Now Dig This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern 1950-1995 Read online

  Now Dig This

  The Unspeakable Writings

  of Terry Southern

  1950-1995

  Terry Southern

  Edited by

  Nile Southern and Josh Alan Friedman

  FOR TERRY

  Contents

  Introduction: An Interview with Terry Southern by Lee Server

  Tales

  Heavy Put-Away; or, A Hustle Not Wholly Devoid of a Certain Grossness, Granted

  A Run of Dimes

  Fixing Up Ert

  Blue Movie: Outline for Novel

  Letters

  Dear Ms.

  Letter to Lenny Bruce

  Letter to the Editor of National Lampoon aka Hard Corpse Pornography

  A Letter to the Editor: Stiff Gook Rimming

  Letter to George Plimpton aka Sports-Death Fantasy

  Worm-ball Man

  Behind the Silver Screen

  On Screenwriting: An Interview from Movie People

  Strangelove Outtake: Notes from the War Room

  Proposed Scene for Kubrick’s Rhapsody

  Plums and Prunes

  New Journalism

  Fiasco Reverie

  Grooving in Chi

  The Straight Dope on the Private Dick

  The Beautiful-Ugly Art of Lotte Lenya

  Riding the Lapping Tongue

  The Quality Lit Game

  Placing a MS. with New Yorker Mag?

  Flashing on Gid [Maurice Girodias]

  Rolling Over Our Nerve Endings [William S. Burroughs]

  Writers at Work [Henry Green]

  King Weirdo [Edgar Allan Poe]

  The Scandal Continues

  When Film Gets Good …

  Drugs and the Writer

  Strolls Down Memory Lane

  Strange Sex We Have Known [William S. Burroughs]

  Frank’s Humor [Frank O’Hara]

  Memories of Michael [Michael Cooper]

  Remembering Abbie [Abbie Hoffman]

  Trib to Von [Kurt Vonnegut and George Plimpton]

  Origins of the Lampman [Larry Rivers]

  Epilogue: Drugstore Cowboys: a Conversation with Terry Southern and William S. Burroughs, by Victor Bockris

  Afterword: Now Dig the Archive by Nile Southern

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: An Interview with Terry Southern

  BY LEE SERVER

  LEE SERVER: Terry, let’s begin with that grandest and most admirable of your creations, a certain Candy Christian. Girodias and Hoffenberg have given their accounts of how she came to be; what’s the real story?

  TERRY SOUTHERN: God only knows what’s been said about the genesis of Candy, but the true account is as follows: There’s a certain kind of uniquely American girl who comes from the Midwest to Greenwich Village—cute as a button, pert derriere, full wet lips, nips in eternal distention, etc., etc.—and so full of compassion that she’ll cry at card tricks if you tell her they’re sad. Anyway, I wrote a short story about such a girl—how she befriended a humpback weirthe to the extent of wanting him “to hurt me the way they hurt you!” Everybody who read the story, loved the girl—all the guys wanted to fuck her, and the girls wanted to be her—and they all said: “Yea Candy! Let her have more adventures!” So I put her in a few more sexually vulnerable situations—with her professor, with the gardener, with her uncle, with her spiritual guru, and so on. And this friend of mine, Mason Hoffenberg, read it and said, “Why don’t you have her get involved with a Jewish shrink?” And I said, “Why don’t you write that part?” So the great Doc Irving Krankeit (and his doting mum) were born.

  Candy’s escapades were the talk of the Quarter. “Gid” Girodias demanded to see the manuscript pronto; and, mistaking Quality Lit erotic-humor-allegory for porn trash, he agreed to publish it.

  L.S.: This was in Paris, the mid-’50s, when such books were taboo in the States, right? Can you fill us in on Girodias’s set-up at that time?

  T.S.: Well sir, Mr. Maury Girodias had what you might call a “house o’ porn operation extraordinaire.” A man of infinite charm, savoir-vivre, and varying guises, he was able to entice impressionable young American expatriates, such as a certain yours truly, to churn out this muck by convincing us we were writing Quality Lit! Not only did the Hemingway types succumb to his wily persuasions, but (would you believe it?) young American girl-authors as well! Cute as buttons they were too! Darling blue saucer-eyes and fabulous knockers with nips in distention! Marvelous pert derrières and full wet tremulous lips, the kind that quiver and then respond … but I digress.

  L.S.: Girodias and Olympia Press did root out quite a few great works, though.

  T.S.: Oh, his “operation” turned up some first-rate stuff—Lolita, The Ginger Man, things by Beckett, Ionesco, Henry Miller, and, of course, that veritable crown jewel of Contemp Lit, Naked Lunch.

  L.S.: The pay for writing Candy was pretty low, I believe. Five hundred dollars, for all rights?

  T.S.: I don’t recall the fee involved, but it was hardly enough to get us laid.

  L.S.: Reading Candy as a kid, I’ll confess to you, played a definite part in my growing into manhood—I don’t intend to go into details. What would you read for “erotic purposes” as a youngster?

  T.S.: When I was young, they had what were called “little fuck-books”—which featured characters taken from the comics. Most of them were absurd and grotesque, but there were one or two of genuine erotic interest; “Blonthe” comes to mind, as do “Dale” and “Flash Gordon” and darling “Ella Cinders.”

  For a while, convinced there was more than met the eye, I tried to “read between the lines” in the famous Nancy Drew books, searching for some deep secret insinuation of erotica so powerful and pervasive as to account for the extraordinary popularity of these books, but alas, was able to garner no mileage (“J.O.” wise) from this innocuous, and seemingly endless, series.

  L.S.: You grew up in Texas. Can you talk a little about what sort of sex life a young man growing up in that region was likely to have in those days?

  T.S.: Texas is part of the car culture of the great American Southwest, where all social events revolve around the car. Every high school boy either has his own car or has the use of the family car for dates. In those days, the “dating scenario” was well established. It consisted of taking the girl to a movie, to the school dance, or to a roadhouse which had a band and a dance floor. Afterwards, there would be a stop for food, then the all-important period of “parking and necking.” This was an accepted part of the ritual, and the guy was given about fifteen minutes in which to “make out.”

  There were several degrees of “making out.” The first was “tongue.” “Did you get tongue?” was a question frequently heard after a first date with an extremely nice, honor-student-type girl. Next was “knocker.” “Did you get knocker?” they would ask. There was a big difference, of course, between “getting knocker” and “getting bare knocker.” Getting “bare knocker” implied “getting nip” as well, but there was also the distinction of “kissing nip,” which was considered to be quite a score—especially on the first date. Next in order of significant intimacy was “getting silk,” which meant touching panty-crotch, and then for the more successful, “getting pube.” The ultimate achievement—aside, of course, from puss itself—was to “get wet-finger,” also referred to (by the more knowledgeable) as “getting clit.” It was almost axiomatic that, under “normal” circumstances, to “get wet-finger” meant that the girl’s defenses would crumble as she was swept away on a tide of sheer physical excitement—
and vaginal penetration would be unresisted and imminent.

  But this was the era, alas, of the damnable “panty girdle,” especially for semi-formal occasions, where stockings were worn. It was well nigh impossible to achieve “full-vage-pen” by breeching aside the crotch panel of this snug-fitting garment. There was, however, a “technique”—one would take a pair of kindergarten paper-scissors, the harmless kind with rounded ends. These scissors are ordinarily so dull they will cut only the softest of paper, but they may be given an edge—and a keen one! so that during the height of the necking session, the precious girl, feeling quite secure in her sturdy garment, might permit certain fondling liberties—such as “vage under silk”—except this time the caressing hand would also carry the keen-edged paper scissors … and snip, the outrageous barrier was undone!

  This was also the era of “forcible seduction,” which is perhaps only different from actual rape in that the girl, despite a frenzied resistance, would invariably end up “oohing” and “aahing” ecstatically, and in the immortal words of the Bard, “begging for more.”

  Since all is fair in love and/or forcible seduction, another keystone element in the dating scenario was to try to “get her drunk.” The potion of choice in this regard was vodka and grapefruit juice—presumably because the darling girl would not be able to taste the copious amount of vod in the astringent mixture—and so, in the (false) security of her panty girdle, and slightly whacko on vod, she might just relax her defenses long enough for the absorbent panty-panel (by now, of course, sopping with the nectar of her passion!) to know the keenness of your scisseaux d’enfant!

  Golden days, now that I think back on them—and I do think back on them quite often.

  L.S.: We mentioned in regard to Candy that you were living in Paris in the ’50s, making the expatriate, starving artist scene. What are your memories of the period?

  T.S.: That (late ’40s, early ’50s) was a golden era for Americans in Paris. All the great black musicians—Bird, Diz, Thelonius, Bud Powell, Miles, Kenny Clarke, etc., etc.—were first appreciated there, so it was a very swinging scene musically. Also, there is a large Arab quarter in Paris, and hashish was an acceptable (to the French authorities) part of the Arab culture—so the thing to do was to get stoned and listen to this fantastic music. That was the most important aspect of life in Paris in those days.

  This was also a period of intensive research into the mind-expanding qualities of Pernod and cognac.

  L.S.: There were quite a few future literary heavyweights hanging about at that time, weren’t there?

  T.S.: Yes, there were some interesting Quality-Lit types on hand. Henry Miller was still there, of course. And so was Samuel Beckett; William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, William Gaddis, and Bill Styron come to mind as well. Also there, off and on, were Capote, Vidal, and tip-top Tenn Williams. The Paris Review crowd was headed up by G. Ames Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen—the latter known as “Bush Master Math” because of his many hair-raising adventures on the Dark Continent and elsewhere.

  L.S.: Wasn’t the town also known at that time for an abundance of you know, wide-eyed American coed types, eager to lose their innocence?

  T.S.: Yes indeed. As for picking up those fabulous, full, wet-mouth, pertknocker American college girls in Paris, there were three standard ways: 1) pay a French person to annoy her at a cafe, then go to her “rescue,” dispatching him with rapier thrusts of Parisian argot; 2) hang around the American Express mail line until the girl with perfect American derriere and nips arrives, then get behind her in the mail line, concealing your appearance with a newspaper; and in that way learn her name (when she asks for her mail); then follow her to a hotel or to a cafe—and when opportune, approach her with: “Say, aren’t you Candy Christian?” or whatever. It can help if you are able to see where the letter she gets is from, then you can get some regional rapport and I.D. going (“Say, didn’t you used to be a cheerleader in Racine, Wisconsin?”). The third surefire way is to go to the Louvre and sit on a bench in front of a large El Greco, studying it (between fab “d”s and “k”s, natch). Then, when the time is right (d and k wise), you make your move (“I know this is going to sound, well, sort of forward or silly even—but I couldn’t help noticing how much your hands are like those of the women in El Greco’s paintings.”) This has never failed. Poon City! You are there!

  L.S.: Back in the States in the early ’60s, you were doing a lot of magazine work. It seems to me, going over those articles, that you were anticipating or, really, inventing the whole “subjective journalism” style. I mean, Hunter Thompson’s whole “gonzo” oeuvre is right there in something like your “Twirling at Ole Miss” and a few others. Can you discuss how you formulated this “revolutionary” approach to your journalism?

  T.S.: There are some Edgar Allan Poe stories—particularly one called The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym—where he uses a narrative style which has a strangely authentic documentary quality; I mean, in the light of its times, natch. Anyway, I think I first picked up on it there, from the great E. Poe. Then, of course, there was Henry Miller; he used the first-person narrative so convincingly—in the Tropics, and his other sex-adventure stuff—that most people still don’t realize it was 95 percent fiction. So that is—roughly, to be sure—the genesis of it. The idea is to describe something in such a way that you truthfully convey the essence of it, without being boring.

  L.S.: What about “Blood of a Wig,” one of your all-time greats. How much truth was there to that one? Did you work on a “skin” mag for a time?

  T.S.: I worked at Esquire for a two-month period, when Rust Hills was on vacation. My duties were to read the fiction submitted and try to come up with some good stories. The manuscripts were in two categories—the ones submitted by agents, which were referred to as “the manuscripts,” and a second and larger selection, the unsolicited stories, and that category was called “the shit-pile.” Ordinarily, the shit-pile would be read, or scanned, by some kid who had majored in English, or who had been promoted from the mail room, while the editors would read the manuscripts from agents—when they weren’t humping their secs, that is.

  My own policy, however, was to read the unsolicited manuscripts myself. I had a theory which involved the existence of a rarefied kind of ‘quality folk-lit’—like Grandma Moses in painting—so I dreamed of finding something pure and primitive, and at the same time, weird and haunting. Maybe a story entitled A Strange Event, by Mrs. E. Johnson, would prove to be so extraordinary, so oblique and ambiguous as to defy classification. No such luck. And before my tenure was done I had so refined my critical faculties that I could reject a story after reading the first paragraph. Then it got to be the first sentence. Finally, I felt I could safely reject on the basis of title, and at last on the basis of the author’s name—if it had a middle initial or a junior in it. Under this system I lost a few things by Vonnegut and Selby… but I never claimed it was perfect.

  L.S.: The title “Blood of a Wig” refers to what you described as your most “outlandish” drug experience. Could you recount for us said experience?

  T.S.: The word “wig” is street/drug parlance for “head.” A “wig” is a person’s head. To “tighten one’s wig” is to get high. It also means insane. To say that a person is “a wig,” or “is wiggy,” is to say that they are insane—even though it could be in an interesting or even desirable manner. In the incident I refer to, the “wig” in question is Chin Lee, the Chinese symbolist poet who is incarcerated on the fifth floor of Bellevue. The term “red-split” refers to the blood of a schizophrenic, which has been found to produce radical changes of mood, etc. when injected into a normal person’s bloodstream. The story is about a moment in history when this “red-split”—or “blood of a wig,” as it were—was the drug-of-choice. One must be selective, however, and not ingest the blood (it has to be fresh and still warm) of just any run-of-the-mill lunatic, but someone interestingly insane, like, say, Chin Lee, or Ezra Pound.

  L.S.: Ca
n we talk about your first screenplay, Dr. Strangelove? How did Kubrick come to hire you? The picture, as I understand it, had originally been planned as a straight drama.

  T.S.: The first draft of Dr. Strangelove was a more or less faithful adaptation of a novel called Red Alert, by Peter George. He and Kubrick had done the adaptation, and the result was a straightforward melodrama of the Fail-Safe variety. In fact, certain technical details in Fail-Safe were so similar to those of Red Alert—which had also been used in Strangelove—that Kubrick was able to get a court order forcing the producers of Fail-Safe to postpone the opening of their picture, because of the rather obvious plagiarism which had occurred.

  Anyway, my own involvement came about when Kubrick realized that the hydrogen bomb and the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it were just too unusual to be treated in any conventionally dramatic fashion, and had decided to go the “black comedy” route. This was a decision not without certain immediate adverse ramifications; his partner, James Harris, who had acted as producer for most of his previous films, was so much against it that he withdrew from the production. However, back to the circumstances of my participation. It seems that not long before that, Peter Sellers had discovered my book, The Magic Christian, and had actually bought one hundred copies of it—which he then gave to his friends, on their birthdays, at Christmas, and so on; and he had given one to Stanley.

  So Stanley phoned me from England, and I went over and went to work. We worked together on the script before and throughout the filming.

  L.S.: Wasn’t Peter Sellers supposed to play a fourth part in the picture, but he had to drop it due to illness or something?

  T.S.: Peter was scheduled to play the role of Captain “King” Kong, along with the three other roles. When we had to replace him, Stanley said, “Well, Peter Sellers can’t be replaced by another actor, it will have to be an authentic gung-ho Texas cracker!” I suggested big Dan Blocker, of Bonanza fame. A script was rushed to him—or rather, his agent, who rejected it in summary fashion as being “thoroughly pinko.” Then Stanley remembered Slim Pickens, called him, and he was on the next plane.