A Grand Guy

Lee Hill's conversations with Terry Southern from 1990 till his death in 1995 have helped form this biography of the under-celebrated man of the counterculture, the screenplay-writer behind Dr Strangelove, Barbarella and Easy Rider - and the writer of 'Quality Lit' erotica. Southern was born in Texas but, like Janis Joplin or Robert Rauschenberg, had an odd relationship with his home state: he was the intellectual anti-racist growing up in red-neck territory. His home was both magical and stifling. In Texas Summer he writes of 'the scorpion beneath the yellow rose'; the darkness behind the beauty always fascinated him. Southern eschewed Texas, not even visiting between 1946, when he moved to Paris to rub shoulders with left-bank intellectuals and artistes, and 1993 - apart from a stop-off on a Rolling Stones tour. But Hill is keenly aware that Southern was influenced by England as well as Paris. Southern was stationed at Reading during the Second World War as a demolitions technician, and was able to visit London often where he became fond of the English predilection for irony, dry wit and fantasy under the genteel and reserved facade. It's not surprising that he later worked with John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Peter Sellers. In his writing he was interested in style and form while his American contemporaries favoured a sustained naturalist voice. His mentor was the formal, experimental novelist Henry Green, and he cultivated 'the attitude of an independently wealthy Oxford don without the snobbishness or affectation'. Hill does justice to the irony and elegance that informed this avuncular, 'grand' man, despite the fascination in his writings for excess of all kinds. This is a straight biography written with affection and insight, and will drive new readers back to this contradictory writerly talent nowadays more appreciated for being the guy in shades on the cover of Sergeant Pepper. (Kirkus UK)