There is a sequence in Terry Southern’s first novel, Flash and Filigree (1958), that features a TV show called What’s My Disease? It is Southern’s version of the once-popular Sunday night show called What’s My Line?, during which a panel of four attempted to guess the identity of a mystery guest.
In What’s My Disease?, the contestant is wheeled in, obscured in a sort of shrouded cage, thus invisible to the panelists. Questions from the panel follow the usual routine—”Is your condition local, or general?” “Are the manifestations of this condition visible?”—to which the answer is negative. A panelist asks, “Is it—your face?” (The negative answer provokes a sigh of relief.) One of the panelists whether its manifestations are above or below the waistline. (Answer: below.) “Is it of the limbs?” (A hesitant yes.) “A single limb?” (Yes.) “Is it elephantiasis?” A positive answer to which “with grand good humor” the moderator announces, “Yes, it IS elephantiasis!”
Further contestants are found, eventually, to have ichthyosis, multiple goitre, and giant measle. Flash and Filigree is an odd “novel” to say the least, its plots not connecting with each other, the characters not (as my students now say) “relatable.” But the what’s-my-disease sequence hit me where I live, and in my depraved consciousness, I became an instant fan of Terry Southern.
This hefty collection of his letters, edited by his son Nile and the literary critic Brooke Allen, is published, appropriately, by Antibookclub, a name after Southern’s own heart, since his career as a writer and film scenarist was predicated on an “anti” stance.
In a 1958 letter, written as his second and best novel, The Magic Christian, was about to be published, he pointed out that the novel’s hero, Guy Grand, only deals with “social, intellectual, and humanitarian abuses.” Readers of the novel remember that Grand (“Grand Guy Grand”) dealt with such abuses by using his millions in concocting schemes designed to “make it hot” for people by putting them in fantastic, unbelievably embarrassing and degraded circumstances. Circumstances like being invited to plunge into a huge concrete vat, constructed in midtown Chicago, which Grand has filled with 300 cubic feet of manure, 100 gallons of urine, and 50 gallons of blood. The public is enticed to dive into this heated mess by a sign Grand has scrawled on the vat’s sides—FREE $ HERE—to advertise the 10,000 hundred-dollar bills he has stirred into the mess with a wooden paddle.
This is one of the livelier instances of Guy Grand making it hot for people. Yet when Southern writes to John P. Marquand Jr. that “all of Grand’s protests are against corny abuses of the mind and spirit within his own culture,” the words seem hardly adequate to the outrageousness of Southern’s comedy. In a “novel” made up of them, my favorite is the prize fight in which the two heavyweights are paid to prance about the ring in “effeminate” manner. Or there is the audience’s bewildered and angry reaction to improbable “inserts” Grand has made to movies (he now owns a theater) such as Mrs. Miniver and The Best Years of our Lives, in the latter of which a war hero who has lost his hand is suddenly seen to be “grappling urgently” with his metal hooks under the skirt of his fiancée.
In the titular and longest sketch, the equipping of a luxury liner called The Magic Christian results in a maiden voyage in which everything that could possibly go wrong does. During lifeboat drills, the lifejackets inflate in a colossal way, each one blowing up so much that the person wearing it is obscured and ends up either rolling on the floor or getting stuck in a corridor. It’s far from clear what “corny abuses” are being sent up here; what we’re left with is aesthetic delight in the creative fantasy rather than a moral response to some social wrong.
It may seem odd to invoke T. S. Eliot in connection with anything Terry Southern touched, but Eliot showed how, in the work of Ben Jonson and John Dryden, the “abuse” was enhanced rather than criticized (think Sir Epicure Mammon or MacFlecknoe). At one point in these letters, though it’s hard to believe, Southern invokes Eliot by quoting from “Tradition and the Individual Talent” to (a perhaps surprised) Allen Ginsberg.
These letters, painstakingly edited with scores of names identified, are unlikely to cause serious reevaluation of the life and work of Terry Southern (1924-1995). Lee Hill’s 2001 biography (A Grand Guy) carefully traced the main events of his life: boyhood in Texas; military service and some higher education; life in Paris and New York after World War II; and affiliations with players in the literary world: William S. Burroughs, Alexander Trocchi, George Plimpton and the Paris Review crowd, Jack Gelber, and many others. He married Carol Kaufmann in 1956 and they had a child while Terry scrambled to establish himself in what he always called the “Quality-Lit Biz.”
The establishing came almost all at once, with the novels Flash and Filigree, The Magic Christian (1959), and most scandalously, Candy (1958), cowritten with Mason Hoffenberg, which got up there on the bestseller charts. Then, meeting with Stanley Kubrick and working with him on Dr. Strangelove (1964), he moved into writing film scripts, dashing off various shorter pieces of prose. He would publish two further novels, Blue Movie (1970), the travesty of putting together a dirty movie, and Texas Summer (1991), a charming, loving recollecting of boyhood in Texas, published not long before his death.
The years between Strangelove and his death are, overall, not pleasant to read about, with one after another project failing to catch fire. Still, the letters show scarcely a trace of defeat or depression that circumstances weren’t going his way; his tone remains steadily upbeat, relentlessly productive of the fantasies or “bits,” so constructed as to be unmentionable, obscene, or both. One was a suggested comic strip titled The Adventures of the Vomiting Priest to be drawn by Larry Rivers. Southern characterized the strip this way: “You have this guy, dig, the priest—naïve, sympathetic, sort of Karl Malden type, wants to be a regular fellow, one of the boys, have a drink now and then, an ordinary Joe . . . except that he’s constantly vomiting.”
Nobody picked that one up.
In one letter, Southern claims that “almost everything deserves sardonic treatment,” although it would be a pity to ignore “rare instances” when something great genuinely was at hand. When he explained to the publisher Maurice Girodias the plot of what would become Candy, he told him that he had something in mind in the tradition of Candide. It would be modernized to follow the adventures of “an attractive American girl” who comes from the Midwest to New York to be an art student and social worker:
One notices here, in contrast to the crude, sensational subject matter, how carefully and satisfyingly formed are the sentences that convey it—more subtle than the novel that would eventually result. When his friend Marquand objected to the skit from The Magic Christian in which Guy Grand hires an airplane to write filthy words in the sky over Boston, he cautions Southern to avoid “vulgarity.” Southern picked up the charge and turned it around:
John Simon once referred to Terry Southern’s talent as a “slender, unwholesome [one].” A clever phrase, and I suppose the imagination behind Candy and many of the routines spelled out in these letters is certifiably unwholesome. But although Southern’s output was small, the talent it showed was anything but slender. A trivial headline in the New York Herald Tribune—”Eisenhower Says His Faith in God Has Kept Him Sane”—can bring forth some original wordplay, as Southern suggests to Mason Hoffenberg, “Send that to your smart-aleck Jack Sartre and Al Camus! I’ll bet it would make them cross as pickles.” Or this free-floating fantasy devoted to “pure sloth.”
More than once the reader might have been tempted to say, “Enough, Terry! You’re overextending yourself.” But of course, overextension was what Southern practiced every day, all the time. At its best, as in The Magic Christian, the result is dazzling. In a 1964 talk given by Norman Mailer, “The Dynamic of American Letters,” he ended his survey of 20th-century fiction with Saul Bellow’s Herzog and Southern’s novel, which Mailer called satire, “the aristocratic impulse turned upon itself.”
The Magic Christian, Mailer concluded, was “a classic of Camp.” Fifty years later, that word—”camp”—has pretty much gone out of use. But it may have captured the particular nature of Terry Southern’s contribution to American quality lit.
William H. Pritchard is the author, most recently, of Writing to Live: Commentaries on Literature and Music.
