"The Candy Men" by Nile Southern

By then, Terry Southern's fiction career was almost over. A brilliant collection of short stories and journalism, "Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes," came out in 1967 (and included some stories that can stand with Faulkner). His penultimate, and best, novel, the wild "Blue Movie," would appear in 1970. But Southern devoted himself to writing screenplays that went unproduced, or doing polish jobs on other writers' screenplays, often just generating enough money to placate the IRS, with whom he had trouble for years. There was a one-season stint as a writer on "Saturday Night Live" in the early '80s (to borrow a phrase from Camille Paglia, Southern writing for "SNL" was like Caruso dueting with Tiny Tim), and also an increasing dependence on booze and speed.

Southern suffered a heart attack in 1995 on the steps of Columbia University, where he was teaching a writing course, and died four days later. Hoffenberg had preceded him in 1986, dying of lung cancer after years of using junk.

(It has been Hoffenberg's bad luck to have "Candy" spoken of as if it were the sole creation of Terry Southern, and what follows in this piece may be guilty of the same. "The Candy Men" reveals that most of Hoffenberg's contribution was in the novel's "Dr. Kranekit" section. Unlike Southern, Hoffenberg left behind almost no other public writings from which to discern a distinctive voice.)

Even if you get lost in the legal maneuverings and depressed by the downer arc of the tale, "The Candy Men" offers the pleasure of a generous selection of Southern and Hoffenberg's correspondence. We are in the realm of the hipster here, in the company of men who push a joke as far as it can go for the sheer pleasure of seeing what they can get away with. In a 1954 letter written from Greenwich Village to Hoffenberg in Paris, Southern alerts Hoffenberg to a pair of young women traveling to France:

"These are two nifties, Hoff, and will be calling for organ thick and fast. To get the best out of one of them ... you'll be wanting to don a beard and say, repeatedly during the act: 'I'm your old dad! I'm your old dad!' and the child will spasm like a veritable machine-gun."

It wasn't just to Hoffenberg that Southern wrote like this. After "Candy" appeared in the U.S., an excerpt of the novel was slated to appear in the porno mag Nugget (this was when skin mags actually had some literary content), then under the editorship of the writer Seymour Krim. But Krim, nervous about getting in trouble with the censors, changed a phrase uttered by Candy's nymphomaniac Aunt Livia, "hot greaser cock," to "hot greaser stuff." Southern responded:

"The word 'stuff' has vague and amorphous connotations, whereas it is well known that Livia required organ of stout and smart definition, and it does, I must say, reflect editorial shoddiness of a very shocking order. I'm not insisting on the word 'cock' ... 'Hot greaser joint' is acceptable, as is 'bit,' 'wood,' 'rod,' 'dip-stick,' 'shaft,' 'staff' and 'jelly-roll' (or 'jumbo,' or the very contemporary 'zoomba'!) ... You'll be hearing from my powerful solicitor who is charged to oversee these instructions."

You can detect in that seemingly frivolous letter Southern's insistence on getting the exact tone and rhythm (what Norman Mailer famously called Southern's "clean, mean, coolly deliberate, and murderous prose"). His friend George Plimpton once described Southern's style of speaking as combining the sound of his native Texas with mock English propriety and locutions and a hipster habit of abbreviation. Transferred to Southern's prose, that combination of hipness and propriety allowed nearly anything to be described in language suitable for a speaker addressing the Ladies Sewing Circle at the local Episcopalian church. Take this sentence from "Candy": "'Well,' said Candy, 'I've never met a ... gynecologist socially. How do you do?'"

Look at the nuances packed into that brief sentence: Candy's polite pause -- almost a demurral -- before speaking the word "gynecologist" in mixed company; the way the emphasis on the conditional "socially" rushes to assure her listeners that Candy has, in fact, been to a gynecologist; and finally the way she steers away from that revelation back to social decorum with the very proper, "How do you do?"

Next Page: Hard as this is to imagine, "Candy" was published in an America where censorship was alive and well

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