{"id":126897,"date":"2018-07-11T13:00:06","date_gmt":"2018-07-11T17:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=126897"},"modified":"2018-07-11T17:52:49","modified_gmt":"2018-07-11T21:52:49","slug":"destined-for-the-dirty-book-bin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/07\/11\/destined-for-the-dirty-book-bin\/","title":{"rendered":"Destined for the Dirty-Book Bin"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/a2c88b54fecef2d99d9737327da94a95-recovered.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-127479\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/a2c88b54fecef2d99d9737327da94a95-recovered.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1000\" height=\"561\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/a2c88b54fecef2d99d9737327da94a95-recovered.jpg 1000w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/a2c88b54fecef2d99d9737327da94a95-recovered-300x168.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/a2c88b54fecef2d99d9737327da94a95-recovered-768x431.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve been fixated on\u00a0Mason Hoffenberg and Terry Southern\u2019s\u00a0<em>Candy <\/em>since I first came across it in college. I\u2019ve read it out loud many times to try to capture and understand its rhythm; I\u2019ve given many copies to friends. And yet, what is it? And\u2014even more intriguingly, and more on this in a second\u2014<em>why<\/em> is it?<\/p>\n<p><em>Candy<\/em> begins with exhilarating precision; the opening chapters are my favorite pages of any book ever written, with its exquisitely tuned language guiding us through an ecstatic parody of outrageous ego-driven meaninglessness, pulled off with the combination of subtle precision and insane audacity that you might find in a pilot successfully flying a plane under the Brooklyn Bridge. As it continues, the book\u2019s writing gradually collapses, with an entropy that might well be described as obscene, into a tone of sloppy, lascivious wildness that syncs well with its plot. Along the way, it goes on extremely unnecessary tangents to satirize nearly everything imaginable to an audience of its time: psychotherapy, New York City, Hollywood screenwriting, Jewish mothers, quack doctors, New Age healing, progressive causes, pretension, na\u00efvet\u00e9, innocence, idealism, corruption, generosity, selfishness, spiritual searching, gurus, the male gaze, awareness of the male gaze, \u201cdaddy issues,\u201d sexual repression, sexual liberation\u2014as one review suggested, sex itself\u2014and perhaps most of all, the reader who would buy such a book\u2014a person they surely pictured on the banks of the Seine, scratching his head as to what the hell he was reading and whether it was turning him on or not.\u00a0<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The one story that comes close to matching the tone of <em>Candy<\/em> may be the story of <em>Candy<\/em>. <em>The Candy Men<\/em>, by Nile Southern, tells it well, as do a handful of other sources; it\u2019s a story that is bizarrely, almost divinely consistent with the tone of the book itself. It\u2019s well-known that a lot of ahead-of-their-time literary classics had to be first published as banned books, working their way out over decades. Many of these were published first by Maurice Girodias, the legendarily shady Parisian publishing figure who ran Olympia Press and was revered by readers in the know and reviled by writers who knew even more, who lucked and sleazed his way into a business publishing first editions of classics such as Nabokov\u2019s <em>Lolita<\/em>,\u00a0Burroughs\u2019s <em>Naked Lunch<\/em>, and Henry Miller\u2019s works when they were still banned in the U.S.<\/p>\n<p>But <em>Candy<\/em> traveled in the opposite direction, against traffic. Girodias\u2019s dirty-book bin was not the place of last resort\u2014Southern and Hoffenberg deliberately sought it out as the destination into which they would smuggle their transcendent work of nihilist comedy brilliance. And that may be the funniest thing of all about this book: Just, well, <em>why<\/em>?\u00a0It was supposed to be nothing more than a slim packet of smut, dashed off by two broke and brilliant writers for the brief arousal of horny expatriates in Paris. Why in the world did they bother to compose a book like \u2026 like <em>this<\/em>?<\/p>\n<p>The unlikely journey of this book from smut bin to commemorative sixtieth-anniversary edition is just one too-good-to-be-true example of how the rebellious, paradoxical high-low culture mash-up of <em>Candy<\/em>\u2019s metastory uncannily matches the tone of the book itself. Another is that the closest description of the book\u2019s impossible-to-describe tone comes directly from J. Edgar Hoover\u2019s FBI, in a 1965 memorandum we can picture typed out in the same square-jawed, all-American bureaucratic humorlessness Southern was famous for satirizing: \u201c<em>Candy<\/em>, for all its sexual descriptions and foul language, is primarily a satirical parody of the pornographic books which currently flood our newsstands. Whatever erotic impact or prurient appeal it has is thoroughly diluted by the utter absurdity and improbability of the situations described.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The story of the film version, too, is impossibly true to this high culture\u2013low culture cocktail of the book itself: the movie is an unabashed abomination, and yet it somehow features Marlon Brando and Richard Burton\u2014two of the greatest screen actors of all time\u2014who act opposite the first Miss Teen International winner, Ewa Aulin (as the all-American Candy) and Ringo Starr (as Emmanuel the Mexican gardener). (Brando, years later, reflected on the movie in the documentary <em>Listen to Me Marlon<\/em>,\u00a0calling it \u201cprobably the worst movie I ever made,\u201d and then piled on even further, musing aloud, \u201cHow could you do that to yourself ? Haven\u2019t I got any pride left?\u201d)<\/p>\n<p>All of this\u2014the brilliance and cheapness of both the book and its journey\u2014has a unique cool to it. Let me here make the case for Terry Southern as the coolest figure of twentieth-century literature. He\u2019s the author of two indelible cult classics, <em>Candy<\/em>\u2014coauthored with the poet and Olympia veteran author Mason Hoffenberg\u2014as well as another unique book even more famous in some circles, <em>The Magic Christian<\/em>, which awakened the inner mischief-for-mischief\u2019s-sake spirit within me and nearly everyone who\u2019s read it. He\u2019s also the screenwriter of two counterculture landmarks, <em>Easy Rider<\/em> and <em>Dr. Strangelove<\/em>,\u00a0each unmistakably infused with his deadpan ear for the rhythms and psychology of authority figures. And look: if you\u2019re trying to find the coolest person you can, you could do worse than to pick up the cover of the Beatles\u2019s <em>Sgt. Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club<\/em> <em>Band<\/em>\u00a0and choose the only guy there wearing sunglasses.<\/p>\n<p>In college, I had been searching about for literary heroes and had landed on Terry Southern for the reasons above. After reading <em>Candy<\/em>, I signed up for a meeting with my English professor\u2014during the always-empty \u201coffice hours\u201d that colleges offer to prove that their star academics are real and approachable people who totally care about students\u2014just to try to make sense of <em>Candy<\/em>, which was not part of the class. I showed up and asked, \u201cHave you read the book <em>Candy<\/em>?\u201d \u201cYes,\u201d nodded Philip Fisher, with a smile. \u201c<em>Candy<\/em>, by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg?\u201d He nodded again. I nodded then too. He nodded again. And I realized I had nothing else to say about it, and he didn\u2019t either. I don\u2019t know what there is to say about <em>Candy<\/em>, other than \u201c\u2009\u2026\u00a0<em>right<\/em>?\u201d And so I said that. And he nodded again, and I left and never went to office hours again, and as far as I know, neither has anyone else.<\/p>\n<p>So I guess that\u2019s really all I have to say about this minor masterpiece (the coolest type of masterpiece):<i> <\/i>Right?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em>B.\u2009J. Novak is a writer and actor best known for his work on NBC\u2019s Emmy Award\u2013winning comedy series <\/em>The Office<em>\u00a0as an actor, writer, director, and executive producer. He is also known for his stand-up comedy performances and his roles in motion pictures such as Quentin Tarantino\u2019s <\/em>Inglourious Basterds<em>\u00a0and Disney\u2019s <\/em>Saving Mr. Banks<em>. He is a graduate of Harvard University with a degree in English and Spanish literature.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Excerpted from <\/em>Candy<em>, by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg. Introduction copyright \u00a9 2018 by B.\u2009J. Novak. Published by arrangement with Grove Atlantic.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; I\u2019ve been fixated on\u00a0Mason Hoffenberg and Terry Southern\u2019s\u00a0Candy since I first came across it in college. I\u2019ve read it out loud many times to try to capture and understand its rhythm; I\u2019ve given many copies to friends. And yet, what is it? And\u2014even more intriguingly, and more on this in a second\u2014why is it? [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[34508,7068,34509,34510,239,3708,30,33535],"class_list":["post-126897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-b-j-novak","tag-banned-books","tag-dirty-books","tag-mason-hoffenberg","tag-nile-southern","tag-olympia","tag-terry-southern","tag-the-magic-christian"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Destined for the Dirty-Book Bin by B.J. Novak<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"B. J. 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