by Lee Hill
Southern dutifully finished his work by the spring. In the summer, he made a muted appearance at the Yale Summer Writing Program. Jeff McGregor, a humorist who attended Southern’s lecture, thought he looked like the Anti-Santa. When asked how he wanted his work to be remembered, Southern stumbled over his words, but eventually delivered a considered and serious reply:
“Well, the work I like, art of all kinds, is work that has a multilevel appeal and interpretation. One musicologist I was reading was talking about some passages from Bach, where you analyze all you cared but you couldn’t decide whether it was celebrating joy or sorrow. You were unable to make a convincing distinction between the two…. I like to think I aspireto that often and hopefully sometimes manage it.”
In October, a BBC film crew arrived at George Plimpton’s apartment to interview the Paris Review editor, Richard Seaver, and Southern for a documentary on Alexander Trocchi. Seaver, Southern, and Plimpton gathered in the kitchen to reminisce. The hot lights almost seemed to melt Southern away. His comments were very brief. Another BBC crew wanted to meet with Southern in a few weeks to talk about Easy Rider for a special documentary to be aired during the Christmas break.
The last week of October turned out to be very busy. In addition to the Easy Rider documentary, Richardson had generously arranged through ace publicist Bobby Zarem to hype Southern’s role in the Virgin book. Drinking Bombay Sapphires at the Algonquin, Southern answered the usual questions about Dr. Strangelove, Easy Rider, and Candy for various journalists. The publicity for the book would culminate in two launch parties, one in London and another a week later at Elaine’s, in early November. Southern arranged to get his passport updated for the visit to London.
On Wednesday, October 25, at approximately 2:00 P.M., on his way to teach another class at Columbia, Southern collapsed on the steps of Dodge Hall. He was having severe difficulty breathing. An ambulance took him to nearby St. Luke’s Hospital. His condition stabilized. He was taken into emergency, Gail recalls, where he spent what seemed an eternity lying on a gurney. Gail was told that Southern would be given a bed as soon as one became available. She spent the night at Amy Wright’s apartment near Washington Square.
Early the next morning, Gail went in to visit Terry and his mood lightened. He made jokes about how good the oxygen made him feel. Some of his students came to visit, including Caroline Marshall, who brought him some magazines.
On Friday, with Southern’s condition appearing to stabilize, Gail felt hopeful. She almost went back to Connecticut, but the doctors told her that the next forty-eight hours were crucial. She called Carol and told her things were bad and asked her to come. Carol arrived and Nile booked a flight from Boulder to see his father for what could be the last time. After Southern was moved to intensive care, his condition deteriorated.
Gail and Carol were shown X rays of Terry’s lungs. “They were absolutely white,” Gail said. “The doctor took Carol and me into the room and asked ‘Did Terry ever work in a coal mine?’ ‘Coal mine?’ I looked at Carol and she looked at me. Then [the doctor] said, ‘Well, has he ever been a farmer?’ ‘Yeah, but it was an organic farm.’ It turned out that Terry’s lungs had calcified.”
Gail told the doctor about Terry’s pathological hatred of flies. In the summer, he would spray them with huge cans of Raid. The doctor dismissed the Raid as a possible cause of the calcification.
“But I don’t think the doctor understood how pathological he was. Every time I found a can of Raid, I would stash it. I had about fifty cans of Raid under the sink,” said Gail.
Given many of Terry’s struggles to complete one promising script after another in the last twenty-five years of his life and the plague of money problems, he might as well have been working in a coal mine. The seemingly insignificant stroke in 1992 had sapped his strength in the last three years of his life. There were, as it turned out, some limits.
At one point, Southern asked for his oxygen mask to be removed so he could talk. He stiffened and said, “Something’s happening.” “What?” asked Gail. “I don’t know…. I feel like an icon.” She asked why. “Because they are doing so much.” Gail told Terry that there was more attention being paid to the patient next to him. These words seemed to give Terry a great sense of relief.
All day Saturday, with Carol and Gail in attendance, Southern drifted in and out of consciousness. One young doctor came in and said, “I loved The Magic Christian.” It was like something you would hear at one of Plimpton’s parties. Another doctor, a beautiful blond woman not unlike a young Candice Bergen, came in. And yet another doctor asked, “Mr. Southern, Mr. Southern, do you know that you are dying?” Gail admonished him, “If you talk to him like that, he’s going to tear this room apart.” The voices seemed like a distant parade of the routine, surreal and banal.
Saturday afternoon, Nile arrived at St. Luke’s directly from the airport. Gail had left for the day to check on the house in Connecticut. In the last seven hours he spent with his father while he was still conscious, Nile heard Terry ask, “What’s the delay?” Nile watched his father pitch forward in bed upright as if preparing to leave the hospital. “I’m out of here….” Terry said. “Got to GET OUT!” Then he fell back into the pillows and sheets with sudden resignation. “All right, let’s go…. I’m ready for the next step…I’ve had enough of this….”
Nile asked Terry if he could sleep.
“Yes…yes…time for a bit of shut-eye…bedways is rightways now.”
Southern was pronounced dead at 11:30 A.M., October 29.
Carol and Nile made arrangements for Terry to be cremated. His ashes were strewn over the pond on the grounds of the East Canaan home. Texas might have occupied a big part of his imaginative landscape, but he was, in the end, an Easterner.
As the news of his death traveled, the tributes began. The original Grand Guy was gone forever, but his voice remained clear and distinct in print, on-screen, and in memory. Where there was darkness, there was laughter.
The majority of the obituaries and tributes for Terry Southern that appeared in newspapers, wire stories, and magazines around the world foregrounded this quote from the 1964 Life profile by Jean Howard: “The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock—shock is a worn-out word—but astonish. The world has no grounds whatever for complacency. The Titanic couldn’t sink, but it did. Where you find smugness, you find something worth blasting. I want to blast it.”
Terry Southern’s work on Dr. Strangelove topped the list of astonishing works, along with Candy, Easy Rider, and The Magic Christian, most often cited in the news stories and tributes published in publications as varied as the New York Times, People, New Musical Express, the Guardian, and the International Herald Tribune. These achievements tended to be contextualized as the work of a writer who had peaked in the mid-sixties when the counterculture was in full swing. The London Times said Southern “never really recovered the creative edge he possessed in the Fifties.” Variety, the trade paper of an industry Southern gave too many of his best years to, mercifully made no such judgments in a brief obit that dutifully listed his on-screen credits. Henry Allen, a staff writer at the Washington Post and a fan of Southern’s work, rose above the predictable cookie-cutter copy with a concise and insightful essay. “Southern,” Allen wrote, “was either way ahead of his time or way behind it, it’s hard to tell. In any case, nobody astonishes now in this Decade of the Dead, and nobody seems to have any of the fun Southern had.”
As simplistic as it sounds, the idea of fun ran through all of Southern’s writing. What if? Wouldn’t it be cool? Why don’t we just follow this crazy idea and see how far it goes, eh? Nothing wrong with that. It will be grand.
Southern was serious about having fun with his writing. He didn’t think it was possible, or even helpful, for a writer to separate the joy of writing from the labor and routine of sitting at a desk and putting pen to paper hour after hour, day after day. He wasn’t a writer given to agonizing over the
fickleness of his muse. Nor was he a clock-watcher—putting in so many hours, churning out the exact same number of words each day. He liked to write when the mood hit him, whether that mood was anger or delight. His best collaborations, Candy, with Mason Hoffenberg, and Dr. Strangelove, with Stanley Kubrick, succeeded because they shared Southern’s desire to communicate the wonder of pushing a crazy idea to the limit.
The success of Candy and Dr. Strangelove in 1964—that year when so many lives were changed forever—turned Terry into a “professional.” It was a status he and so many of his generation of writers strove to avoid in the Hipster fifties. But it would be trite to argue that Southern “sold out.” Instead, the mainstream was briefly taken over by the underground values of Hip in the form of the counterculture. For a brief period, 1964–1970, Southern was in perfect sync with the times. When his day in the sun was over, “selling out” became increasingly meaningless as a way to define one’s beliefs and values. When the glory days of the sixties ended, Southern remained a writer with a sensitive and precise gift for pitch-perfect dialogue and outlandish situations and characters that seemed to stand outside time.
Buck Henry, a contemporary who managed to navigate the vagaries of success and fashion more adeptly than Southern, believed Southern’s gift was unique: “He invented his own idiom out of the 50s and 60s, his own language; García Márquez meets Eisenhower. I think because his work is very specific and noncopyable, he had no influence on us at all. It was a whole new chapter in black comedy, in farce.”
One can certainly find traces of Southern’s influence, but few writers have attained what Henry Allen described as “a style of spectacular grace, clarity and modulation” in recent years. Certainly the generation that grew up with Saturday Night Live, National Lampoon, and Monty Python’s Flying Circus in the seventies can see their connections with the joyful subversion of The Magic Christian, Candy, and Dr. Strangelove. However, the eighties and nineties beat the daylights out of any profound notions of “hip” or “cool” making it harder for the fragile ironic precision of these books and films to resonate meaningfully. “Hip” and “cool” began and continue to be aligned with the things one buys and consumes as opposed to what one believes. Thus Tom Cruise wearing Ray-Bans in Risky Business became cool. Huey Lewis sang “It’s Hip to Be Square,” and for a time, he was cool.
By the end of the twentieth century, the mass media, thanks to the unending wave of the Internet, was flooded with all kinds of seemingly cutting-edge information that tended to emphasize diversion rather than enlightenment. Much of this information is conveyed through a brand of irony that reassures the consumer with the following mantra: “Yeah, we know that you know you are being sold a bill of goods, but hey it looks cool and you don’t really care anyway.” Indifference, apathy, smugness, and snobbery have increasingly taken the place of the commitment, openness, activism, community, and love that the truly hip aspired to in the fifties and sixties. This is not to say that these selfless qualities do not exist today, but they are certainly not encouraged or valued by the culture at large.
Intriguingly Southern’s last great satire, Blue Movie, may be having the most palpable influence on some of the more interesting films and television of recent years. Cable, video, DVDs, and the Internet have made all manner of erotica (or “smut,” “porn,” “sleaze,” name your poison) available to even the most isolated, naive, or repressed citizen. Although some directors have made the kinds of “blue movies” Southern and Kubrick once dreamed of—the quirky list might include Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman, Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion, and Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct—that goal is less important in an era where the revelatory shock of seeing two beautiful stars fuck on screen is an all too frequent and predictable exercise in diminishing returns.
Southern’s 1970 novel, however, remains a template for media satire. Since the countercultural assumptions of right and left, us versus them, and old against young have been rendered meaningless by the rise of the media culture of the last twenty years, the media culture itself has become the focus of some of the best satire in recent years. Blue Movie’s scathing portrait of a universe where everyone has their price and any experience, no matter how personal, can be packaged for immediate consumption in the form of a film, bestseller, hit record, or celebrity has surfaced in Robert Altman’s The Player, and in The Larry Sanders Show, Bulworth, The Truman Show, There’s Something about Mary, Bowfinger, American Beauty, and The Fight Club. These films share Blue Movie’s cynicism about an age when our true responses to the world seem diluted by the virtual experiences provided by the media culture. None of these works is Southernesque in a specific sense, but they all possess the qualities of defiance, outrage, razor-sharp wit, off-the-wall speculation, whimsy, and awe that the writer aspired to in his writing.
Southern’s influence on the current generation of novelists and short story writers is harder to define. Thanks to the proliferation of superbook-stores and phenomena like Oprah’s Book Club, Quality Lit seems to be everywhere, but the notion of the writer as a kind of visionary outlaw or deflater of bourgeois pretension and hypocrisy has also fallen victim to the coopting influence of the media culture. Kerouac’s image was used in ads for The Gap and William Burroughs even appeared in a commercial and several rock videos before he died.
When attention is given to writers at the best of times, it is not for their ability to alter the way we see ourselves and the world (and thereby challenge the assumptions of the status quo and the received ideas that lead to complacency) but for “life lessons.” Novels and short stories are reduced to the level of self-help manuals. Memoirs are no longer valued for the evocative style or language of, say, Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, but for the narrator’s triumph over adversity, abuse, or addiction.
In a climate where simplistic answers are king, perhaps it is just as well that Southern’s literary legacy is not that dissimilar from Henry Green’s. To be a writer’s writer is not such a bad thing. It means that those who care about the kinds of books they write are responding to work that cuts through the silence of reading and reawakens the senses. Michael O’Donoghue, Darius James, Bruce Wagner, and Mark Leyner are a few of the disparate writers who have been liberated by Southern’s non-naturalistic approach to the novel and short story. Many of the writers interviewed for this book told me again and again how Candy, The Magic Christian, or the enigmatic stories and articles in Red Dirt Marijuana expanded their notions of what writing could be.
But beyond this quiet but enduring influence, the books—which Grove Press and Bloomsbury have reissued in the years since Southern’s death—are being read. Southern is one of those writers who keep being discovered by readers at just the right time—usually, if this writer’s informal poll is of any value, when they are in their teens or early twenties. As homogeneous and deadening as the media culture of today seems, Southern’s targets—violence, ignorance, hypocrisy, and pretension—remain as important to attack as they did during the Cold War conformity of the fifties. Just as readers have rediscovered the seemingly “dated” work of Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, Henry Miller, Paul Bowles, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Ken Kesey, Hunter Thompson, and others, so will they find Terry Southern. Good writing is always hip.
To the extent that this wildly inventive writer had a single theme, it was in his poignant exploration of innocence, naïveté, and idealism on the one hand, and worldliness, cynicism, and materialism on the other. In his greatest novel, The Magic Christian, Southern created an alter ego, Guy Grand, who embodied all these qualities and contradictions. The book is more than just a satire about money and greed, it is also a fable about making one’s dreams a reality and the importance of giving for its own sake. Southern manifested this level of generosity, kindness, and humor in his life as well as his art.
Sources
Legend for sources: TS = Terry Southern, CS = Carol Southern, NS = Nile
Southern, GG = Gail Gerber, LH = Lee Hill.
Prologue For Love, Art, and a Lot of Money
General background on this period from The Log Book of The Loved One (New York: Random House, 1965) by Terry Southern and William Claxton and “A Creative Capacity to Astonish,” by Jean Howard, Life, August 21, 1964.
“Greek tragedy rewritten by…” “Christian’s Pilgrimage,” Newsweek, May 18, 1964, p. 108.
“I’m treating the script…” “Son of Strangelove,” Newsweek, August 31, 1964, p. 73.
TS phone call to Barney Rosset, Rosset to LH, January 14, 1999.
“Well, I’ll say this…” TS on the Caspar Citron radio show, New York, June 1964. Tape courtesy of the Terry Southern Estate.
1 Youngblood
“The pond was like an oasis…” Texas Summer by TS (New York: Arcade/Little, Brown, 1991) p. 14.
“I love Texas…” “Beyond the Myth, Beneath the Haze: Digging into Terry Southern’s Buried Texas Roots,” by Robert Wilonsky, Dallas Observer, April 2, 1992, p. 13.
“Growing Up in Texas…” “The Vox Interview with Terry Southern,” by Lee Hill, Vox (Canada), September 1990, p. 16.
“It was like The Last Picture Show…” Gail Gerber to LH, April 1997.
“…in order to understand Terry…” Carol Southern to LH, March 1993.
Background on Alvarado, Texas Handbook, Texas State Historical Association, 1999.
Southern family information taken from Southern’s birth certificate. Terry Southern archives.
Background on Depression, Texas Handbook, Texas State Historical Association, 1999.
“His father was…” Gail Gerber to LH, April 1997. Southern Sr.’s alcoholism also corroborated by Carol Southern and coroner’s report in Terry Southern archives.