Dad Strangelove: An interview with Nile Southern

NILE SOUTHERN is the son of the late novelist, screenwriter and 60s counter-cultural figure Terry Southern (1924 – 1995). His book The Candy Men: The Life and Rollicking Times of the Notorious Novel Candy (2004, Arcade Publishing USA) tells the story of the satirical novel his father co-wrote with his friend Mason Hoffenberg.
Nile’s book follows the novel from its beginnings as an idea of Terry Southern’s to write an erotic update of Voltaire’s Candide, to the jaunty co-writing of the book by Southern and Hoffenberg, to its banning in France, later success in America and a big-budget and star-studded, if artistically-discreditable, film version in 1968.
That story is reviewed in more detail in a companion piece to this interview, in Issue 14 of NUDE. Here Nile speaks about the writing of his book to literary correspondent JAY CLIFTON, and about the highs and lows of being the son of the famous ‘grand guy’ Terry Southern.

Image: Terry Southern by Matt Aston

Nile, one of the many things that impressed me about your book was your objectivity in relation to your father, Terry Southern, even when dealing with material about his relationships with women that must have affected you personally at a tender age. How were you able to maintain this cool non-partisan tone through the book?

You have zeroed-in on an interesting topic, for sure! It is remarkable that in this entire book I use the first-person, which I must do, because I say ‘I was born…’ at something like page 300. And that was a bit odd for me, to suddenly realise I needed to write in the first person, whereas throughout the book it’s more of an account of my father’s life and times. I’m certainly a part of that story, but in the story I’m telling I obviously play quite a minor role, because I was born in 1960 – I’m kind of side-stepping your question but I’ll get back to it – literally a ‘child of the Sixties’ – whatever that phrase means – so interestingly I was born in that period when Candy was undiscovered still. Right in the middle of a bridge, let’s say, from 1958 to 1964, because it comes out in France in 1958, in Paris, and was quickly banned there. But it doesn’t come out again until 1964 in America, when it becomes a big hit. So I’m born right in the middle of that gap, shall we say.
And then the Sixties really take hold of my life, my father’s life, of everyone’s life the world over. That era was a very dynamic one with lots of changes. So I think focusing on the book Candy was a way for me to shine a light on those interesting times and what led up to some of the movers and shakers of that era. I wanted to really explain that my father and this book Candy, and the very sentient and prescient ideas my father had – that there are no limits, and that if there are apparent limits they should be destroyed, and things like this – they didn’t just appear from nowhere. They interestingly, I think, date back to Existentialism in Paris after the War, and the great jubilant sense of possibilities there. And also Terry cultivating himself as an artist there at that time… and in relation to the writing of Candy, his sitting around in cafes smoking hash, and just observing the culture, especially the culture of American expatriate young women, who were coming to Paris as they had come to Greenwich Village, and sort of riffing on it big time… but in answer to your question, which is an interesting one, I didn’t focus so much on my father’s personal relationships and what was going on in his personal life. But I think it’s clear that a lot happened after the success of Candy, there were changes in his life. And then as a veneer over that the Sixties creates even more apparent possibilities and confusions and impulses that he – (Nile laughs ruefully) acts on!
Terry did meet another woman in Hollywood, when he was really at the apex of his new career as a screenwriter, where suddenly he’s earning more money per week than he had been earning in a lifetime of writing literature. And frankly his head was turned around to many things, including the idea of a traditional family set-up. It is ironic though, that I’m very much a family man – I have two daughters and I live quite a different life – so I do reflect on that.

At what point in your childhood did you realise that your dad had a pretty unusual career and group of friends?

Well, when my father was away, during the mid-to-late Sixties, doing all of these different projects, of course The Beatles were having this tremendous impact at the time as well. And my father would write to me, because he happened to be making The Magic Christian with Ringo Starr and Peter Sellars – and so the Beatles would come around to the set, and my father really became quite good friends with Ringo. And so I would get these letters from Ringo and my father. So it was quite amazing, because even though my dad was gone it was like the whole culture was coming back to me – the culture that he was working in and helping to create and being a part of.
And that made up for a lot in his absence, because –‘a’ – I felt that the work he was doing was important and – ‘b’ – because it was such a kick to have Ringo sending me letters. Ringo had his own stationery, made I think by Peter Mack, with a profile of Ringo on it. He sent me one letter on this ‘Ringo’ stationery, telling me to ‘keep up the piano lessons’. He actually used to send me sneakers! These wonderful sneakers from somewhere along Portobello Road, with stars on them – you could never find them in the States. My father also later introduced me to Marc Bolan when the Slider album had come out.
So I was in heaven in terms of plugging into and getting my fix of popular culture, which at the time was not a commodity, it was more of a way of being, like a tidal wave, it was unstoppable and questioning everything. I wasn’t that aware of it at that time intellectually but I was aware of it almost like an environmental effect. The Sergeant Pepper’s album was like something that stuck to the walls, and dripped down and was just everywhere. And the fact that my father was on the cover of the album – I honestly can’t say that I knew that until probably the Seventies – when everything was over.
But I was aware, because of my father’s absence, that he had a job and a career that was taking him away from me and my mother. Then later I realised it wasn’t only that, it was some other attractions as well, in particular a woman named Gail Gerber, who was a movie actress and was quite appealing to my father. Also divorce at the time – a lot of families were breaking apart in the Sixties, it was almost a joke if you had a stable family. The majority of people I knew had broken homes.
But getting back to your question, there was also this paraphernalia related to things my father had done – these Magic Christian buttons, that said ‘Sink the Magic Christian’, or Barbarella buttons. I remember my mother sneaking me in to see one of his movies, in New York, I think it was The Magic Christian, because that film was not for kids. But he was very much absent from my early life, and then he kind of came back as the Sixties ended. I’m working with these themes in a new project, which is a film I’ve begun about my father, called ‘Dad Strangelove’. I’m trying to get my head around it – perhaps that’s why I’ve been talking about it so much!

When your father died he left some hefty debts to the IRS, and Terry Southern’s archive of writings and letters was held by the government against payment of this debt, until the intervention of film director Steven Soderbergh. Is that story correct, and could you elaborate on that?

Yes. He did leave some debt, it wasn’t a tremendous amount, but it was beyond what I could manage and you can’t just declare bankruptcy because that means you have no assets. So we needed to first make sure that his literary properties were in fact assets and considered of some value, for all kinds of reasons obviously. And it was good we did that. Meanwhile I found that dealing with the IRS here in Colorado was easier than dealing with them in New York. I found them here to be very approachable, so I would call them up and we would have these conversations. So eventually I settled with them; I just kept paying them, every year I would pay them whatever money would come in from his royalties – we still get some royalties whenever Dr. Strangelove or Easy Rider plays on television – so I would just send any of that to the IRS – it was pretty depressing really but it was a desperate situation…

For how many years did you have to do that?

I’d say about five years. I tried to do other things to raise money and have other people to come to the rescue, but that didn’t really work out. There was also a probate going on, that’s where the judge is trying to settle the debts of the Estate if you can do it readily, and so yes, at one point they threatened, in a sense, that if I couldn’t bring this to a close, the State would have to sell whatever assets the Estate had, in a kind of ‘fire sale’. Gosh, I could not let that happen! So I just persevered and like I say being in the West helped to bring it to a close.

And what was the part of Steven Soderbergh in all this?

Right! Well, during the time I was trying all sorts of things to bring more attention to my father’s work and sort out his affairs, there was an article written about me and my efforts called ‘Odd Man Out’. It appeared in a newspaper that was available in Los Angeles, Denver and New York, and so Steven had read this account, and he was talking with Elliot Gould – who knew Terry – when he was making Ocean’s Eleven. And Elliot Gould said, ‘Well, I know Terry’s son, Nile, and I can put you in touch’. Because Soderbergh was quite shocked that there should be this situation; of the archive of Terry’s that no one would buy, and debts that the IRS still wanted to collect on, and all this sort of ‘tragic tale’. So he got in touch and essentially offered to take care of the main problem, which was that the papers of my father needed a home. So he purchased the papers, and donated them to the New York Public Library, and in the mean time, also worked out a film deal to have a ‘first look’, as they call it, on the property. That’s worked out well – he hasn’t actually developed anything yet, but he’s been very helpful and it certainly helped me at the time.

One of the real treasures of your book are the many letters between Mason Hoffenberg and Terry Southern, which express a satirical and ribald sense of humour that makes even the Beats look timid by comparison. Was your discovery of these letters the inspiration for you to write the book?

Yes, the discovery of these letters was the inspiration for doing the book, and ironically it was Maurice Girodias’s lawyer who turned over the letters to me. In a sense he was ‘on the other side’, because my father and Mason ended up fighting Girodias over the copyright and it was a long and protracted international court case. So it was wonderful to have Leon Friedman contact me after Terry’s memorial service in New York and say, ‘You’ve asked for letters from anyone who has them, I have a whole file full’, and he promptly sent them to me. They were fascinating. Many of them were marked as evidence, to appear in court, to help argue one side or the other about who was the author was what, or whatever some point was. So that helped to explain what was a very complex publishing row that may in fact be one of the most notorious publishing stories ever; where you have such a successful book, the copyright is unknown or in dispute because it was first published in Europe, and the race is on to make the movie, but, ‘Uh, who has the copyright?’ – it was kind of like a ‘Keystone Cops’ story!

But what about the more personal letters between Terry and Mason, who had possession of those?

Terry kept a lot of those letters, and that’s interesting, because he didn’t keep all of his letters, and I think he really harboured those – in a good way. He relished, in a sentimental way I think, those days with Mason and creating the book Candy. I think he really didn’t focus on any of the aspects that I did in the book. He really wasn’t interested in lawsuits and legal cases and royalties and all of that. It was pretty straightforward for him – there was the creative act, there was out-riffing your friend and others at the table and seeing how far you could go with a satiric idea. And then getting it in print was very important for my father, and he was very dedicated and disciplined about it – and I think his letters really show also a great dedication to prose style, they’re very fluid. Letter writing is a lost art, shall we say – it would’ve been interesting to have seen what Terry’s ‘blog’ would have been like… but he really did like to write, and I think the fact that he kept these letters shows something about how he felt about those times – that he was fond of them.

Your book begins with Terry and Mason meeting in Paris in 1948. Both had come there on the GI Bill and were ostensibly studying at the Sorbonne, although in reality they spent most of their time socialising with offbeat characters at Parisian café tables. They complained about their threadbare lifestyle in their letters, but still it seems like it was a near-ideal situation for two potential writers: plenty of spare time, interesting surroundings, cheap lodgings and a basic stipend provided by Uncle Sam. The number of other literary Americans also taking advantage of this post-war Parisian situation – Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, George Plimpton, William Styron – suggests a slight return to the Lost Generation of Twenties Paris. Would you agree?

Certainly everything you’ve said is correct. I think the difference is that they really wanted to do something new, as any new generation of writers wants to do. I think they certainly embraced the ex-pat lifestyle, but they did it in their own way, which for some of them – my father and Alex Trocchi in particular– meant smoking the ‘wog-hemp’, as they would satirically call marijuana, and hash, to upset those like Plimpton and Styron, who would not partake. They would also invoke the tradition of the Surrealists in their search for mind-altering experiences. But mainly, in terms of the writing, my father wanted to do things – short stories for instance – that would capture Hemingway’s clarity and attention to mythic contemporary scenes, but focus on some things that hadn’t been treated before – like black-white relations in the South – and around drugs.
For example, ‘Red-Dirt Marijuana’ is a coming-of-age tale about a white boy who is kind of educated by a young black farmhand, who is showing him how to cultivate marijuana – he shows him how to dry it out, and explains why he smokes it, and what it does to a man’s perceptions. This was unprecedented territory; Hemingway would not have thought to explore such a scene. Also if you look at my father’s stories, collected under the title Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes, you’ll find stories that also follow an O. Henry-like construction. So I think he wanted to be a great writer, and be considered as a serious author, as opposed to many of the Beats who really just wanted to write poetry and be outrageous, and maybe didn’t have those aspirations. And Terry had, I think, many novels in him that were not written. If you look at Styron or some of the other novelists who were around that scene – they really just became novelists their whole lives; they did not work in film. Terry was always interested in mastering a genre and then moving on, it seems. So I think what you said is completely accurate, but in terms of aspiring to do what had been done before with the Hemingway generation, my father in particular wanted to do something more – something more profound, shall we say, so it would raise certain reflective qualities of a society looking at itself. I think The Magic Christian, as a novel, was his great discovery, it certainly gave him a lot of satisfaction to come up with that character of Guy Grand. And that sense of subversion ran very forcefully through my father, even though he tended to use a prose style which was not what you’d call subversive or experimental. He would use the forms that Robert Louis Stevenson would, or the great writers of his day – or of all time, shall we say.

Though Terry and Mason were clearly ‘progressives’, politically-speaking, their discussion in their letters of the women around them in exclusively randy terms, and their creation Candy Christian, the sexy and naïve college-girl teenager at the centre of their novel, could lead to criticism that the two men were simply sexists where women were concerned. Is that a fair criticism?

Well, I think my father had a very reverential attitude about women, really, and that he actually treated them with a great deal of gentlemanliness – a mixture, shall we say, of the gentlemanly and the… sleazy (Nile laughs). I think he had a good measure of both. He put them on a pedestal, in a way, and he had very much a voyeuristic, empathetic love for them, in wondering what it would be like to be a woman. I think it was always something that inspired him, and titillated him as well. You could say, ‘Well, that’s just some sort of perversity’, but really it was quite wholesome I think.
There was another side to him, of course, that was a very experienced seducer. There’s an interview in Now Dig This, where he talks about how they used to seduce young women in Texas, and the way it would work. And it was very naughty: spiking their grapefruit juice with vodka, or having small pairs of scissors to undo their undergarments, which at the time were very robust. I think it’s more complicated than just, they might be misogynists or sexists; I think that Mason and Terry were of a generation of men where, ‘what a man says goes’, shall we say. But in his relationship with my mother it was a very even one – they had a farm in Connecticut, and they had a great relationship. He had great relationships with women. I think if you look at his stories, and in particular his novel Flash and Filigree, you’ll see women portrayed in a way that is very sensitive to them, and is pretty remarkable actually, and in strong contrast to Candy.
It would be interesting to get more feminist readings of Candy. We had one recently in New York and I think that there’s a couple of things to look at. One is the use of the terms ‘jellybox’, ‘sugar-scoop’ and so on to describe the vagina, which is sort of an endearing personification of something that obviously was very important to him, and to most men. And it’s true that you’re not really in Candy’s head so much as the author’s notion of Candy’s head… although I don’t know if it’s fair to critique it in that way, because there were some really poetic moments in Candy, where I think you really do get into her psyche. But I think he’s very much playing with that whole dynamic of a reader’s expectation of how a young woman is portrayed. If you look again at Candide and how Voltaire portrayed the young man in the same situation, where he’s going from encounter to encounter amongst the upper classes, and he’s really screwed-over at each juncture, and it’s written in a way where you have a certain empathy with him but you ultimately say, ‘Well, he’s just kind of naïve really’. And that’s kind of the point, that with all these good intentions, they cannot restrict someone who’s out to do you in.
Also Terry was playing with pornography, which people still are having difficulty with today. I think Terry was in a league of his own by making sex funny, not something that is troubling or perverted or disturbed. He does go pretty far-out with some of the perverted aspects, but I think it’s all in good fun. And Candy certainly enjoys it, and has her own way, whether it’s with the hunchback or even where she’s trying to get the Buddha into her, the stone sculpture, at the very end, she is doing it for herself as well, for her own pleasure.
I have always wanted Camille Paglia to look Candy over and give it her comments. I don’t know that she would be the litmus test for post-feminist reaction, but it certainly would be interesting because there are many women that have said to me, ‘Candy is my favourite novel’, so it makes me wonder exactly why, and it would be interesting to hear more women’s comments about the novel.

At this point I have to bring in the ‘third man’ in your story, Olympia Press publisher Maurice Girodias, who commissioned the novel after Terry Southern pitched him the idea of a dirty book ‘with literary possibilities’ in 1956 – or perhaps Girodias had already planted this idea in Terry’s mind. Both Terry and Mason came to view him as a pretentious double-dealer, but Girodias appears to have been a man of respectable family and good literary taste, who could have easily pursued a more stable, if ordinary, career in respectable publishing. What is your take on him?

He was certainly a mixture. As a businessman he was incorrigibly corrupt, but he would get the best out of his authors and he encouraged creativity, and he really made it happen; he made it possible for so many British and American authors to just have a great life in Paris. They could turn in the pages every week and get a little dosh, and this was just wonderful.
But at the end of the day, he’s got the copyright on all of it, so you have to wonder – ‘Hmmm, that’s quite a good investment on his part’. He spent the money on other enterprises – he built a grand-scale restaurant-nightclub, La Grande Severiné, for example. He was a high-living visionary, really, but he was always in trouble financially, so he would exploit any opportunity he could to not pay someone or make things a bit cloudy. His story is a fascinating one – but I think that though he gave these great opportunities, he made sure that he himself would do very well from them, as he did with Lolita, which he published first. It was very difficult for Nabakov to extract himself from his former relationship with Olympia; he finally did, but it cost him a pretty penny.

But was there a side of Girodias, in your opinion, that wanted to be more than just a successful businessman – a kind of cultural avatar perhaps? Because it seems to me he could have been successful in a more mainstream direction, with less trouble. He certainly pleads this in some of his letters to Terry and Mason, at the point he was facing a series of court battles over obscenity issues. Do you think it was more than just the commercial appeal of publishing ‘sexy books’ that led him to publish writers like Terry Southern and Vladimir Nabakov, or was it simply for profit?

Girodias was clearly committed to sexual freedom in literature, to making sure that could be published; not so much photographs, but with literature of any kind he firmly believed that there was no reason it should be censored, and that it was prudish and ridiculous to do so – an example of the State exercising too much power. So he fought that throughout his life, and I think that’s the main thing that he aspired to do. I don’t think he had aspirations for some kind of popular cultural pedestal that he would sit on; instead I think he just inherited from his father a sense of who were the classic counter-cultural writers of the day, whether it be Henry Miller, or Anais Nin, or others that his father published and he inherited the back catalogue of. I think for whatever reason, Girodias latched onto the idea of sexual literature – we’d call it erotica – written in fine prose style as being something really worthwhile and rewarding. That was his focus, and I think it carried him through each era in a really interesting way – for example, his Olympia magazine became the model for Evergreen magazine in the States, which is famous now.

You describe in one chapter of The Candy Men the decade of censorship battles fought and won by the publishers in the courts in America, that preceded the publication of Candy there in 1964, and which paved the way for the novel’s success. There seems to me a cultural irony here, as Candy was in 1964 readily available in the States to buy in major bookstores, whereas in France it was still contraband. This is a turnaround of the usual cultural image of America being more prudish, comparatively-speaking, and France – or at least Paris – being perceived as more liberal and sophisticated.

That’s true, but I think it just depends on the Administration. During this Bush administration there have been tremendous censorship penalties put in place on Iranian writers; you cannot publish a book of Iranian literature in America right now, as far as I know. There are publishers who are fighting that in the courts right now, and of course I bet in France you could publish those books. So in these competing cultural mores that are exercised by the government for strictly political reasons, it’s the people who suffer, because writing should be published, and I think at the time the doors were opening up in America, and Candy slid right through.
In fact Candy was really not on the radar as a target, it was more Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch as well. Candy was really in the right place at the right time to have a wonderful day. America just ate it up, because it had all these elements – it was a satirical look at American culture anyway, that was a plus, and then it was a very seductive immersion into the sex life of a young woman, who is from the Midwest, and who is experiencing all this craziness in New York City and in particular Greenwich Village, which at the time was a hot-button – it was almost like a Communist Red Square for America, because it was associated with the Beats and drug-taking and this new jazz music.
So I think my father was able to rise above all the stigmas and celebrate them, in a way, and also critique things that needed it like television and certain books – it’s all made fun of in a way that was very refreshing. Interestingly though, that had all been written by 1958, so it’s interesting that it was still relevant in 1964 and shows just how behind the times America really was, and how it had a late blooming. Because you can see in Europe at the time, through the Fifties, there’s a lot of freedom in the arts and literature which wasn’t the case in America. It took all of the work in the courts by the publishers to really make it happen, and that’s part of the story I tell.

There seems to be two contrasting dramas running though your book, one a tragedy, the other a black comedy. The tragedy is in the dissolution of Mason’s clear writing talent due to his all-consuming heroin addiction, and the consequent souring of Terry and Mason’s friendship as Terry becomes more successful, and Mason becomes more lost and bitter. The black comedy is in the decade-long battle between Maurice, Terry and Mason over publishing rights and percentages related to Candy between 1958 and 1968, which results in none of them receiving more than small change from the millions of dollars made from legitimate and pirated copies of the novel sold during their wrangling. Were these two dramas already familiar to you, or did they emerge during your research?

About the drama of Mason Hoffenberg and my father’s relationship with him, I really didn’t know that much about it at all. Terry was a very private person, we didn’t really talk about the past. Occasionally you’d get a story that he liked to tell about Mason, or something like that, but he never focused on the negative. The same with Easy Rider and what happened with my father not really being cut into the profits of that, as he had originally been promised, and his role downplayed over the years – he never held a grudge against any of his former friends or colleagues, and never liked to draw attention to any bitterness, or showed any sign of bitterness about it. I think part of that was just his modesty, but also a sense of decorum that he inherited living in England for so long. He aspired to a Henry Green level of lifestyle and conduct. I think the drama played itself out in the letters, and thank goodness Mason kept writing the letters, because for a heroin addict it’s not always easy. But he did, and he was such an impulsive, sarcastic, trenchant wit, and it can’t help but come off the page. What I was surprised by was some of the hilarious writing he did in his journal. There’s a chapter in the book which is a story he wrote in his journal where he describes his attempts to fool his wife as to his drug intake by using a chemical called atropine on his eyes, and it shows what a brilliant writer he was.

That’s credit to you, as it would have been easy to downplay Mason’s talent. As you say somewhere in the book, apart from Candy, Mason’s writing talent was and has been largely unquantifiable for most critics or observers, as he had little else in print. But through the letters and journal entries you have used in your book, it’s clear that Mason had talent, which makes it also clear that it was really just the drugs mainly, and the problems that come from using them, that stopped him from doing more with it.

Well, there are people who said, Mason really had no talent, and he was an asshole, and why did you give him so much slack? But I think I inherited from my father the desire to look at the positive side, and what’s more the creative output – and he did have some tremendous creative gifts. And I think my father was attracted to people like that throughout his life, be it Harry Nilsson, the wonderful songwriter, or Michael Cooper, the tremendous photographer. Terry really didn’t think along the lines of, ‘Are these guys on a track to stardom?’ or ‘Is this good for my career?’ – he really just liked hanging out with creative people and ‘riffing’ – getting into a dialogue on a high level of creativity and invention. And I think Mason could do that when they were together, and he could often do that in letters and when they were collaborating on the book.
But then things fall apart when the money becomes an issue, and it certainly became an issue for Mason, and then there is this added level of Mason feeling that Terry was having too much of the limelight. Before the success of both Dr. Strangelove and Candy at around the same time, Terry had been under the radar and more known in Europe. And when these successes followed one after the other, he was suddenly in the limelight – all these magazines and newspapers – and it offended a lot of his old friends who were nowhere near capable enough to share in such a career – I mean Terry tried to give Mason some screenwriting work, but Mason couldn’t make the deadlines. I think that’s one thing that distinguishes my father from so many of the Beats or other writers of that generation; he really had the chops – he had the ability and the discipline, and the desire to work with people on a high creative level, and do something that would stir things up on a grand scale.

Terry and Mason despised the film version of Candy, which has had some cult success since it was re-released on DVD a few years ago. What was their main objection to the film treatment of the novel, and where do you stand on the film version?

Terry claimed to have never seen the film all the way through, and to have walked out in tears. He could pull out the melodramatic bit when he wanted to, and I’m not sure how much of that is true. But the truth is he didn’t write the screenplay at all. It was written by Buck Henry, and Buck Henry – bless the man but at the time he was famous for Get Smart, which was a TV show that my father dismissed out of hand as just the worst kind of television muck you could aspire to see. In terms of where I stand on the film, it has some super…(a thoughtful pause from Nile)…music…but I think it represents what it is, which is the height of Sixties indulgent, narcissistic… just playing around. And it doesn’t have much to do with my father’s original vision of the character or the story. I mean just for starters this prototypically American role was cast with a non-native-English-speaking Miss Teenage Sweden. It speaks volumes for the dismissive attitude that the producers and the director had for the source novel at the time. And this continual misinterpretation by film producers of what my father’s work was about was something that I noticed as I got older. Film producers would say to me, ‘We’re making a Terry Southern film here!’, and I was supposed to say, ‘Oh, great!’, but I could see clearly that they had no idea what my father’s vision was all about. For example, my father was very much about establishing a level of credibility. He felt that you needed to establish a level of credibility or else you were just in the territory of farce, which for him couldn’t be worse. Satire is a difficult thing to pull off. What he learned from Edgar Allan Poe was that you could go as far out as you wanted, as long as your narrator is credible, or giving you details that are believable. So Terry would go out of his way to keep things credible. Dr. Strangelove is certainly a good example, where if you didn’t believe these men sitting around the table were actually the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and so on, the film wouldn’t have the power that it does, you wouldn’t believe it. So he really felt that was important, and the film of Candy doesn’t have any of those literary values that he had cultivated throughout his life.

And yet there’s enough of a resemblance to the basic story of the novel to give people a feeling that perhaps they understand the book through the film. Which must be pretty depressing – the more successful that film becomes as a cult-film the worse it is for the book…

The cult success of the film is fine, because people are drawn to it for other things than wanting to get my father’s story out of it. I think they’re getting a taste of Sixties indulgence, which is great in a way because you can’t find that anymore. There’s some irreverence there and outrageousness, and Terry did want to push things to extremes, but he wanted to do it – if not tastefully, at least believably. I mean just for one example, in the opening scene we see Candy arrive from outer-space! That’s just outrageous! Terry set it up so she comes from the Midwest and goes into Greenwich Village – you couldn’t get a more wholesomely American character than that, and so the story is a critique and a romp through American taboo subjects of the time. If you start with her coming from outer-space then it becomes more of a – I think – quasi-misogynistic story – you know, ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’. Or you’re going to the other extreme – she’s so heavenly that she’s from an astral plane. That’s just unnecessary. Who knows why they conceived it that way, but it had nothing to do with Terry’s vision, and they really had no interest in exploring any of the satirical scenes, they really were just going for shock effect and fantasy.

Are there any writers that you feel are carrying on the satirical tradition of Terry Southern or who may have been influenced by him?

Thomas Pynchon… Gore Vidal has written a number of novels that have been very much in the spirit of my father; one is called Live From Golgotha, where you have a TV network that has figured-out how to go back in time and they’re broadcasting from Jesus’ crucifixion – it’s quite satirical and cutting, and I think my father would have done similar novels to those if he had not been tied-up for so many years with script-work to pay the bills, and could have done just whatever he wanted to.

My final question for you - when is The Candy Men going to be published in the UK?

Well I think it’ll take a little clamouring from your readers in their local bookshops – just start by asking for ‘Terry Southern’. It’s a shame, because the novels have fallen out of print over there. There is still Now Dig This in print, which I highly recommend – ‘The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern’ – and it’s a great collection. Or if people took the step to email me through the website showing their interest I could say to a publisher, ‘See? There’s a ripple here’…the fact that it’s out of print might be helpful finally as publishers are always looking at acquisitions, and if they can get five out-of-print books for the price of three or so on, and on that kind of deal perhaps The Candy Men… could be the sweetener…(laughs). There you go!
www.terrysouthern.com
-15-Jun-08