T bones

November is my favourite month. You can ruin it for me by growing a moustache or writing a novel. There's nothing wrong with writing a draft of a novel in thirty days. Faulkner did, as we are reminded to the point of annoyance; less glowingly, so did Sebastian Faulks when he was paid a gazillion to write a post-Fleming Bond (twenty-eight days for typing and two for sobbing in the shower). A better use for November would be Publish A Novel In A Month.

Terry Southern spent a year on his novels. Specifically he wrote a page a day, then on New Year's (approx) dispatched said 365pp "manuscript" off to some poor bastard of an editor. He had no judgement but he had an amazing talent and instinct for concept - the big shape wired like a switchboard to a wider community of cultural references - which is why he flourished in film even if his storytelling faltered (or wandered, rather) on the page. Southern was simultaneously hard-working and lazy; dogged yet careless. He was English, in other words. Plenty of American authors drank that much and crashed; Southern crashed and kept on going. His son Nile wrote about him in Gadfly in 2001:

Terry used to say to me, "Never take a job just for the money." I was ten years old at the time, and he continued saying it as my friends were doing their summer jobs, which I eventually did as well. "Only take a job that somehow relates to film work, or that informs or facilitates your creativity. "A night watchman" was his favorite suggestion — which, for a kid, of course, was not possible. But the irony is that Terry himself ended up taking so many jobs "just for the money" — and yet they never paid well. It worked like this: someone would find out how to contact him (often by looking him up in the phone book), call him up, bottom-line it by saying they could pay him $5,000 ($2,500 now and $2,500 when he finished), he would say "yes" and it would be another (failed) project under way. If he was lucky, there would be some sort of contract where the Guild minimum was promised. But that would only kick in when a studio picked it up, which they never did.

His work method is described thus:

Early on, Terry developed the habits for composition that remained with him for the rest of his life. "Let discipline be my touchstone," he wrote in his journal of the early '50s, and later, toward fulfilling his minimum "page a day," he would say, "Get up, no matter what time, have coffee and go to the desk. Chain yourself to the chair."

Altx interviewed him about his work method:

What is your general routine for writing? Do you need to create some sort of discipline to handle different demands from articles to screenplays and teaching?

TS: I like to work at night. My metabolism seems to be one of those if there is such a thing. It's sort of a hit and miss thing with me. The nearest thing to a methodical procedure that I can relate to, in terms of theory, is unfortunately just a sense of imminent deadline, either imaginary or real. Imaginary in the sense of deciding of 'Well, you really must get working on this' in order to avoid some kind of last minute rush. If I had, as I always try to encourage my son, Nile, to develop a methodical or disciplined approach, I would be more productive and prolific.

Southern wrote for Stanley Kubrick and did or did not write a film called Easy Rider, depending on which living person you speak to. He told Dazed and Confused:

How much involvement did [Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda] have in the script? Because they're both credited along with you as scriptwriters.

Well, right at the beginning Dennis (Hopper) and Peter (Fonda) had just this one idea, right? Listen, this is their contribution to the whole thing. These two guys, Peter and Dennis, at first they were going to be in cars, so they could do stunts in cars. It was going to be called Barnstormers or something. This is what they came to me with. So we changed it to motorbikes, but the idea then was that they would score some drugs and--this is when people are just beginning to realize you can make big money in drugs--so they buy some Coke in Mexico, sell it, ride their bikes to Florida, buy a boat and leave the American rat-race. Sail off into the sunset. The entertainment aspect of the film, presumably, was to be their pilgrimage from Mexico to Key West. That was it.

What were the formative experiences that led you to write Easy Rider? There's an anger and bleakness that comes through in that film that made it quite unlike anything else being made at that time.

Well, I'm glad that anger and bleakness came through. Because Dennis Hopper didn't have a clue as to what the film was about. The thrust of the film, from my point of view, the philosophical position is that it's supposed to be an indictment of the blue-collar thing, the truck-driver people of America, for their intolerance and their support of the Vietnam war. It's supposed to be an indictment of the worst part of mainstream Middle America, as personified by those two assholes in the pick-up truck. Bigotry incarnate. And the final sequence is, I guess, the ultimate statement about that mentality, where these two assholes don't like their looks, So that's the ending. And when Dennis Hopper read it he said 'Are you kidding? Are you going to kill of both of them? Yeah, that's what he said, 'kill off', (laughs). So I said, 'Well, that's the only way it can be, because otherwise we're not saying anything, it's just a little odyssey by a couple of irresponsible hippies. So they've got to serve some purpose, make some point'.

(Photo: Stanley Kubrick, 1963)