A Grand Guy: The Art and Life of Terry Southern
Lee HillMBR<Bloomsbury £25, pp343
Who on earth was Terry Southern? He once lived in the high-altitude literary salons of the Paris Review . He was an American in Paris with Sartre and Camus. He swung vigorously in London in the Sixties and in 1972 he was on the Rolling Stones' tour jet, immortalised in Robert Frank's documentary, Cocksucker Blues, a film so gross that even Mick and Keith were chastened when they saw it. He was anthologised by Tom Wolfe in the influential New Journalism. While Southern is unknown to the present younger generation, his brilliantly trashy novels and sardonic filmscripts helped frame the perceptions of people my age.
Terry Southern was born in nowheresville, Texas, in 1924. As a child, he was attracted to what he called 'weirdo' literature: copying Edgar Allan Poe led to Baudelaire and Céline which eventually led to the normally sober New York Times calling him the 'hippest guy on the planet'. Although I have to say his early Sixties regime doesn't sound all that cool to me: rise at 4pm, eat raw eggs and milk, read the Herald Tribune, write in a room papered with rejection slips, go to bed zonked by sodium amytal.
Southern was post-Beat: less dark than Burroughs, shinier than Kerouac, much funnier than Ginsberg. Yet his debut as an author came through what he called The Quality Lit Set. Adoring the works of Henry Green, the compliment was repaid when the novelist called him a 'genius'. It was Green who got Southern's first novel, Flash and Filigree (1958), published, although André Deutsch only did so with the proviso that Green himself review it (in The Observer). Which he did, very favourably.
Candy (1958) and The Magic Christian (1958) made his reputation, but filmscripts confirmed him as a counterculture hero. In Dr Strangelove (1963), General Jack D Ripper is convinced that communists are trying to rob Americans of 'precious bodily fluids'. The hysteria and eye for symbolism are maintained in the scene where, needing a dime to make a phone call to save the world from imminent thermonuclear holocaust, our hero is told: 'You can't shoot that [vending machine], it's the property of the Coca-Cola Company.'
There was Barbarella in 1967 and Easy Rider followed in 1969. This road movie, a paranoid parable of discovery and disappointment, dense with motifs of hip rebellion, was made on a budget of $400,000 and grossed $60 million. That was more than Dr Dolittle.
Somewhere in between the great movies, Southern hooked up with the Beatles. Here was a genuine symbiosis: he satisfied their voyeuristic taste for Americana, while they gave access to the ultimate Pop experience. The Blue Meanie in Yellow Submarine was based on a Peter Sellers character in Dr Strangelove and Southern appears on Peter Blake's Sergeant Pepper sleeve. Unlike his neighbour, Oscar Wilde, Southern is wearing shades. But there was a dark side to this bright world.
Southern's gargantuan appetite for booze and drugs made even his friend, the hard-drinking, hard-writing Mordecai Richler look tame. Richler had to escape from two ghettos - Jewishness and Canada. Southern only had to escape from one - Texas - but the dimensions of his excess and the velocity of his escape suggest that the Lone Star state was emotionally a more confining prison than schul in Montreal.
Southern's was a classic small-town breakout. He was an authentic artist, a true original, but nowadays the novels and movies can only be enjoyed historiographically. Candy is like Ronald Firbank on acid; Dr Strangelove, mannered to the point of distortion; Easy Rider, shallow; Barbarella, silly.
Southern addled his brain. Epic carousing was followed by periods of 'cooling it somewhat off the scene', a location where he spent more and more time. There had been too much too soon; for Terry Southern there was no maturity as a writer, it had all been early promise. There were arguments with Kubrick about the Dr Strangelove credits. There was chronic writer's block and perpetual money worries, with lively orchestration by the IRS. By the early Eighties, Southern was writing scripts for Saturday Night Live. He died in 1995 on his way to a film class he taught at Columbia University.
If ever anything needed (and deserved) 'tightening and brightening' (Southern's memorable description of the editing process), it is this ham-fisted, slavish and breathless biography. Lee Hill tells us that Chelsea is a chic London district and believes that Villefranche is a 'little fishing village', although these may be true perspectives if you come from Calgary, Alberta. Five years of research with the diffident Southern has left no great impression of intimacy or insight.
'We blew it,' Captain America (the Peter Fonda character) says at the end of Easy Rider. Southern blew it, too. Big time. Alas, we know very little more after reading a biography with more facts than feeling.
