by Lee Hill
“I always felt that he didn’t know how to finish The Hipsters because it was so autobiographical,” recalls Carol Southern.” He got caught up in the city currents…he wasn’t involved with film yet, but he was very interested in it. He was writing for the Nation and he was trying to make some money because then I got pregnant. I was not going to be able to continue to work. I just think life sort of overtook him [in the U.S.]. It’s too bad that he never finished it.”
Despite his reservations and quiet cynicism about the scene, Terry loved a good party. Carol joined him on his New York visits, which often included gatherings at Plimpton’s East River apartment.
“Everybody was so young. George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, Philip Roth, Norman Podhoretz, everybody by this time was in their mid-thirties and very very lively, ambitious, and interesting. The whole culture was changing,” recalls Carol. “It was a very dynamic time. The jazz scene was fabulous and the art scene was incredible. We went to a lot of openings and Leo Castelli was coming into his own. Frank O’Hara was around and Joe LeSeour and Patsy Southgate. Artists and poets like John Ashbery and Bill Berkson. Jack Youngerman [the painter] was a friend of the Seavers. There were huge parties—not only those that George gave, but also in the Hamptons. Barney Rosset had big parties.”
Terry would often bring along odd and weird Village types such as Boris Grgurevich, a New Yorker of Russian descent who managed to join the Bay of Pigs assault and live to tell Southern the tale. “Boris had two friends, Cookie and Shadow,” recalls Carol. “They traveled together and seemed like hoods. They were always stoned on something. Terry was fascinated by them…he really enjoyed their company and Boris was such a character and extremely good-looking. They were real hipsters in the true sense of the word. They were total druggies and total counterculture people. They were their own counterculture.”
Boris, Cookie, and Shadow joined the countless athletes, call girls, junkies, and musicians who formed the lively backdrop to the main characters of the Paris Review salon. These included the likes of James Jones, William Styron, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Harold L. Humes, Jack Gelber, Sadruddin Aga Khan, Blair Fuller, the cast from Beyond the Fringe, Robert Silvers, Joe and Jill Fox, Peter Duchin, Jean Stein, David Amram, Jules Feiffer, and even Jackie Kennedy. Norman Mailer called it “the nearest thing we had to Bloomsbury.”
At such gatherings, Southern was one of the lead actors. He was always good for a memorable quip usually accompanied by a cocked eyebrow. For example, a very young Jean Marsh (the future star and cocreator of Upstairs, Downstairs) was dubbed “Falling Down Jean” by Southern for her inability to remain standing after one or two drinks. On other occasions, he could be very solemn. At a party at Gore Vidal’s Edgewater home on the Hudson, the author of Myra Breckinridge remembered: “Terry and wife [standing] on the lawn…a lawn that ended in the Hudson River. They were talking solemnly—I asked what of? ‘What if,’ said Terry, ‘a child should run down the lawn and fall in the river and drown?’ We agreed that this would be very depressing.”
The hothouse atmosphere at these parties, combined with money worries, made Southern more conscious of the need for a semblance of career management. He bugged Curtis Brown about any opportunities to, as he often liked to say, “put some flour in the pot.” One of the projects Southern considered was an offer by Peter Israel, a sympathetic editor at Putnam, about doing a biography of actor Tom Ewell, Marilyn Monroe’s costar in The Seven Year Itch. He also approached the agencies and networks for TV work. In the latter case, a William Morris agent, Harold Franklin, responded to a query about scriptwriting by saying satire was not popular on American TV and that it would be difficult to place a writer like Southern.
In addition to reuniting with the Paris Review crowd, Southern began to see more of Kenneth Tynan and Elaine Dundy. Tynan had been hired by William Shawn at the New Yorker to become the new drama critic. And he would do this from late 1958 through 1960 until tiring of Shawn’s rule that the critic discuss only Broadway fare.
“[The Tynans] were marvelous. Elaine never stopped talking and neither did Kenneth. They were very lively,” recalls Carol Southern. “We went up to Harlem one night to the Savoy. There was a show and then there was an orchestra and dancing. We were the only white people there and Ken was so tall and pink faced and all these black people swarming around, it was really very funny. He looked like somebody from the UN.”
Southern and Tynan loved to riff and toyed continually with collaborating on a play called Funny Foot based on the life of Byron. Tynan introduced Terry to Lenny Bruce during the latter’s stint at the Duane Hotel in the spring of 1959. They went backstage to meet Bruce, who would become the Orson Welles of the satire boom now taking hold of the cabaret scene. Southern and Bruce clicked immediately. In Bruce, Southern recognized a kindred spirit—a comic talent who would not let categorizations limit his mode or choice of expression. As well as Bruce, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Mort Sahl, Bob Newhart, Shelley Berman, and Woody Allen were pushing stand-up beyond the realm of the one-liner into the theater of the absurd. It was also the period when Jules Feiffer’s brilliant Village Voice cartoon strip gained widespread popularity. The strip usually consisted of a monologue expressing one form of neurosis—political, sexual, or cultural—or all three at once.
The satire boom was still very much a New York–Chicago phenomenon as far as the rest of America was concerned. Nichols and May had made some well-received TV appearances and Lenny Bruce was an increasingly popular and well-paid club act in the big cities, but Vegas-style showbiz still dominated the substance and tenor of American comedy.
Southern’s writing was becoming part of the groundswell behind the satire boom. Coward-McCann published Flash and Filigree in the United States in the fall of 1958. The cover art by Edward Sorel was a cubistlike collage of cars, palm trees, and hypodermic. The author photograph had been taken by Pud Gadiot several years before. American reviews were generally mixed. The consensus was that Southern’s work was funny and unique, but there was uncertainty regarding the ultimate intention of his satire. Martin Levin in the New York Times Book Review felt Southern’s characters were “Bakelite people without substance or feeling. Inevitably they leave the reader with a lingering sensation of emptiness.”
When the Southerns first arrived in the U.S. the Paris Review ran “Grand Guy Grand,” an excerpt from The Magic Christian, with illustrations by David Burnett. It created more excitement than Flash and Filigree and Southern won an in-house prize. Random House would publish the novel the following spring.
Terry submitted another fragment of The Hipsters, the short story “Red Dirt Marijuana,” to the Evergreen Review. It was published in their January/February 1960 issue. Southern received a better-than-average $250 for the piece. The story focused on the almost prosaic friendship between a young white Texan boy named Harold and CK, a black farmhand. Told mainly in dialogue form, the result was a Twain-like tale in which a child’s introduction to mind-altering drugs is seen as an innocent, natural, and dare one say it, necessary, rite of passage.
In addition to Lenny Bruce, Southern was excited by a new play he saw in August 1959 called The Connection by Jack Gelber. Produced by the Living Theatre, the play re-created the world of a junkie’s pad by having real addicts perform side by side with actors. Gelber, the play’s author, was from the Midwest. His play grew out of several frustrated attempts to write about the Village milieu as a novel. Tynan was one of the early champions of The Connection, which created a sensation in New York that summer. The play won a drama prize in Paris when the Living Theatre took it on a celebrated European tour with The Brig by Kenneth Brown, a harrowing look at an American military prison.
Gelber recalls meeting Terry and Carol at a Christmas party thrown by the Tynans at the end of 1959. For the next three to four years, the Southerns and Gelbers would remain good friends until Dr. Strangelove took Terry out of the Quality Lit Game. Gelber and his wife, Carol, briefly stayed in Connecticut wit
h the Southerns while they looked for an apartment. During the various runs of The Connection, Gelber would get whimsical calls from Terry suggesting “rewrites.” Through Gelber, Terry was introduced to Seymour “Si” Litvinoff, a lawyer with many clients in the theater and visual arts including the French actress Delphine Seyrig. Litvinoff became Southern’s lawyer and business manager until the late sixties when he shifted into film production. It was a relationship typical of the new decade when the lines between art, commerce, business, and friendship were increasingly blurred beyond definition.
When Gelber went to England and Europe to oversee various productions of The Connection, he maintained a lively correspondence with Terry. They tried to see each other when they were both in New York. Gelber liked Southern. As Southern would say often of his many eclectic friendships, “We shared values.” What those “values” were was left unspoken, but they had much to do with the growing awareness that the sixties was going to be a decade of enormous cultural change. For his part, Gelber found Southern a delightful source of laughter whether in person or in countless letters or over the telephone. Yet beneath Terry’s funny exterior, Gelber sensed a growing internal conflict between the purist idealism of the Hipster and the material possibilities of becoming a celebrity writer.
For now, one of the ways Southern brought money in was through book reviewing. The bulk of Southern’s book reviews would run in the Nation from 1960 through 1962. Robert Hatch, the book editor at the Nation, paid seventy-five dollars a review. A few others appeared in the New York Times Book Review for a slightly higher fee. The paltry sums must have deepened Southern’s misgivings about the Quality Lit Game, but he took his assignments seriously. The book reviews allowed Southern to drop the hipster mask and by discussing the work of others articulate his aesthetics through the backdoor.
Terry’s Nation work included reviews and commentary about Henry Miller, William Faulkner’s The Reivers, Harry Matthews’s The Conversions, and Peter Matthiessen’s Raditzer. A common denominator in these reviews was Southern’s preference for novels that pushed style and narrative beyond Hemingwayesque naturalism. In the December 17, 1960, issue of the Nation, Southern listed The Connection by Jack Gelber, Clea by Lawrence Durrell, William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, Ko, or A Season of Earth by Kenneth Koch, and The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth as his year-end favorites.
“Dark Laughter in the Towers,” an essay that appeared in the April 23, 1960, issue of the Nation, is as close to a manifesto on his own brand of satire as Southern would attempt. The piece attempts to trace the moment when the absurd began to surface in American literature when “God and Democracy folded,” leaving nothing but “Laughter and Sex.” Southern makes a convincing case for William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying as an early marker of a brand of existential fiction on par with Albert Camus’s The Stranger. The second and final part of the essay roams more generally over works such as Nelson Algren’s Walk on the Wild Side, Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. What these works share, argues Southern, is an “awareness of the absurd and candor” that is easily dismissed by those who should know better as “‘novels of social criticism’ and thus ‘creatively impure.’ This interpretation—that they are, by design, novels of protest, and further, that the protest is well founded—no doubt accounts in large measure for the work’s popularity, whereas, actually the ‘social criticism’ aspect of it is simply incidental, an understandable by-product of the combination of sensitivity and candor. The real answer is that it is an existentialist literature.”
In writing this essay, Southern indirectly sets the terms by which his novels, which were also being pigeonholed in the same way, should be discussed. The other key essay that Southern would write for the Nation would be “When Film Gets Good,” written almost at the point when Southern was about to leave for London to work on Dr. Strangelove. But more on that later. Of the New York Times reviews, the most significant was an early rave for the work of the relatively unknown Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and his novel Cat’s Cradle. Southern wrote, “Like the best of contemporary satire, it is work of a far more engaging and meaningful order than the melodramatic tripe which most critics seem to consider ‘serious.’”
Interestingly Southern avoided writing any political commentary for the Nation except for a very short editorial decrying the execution of Caryl Chessman as the worst kind of nihilism. While his personal politics were very much left of center and would remain so through the rest of his life, Southern preferred to let his fiction (and later screenplays) express his political beliefs. Direct expressions of one position over another were as unnatural to Terry as frank confessions of his deepest emotions.
While moonlighting as a book reviewer, Southern became involved in an anthology provisionally entitled Beyond the Beat with Richard Seaver and Alexander Trocchi. (Southern also tried to get Mason, now back in Paris, involved, but nothing came of it.)
“Trocchi got a job as an editor at this small publishing house named Frederick Fell, which was a very clunky house,” recalls Seaver. “Fell was a man who aspired to be a publisher, but didn’t want to take any risks. That’s a contradiction in terms. So Trocchi conned Fell into getting into the real publishing world. ‘We’ll put together this avant-garde book for you which will put you on the map! I’ll guarantee it because I know what I am talking about because I have long experience in this Lit field!’ So [Trocchi] called Terry and me and said, ‘What we want to do is put together this anthology and we’[d] get money for ourselves and I think it will work.’ We had long sessions trying to determine what we’ll put in this book. There was very little common ground. We chose and settled on two or three writers and wrote to their agents. Their fees came back and they were horrendous. We had to change our whole tack. Our original plan as I remember was to do the sixties avant-garde writers, Beckett would have been in there of course…what we wanted to do because it was the American market was put in more Americans than Europeans.”
Seaver recalls a working budget of $400–$600 for each piece to secure the rights to print an excerpt. “We shifted gears somewhat and to broaden our scope and include people in the public domain, people who were Europeans the costs were much more reasonable and some we knew. Terry wrote this letter to Candida Donadio about [getting] William Gaddis. At the point Gaddis was riding quite high because The Recognitions had just come out. He was very highly praised…we wanted a part. I think we also had a bit of the Marquis de Sade.
“It should have taken us three months to put that together, but all of us were doing other things, so it took us twice that long, but in the midst of doing the whole thing, we had probably progressed about two-thirds of the way through, Trocchi absconded.
“He got in trouble with the law and was heavily on drugs. You could really go to jail for a long, long time in those days for possessing a relatively minor dose. When he came [to the U.S.], he was a known junkie. The New York police knew he was a junkie and he lived on Fourteenth Street in a loft that was really a shambles, a junkie shambles, but Trocchi was extraordinarily smart and literate.”
After Trocchi fled to England via Canada, Terry and Richard Seaver finished the project. Seaver, through his Grove Press connections, secured rights to excerpts from Beckett and Malaparte, while Southern wrote most of the introductions.
The contents of the anthology, which was finally called Writers in Revolt, include the Beats like Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, the Marquis de Sade, Baudelaire and a commentary by Sartre, Artaud’s “No More Masterpieces,” an excerpt from Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, Malaparte’s The Skin, Henry Miller, Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers and commentary by Sartre, William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, Evan S. Connell Jr., Chapman Mortimer’s Young Men in Waiting, Charles Foster, Edward Dahlberg, H. L. Mencken, the “Tra-la-la” section from Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, Ionesco, and “The End” by Samuel Beckett. The anthology was and remains as g
ood an introduction to underground literature as any other. It certainly turned on many readers as the paperback edition became a perennial used-bookstore favorite.
Southern probably had mixed feelings about the anthology at the time. It took up a lot of his time and yielded a relatively small amount of cash. When Carol gave birth to their son, Nile, on December 29, 1960, he was delighted, but also worried. He would need to be more aggressive in finding work.
Still he persisted with the Quality Lit Game. Nugget, a men’s magazine edited by Seymour Krim, paid $350 for a new short story, “The Face of the Arena.” In this vivid tale of bullfighting, a cowardly matador sees a child run onto the ground of the arena. The matador grabs the child. Just as he does so, the bull charges and in his panic, the matador uses the child as a cape.
Much of 1961 was taken up by Southern and Hoffenberg’s discussions with Peter Israel at Putnam about reissuing Candy as a mainstream book under their own names. These negotiations were helped by Southern changing literary agents. Sterling Lord, who was successfully managing the affairs of Jack Kerouac and other young writers, was more sympathetic to the attitudes of his clients.
“Love Is a Many Splendored,” a three-part story whose abrupt scene changes anticipate Monty Python, appears in The Hasty Papers. This was a onetime publication put together by Alfred Leslie, a painter and the codirector with Robert Frank of the Beat film Pull My Daisy. Southern’s story appeared alongside the work of Gregory Corso, James Schuyler, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Jack Kerouac, Charles Olson, Peter Orlovsky, and others. It was a very sixties project celebrating the diversity of creative spirit in New York at the time.