The Flash and Filigree

of

Terry Southern

While he is perhaps best known for collaborating on the screenplays for Easy Rider, Dr. Strangelove and Barbarella, among other influential '60's films, the late Terry Southern (1921-1995) was also a trailblazing and controversial novelist.

Grove Press issued four of Southern's five novels (excluding 1992's Texas Summer), in this year following his death in 1995. Although not as well remembered as some of the more overblown characters of his day, Southern was a '60's counter-culture pioneer who had as much influence on the anti-establishmentarian mindset of pop culture in that heady decade as any writer.

Southern reads today like a combination of Philip K. Dick and William S. Burroughs-- bitingly satirical, vastly imaginative and often very very sloppy. His first book, Flash & Filigree (1958), the least satirical and most underdeveloped of the four reprinted by Grove, seems like it could have been a fine "Twilight Zone" episode, nicely setting a tone of quiet menace, but as the story progresses and more characters are introduced, the novel as a whole proves awkward; it's feels more like the writing workout of a beginner than a fully-realized project.

Southern co-authored Candy (also 1958) with Mason Hoffenberg-- the two men originally using the pen name Maxwell Kenton, because Southern was alternately trying to sell a children's book and was afraid that the notoriety the controversial, highly "bawdy" work would hurt his chances of snaring a publisher. A take-off on Candide, the novel is centered around the character Candy Christian, a college-aged naive beauty whose humanitarian impulses make her want to do anything she can to help others self-actualize; typically, and amusingly, the slimy college professors, psychologists, would-be gurus, et. al. who come into contact with her are only too glad to have the wide-eyed nymph accept their, uh, expressions. If Candy's storyline becomes predictable, its humor repetitive, it's still an Important, taboo-breaking time piece. . . one that was later made into a rather silly (and instantly dated) big-budget motion picture bomb co-starring the Beatles' own Ringo Starr and the late, great Peter Sellers.

Starr and Sellers were also in the film version of Southern's next book, The Magic Christian. This is easily Southern's best work. Eccentric millionaire Guy Grand seems to take a perverse pleasure in seeing how he use his wealth to illuminate, anger and confuse people. Through his pranks, much of what we know as Modern Capitalist Society is turned on its head. Like Candy, this book suffers from needless repetition, and today's jaded reader may even want Grand to go even further out than Southern let him; the book also benefits greatly after a viewing of the film version One of the era's masterpieces, featuring the relaxed camaraderie of Sellers (as Grand) and Starr (as the millionaire's man-friday), and the fast-cutting ennui of swinging British filmmaking in the Richard Lester era.

As an original screenwriter, Southern was more successful, but also prone to sloppiness and tackiness. His scenes in Easy Rider-- pretty much the surreal confrontations between the hippie protagonists and Middle America-- are some of the things that stick with you from that somewhat overrated counterculture time capsule, (which Southern co-wrote with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper).

And Southern's one undisputed classic screenplay collaboration, with director Stanley Kubrick and Red Alert author Peter George in Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, has a stridently parodistic tone that was more his than the director's (check out the argument over the Coca-Cola machine while the world is ending, or the cowboy soldier Slim Pickins riding a bucking warhead to oblivion-- prime Southernesque surrealism!), although auteur Kubrick later diminished the writer's involvement in the project as one of a polisher.

By the end of the '60's, the author became sort of a psychedelic, swinging version of Ben Hecht a talented and fast hack hired-out to give some big-name Hollywood movie a good line or two, a bawdy subplot, a hipness quotient. New Yorker critic Pauline Kael, no big fan, remarked that he had "a wise guy's love of the ridiculous" but that his work was ultimately shallow in all of its surface flashiness. Some of his books and film projects were classics of their kind, anyway. Terry Southern was truly of his era.

--- Brian Greene

(with additional thoughts by Don Harrison)