by Lee Hill
Candy conveys a delicious sense of fun that belies any sense of competition or animosity between the two authors. Although the characters are either fantasy figures or grotesques, they are oddly likable. Perhaps because no one in the book, except perhaps for the hunchback, ever really gets what he or she wants. The horny antagonists, from Mephesto to Aunt Livia, fail to achieve the mind-blowing sex they lust after, and poor Candy remains caught in a cycle of disbelief, shock, and astonishment with only her purist naïveté to comfort her. William Styron was only half kidding when he said Candy was “the stuff of heartbreak.” For readers in the decade ahead, Candy’s cry, “Give me your hump,” could also be translated as “Candy Christian, c’est moi!”
Candy quickly became a cult hit among Paris’s expatriate community, and slowly, a trickle of copies made their way to London and New York. Some of these would show up in bookstores like Frances Steloff’s Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan.
Through the fall and winter of 1958–1959, Southern finished The Magic Christian. Carol recalls Terry laughing out loud during the writing of the novel, and he would invite her into his Geneva study to read aloud his favorite passages. Queried on the title many years later, Southern had only this enigmatic response to offer: “Titles it seems to me are made up of the most engaging words you find which correctly describe the content of the work. The words ‘magic’ and ‘christian’ are certainly two such words, and surely they describe Guy Grand to an almost uncanny degree—a billionaire who does outrageously benign and charitable things.”
Southern told Paul Krassner that The Magic Christian essentially grew out of the question, “Wouldn’t if be funny if…?” The book’s episodic structure alternated Grand’s planning and execution of pranks with his drawing-room chats with his maiden aunts, Agnes and Esther. The pranks grow in size and intensity as the chats become more surreal in tone. Not content with teasing a hotdog vendor with a hundred-dollar bill he cannot possibly change, Grand moves on to taunting the very establishment he represents. Grand makes a pig of himself at a chic and expensive restaurant. He inserts nonsequiturs and racial slurs in one of the newspapers he owns. He uses a howitzer on a big-game hunt and enters a hungry panther in a dog show. He bribes the cast of a popular soap opera to break out of character and insult the sponsors as crass pulp merchants. But one can sense Grand getting more and more restless with these guerrilla forays that are meant to épater les bourgeois. His pièce de résistance becomes the building of the luxury liner the Magic Christian. Only the rich and powerful can afford a ticket for the maiden voyage of the state-of-the-art ship. For the first few days, the travelers revel in the ship’s luxury, but then very quickly all hell breaks loose. Passengers are drugged, crew members seem to be engaged in mutiny, and the ship appears about to sink or go up in smoke. Somewhere behind the scenes, Grand shifts and alters the mood of chaos that envelops this floating torture chamber/funhouse.
As with all of his stunts, Grand must pay off a large number of people to avoid being prosecuted for his mischievious acts of subversion. The first and only voyage of the Magic Christian creates such a furor that Grand decides to lie low. Of course, the controversy only inspires Grand to create more insidious stunts such as the mysterious “Get Acquainted Sales” that appear and then disappear around the country.
The Magic Christian is Southern’s “beat novel.” Where Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg either appealed to the reader’s emotions or attempted to provoke those emotions through raw (albeit carefully sculpted) imagery, Southern opted for the gentle tone of a storyteller. His targets however are the same as the Beats’: Cold War America’s repressive media and political culture, the public’s willingness to parrot the received ideas of the status quo, the unquestioning acceptance of consumerism, the banality of middle-class notions of good taste, and the amorality of the wealthy—to name a few. Guy Grand is a Zen master of subversion unconcerned with any interpretation of why he does what he does—believing instead that the pranks and their planning already embody a critique.
Southern’s relationship with the Beats was warm. He knew Ginsberg socially from his Village days. And in late 1958, he was introduced to Burroughs through Gregory Corso at the scruffy nondescript rooming house at 9, rue Gît-le-Coeur dubbed “the Beat Hotel,” where the soon-to-be-famous-but-presently-broke Beats lived. Burroughs was preparing Naked Lunch for Maurice Girodias, who was having second thoughts. Southern, along with Ginsberg and Corso, pressured Girodias to publish Burroughs’s antinovel even if its titillation quotient—the homosexual couplings, hangings, weird science fiction images—was hard to deduce.
Southern had no problems with Naked Lunch. It was like nothing else he had ever read. However, he was less enamored with the work of Jack Kerouac. In a letter to Allen Ginsberg from Geneva, he forwarded a copy of Flash and Filigree and had this to say about Kerouac: “…[The Subterraneans] is certainly a much more interesting book than On the Road—you know? That is to say, I had the feeling with On the Road that it was so severely edited, butchered actually, that there was almost nothing meaningful (convincing) left. Do you happen to know anything about how, how much it changed, etc.? I felt The Subterraneans was unique and original in the sense that it hadn’t been done before—that is to say that that particular scene hadn’t been treated before, or rather so adequately. Perhaps it was more of a publisher’s coup than a writer’s—because the ‘real value’ of it seemed to me to be in the rarity of it, you know, just as a phenomenon, so to speak, in print. Anyway I would really like to know about that if you do.”
In a reply, sent to Terry from the Beat Hotel, Allen Ginsberg confessed he was equally puzzled by Flash and Filigree: “I asked Mason then, he said it was purposely pointless, a form of wit, is that so, is that it? I was not sure, if so too Dada for me, tho perhaps inevitable if you want to destroy that form of novel, that’s one way of doing it, i.e. make a speedy well-built novel with an intricate plot that at the end never ties in and closes boxlid like well made detective-Greene etc novel is supposed to—so I was confused what your intentions were—tho if one wanted to destroy novel why not invent new form of writing entirely rather than satirize old form—or perhaps I miss the point entirely?”
Henry Green remained Southern’s biggest fan. Back in the summer, Green appeared on a radio show called Recent Novels broadcast on the BBC’s Third Programme on June 20, 1958. Green artfully anticipated the critical confusion over Flash and Filigree by explaining, “I think it’s a first novel, and there are about three books in it. Because it is a first novel it’s inexperienced. But I think with any luck—and I have great faith in him—after he’s written two more, I think he’ll be writing more in-one-piece, as you wish.”
When Christian came out in the spring of 1959 from Andre Deutsch, Green wrote to Southern with more encouragement: “Although I feel it is too short and perhaps drives the same nail in with the same hammer too many times, I found it very powerful. Very funny in the bitter way I think you mean (because I don’t know the US) and totally unlike anything I’d read by any countryman of yours. You have a very great distinction in every sentence, distinction in the sense that every sentence is yours and could only be yours and elevated at the same time—you will forgive me, I’ve just been rereading Horace Walpole’s Letters of 1753 and am using distinction and elevated.”
Southern received approximately $750 for The Magic Christian. The reviews were positive, but even though The Magic Christian was the more fully realized book some were disappointed. In another roundup piece for London Magazine, Anthony Quinton wrote: “The whole undertaking is too directly purposive for Mr. Southern’s marvelously wild talent and it is a little as if he were using a high-precision rifle with telescopic sights to shoot at a milk bottle four yards away. But even in this group of originally-conceived books it stands out for its singularity.”
If the response of English critics tended toward the fussy damning-with-faint-praise side, at least there was an essential recognition that satire was a l
egitimate form for the novel. American publishers and editors were still looking for the big fat Great American Novel heavy on naturalism and autobiographical subtext. Coward-McCann, who would publish Flash and Filigree in the States in the fall of 1958, passed on The Magic Christian. Another U.S. publisher said, “Maybe America isn’t up to satire and Mad-type humor in $3.50 form yet.” Joe Fox, the gifted editor at Random House, did pick up the book and slated it for a spring 1960 publication.
As the English critics began to mull over The Magic Christian in the spring of 1959, Carol and Terry had come to a decision to return to the United States. Terry felt he was growing estranged from his source material—America the Beautiful. During the many months in Geneva, Southern had begun to daydream about becoming a gentleman farmer and he wrote to the Department of Agriculture to for pamphlets on irrigation, seeding, animal husbandry, and the like.
“While we were in Geneva, we were making plans for our future and where to live and so forth,” recalls Carol. “Terry asked me about California and I burst into tears. So we decided to live in New England and so we planned this farm and got all this literature.”
By the beginning of April, they were on their way. While Geneva’s placid routine had obviously begun to pall, one wonders what Southern’s life and work would have been like had he decided to live in Paris or London. In Paris, he might have become a bit of a jet-setter like James Jones or Irwin Shaw. In London, where Mordecai Richler stayed until the late sixties, he might have had the best of both worlds—Quality Lit and the emerging British film boom. Or maybe he could have gone the Russell Hoban route of quietly alternating between adult novels like Riddley Walker and children’s books like The Mouse and His Child.
But whatever his misgivings about the new Beat phenomenon, Southern was worried he might be missing the real action. For now at least, New York was once again the red-hot center.
The Quality Lit Game
The big move back to the U.S. in the spring of 1959 was sobering at first. Short on cash, Carol and Terry spent almost two months in Great Neck, New York, as the houseguests of Madeline Bernard and her husband.
“She said, ‘When you come back from Europe, please come and stay until you get settled.’ Well, it took us a long time,” Carol recalled. “Terry had no compunctions about being a houseguest for so long—I was terribly uncomfortable—but he seemed to feel he was owed this. He felt that they were lucky to have us. Mr. Bernard was not too pleased about it.”
In June they moved in with John and Susen Marquand, who lived in an apartment on Eleventh Street. The Marquands spent their summers in Martha’s Vineyard, giving Terry and Carol some breathing room. They immediately began looking for the farm they had daydreamed about in Geneva. Carol worried about money constantly. She was still the primary breadwinner. As Terry began to reacquaint himself with the New York literary scene, Carol got a summer job in Brooklyn. Then in the fall, she began work at the Yale Child Studies Center in New Haven. Upon the Marquands’ return from holidays, the Southerns became gypsies again and lived in the various rentals around New Haven, recently vacated by “summer people.”
Through John Marquand, Terry had become friendly with the pioneering bandleader Artie Shaw. Shaw had become a millionaire by the end of the forties, but grew disenchanted with the Big Band swing that made him rich. No doubt his seven marriages including Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, and Evelyn Keyes took their toll. In quasi-retirement, he began to write short stories and a novel eventually published as I Love You, I Hate You, Drop Dead. Like the Southerns, he was searching for a home in the country, but obviously had more income at his disposal. “[Shaw] was looking for a house and we were looking for a house,” recalls Carol. “Artie said, ‘I have this great real estate agent, let’s all go together!’ So we did and at the end of the day, the agent showed Terry and me this house and Artie said, ‘I like it.’ Artie put a binder on the house in order to take it off the market. Artie bought it immediately because he was able to put down the 10 percent. Mike Goldberg [the painter] said to Terry, ‘You need a house for your family. Are you going to let this guy get away with this?’ And Terry stood up to him. We bought the house from Artie for $23,000. We paid the down payment with my mother’s inheritance and some money of our own.”
The dilapidated farmhouse in East Canaan, a village in the northwestern corner of Connecticut, resided on twenty-seven acres of land. There was plenty of room for cattle to graze and a small wooded area with a pond at the edge. The Blackberry River ran along the south side of the house. On the other side was a road that connected the farm to the village, barely five minutes away.
Life in the country appealed to the Anglophile in Terry and rekindled memories of his childhood in Texas. East Canaan was located at a sufficient distance from Manhattan to allow Terry to write in peace, but close enough to maintain regular contact with editors and publishers. Buying the home also reflected Terry’s jockeying between a Kafka-like embrace of the inner life and a compulsion to burn the candle at both ends in the bars, parties, and salons of the Manhattan cultural scene.
This odd impatience was also manifested by Terry’s frustrations with the business of being a novelist. During his time in Geneva, the New York literary scene in the late fifties and early sixties was mutating into an ever-changing uptown and downtown scene. The Paris Review was now being run out of George Plimpton’s Upper East Side apartment. While the Beats were gravitating to Barney Rosset’s Evergreen Review and Grove Press in the Village.
Rosset saw the changing geography of the New York scene in somewhat conspiratorial terms.
“There was CIA and anti-CIA and I felt Terry fell between the two. He wasn’t one or the other, but he was torn. He was pulled in both directions, so I forgave him. I didn’t forgive a few others, but him I did. There was the sort of Peter Matthiessen–Styron syndrome and Dick Seaver and me…. Terry loved [the Paris Review], but he was somewhere floating around and Maurice Girodias was another planet that was important.”
Rosset turned Grove Press and the Evergreen Review into a miniempire that included film distribution. Through the late fifties and sixties, Rosset would lose as much money as he would make. To some in America, he would simply be a “smut peddler,” but to those interested in the best of new writing, he was a pioneer.
The child of a Chicago banker, Barney Rosset was born in 1922 and served in the Signal Corps in World War II. In 1952, he bought Grove Press for $3,000 and began acquiring the translation rights to the likes of Genet, Brecht, and Ionesco. When he published the unexpurgated edition of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he began the first of many legal battles to extend the boundaries of free expression and won a successful court battle to keep printing the book in 1959. Grove’s publication of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer precipitated another costly legal battle to the tune of $250,000 before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Rosset’s favor in 1964. Given his costly struggles with the status quo, his view of the Paris Review crowd as a bunch of Ivy Leaguers on permanent holiday was understandable.
It was a heady time for writers in the Big Apple. The transition from the Eisenhower years to JFK’s Camelot coincided with Terry’s transition from being a literary writer to something more ambitious and interdisciplinary. Thanks to distributors like William Becker’s Janus Films and Dan Talbot’s Thalia theater, the European art film was capturing the attention of the middle class. The philistine excesses of the McCarthy era were fading away and there appeared to be a collective unbuttoning of the collar in the American psyche. Television had gotten worse, but some of the former whiz kids of live TV drama like Sidney Lumet, Arthur Penn, and John Frankenheimer were entering Hollywood with ideas taken from the Actors Studio, Cahiers du Cinéma, and psychoanalysis. And instead of just poetry or paintings, the downtown galleries were staging multimedia events including screenings of films by Kenneth Anger and Jonas Mekas.
This cross-pollination of media was exciting to Terry, who tried to keep up during his forays into the
big city. Like Rosset, he shared an impatience with the incestousness of some aspects of the New York publishing scene. He coined the all-purpose term—the Quality Lit Game—to express his ambivalence toward the somewhat unholy blurring of commerce, careerism, and politics with lofty literary aspirations.
“The Quality Lit Game was a term Terry used for the New York Review of Books crowd. He did do one or two pieces for them, but it didn’t pay enough money…not like Dr. Strangelove,” said John Marquand.
Like Norman Mailer, Terry was frustrated by the limitations of the realist novels of his contemporaries. Yet Southern was not interested in writing advertisements for the self, nor did his personality allow him to seriously consider the possibility. He was more in sync with the baroque conceptualism and black comedy of such emerging talents as Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth, Harry Matthews, John Hawkes, Thomas Pynchon, and others. All these writers really had in common was that they barely knew each other.
Terry’s restlessness was affecting the progress of a long semiautobiographical novel called The Hipsters, which he had started in Geneva. The novel began with a Southern-like character arriving in Paris to join the bohemian scene. It was intended to jump back and forth in time to trace the events that led to the character’s flight from America.