Terry Southern's Magic Christian
Mr. Moneybags the modern day miracle worker...
Terry Southern: The Magic Christian. London: Souvenir Press, 2010 [1959].
It’s time to do something of a pickup in this letter, considering the Kubrick reading project, as well as a mini-series of postwar fiction to come.
It’s also a chance to give some overdue attention to an American writer in the satirical tradition who in a sense laid down the cultural blueprints for the 60s.
Consider the 60s: the countercultural youth hedonism, the swinging London scene, the rise of New Journalism and indie cinema, the caustic MAD magazine humor. It all has a foundation with Terry Southern’s work: he truly had a finger in all of these pies. Of the same generation as the Beats, Southern was among the first wave of gonzo journalists before writing the screenplays for Dr. Strangelove as well as Barbarella and Easy Rider (and script-doctoring Pink Panther).
Published in the late 50s, The Magic Christian was Southern’s third novel but the first written without a collaborator. Peter Sellers gave a copy to Kubrick, and ended up starring in an adaptation in the late 60s.
TMC isn’t doing anything ambitious: it’s short, funny, brisk — yet it has a portentous aura around it. As if this book opened the Overlook elevator door, and the rest of postwar American fiction in all its contrarian absurdity (William Gaddis, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, James Purdy…the Original Silly Boys) comes rushing forth throughout the 60s.
I remember leafing through an issue of the Paris Review in undergrad, between 2011—2015, and coming across a reference to Southern, who was close to Plimpton and the PR people in its heyday. What the article liked most about Southern was his way with punctuation style. He was kind of novelist who wrote lines like “The Champ’s Mom! Can you imagine!?!”
And the eccentric billionaire Guy Grand (a “Grand Guy”), is the kind of individual who dons a pig mask while scarfing down a hot dog purchased with a $500 bill — and I’m not sure what kind of world we’re in, if that’s a fake quintuple c-note or a real overkill of a tip.
Grand uses his fortune to engineer and then resolve ridiculous situations: a worker sledgehammering saltine crackers in Times Square, or filling a swimming hole with raw sewage, bribing a man to eat a parking ticket simple because he had talked to Grand. Money and the insane desire for public attention and recognition are Grand’s weapons of public debasement.
The structure is simple: to use Northrop Frye terms, it’s a novel braided with a romance. The “romance” is the chain of short Grand antics (including hauling a French Howitzer field gun to a bourgeois safari). These are cross-cut with a continuous dramatic scene (the “novel” component) of Grand visiting the eccentric aunts Agnes and Esther for tea.
It’s tempting to spell out a Grand allegory of this titanic finance capitalist as American monopoly power itself, commanding the population with his clownery as the state commanded entire economies at this moment in the 50s.
But the novel also reads to me as a world of advertising, specifically ad copy and the language that has evolved or devolved out of this industry of circulation and seduction. Truly a man of the Greatest Generation, Grand cares enough to write his own unhinged prose to promote his commodities:
“DOWNY…will make your hair . . . softer than the hair of YOUR OWN CHILD!”
What techno-monopolist would even have the intellect or sensibility to prepare rhetoric on Grand’s mid-century level? Here he promotes “do-it-yourself” editions of classic novels where the reader gets to fill in the blanks on their own. For Kafka’s Metamorphosis:
Now you too can experience that same marvelous torment of ambiguity and haunting glimpse of eternal beauty which tore this strange artist’s soul apart and stalked him to his very grave! Complete with optional imagery selector, master word table and writer’s-special ball-point pen, thirty-five cents.
And for the relatively forgotten but verbose Thomas Wolfe:
‘Hey there, reader-writer—how would you like to spew your entrails right out onto a priceless Sarouk carpet?!? Huh? Right in the middle of somebody’s living room with everyone watching? Huh? Well, by golly, you can, etcetera, etcetera.”
The Magic Christian of the novel’s title is actually the name of a passenger ship, a climactic set-piece that is transparently the precedent for Triangle of Sadness (2022).
It’s a suggestive title, and maybe it still applies to Grand in a thematic sense: does he embody both the sacred and the profane, divine Christianity as well as the worldly magic it condemns? Is money no different from magic in the transformations it can achieve?
Maybe Guy Grand is a God after all, in the sense that he has “magically” melded the three independent forms of the Holy Grail quest object—Money, Power, Knowledge—into a unity-trinity in the shape of a man in a pig mask throwing out cash by the handful aboard the Portland Plougher.