Candy cut
ED FISHER
The cuts in Candy sounded hopeful. I looked immediately for improvements, ready to enjoy the promised irony of seeing Candy face- lifted into a better book, a tight-skinned beauty, all its rotten growths removed and aimless sproutings dropped into the can along with the ostensible dirt for which the expurgator was reaching. What if the expurgator proved in inadvertent artist? How delightful if a work of celebrated literary value, which Will be taken up as a cause by enemies Of prudery and hurled against the battered gate Of censorship, were found to have acquired its value mainly in the censoring—what a rich joke on Puritan and freedom-shouter alike! But no, the eternal villainies hold, the prude's shears never im- prove. The cutting only hobbles a book that was not very bright on its toes to begin with.
What mkt of book? Some will say it is a satire on pornography, on the- typical 'dirty novel' in all its standard permutations: In a way, yes. There are encounters with a bisexual professor, a militant onanist, a sadist, an octogenarian, a hunchback. These are written in a manner that attempts 'tti be erotic and ludicrous at once, an almost itnpOSSible trick to bring off, although it succeeds pretti Well in the final sub-section of tik, httrichback episode and 'Daddy's' fantasy of hiCilatighter"S 'ravish- ment in chapter four—both ) If which:: 'alas, have been wholly cut frbnilitheGeiV. edition (though much that is dirtidenindieis cleVet has not; the cutting is wildf? EaKcieuk).", " There are other hints' Of " ileSigh" to go parodying through the PotiteigraPhic ' gamut. There is a bit in which 'a" mo* receptionist helps Candy to change clOthes;'"theu eyes her with 'perhaps slightly mbre'`iiiterest than she should have.' Ah, you think,--cue for .the big lesbian scene: But this tun* out to have been only a vestige of some pritir intention. The cue gets dropped, the autirdis wander from thatpoint through some trivial byways of social satire; a la Max Shulman, taking aimless kicks in passing at the 'clean-fallout missile pro- gram,' leftist-idealist youth camps and shady Russian dmigrd intriguers. There is a seduction in a cave by a pseUdo-religious fanatic; accomp- lished through the dodge of 'instructing a novice,' the wily seducer muttering hypocritical burlesques of canonical mumbo-jumbo through- out: 'Regard how I have willed my member: no base or material desire is connected with it, yet it resembles the so-called sexual erec- tion. Does it not?'
This episode strikingly resembles in form the Decameron tale of Lady Alibech's instruction by the hermit Rustico (Day 3rd, tale X) 'putting the devil in' hell': we have the cave setting, the obscene burlesque of liturgy. Rut whereas Boccaccio mocked the liturgy of the dominant faith of his time, of his own mother church (which soon after reclaimed him as a penitent, to give just a small example of the living power of that faith), Southern and Hoffenberg are tilting at beatnik spiritualism, the kooky faiths of Greenwich Village. Candy's hermit pretends a sort of ridiculous Zen-Yoga: Cosmic Rhythm Exercises, 'mastery of the glandular functions,' mastery of Will and Illu- sion: '"Are you really sure," she asked, wide- eyed and darling, "that you willed out Ull' the . . . the spermatozoa from the semen? . . Re- cause," said Candy, lowering her voice and blushing deeply, "my . my period is lake. And it simply never is! " (From the Putnam edition.) There is some fun in this, it May even strike you as strong, corrective satire, if you have ever taken the Zen fad seriously. But it is rather different from the bold Voltairean art of attacking formidable reigning institu- tions bristling with orihodox defenders, state power, a Holy Office and the lynch mob.
And this is the difference that defines Candy, I think. It's an erotic pilgrim's progress, not through the pertinent world but through the zonked-out world of gurus, Diggers, hippies; fag clubs, utopian societies, pacifist-anarchists, health nuts and intellectual quacks. The repre- sentative specimens are drawn in broadest transparencies, cliches, in erratic Changes and inconsistencies of tone (this will seem the fink of cutting, but it is as bad in the full text). These wretched, lurching, ill-shaped prototVeles fasten, feast and cavort upon the naive heroine. A modern Candide, she is equipped with a fall set of simplicities, 'progressive,' dreamy, vaguely leftish, gushingly egalitarian, flavotired with kirsch, chianti, kleenex, art films, Blake etchings and A & P oregano. In consequence of which, as Terry Southern explains in a prefa- tory section of The Olympia Reader. she "of course gets raped by Negroes, robbed by Jews, knecked up by Puerto Ricans, etc.' The perils of a hip Pauline. A non-Voltairean target, I repeat. A pathetic subworld that doesn't burn its heretics or lynch its critics—at least that didn't.
Then what of Candy? Is it simply a mistake, a worthless, formless nothing? No, not altn- gether. Not if you go on the assumption that Southern and Hoffenberg, being humorous by inclination, would tend to give a funny turn to almost anything they wrote. In this case, a sex novel. Not a parody of one but the real thing; with humorous overtones of coursc'and supposed social or humane significance; to which these authors also naturally incline.. But those inclinings are peripheral. Candy only emerges whole, only makes sense if you forget the trimmings and recall that it is basically. of the Olympia genre, for which it was turned out on assignment and in which context it assumes place and shape. Then, as pornography; YOU can understand it. Or as little of it as you'll 'get in the Geis/London edition.
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