King of writerly cool

AT the height of Sixties hipdom, no one was ever as hip as Terry Southern.

Creator of darkly satirical novels like The Magic Christian and the infamous Candy, a sexedup Sixties version of Voltaire's Candide, as well as the coscriptwriter of two very different films that encompassed the rise and fall of the Sixties revolution, Dr Strangelove and Easy Rider, Southern's status as a king of writerly cool has long since been assured.

And then, as if to confirm his position at the pinnacle of counterculture, there's Southern standing in his Ray-Bans at the shoulder of Edgar Allan Poe on Peter Blake's record sleeve for Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Band.

Yet the way in which the Texan-born writer achieved alternative- cult status relied upon traditional means.

Having fought in the Battle of the Bulge, Southern gained an English degree on the GI Bill and then spent five years in Parisian cafs in a drink and drug-fuelled pursuit of hazy literary aspirations. During these wandering hours, however, the American flneur met and made friends with everybody from Sartre, Genet and Cocteau to fellow exiles such as James Baldwin and Mason Hoffenberg, the crabby heroin addict with whom he wrote Candy.

With its gallery of jaded monsters, antiheroes or "preverts" [sic] swirling around a jailbaitjuvenile heroine, Candy marked a switch in America from post-war innocence into a more knowing irony and it became Southern's calling card when he returned to America in 1953. Indeed, it was because Peter Sellers gave a copy of the novel to Stanley Kubrick that Southern was asked by the reclu-A GRAND GUY: The Art and Life of Terry Southern by Lee Hill (Bloomsbury, 25) director to work with him on the Dr Strangelove script in the autumn of 1962.

After contributing to such a critical as well as commercial success, Southern had the pick of any upcoming Hollywood scripts.

Usually, the Texan existentialist chose well. He co-wrote The Cincinnati Kid, and then his updated spaceage version of Candy came to the screen in the form of Jane Fonda's Barbarella, but he was also induced by his old friend, Peter Sellers, to add some lustre to the script of the cataclysmic Bond movie, Casino Royale.

Such a rich life cries out for a vivid, dramatic account of the vital moments in Southern's story, as well as a reasoned re- evaluation of the writer's work; but Lee Hill's THE artistry of VS Naipaul can be divined from the first lines of Half a Life.

"Willie Chandran asked his father one day, 'Why is my middle name Somerset? The boys at school have just found out, and they are mocking me.'

"His father said without joy, 'You were named after a great English writer. I am sure you have seen his books about the house.'" Like a series of musical variations, the novel that follows these lines never departs from them in essence.

Half a life is how long it takes Willie to travel from childish curiosity to adult disillusion: it is the distance between an innocent question and an experienced answer.

Willie Chandran's father has made this journey himself. Born to a family of Indian civil servants, his future has already been bequeathed to him.

"The plan was that I should get a BA degree and then perhaps get a scholarship from the maharajah to do medicine or engineering. Then I was to marry the daughter of the principal of the maharajah's college. All of that was settled." Chandran senior regards this future with a sort of existential indifference. Nothing seems real to him. It is in this spirit that he embarks on a career of passive rebel-book, the first full-length biography of Southern, fails on both fronts.

Hill's determination to keep to the facts never allows room for Southern's outrageous wit and love of anarchy. What's more, Hill fails to point out that Southern's success as a writer of black comedy carried within it the reason for his later failure and loss of cultural currency: because he changed America's taste and made the outrageous and irreverent increasingly acceptable and then even routine in TV shows like Saturday Night Live and its offshoots, Southern also made himself increasingly irrelevant.

Such a curiously unenquiring approach to biography might be more acceptable if there was a shortage of material or records of important moments in Southern's life.

But even a cursory look at other sources supplies dramatic twists and turns that Hill has either overlooked or not bothered with.

Most notable is Hill's exclusion of Southern's own account as troubleshooter and co-scriptwriter for Kubrick on Dr Strangelove. But, even more crucially, Hill fails to provide a full account of Dennis Hopper's and Peter Fonda's refusal to give Southern full credit for or a percentage of Easy Rider's stupendous profits for his essential contribution both to the script and to raising finance for the film's production.

As Southern said of his collaborators: "Neither of them are writers. They can't even write a f***ing letter." In the spirit of Southern's splendid savagery, the same could almost be said of his biographer. But what is certain is that Southern's words will outlive this life.

HALF A LIFE by VS Naipaul (Picador, 15.99) lion. He does no work for his degree, to little effect. ("They wanted to fail you," says his father. "The principal of the college had to talk them out of it.") More daringly, he goes daily to a local caf where he sits silently at the table of a low-caste girl until a scandal has been generated. Then he takes a vow of silence and stands week after week in the temple courtyard.

Tourists come to look at him, among them Somerset Maugham.

But in the end, in spite of its eccentricity, Willie's father's life was a more or less accurate reflection of the mixture of environment and self that is human identity: he got away and he didn't get away. Willie's own experiences, by that logic, will take over where his father's left off.

In his twenties, Willie goes to London to take up a place at a college for mature students procured for him by one of his father's contacts from his tourist-attraction phase. He makes friends and begins to write ficsivetion: a book of his stories is published, and a young African woman writes him a fan letter. Willie is lonely and lost: the young woman, Ana, has a life she can offer him back in her home country, a Portuguese colony.

They return to her family's large estate and live there for two decades, during which time Willie's love for Ana shades into boredom and a sensual preoccupation with a life that is beginning to seem to him unlived. He finds, as his father found before him, that his existence lacks reality. He visits prostitutes, and finally leaves Ana.

"I am 41," he says. "I am tired of living your life." "Perhaps it wasn't really my life either," she replies.

This is brilliant, affecting stuff: the novel's melancholy drama is played out on the furthest margins of fiction, where things are recollected rather than observed. The half of life that Naipaul delineates here is the half that is composed of pure pointlessness. Its shadowy other, where joy and fulfilment and meaning lie, is implied but not assured. Willie, certainly, experiences terror at the thought that it might not exist at all. "Who will rescue that man?" he asks, of a poor labourer being abused by his employer.

"Who will avenge him?" It is a good question.

Copyright 2001
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