Customer Reviews

A Grand Guy: The Art and Life of Terry Southern

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Lee Hill was disserved by his editors, who permitted him to compile a 'Terry Southern and his times' tome that is chock-a-block with cliches and party lists, and lacking in critical focus of the man. It tries to be both cultural history and biography, and fails on both counts. However, this is the first and badly needed biography of a man who brought fame and fortune to dozens of other people, and Hill deserves to be commended for his years of spade-work.

Hill has no feel for American culture. He is apparently a Canadian who spent some time in London and is primarily a film historian. His sense of cultural history in a broader scale is ludicrously third-hand, delivered in broad generalities on the order of, "America was in the grip of repressive McCarthyism in the early fifties," or "Many well-meaning people were concerned about the plight of the negro."

Paradoxically, Hill titles his book 'A Grand Guy,' although his lack of feel for modern American cultural history makes it impossible for him to tell us where Terry Southern's 'Grand Guy' persona came from. The 'Grand Guy' act, a compound of heartiness, mock-haughty superciliousness, and college-humor hyperbole, was a standard persona for those of Southern's generation. Many of Southern's contemporaries (from Gore Vidal to Bill Buckley and even Norman Mailer) played the same notes on their fiddles. This act was a continuation of the tongue-in-cheek snootiness you find in the early years of the Luce publications (where Time letter writers would be accorded a put-down caption on the order of, "Let Subscriber Brailsford Mend His Ways!") as well as The New Yorker (think of Peter Arno's captions or E.B. White's snotty captions for squibs pulled from local newspapers). This was the accepted "hip" idiom for the 20th Century Quality-Lit man, and it reached its full effulgence in the Esquire of the 1960s, when an unrelenting, over-the-top mockery of sacred cows became the mark of sophistication. Southern's tragedy, perhaps, is that he got stuck in what was essentially a passing style of ephemeral journalism, and he was unable to grow beyond it, and he had no friends to encourage him to grow beyond it. Thus, by the early 70s, his output was reduced to self-parodying letters to his friend and imitator at the National Lampoon, Michael O'Donoghue.

Students of American humor will recall the bitter end of Mark Twain's life: anti-war, atheistically critical of human beings, loosing all his money trying to protect his investment in a machine to automate the printing business. A GRAND GUY THE ART AND LIFE OF TERRY SOUTHERN does not have anything about Mark Twain or printing, but it reveals a lot about the entertainment business in the second half of the 20th century. I was interested in how Terry Southern put in some time in World War Two as a young man. He was so young, he didn't get into combat until the Battle of the Bulge, a winter offensive by the Germans after D-Day, June 6, 1944, when the guys in the 435 Quartermaster Platoon were so close to the action that a buddy standing beside Terry was killed. (p. 18). That might account for Terry's appreciation of William Burroughs, which might be a high point in the irony in this book:

"Then Chuck Barris, the mercurial producer of such TV shows as `The Dating Game,' took out an option on NAKED LUNCH and sent Southern and Burroughs first-class plane tickets to talk story at his Bel-Air mansion. The two literary outlaws were picked up by a chaffeur-driven Daimler at the airport and taken to their audience with Barris.

"Barris was just all-out insanity," says Burrough's longtime assistant, James Grauerholz. "The story is that he said, `I finally read the book last night. Can you take out the sex and drugs?' Terry and Bill looked at each other and said, `We'll try,' " (p. 201).

This is such a perfect reflection of the state of entertainment values; the people in this book kept betting their lives on being able to come up with something that will draw big at the box office. On the same page, Jerry Schatzberg remembers how much fun he had writing a script with Terry Southern of `A Cool Million' by Nathanael West: "He was brilliant with dialogue. And we had a lot of fun." (p. 201)

I'd heard writer Terry Southern spoken of as an almost mythical character. Knowing nothing of what he'd actually done, I hoped to come away from this read with a deeper understanding of the writing craft. I have, but in a way that surprised me.
Either Terry Southern was a phenomenal talent whose value Lee Hill doesn't quite sell, or Terry Southern was an accomplished pretender and hanger-on whose total creative output amounted, in the end, to a puff of smoke.
After reading, I lean to the latter. Despite front-and-center visibility as a member of the beat generation, and friends who were the most famous creative artists of the day, Terry Southern never really did anything memorable himself - and for me doesn't warrant inclusion among the greats.
Yes, he did things with panache - I'll give him that. His semi-pornographic novel Candy sold well. He probably deserved more credit, too, than he ended up with for the creation of films like Easy Rider and Dr. Strangelove. He didn't get it. Kubrick did, and Fonda and Hopper, and that's the bottom line: Southern comes up short. In fact, A Grand Guy reads like a recap of a very long losing streak punctuated with a very emphatic period - fired from his job as writer on Saturday Night Live.
In truth, I liked Terry Southern more before I read this book, than now, but there is still a lesson to be learned here.
In Hollywood and New York, writers are lower than dirt. Necessary, yes, because the ideas and words needed to make good drama come from them, but the moment the creativity is sucked out - the movers and shakers have a story - the writer gets pushed out of the way and in the end is lucky to end up, like Terry Southern did on the cover of the Beatles album Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, as little more than another face in the crowd.
Art Tirrell is also just a face in the crowd. His 2007 novel, "The Secret Ever Keeps", contains "...simply the best underwater scenes I've ever read..." but has also been described as "...the best adventure story nobody ever heard of". http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1601640048/

I've been waiting so long for a bio of the "quality lit" master that I was afraid I'd have to write it myself - thank God Lee Hill beat me to it! Southern practically invented modern cool, from landmark novels like "Candy" and "Flash & Filigree" to his groundbreaking work on films like "Dr Strangelove", "Easy Rider", "The Loved One" and "Barbarella." Without his talent for words, it's highly doubtful Peter Sellers would have had much of a career after Pink Panther; and without his superb sense of story and genuine gentleman's generosity, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda would probably only be known today for 1960s Z-grade biker epics. Bravo for Southern, and applause for Hill.

excellent and direly-needed bio in these irony-free days. a great picture of the swinging 60's too.

Unfortunately, it is not terribly well written.

What Lee Hill apparently did was compose a laundry list of everything that Terry Southern ever wrote, sort it chronologically, and then string it together with whatever biographical material was available. What is missing is any kind of objective analysis, fawning praise taking its place. Terry was a good guy, but that doesn't mean he was a great writer.

As Hill points out, it is difficult to assess Southern as a writer because so many of his collaborators claim credit for much of what he did (e.g., Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda on "Easy Rider"). Thus, his reputation has to rise or fall based upon a few major works -- "Flash and Filigree," "Candy" (coauthored with Mason Hoffenberg, a junky), "The Magic Christian," "Red Dirt Marijuana," and the screenplay for "Dr. Strangelove" (for which Stanley Kubrick also claimed credit). Lee Hill concludes that "The Magic Christian" is the best of these. I generally agree, although there is a story in "Red Dirt Marijuana," titled "Razor Fight," that is on a par with anything Hemingway wrote.

Terry's son, Nile, has published a collection of his shorter works, "Now Dig This: The unspeakable writings of Terry Southern" that provides additional indications of greatness and is well worth purchasing.

Why bother with a bio of hipster Terry Southern?Author tries a tongue in cheek run, but that does not work . Southern, by this account , was an alcoholic who made his living scribbling lines for B movies. Check that the author is a Canadian who does not have the slightest idea of what life was like in Terry Southern's haunts.Read this only if you wish to see what low grade stuff publishers are shoeveling onto the market these days .