Hipoisie

Digging Terry Southern

by Richard C. Walls

Now Dig This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern 1950-1995. Edited by Nile Southern and Josh Alan Friedman. Grove Press, 263 pages, $25.

Now Dig This, a collection of the kind of scraps and tidbits -- feuilletons, letters, and random jottings -- that any long-at-it working writer leaves behind, may not shore up the late Terry Southern's reputation as a founding god of hip, but it is a sporadically enjoyable collection for those who have already read his better stuff, that being some of the short stories in Red-Dirt Marijuana, an unabashed dice throw in what he called the Quality Lit Game. Fans, though, might hold out for the rancid and randy satires The Magic Christian and Blue Movie -- the more focused stuff. Here, aside from a few fairly solid new journalism pieces ("Fiasco Reverie," "Groovin' in Chi"), the mode is more that of the hoping-to-be-inspired tossoff, short spurts of appreciative assessment aimed at the likes of William S. Burroughs and Abbie Hoffman, anecdotal goofs, manly attempts at rather baroque filth. Although it's hard to imagine much that is "unspeakable" in this day and age, Southern can still rap beyond the pale on occasion, as in a birthday tribute to Kurt Vonnegut during which he can't restrain his penchant for sexual fantasies involving prepubescent girls (not that he was, you know . . . it's just a Sadean trope meant to stick it to the bourgies). In the main, however, time has made Southern seem more mild.

At his worst -- and this kind of marginal effluvia is bound to show off one's worse -- Southern's conversational mode can seem a little too willed, a little too much like snappy patter meant to boggle the rubes. It must have been something of a strain, being so hip and all, having to sustain that not-your-father's-gazetteer mode each time out, and so no wonder if he sounds a little frantic -- all those italicized words, all those flip sobriquets laid on his famous acquaintances ("Tru" for Capote, "Von" for Vonnegut, et al.), all that crazy slang. Still, he can be pithy even when you feel he isn't really putting his back into it, as in "When Film Gets Good . . . ," a not-too-long review of 16 novels that manages to make incisive comments about each without entirely convincing you he's read any of them. For a long-at-it working writer like myself, this qualifies him as a minor hero, at least.

Southern's most famous gig was spicing up Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove script, and it's generally agreed that the tangy mix of sex and dread that moves its satire beyond mere polemics is his special contribution. But it also seems that his taste for escalating absurdity was held in check by the always measured Kubrick. In "Strangelove Outtakes: Notes from the War Room," Southern gives his version of the famous pie-fight climax that was edited out of the movie's final cut, and if he's to believed (always a question with this guy), the sequence was more extended than previously thought, including some corny shtick with Peter Sellers falling out of and trying to get back into his wheelchair. The official version has always had it that the scene was ditched because the lines spoken by George C. Scott after the president takes one right in the face -- "Gentlemen. The president has been struck down in the prime of his life and his presidency. I say massive retaliation!"-- became a bit too dicy when, between shooting and editing, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. But Southern has it that the scene was cut because it didn't come out right and they didn't have the time or money for a reshoot. Maybe that's what, in a diplomatic moment, he was told by Big Stan (as Terry calls him), because it's obvious that the scene was cut mainly because it was gratuitous.

And that's the nub. Southern was egregiously gratuitous at a time when that was a needed tonic. But that was then, and we're all way beyond it now. In "Proposed Scene for Kubrick's Rhapsody," his comic approach seems just as turgid as what ended up in the final flick, Eyes Wide Shut (20 years later, sans Southern input), though we're supposed to get some wild tee-hees from his reference to a "hooded clit." Southern fought the good fight (and wrote some damn good short stories), but now, like the psychedelic cover rigged up for this spotty collection, he can seem terribly quaint.