the Crackers (with their hit slogan “We are the Crackers/the Crackers are we!/True to each Cracker as Crackers can be/We’ve got to build, boys and girls, for a world of peace!/A world of peace, a world of peace!/without silly police!”) and finally to the Himalayas, where she confronts the ultimate guru.