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An Interview With Our Greatest Satirist: Terry Southern

In 1989, the day after returning from a book tour in Amsterdam, I drove up to Terry Southern’s beautiful country house, Blackberry Manor in Northern Connecticut.

There he has resided these many years, and from there he has launched comic broadsides on the state of America, ranging from the madcap film Dr. Strangelove to his novels Candy, Blue Movie, and The Magic Christian. His collection, Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes (being reissued this spring by Citadel Press), once prompted Norman Mailer to describe Southern’s prose as “clean … and murderous”, and hail him as the rightful heir to Nathanael West. My mind was full of questions about Southern’s secret writing process as my car came to a halt outside his elegant 1756 house perched between green fields and babbling brooks. A grand scene lay before my eyes when I went inside.

Terry Southern sat in a large armchair before a roaring fire. Books, magazines, papers, bottles, and ashtrays were strewn across the coffee table, atop which a large electric typewriter stood at the ready. Looking like a cross between Voltaire and a roué Mark Twain, the squire rose to greet me, emanating the charm and courtesy of a time gone by. We sat down to a groaning board of exquisitely prepared food, and he remarked, “You’ll find that we know how to entertain our guests here at Blackberry Manor.” Then, turning to his companion, Gail, he said, “Vic thinks it’s an elaborate set-up for some weird intellectual sting.” This serious/comic paradox, this magus of the sexual revolution, is also, of course, a man of letters deeply committed to writing in a fashion that has not been, and apparently cannot be, corrupted.

VICTOR BOCKRIS: As writers, you and I come from different worlds. You – as I understand it, correct me if I’m wrong – are the pure writer who eschews any relationship between successful writing and commercial success.

TERRY SOUTHERN: I think you’re trying to draw a distinction between an artist and a professional. This is the difference between a party girl and a hooker. A party girl is somebody who does it for fun, but a hooker is somebody who does it for money. I’m just talking about the distinction this way so we can limit it to this dichotomy. I’m a party girl. No, I would prefer it, and that’s on record now, if you would say ‘party person’.

BOCKRIS: When you put a message on your answering machine, do you have a very strong sense of yourself?

SOUTHERN: I try to get away from myself. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this T. S. Eliot quote which I used as the prefatory quote in Blue Movie: “Poetry is not an expression of personality, it is an escape from personality. It is not an outpouring of emotion, it is a suppression of emotion – but, of course, only those who have personality and emotions can ever know what it means to want to get away from those things.”

BOCKRIS: Therein hangs the focus of the interview – the conflict between your own being and celebrity.

SOUTHERN: I can tell you quite frankly, that is what put a damper on my keenness about writing: I saw that in the writing lies the trail of celebrity and damnable invasion. The only reason I’m granting this interview is because of my feeling of nonsexual endearment toward you.

BOCKRIS: Despite what you think of the life of celebrity, you’ve worked with many of the outstanding celebrities of our times, from Peter Sellers to William Burroughs. You worked with the Beats, with The Rolling Stones, and with film crews on so many classics, from Barbarella to Easy Rider, but you never became associated with any single group. You always remained true to your own person.

SOUTHERN: Well, I don’t think a person should be given credit for something like that. It was probably just because I never came in contact with a group that appealed to me enough. I tried. At one point I actually wanted to be in a kibbutz with Mason Hoffenberg [Southern’s collaborator on Candy]. Mason said, “Oh, we should go to Israel and be in this kibbutz.” So we went on this ship. We had to clean out the furnace of the smokestack. It was the worst kind of work you could imagine, but it was very satisfying because you thought it was going to be an ideal community, one of these Shangri-La-type concepts. The first night this guy came in and he had been robbed. There were forty dollars missing from his foot-locker. So everybody was freaking out. People said, “My God, we gotta get locks on the footlockers.” Then other people said, “No, no locks on our footlockers! That would defeat the whole notion of our unity. If that person took the money, he needed it.” There was an immediate schism, and so we left the ship. The point of the story is that it’s possible for me to admire and to try and join a group like that, but it’s also impossible for me to join a group. You can probably never find a group that was more motivated than that group, but they split apart over a forty-dollar theft and a simple disagreement about whether the person stole the money or needed it. But I’m certainly interested in causes, as I know you are.

BOCKRIS: I am interested in understanding the process of your career. By the early Sixties, when The Magic Christian was published, your novel Candy was a runaway bestseller, but you didn’t get any money from it because of an international-copyright mix-up that allowed millions of unauthorized copies to be published. Did this sour you so much on the publishing scene that you were cynical or detached when The Magic Christian was also successful?

SOUTHERN: What you are failing to realize is that I never had any notion at all that there was any money to be made in writing. Never – except for much later on, when I was approached to write film scripts. Any disappointments I would have had would not have been from the publishing aspect of it. Critical reviews might have upset me, but not the commercial aspect. You’re thinking of it as though my view is like that of some career-minded writer.

BOCKRIS: But to go from writing Candy in 1958 to Dr Strange-love in 1964, and to get the enormous response that you got in such a short amount of time, must have had a big effect on the development of your career.

SOUTHERN: Are you saying that you can’t comprehend creative work that isn’t done to try to please somebody outside yourself? You seem to be – correct me if I’m wrong – ruling out any comprehensible stimuli other than peer-group approval, power, or just money. Don’t you think that some of these things just happen, almost on the level of, say, doodling when you’re on the phone? I have read enough of your work to know that you often write with a sense of delight about something and that you enjoy what you’re writing. I can tell that you would write even if you weren’t being paid. You’re probably the sort of person who might keep a journal. Do you know those people who keep a journal, Graham Greene types, who don’t assume, Oh well, this is going to be published? They’re not going to show it to you and they in fact resent the intrusion if somebody snatches their journal, but great writing goes in there. I think Kafka’s best writing is in his diaries, and he didn’t want them to be seen by anyone. I’m prepared to invent a whole psyche, if you want, in which I’m a man possessed, a workaholic who couldn’t stop writing.

BOCKRIS: What I’m interested in is understanding how you work.

SOUTHERN: I could tell you, as I have told many of my students over the years, that the way to do it is with some sense of method: if you write a page a day, you’ll have a novel a year. How can you miss? A novel a year, wow! A body of work. We’re talking Dashiell Hammett and Nat West. We’re talking George Orwell.

Students want advice about everything. They say, “How do we do that?” And then you have to encourage them to establish a routine, such as the first thing you do is wake up. You wake up and you have the whole thing worked out where you have your coffee – maybe you have a coffee-timer thing so that the coffee is right there ready – and then pow! you sit down at your typewriter and you work for, it doesn’t matter, two hours, three hours, four hours, or just until you turn out one good page. So you’ve got a page a day, and then you’ve got a novel a year.

BOCKRIS: Is that how you write?

SOUTHERN: No, that’s how I advise people to write. I advise them to work like that and they can’t go wrong. The work can even be bad and then the editor can rewrite it, but if you can turn out 365 pages of stuff, as long as it’s clean copy, you’ve got a novel a year! After two years you’ve got two novels behind you, and then advances start rolling in, so you’ve got to keep up that pace. You’ve got to keep up that damnable pace of one page a day, which is not too unreasonable when you think of what football players have to go through, especially if you have your own typist. You can do it longhand and your typist can type it up, with you saying, “Make sure it’s just one page.”

BOCKRIS: The only person who could come close to you as a satirist is Lenny Bruce. What do you think he would say if he lived today?

SOUTHERN: Well, he often did say, “It is only corruption and injustice that allows somebody like me to make a living.” My God, there’s enough going on that he could satirize now: the whole abortion thing, the damnable Shamir – that Grand Yahoo …

BOCKRIS: People miss you, Terry, and they want to know why they aren’t reading new books by you anymore. Looking into the next decade, can we expect to see a lot more of Terry Southern in the 1990s?

SOUTHERN: [Realizing that the interviewer is too thick to respond to the serious side of Southern’s nature, Southern seizes upon his prior offer to represent himself as the Workaholic Writer, and launches into a routine.] Yes! Norman Mailer once accused me of being a workaholic. He said, “Hey, can you slow down? Boy, are you cooking, you’re smoking. Will you please slow down?” And Norman Mailer’s no Mr. Sloth.

BOCKRIS: As a matter of fact, when I came into your quarters, I noticed a large typewriter next to your armchair. Apparently, even when you’re relaxing you might want to type …

SOUTHERN: Well, if I should suddenly get seized …

BOCKRIS: After your great expedition into the film world, we’re now happily looking forward to the return of Terry Southern into literature.

SOUTHERN: Yes, apart from the reprint of Red-Dirt Marijuana, with a new introduction by George Plimpton, I’m currently completing A Texas Summer, a hard-hitting novel.

BOCKRIS: Do you have plans for a series of novels?

SOUTHERN: Yes, now that I have a real facility for writing quickly, having written against deadlines, my new regime will be a novel a year.

BOCKRIS: So your intention is to go straight ahead.

SOUTHERN: Straight ahead, yes – no looking back and no darn breaking with this work ethic. What if I get into the Book-of-the-Month Club? What would Genet say about that?

BOCKRIS: He’d be happy to hear that you’re going to commit to a novel every year starting in 1990.

SOUTHERN: I’m promising that; I personally pledge that to you. I’ve never had good writing habits. You can say that I’ve been remiss and will shortly get back to the grindstone. God knows there’s a demand, and it would be unreasonable of me not to respond to this demand. Let’s assume that the price will be right, Vic.

BOCKRIS: You are a man who will respond to a letter.

SOUTHERN: I will indeed.

BOCKRIS: If someone sends in the right offer, you’ll be there?

SOUTHERN: I’ll be there with bells on, and wearing several hats.

Nicolas Roeg is another maverick, like Southern, who was associated with Jagger, Bowie, etc via the films he made (Performance, The Man Who Fell to Earth). Among the greatest living film makers, he has been forced to support himself by making commercials, because he refused to kowtow to the Hollywood system, and because of his outspoken criticism of its creative book-keeping. If you ever get a chance to see a film by this man do not fail to take it. You will be well rewarded.