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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Southern could also parody Rotary Club boosterism. He delighted in taking American glad-handing for a drag through the gutter, as in this sentence from "Candy" describing a pair of preps boozing at a West Village bar: "Jack Katt and Tom Smart there, at a front table, lushing it up and keen for puss." The rhythm of that opening evokes nursery rhymes ("Jack Sprat could eat no fat"), but the overall effect is a succinct evocation of drunken, horny, loudmouth rich kids. Can't you see them now, Darien, Conn.'s finest in their Brooks Brothers casuals, slumming it for the evening in a boho bar?
Apart from the concern with tone and language, that letter to Seymour Krim reveals something of the era in which Southern and Hoffenberg worked. "Candy" was published during a period that saw some of America' censorship laws finally defeated, thanks to the efforts of publishers like Grove Press' Barney Rosset and lawyers like Edward de Grazia. But the danger of government prosecution was still potent enough to make writers feel as if they were operating under the Puritans.
Consider these particulars: John Cleland's "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure" (aka "Fanny Hill") was first published in 1748-49. It has only been legal to read it in America since 1963. D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover" has been legally available, both here and in the United Kingdom, only since the early '60s. Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" and "Tropic of Capricorn" were cleared of obscenity in the U.S. just a few years later. In 1966 "Naked Lunch" was convicted of obscenity in Massachusetts and then cleared by that state's Supreme Court. "The Candy Men" reveals that the FBI, under the directorship of J. Edgar Hoover, investigated the possibility of bringing "Candy" up on obscenity charges, but concluded the book was obviously a satire. A bowdlerized version of "Candy" was published in England in 1968 (the critics ridiculed the timidity of the publisher) and the book didn't appear uncut there until 1970.
This is the atmosphere in which Southern and Hoffenberg brought forth "Candy." It's frightening to think that, had the book been written today, it might have faced the legal troubles it eluded in the '60s. Various bills like the Child Pornography Protection Act outlawed the portrayal of sex between minors, which meant, for instance, that the wedding-night scene in a production of "Romeo and Juliet" could have been legally classified as child porn. What might such an act have done to "Candy"?
"The Candy Men: The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel 'Candy'"
By Nile Southern
Arcade
408 pages
Nonfiction
In "Candy," dewiness meets defilement. The joke of the book isn't just that everyone Candy meets is ready to take advantage of her, just as they took advantage of her namesake Candide, it's that she participates willingly in her own abasement. "To give of oneself -- fully," Candy writes in her college thesis, "is not merely a duty prescribed by an outmoded superstition, it is a beautiful and thrilling privilege." Believing it, Candy goes on to meet a succession of men -- her literature professor, the Mexican gardener, a guru, a surgeon, her own uncle, and, in the book's most notorious sequence, a brain-damaged hunchback -- out to convince her that it will be a beautiful and thrilling privilege to give herself to them.
Candy Christian has often been classed with Lolita as one of literature's hotties. But Candy shares less with the knowing, wised-up Lolita than with Lolita's poor culture-mad mother, Charlotte Haze. Suckers who want to think of themselves as enlightened, they have a '50s American taste for "progressive" psychology, and for the accouterments of refinement. With her sherry and her copy of "Songs of Innocence and Experience," no less than the men she gives herself to, Candy believes she's asserting her independence over the stultifying taboos of her middle-class upbringing. To Southern and Hoffenberg, she represents another kind of American conformity.
Southern conceived Candy as the epitome of all the attractive girls he had seen in Paris and Greenwich Village who gave themselves to the worst creeps imaginable as long as said creeps were able to talk a compelling line of B.S. (The right comment about poetry or art or music and the next stop, as Southern once said, was "Poon City!") Which is why the most repulsive of Candy's lovers, the demented hunchback, provides the novel's most hilarious scene. Candy has -- understandably -- turned down his charming seduction gambit, "I want fuck-suck you," but just as quickly gives in after he points to his hump and asks, "Is because of this?" What follows is a wicked contrast of Candy's "selflessness" with the baseness of her paramour's intentions:
"It means so much to him, Candy kept thinking, so much, as he meanwhile got her jeans and panties down completely so that they dangled now from one slender ankle as he adjusted her legs and was at last on the floor himself in front of her, with her legs around his neck, and his mouth very deep inside the fabulous honeypot."
