A Parody of Smut — and of Voltaire — Turns 60

Before Terry Southern wrote the sex satire “Candy” with Mason Hoffenberg, first published (and banned) in France in 1958; before he essentially invented the New Journalism, in Tom Wolfe’s estimation, with a 1963 piece for Esquire called “Twirling at Ole Miss”; before he helped write era-defining screenplays (“Dr. Strangelove,” “Easy Rider”); before he appeared on the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the only one in sunglasses no less; before he covered the 1968 Democratic National Convention for Esquire alongside Jean Genet and William S. Burroughs; before he wrote for “Saturday Night Live” and spiraled into debt and alcoholic excess ... Southern was a Texas boy with red dirt under his fingernails who dreamed of making it into what he called the Quality-Lit Game.

He got in. He kept squirting out again. As a prose writer, Southern (1924-1995) was an inspired and anarchic second-rater, but more necessary than many so-considered first-raters.

What’s left of him between soft covers that repays the effort? Not a lot. Few writers better exemplify E.B. White’s dictum that a writer is like a bean plant: “He has his little day, and then gets stringy.”

The novel some consider Southern’s masterpiece, “The Magic Christian” (1959), is about a billionaire who degrades those who want his money. In one stunt, he stirs thousands of $100 bills into a wide, warm vat of blood and urine and feces, and lets the desperate swim in after them. The novel is as bitter as gall and has Nathanael West’s dark ironies, yet it’s overdetermined and musty, a wizened pelt stretched over a taxidermist’s mannequin.

More plausibly readable are Southern’s foxy collections of journalism and stories, “Red-Dirt Marijuana” and “Now Dig This.” They’re brilliant, in bits, though fewer than half the kernels pop and the aftertaste is often less of butter than of butter-flavored topping.

It’s becoming more than apparent that, outside his screenplays, the Southern production that’s not going to go stale is “Candy,” available now in a 60th anniversary edition with an enthusiastic if slight introduction by the comic actor and writer B.J. Novak. Every sentence in “Candy” seems to have a little propeller on it.

Southern and Hoffenberg wrote the novel in tandem, mailing chapters back and forth, as a satire of Voltaire’s “Candide” and a parody of smutty novels. It was published in France by Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press, which published quickie dirty books alongside higher-brow controversy-makers like “Lolita,” “The Ginger Man” and “Naked Lunch.”

“Candy” became a best-seller when it was published in America in 1964. William Styron, reviewing it in The New York Review of Books, called it a “droll little sugarplum of a tale.”

It’s about a young woman of thrice-scrubbed innocence, Candy Christian, who possesses nuclear pheromonal impact and a “heart too big” to deprive men. She moves from Wisconsin to New York City — from creamy naiveté, that is, to diamond-grit experience.

In her absurdist encounters with doctors, mystics, academics, gardeners, lecherous uncles, messenger boys and others, each of whom has sexual designs on her, Candy obliviously self-designs a kind of pincer movement on the citadel of her own chastity. The almost-sex scenes build to a humid moment in which Candy cries, to a hunchback she’s picked up on Grove Street in Greenwich Village, “GIVE ME YOUR HUMP!”

The hunchback’s overriding emotion? “From an emotional standpoint, he would rather have been in the men’s room down at Jack’s Bar on the Bowery, eating a piece of urine-soaked bread while thrusting his hump against someone from the Vice Squad.”

This episodic novel still lives because its joints are loose. It’s that rare book that smacks of a tight deadline only in good ways. There was no time to overthink it, to gum up the works. The authors work high and low. Candy reads literary magazines and goes to art films. When a radio is flicked on, we read: “The orchestra was just finishing the formless waltz of the syphilitic prostitute.”

“Candy” works in the era of #MeToo in part because it so coyly subverts the male gaze. The men who leer after Candy are truly fatuous primates, fit for little but gibbering at the moon. Candy herself is no feminist paragon; no one escapes satirizing in this bracing commedia dell’arte.

The authors wage guerrilla war on prudery; they view sex as yodelingly absurd yet rather fun and, in this fantasia at least, consequence-free. The authors send up untrammeled sexual longing in all its forms. Their ingrained hatred of authority and pomposity give the novel a rebel spirit.

There are more flung-open doors in “Candy” than in a Feydeau farce. All its coitus is coitus interruptus. Candy’s father breaks in on her with a Mexican gardener; the older man looks “like some kind of giant insane lobster-man.” In his mind, the father issues a Trumpian racial tirade.

A nurse breaks in on Candy and her uncle; they’re going at it like “hot wart hogs” under her father’s sickbed. “Great God!” the nurse shrieks. “Have you no shame!” A bar’s men’s room door breaks open — Candy is inside with a gynecologist — and so much water pours out, thanks to a constantly flushing toilet, that the scene resembles something from Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water.”

Candy stumbles in on one of her professors snapping wet hand towels, nude, with a student. When a police car carrying Candy crashes into the San Remo, the legendary downtown art bar, 275 gay men think it’s a raid and race into the street.

That “Candy” would become a movie was apparent. No one predicted that the resulting film, which starred Ewa Aulin as Candy, alongside Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Walter Matthau, John Huston and Ringo Starr, with a screenplay by Buck Henry, would be unwatchable. (The trailer, available on YouTube, is watchably unwatchable.)

Candy glides through this novel like a sunbeam. Like this novel, she is, to crib from A.J. Liebling, as beautiful as a tulip of beer with a white collar.

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Publication Notes:

‘Candy’

By Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg

222 pages. Grove Press. $16.