Erotica Readers & Writers Association
Review by Rob Hardy
October 2004

"The Candy Men thus turns out to be a sad book with lots of funny stories about how a really funny book came into being. Anyone who values Candy will be fascinated with this complicated biography of the novel."

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Everyone Was a Fool
The Unruly, Unappreciated, Unparalleled
Genius of Terry Southern
By Max Watman
New York Sun,
October 15, 2004
(HTML version)

This is the grand guy who wrote the best hipster fiction ever done, invented the independent film movement, and cracked New Journalism fully grown right out of his skull. He drove across the country and back again while Neil and Jack were still scraping nickels off the kitchen floor for gas money and dex. He was the blockbuster, bestselling author of "Candy."

.PDF version of the review...

Southern's Snarkiness

"...Nile Southern's written his own book about loss of innocence in the 1960s: The Candy Men: The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel Candy (Arcade). It traces the uneven collaboration between Terry Southern and his pal Mason Hoffenberg to create a book which not only caused an inevitable furor for its vulgar take on contemporary culture, but brought about landmark changes in how the First Amendment applied to erotic literature. Terry Southern's slang-laden language may have become dated over the years, but his ideas never got stale, and he's the best guy to read (or watch) for an honest, empowering laugh when the world seems to be collapsing around you."

"The Candy Men" ... captures many of the sights and sounds of those years and that strange terrain. His history is colorful, a mostly engaging portrait of some lively moments in our recent cultural past.

The Candy Men: The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel Candy
By Nile Southern

The late Terry Southern was known for a lot of things, including doing much of the writing on the screenplays of the landmark films Dr. Strangelove and Easy Rider. But for most it will always be his association with the supposedly racy 1960s best-seller Candy that comes to mind when his name gets mentioned. Southern co-authored the novel, and I must say right off that the subtitle of this book by his son Nile Southern saves the reviewer the chore of providing a working precis of its contents, also establishing the right mood for the entire offbeat tale: “The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel Candy.”

". . . a wonderful, stirring and ultimately tragic book, and the whole tale was started by a piece of writing intended to a quick sell for a cheap thrill. Who knew it would turn out to be art?"

Review of The Candy Men: "... doggedly researched and engrossing..."

On Terry Southern: "He broke down one very big barrier separating sexually explicit language from art, and everyone from Lenny Bruce to Madonna has tried to one-up him since."

"Flawlessly detailed and presented with a spellbinding verve, The Candy Men is a truly captivating biography of both the milestone novel and its furiously original and unwavering writers."

"...a highly successful example of an underexploited genre, the biography of a book..."

"The adventures of ''Candy'' have been related before, but never as fully and sympathetically as here, with letters, contracts, legal minutiae, multifaceted biography and, now and then, a wistful personal detail, all conspiring to take the story forward..."

"...thoroughly enjoyable..."

(Link to The New York Times review of The Candy Men here; free registration needed)

By CHARLES TAYLOR
June 10, 2004

"Terry Southern's son tells the wacky tale of his dad's '60s pornographic masterpiece "Candy," whose heroine is both dirtier and more innocent than today's dead-eyed Britney nymphets."

"In its crassness, its lust for celebrity, its pornographication, in the willed yahooism of its politics, America has seemed, for some time now, to be operating according to a Terry Southern scenario.

For the last 30 years or so, he has been the Edgar Bergen of the American zeitgeist. I wish there had been more Terry Southern books, but his voice is a constant. For me there is no other writer whose voice is more present in American public life, whose distant cackle can be detected in the (often overlapping) lingo of showbiz and advertising and corporations and politics."

"A giant of American literature, the late writer Terry Southern blended first-rate storytelling, boho cool, outrageous humor, and forthright sexuality and produced some of the most enduring novels (The Magic Christian, Blue Movie), screenplays (Dr. Strangelove, Easy Rider), and short story collections (Red-Dirt Marijuana And Other Tastes) of the 20th Century. In 1958, shady Parisian porn lit king Maurice Girodias published a satire called Candy by Southern and fellow mad-dog hipster Mason Hoffenberg. The book went on to sell millions of copies and a decade-long, dual-continent legal battle -- against censors as well as between business partners -- ensued. From the fictitious heroine Candy Christian and her motley suitors to the real-life authors and myriad publishers, everybody got fucked one way or another.

Nile Southern, Terry’s son, reconstructs this colorful literary history in The Candy Men: The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel Candy. The original best seller’s title character is a hot, young naïf whose generous spirit allows men repeated access to her nubile chassis. While delightfully prurient, the comedic depiction of masculine rapacity cloaked in mock-serious dialogue elevated the tome to a work of art. The visionary Girodias also pubbed Burroughs’ Naked Lunchand Nabokov’s Lolita; other classics initially banned for “dirty” themes or language. He was equally as infamous for ripping writers off, copyright shenanigans, and hiding assets in other ventures.

By threading the controversy’s narrative with letters between the players and the army of lawyers retained to sort out the intrigue, Nile allows us to live amongst a crew of mavericks whose highly evolved intelligence matched their ability to shock. The mastery of language contained in the correspondence between Terry and Mason, in particular, is a groove to behold and reminds us that there was a not-so-distant-time when geniuses armed with typewriters fought the thought cops and won."

In the spirit of VH1's Behind the Music comes this revealing behind-the-scenes look at the making, breaking, remaking, pirating, filming and legal wrangling of the '60s cult phenomenonm Candy. An erotic satire vaguely inspired by Voltaire's Candide and penned under the name Maxwell Kenton (the nom de plume of its ex-pat coauthors, Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg), Candy was first published in 1958 by the notorious French publisher, Maurice Giordias. The book was immediately banned, then reissued under the title Lollipop, barred again, then reissued again, sanitized in England and eventually shipped stateside, where thanks to Putnam and a slew of publishing pirates, it leapt to bestsellerdom and was eventually crowned "the world's most talked about book."

Southern's own son, Nile, has recounted the novel's bumpy and adventurous journey in a magnificent epistolary style, reprinting the correspondence between Candy's authors, its publisher and its increasingly complicated web of involved parties. The compilation perfectly captures the "growing misunderstandings, temper tantrums, paranoid fixations, jealousies, dreams and utter despair that each of these men went through as they tried to regain control over their book lost in a miasma of cloudy copyright." (Miasma is an apt term: by the second half of the book the legal fog is so thick that it's nearly impossible to keep track of who's suing whom.)

Raucous and voyeuristic, this biography of a book offers valuable insight into the Beat scenes of Paris and New York, as well as into the publishing world during an era of shifting attitudes toward censorship. Perhaps most importantly, it also offers a window onto the lives and minds of two wildly creative literary characters: the authors Southern and Hoffenberg themselves. (April 22nd, 2004)

BOOKLIST, May 2004:

Southern, Nile. The Candy Men: The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel Candy. May 2004. 408p. illus. index. Arcade, $27.95 (1-55970-604-X).

The late satirist Terry Southern is best known as the screenwriting genius behind Stanley Kubrick’s black-comedy masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove. Less well known in contemporary letters is Southern’s friend and lifelong correspondent, Mason Hoffenberg, like Southern a product of the 1950s beat movement. In the mid-sixties, the pair jointly wrote Candy, an erotic parody of Voltaire’s Candide that became an underground sensation and later a victim of its era’s censorship and copyright laws. Southern’s son here engagingly recounts the colorful history of the novel’s composition and success, from gestation in Parisian and Greenwich Village cafés and pubs to being pirated by other underground publishers to its eventual rendition in an embarrassing film starring, among other luminaries, Marlon Brando and Richard Burton. At times more fascinating and readable than the original novel, the Candy saga constitutes an important chapter in the history of popular culture and a worthy second look at one of the now largely forgotten masterpieces of erotic literature.

–– Carl Hays

"Old poops, puritans, the politically correct, and our fun-loving Attorney General may choke on indignation and outraged sensibilities, but the rest of us must laugh along with these anarchic voices. Such wild metaphors and riffs of fervid imagination, daring to celebrate our frailties and folly, are the stuff of literature and life." — Peter Mathiessen

In the early fall of 1958 there appeared in Paris, in the familiar dull-green cover of the already notorious Olympia Press, a novel entitled Candy, a Rabelasian satire loosely based on Voltaire's Candide by one Maxwell Kenton, pseudonym of its coauthors Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg. Following a modest first printing, the book drew the attention of the French censors, was banned, reissued by Olympia's intrepid publisher Maurice Girodias under the title Lollipop, rebanned, then again reissued. Within years it became one of the most talked-about novels of the tumultuous 1960s, selling in the millions of copies in America alone, its success prompting Hollywood to turn it into a move.

Message to hipsters, cultural anthropologists, 60's diehards and book fiends:
Check out Nile Southern's
THE CANDY MEN
out today [5.7.04]
Arcade/Warner Books.

Nile has set down the premier exposition of the storied birth and aftermath of runaway bestseller and scandàle literàire CANDY, an addictive read you simply could not avoid if you were alive in the 1960s. A bona fide phenomenon in a decade rife with outrè happenings, the true story behind CANDY is as heartbreaking as it is hilarious; you will not want to miss this insider's account of two real-life Candides (or Quixotes) as they whip the Quality Lit world but ultimately succumb to inner demons they could not vanquish.

The Candy Men.  Buy it. Read it. If you like it, recommend it.
I wouldn't do you wrong.

Gordon Whiting, San Francisco, Calif.
U.S.of A.

Bittersweet Candy

Written in the uptight Eisenhower 50s in tag-team style by a poet/narcotics addict (Hoffenberg) and 'the ultimate hipster' (Southern), the novel Candy began life as a lark—a quick way to make a few bucks—and ended up a landmark work that not only defined what was (and was not) funny but also what was (and was not) obscene.

Candy's strange trip—from initial conception, to completion, and eventual condemnation—is stylishly told, warts-and-all, in The CANDY Men via the letters of its main players as they conspire, debate, vilify, and argue with each other over the course of several years. This is engrossing and hilarious stuff at times, petty and mean-spirited at others, as 'he said/she said' type arguments rise and fall over authorship, ownership, division of labor, and (of course) division of money.

In The CANDY Men, Nile Southern (son of Terry) comes clean about the making of the ultimate dirty book. "Good grief, it's Daddy!" indeed.

—Jim Yoakum, Director, The Graham Chapman Archives
Literary Executor, The Graham Chapman Estate

Candy remains a delightful anomaly...a funny, poetic, and insightful (and still hot) book. Nile Southern's The Candy Men is a near forensic account of its inauspicious beginnings as a Left Bank lark between Terry Southern, Mason Hoffenberg, and Olympia Press impresario and mad scientist, Maurice Girodias. The book became an underground phenomenon in 1958 and then a mainstream bestseller in 1964. Sadly, Hoffenberg and Southern saw little of the book's profits thanks to the near insane business and legal logic of Girodias (a man who was at once a shyster, patron, and visionary).

Nile has created a timely and long overdue narrative of an exciting period in literary and cultural history—that weird transition from the Beat world of the 50s to the psychedelic meltdown of the 60s - in a prose style that communicates the idealism and passion of those years. However, the book is far from a nostalgia trip. It also serves as a cautionary tale to writers who get sucked into the crevice where art and commerce mix. Funny, inspiring, sad, and tragic. The Candy Men is just what we need in these grim and depressing times of the Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney junta.

—Lee Hill, author, A Grand Guy: The Art and Life of Terry Southern
London, England